Understanding the Kashmir Conflict
Historical Background of Jammu and Kashmir
The Making of the Princely State
The state as we know it is a nineteenth-century creation. After the Sikh empire’s defeat by the British, the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 sold the territory of Kashmir to Gulab Singh, a Dogra general, for a sum of about seventy-five lakh rupees, in return for his acceptance of British suzerainty. From him descended the Dogra dynasty that ruled until 1947 — a Hindu ruling house governing a Muslim-majority population, a mismatch that would prove fateful.
By 1947 Jammu and Kashmir was the largest princely state in the subcontinent, and a strikingly plural one: the Hindu-majority plains of Jammu; the Sunni-Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley, home also to the Hindu Kashmiri Pandits; Buddhist-majority Ladakh; and the thinly-peopled, Shia-majority tracts of Gilgit and Baltistan.
Sitting at the meeting point of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and, then, the Soviet Union, its geo-strategic location made it one of the most sensitive pieces of real estate in Asia.
Accession, the Instrument of Accession and the First War
At Independence, the ruler Maharaja Hari Singh hesitated. Fearing forced absorption by either dominion, he sought to remain independent and neutral, offering both India and Pakistan a Standstill Agreement; Pakistan signed, India chose to wait. The choice was overtaken by force.
On 22 October 1947, Pathan tribesmen backed by the Pakistan army invaded the state, advancing towards Srinagar. His army overwhelmed, the Maharaja appealed to India for military help.
India’s condition was legal accession. On 26 October 1947, Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession, ceding to India control over three subjects — Defence, External Affairs and Communications — while retaining internal autonomy over all else. Indian troops were airlifted to the Valley on 27 October and pushed the invaders back, but not before Pakistan had seized the western and northern portions that India calls Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Pakistan calls ‘Azad Kashmir’.
The accession was legally complete and, in India’s position, final and irrevocable; the disputed circumstances of the war, however, would keep the question internationally alive.
The United Nations, the Plebiscite Question and the Line of Control
On the advice of the last Viceroy, India referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council in early 1948. A UN-brokered ceasefire took effect on 1 January 1949, establishing the Ceasefire Line that divided the state. The UN resolutions envisaged a plebiscite, but on a strict sequence: Pakistan was first to withdraw all its forces from the territory it held, after which India would reduce its own and a vote would be held.
That first step never occurred. Pakistan did not withdraw, so the pre-condition for a plebiscite was never met, and the idea lapsed in practice even as it lingered on paper. Two later developments hardened the position.
The Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir ratified the accession and, in the state’s own constitution, affirmed that the State is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India. And after the 1971 war, the Shimla Agreement of 1972 converted the Ceasefire Line into the Line of Control (LoC) and committed both countries to settling their differences bilaterally and peacefully — the basis on which India has since rejected any third-party or international involvement.
Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan
India’s consistent legal position is that the entire princely state of 1947 — including PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan — is an integral part of India under unlawful Pakistani occupation. Pakistan administers the territory in two parts: the western strip it calls ‘Azad Kashmir’, and the vast northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan, formerly the ‘Northern Areas’ and renamed under a 2009 order.
Gilgit-Baltistan’s status has acquired fresh salience. It is the hinge of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), giving China a direct strategic interest in the territory, and Pakistan has moved — most visibly with the announcement of provisional provincial status in 2020 — to tighten its constitutional hold.
India has formally protested each such step, restating that the region ‘was, is and will always be’ a part of India. For the aspirant, the essential point is that the Kashmir dispute is not only about the Valley but about a larger contested map in which a third power, China, is now directly implicated.
| Year | Milestone | Why it matters |
| 1846 | Treaty of Amritsar | Created the Dogra-ruled princely state — Hindu dynasty, Muslim majority |
| 22 Oct 1947 | Tribal invasion from Pakistan | Forced the Maharaja’s hand and triggered the first war |
| 26 Oct 1947 | Instrument of Accession signed | Legally acceded the state to India (Defence, External Affairs, Communications) |
| 1 Jan 1949 | UN-brokered ceasefire | Established the Ceasefire Line; plebiscite made conditional on Pakistan’s withdrawal |
| 1972 | Shimla Agreement | Ceasefire Line became the Line of Control; disputes to be settled bilaterally |
| 2019 | Abrogation of Article 370 | Ended the state’s special status and reorganised it (treated in detail later) |
Constitutional History — Article 370 and Article 35A
If accession was the political foundation, Article 370 was the constitutional bridge that carried Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union on special terms. For seven decades it defined the state’s unique relationship with Delhi, and its erosion and eventual abrogation form the constitutional spine of the whole Kashmir story. Understanding it requires separating what the provision actually said from the political myths that grew around it.
