Times of Ire: Bifurcation Debate
The question of whether Jammu should be separated from Kashmir has returned with renewed intensity. What distinguishes the present moment from earlier eruptions of this debate is not its recurrence, but its altered moral and political tone. For the first time, visible differences have emerged from within the Valley itself. These internal divergences point toward a deeper political metamorphosis, one shaped by shifting power discourses in contemporary India. Whatever interpretations may follow, the transformation in political consciousness now seeking to unsettle inherited narratives cannot be separated from the governance experience of the past five years. A decisive rupture with the past has occurred, disturbing assumptions once regarded as immutable.
This shift becomes especially evident in the recent assertions of Sajad Lone, particularly in his invocation of “Tut vanan tutis.” The phrase does not merely signify defiance; it announces a willingness to fracture long-protected political certainties. Lone’s articulation marks a clear departure from the traditional idiom of Kashmiri Muslim leadership within India. It neither negates the idea of India nor confines politics exclusively to the language of grievance. Instead, it attempts to negotiate patriotism without rejecting nationalism itself. In doing so, it unsettles not only separatist imaginaries across the Line of Control but also compels regional formations such as the PDP and the National Conference to confront the moral ambiguities that long sustained their political conduct. The era of tacit mystification and calibrated ambiguity appears to be receding.
The bifurcation debate thus re-enters public discourse not as a narrow administrative proposition but as an expression of unresolved historical consciousness. What appears outwardly as a territorial disagreement is, in essence, a struggle over memory, moral legitimacy, and the authority to define collective suffering. Beneath the sharpness of contemporary rhetoric lies the accumulated weight of experiences shaped by selective remembrance, uneven governance, and enduring asymmetries of power.
Political arrangements once treated as natural were sustained less by genuine consensus than by fragile compromises that deferred ethical reckoning. Geography was never the true axis of conflict. What remained unresolved was whose pain merited recognition, whose exclusion could be normalised, and whose grievances could be indefinitely postponed in the name of stability. Each return of this debate sharpens its moral urgency, reminding us that injustice left unaddressed does not disappear; it merely waits.
It is within this unsettled moral terrain that Sajad Lone’s intervention must be situated. His statement does not simply add another voice to an already crowded political arena; it reopens a historical loop that began in the decades following accession. By questioning assumptions long shielded from scrutiny, he disrupts a political grammar sustained less by reflection than by habit, repetition, and inherited fear.
From the 1960s onward, numerical strength gradually became the organising principle of political representation within the state. Political legitimacy came to rest not on fairness but on arithmetic. Admissions to professional institutions and access to public employment were increasingly mediated through demographic calculation rather than open merit. Under successive Congress governments, particularly during the period of Mir Qasim, these practices were institutionalised under the vocabulary of reform and social justice.
Yet reforms celebrated as progressive produced deep structural distortions. A hierarchy of entitlement emerged quietly, marginalising minorities while presenting exclusion as administrative necessity. The Kashmiri Pandits, limited in number and lacking political leverage, became among the earliest casualties. Their representation in education and employment declined far beyond any defensible principle of proportionality. What they lost was not merely opportunity, but recognition as equal participants within the moral community.
Their grievances found little resonance in legislative forums and no space within dominant political narratives. Without numerical strength or organised political shelter, their suffering could not be translated into the language of power. Institutions entrusted with safeguarding citizenship remained unmoved. Over time, marginalisation hardened into invisibility, and invisibility into moral absence.
History, however, rarely remains frozen. Decades later, with the expansion of reservation policies across the country, sections of Kashmiri Muslims have begun articulating anxieties strikingly similar to those once voiced by the Pandits. Concerns over shrinking merit space, bureaucratic invisibility, and institutional marginality have re-entered public discourse—this time from within the majority community.
The sociological irony is unmistakable. Communities that once accepted exclusion as administratively justified are now encountering its emotional and structural consequences themselves. This reversal reveals a deeper truth: systems built upon selective justice do not remain confined to their original