Article 370 — Origin and Scope
Article 370 was written into the Constitution as a temporary and transitional provision, reflecting the special circumstances of accession. Its core effect was simple: outside the three acceded subjects of Defence, External Affairs and Communications, the Union Parliament could extend its laws to the state only with the concurrence of the state government.
In practice this meant the state had its own constitution and flag and a separate legal order, and that central laws did not apply automatically as they did elsewhere.
The provision carried a built-in mechanism for its own modification: under Article 370(3), the President could declare it inoperative, but only on the recommendation of the state’s Constituent Assembly. Since that Assembly had dissolved itself in 1957 without recommending abrogation, a genuine constitutional puzzle was created — how, if at all, could Article 370 ever be removed? — a question that sat unresolved for decades and was answered, controversially, only in 2019.
The Delhi Agreement and the Erosion by Presidential Orders
Article 370 was never a static wall; it was a door that was steadily widened. Beginning with the Delhi Agreement of 1952 between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah — which settled the early terms of the Union’s relationship with the state, including citizenship and the scope of fundamental rights — successive governments used a series of Presidential Orders, issued with the concurrence of the state government of the day, to extend more and more of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir over the years.
The effect was a slow constitutional integration: by degrees, the reach of the Union, the jurisdiction of central institutions and the application of central laws all expanded, so that the autonomy of 1947 was, in substance, greatly hollowed out well before 2019.
The 1974 Indira–Sheikh accord reaffirmed that the state would continue to be governed within the framework of Article 370, even as the practical distance between Kashmir and the rest of India narrowed. This long trajectory of erosion is essential context for the debate over the final step — the 2019 abrogation — whose detail and legal test belong to the later discussion of that watershed.
Article 35A and the Permanent-Resident Question
Working alongside Article 370 was Article 35A, inserted through a Presidential Order in 1954. It empowered the state legislature to define the state’s ‘permanent residents’ and to reserve for them special rights — in public employment, the acquisition of immovable property, settlement, and scholarships — while denying these to outsiders.
Its purpose, rooted in Dogra-era law, was to protect the demographic and economic character of the state from an influx of outsiders.
Article 35A became intensely controversial on several grounds: that it had been added by executive order rather than constitutional amendment; that it discriminated against non-residents in property and employment; and that it was gender-discriminatory, since a woman permanent resident who married an outsider risked losing her rights.
Its defenders argued that it was the essential shield of a fragile identity. The clash between these two readings — protection of a distinct society versus equality and integration — is the same tension that runs through Kashmir’s entire constitutional history.
| Article 370 | Article 35A | |
| Nature | A temporary/transitional provision in the Constitution itself | Added by a 1954 Presidential Order under Article 370 |
| Core effect | Central laws applied to J&K only with the state’s concurrence; separate constitution and flag | Let the state define ‘permanent residents’ and reserve rights for them |
| Main criticism | Encouraged separatism; a ‘temporary’ clause made near-permanent | Added without amendment; discriminatory on residence and gender |
| Main defence | Honoured the terms of accession; a bridge, not a barrier | Shielded the region’s demography and identity |
Origins and Phases of Militancy
Armed militancy did not fall from the sky in 1989; it grew from a specific political failure fertilised by a waiting external hand. Having lost the wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971, Pakistan had concluded that it could not take Kashmir by open war and turned instead to low-intensity proxy conflict — the doctrine examined in detail in the treatment of Pakistan’s strategy. All it needed was a domestic spark. The 1987 election provided it.
The 1987 Election and the 1989 Eruption
The Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election of March 1987 is the hinge on which modern Kashmir turns. The Muslim United Front (MUF), a coalition of religious and regional groups, contested against the ruling alliance and was widely believed to have been cheated of its due through rigging, intimidation and manipulated counting. A generation of young men who had tried the ballot concluded that the democratic road was closed — and many of them crossed the Line of Control for arms and training.
| Case Study — From the ballot to the bullet, 1987–1990 The rigged 1987 election convinced disillusioned MUF workers that peaceful politics was futile; several who would become the faces of the insurgency trace their turn to the gun to that moment. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), demanding outright independence from both India and Pakistan, led the first wave. The insurgency announced itself unmistakably in December 1989 with the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the Union Home Minister, whom the JKLF exchanged for five jailed militants — a capitulation that emboldened the militants, humiliated the state, and signalled that the armed path could force New Delhi’s hand. By 1990 the Valley was in open insurgency. |
Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, moved quickly to capture and redirect the uprising. The indigenous, pro-independence JKLF was steadily displaced by Pakistan-sponsored, pro-Pakistan and Islamist outfits — most consequentially Hizbul Mujahideen, and later Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed — infiltrated across the LoC and armed, funded and trained from across the border.
What had begun as a political grievance was thus converted into an externally-driven jihad, a transformation whose organisational detail belongs to the study of the terror ecosystem that follows.
The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits
The most tragic and defining consequence of the insurgency’s early phase was the flight of the Kashmiri Pandits, the Valley’s ancient Hindu minority. As targeted killings, threats and a climate of terror mounted through late 1989 and into January 1990, the community fled en masse, most of them in the space of a few weeks.
| Case Study — The night of the exodus, January 1990 Through the winter of 1989–90, and dramatically around 19 January 1990, tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandit families abandoned their homes in the Valley amid selective killings and open threats to leave. Government and rights-commission records put the displacement at over sixty thousand families; community and scholarly estimates of the numbers of individuals run well into six figures. Most settled in Jammu, Delhi and beyond, many spending years in migrant camps. The exodus achieved a grim ISI objective — a forced demographic change in the Valley — and left a wound of displacement and unfinished return that remains a live political and humanitarian question to this day. The failure to protect the community, and to bring it home, is counted among the state’s starkest failures. |
The Pandit exodus is not a footnote but a structural fact of the conflict: it changed the Valley’s composition, hardened communal lines, and created a permanent constituency of the displaced whose rehabilitation and safe return every subsequent policy has had to address.
Popular culture reference: The events surrounding the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits are depicted in the 2022 film The Kashmir Files (fictionalized dramatization based on historical events).
The Four Phases of Militancy
Militancy in Kashmir has not been static; it has mutated across four broad phases, each a response to the pressure the security forces placed on the last. Carrying this phase-map in mind lets you place any event — a group, an attack, a tactic — in its proper stage.
| Phase | Period | Defining character |
| Phase I — Indigenous | Late 1980s–early 1990s | Home-grown, JKLF-led movement for independence; largely local cadres |
| Phase II — Foreign-dominated | 1990s–2000s | ISI takes over; pan-Islamist, Pakistan-based groups (LeT, JeM, HM) and foreign fighters dominate; infiltration across the LoC |
| Phase III — Local revival | 2010s (from ~2016) | A fresh wave of home-grown militancy and street mobilisation, symbolised by the social-media militancy around Burhan Wani (2016) |
| Phase IV — Hybrid and low-signature | Recent years | A shift to ‘hybrid’ militants — ordinary civilians without records recruited for one-off attacks — and small, hard-to-detect cells; treated in detail later |
Two lessons run through the sequence.
- First, the conflict has repeatedly oscillated between the indigenous and the foreign — a local grievance drawing in an external sponsor, the external hand then provoking fresh local anger.
- Second, each phase became harder to detect and easier to deny than the last, as the enemy learned to lower its signature.
These phases set the stage for the study of Pakistan’s proxy war, the terror ecosystem, and the doctrinal shifts in India’s response that occupy the remainder of this theatre.
| Current Status (as of July 2026) The constitutional order described here was fundamentally changed by the abrogation of Article 370 and Article 35A in August 2019 and the reorganisation of the state — the subject of a dedicated later discussion, along with its Supreme Court test. Militancy has continued its drift towards the hybrid, low-signature Phase-IV pattern, with violence also shifting into the Jammu region — developments taken up in the analysis of recent trends. The return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits, and the status of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, remain open questions on the national agenda. |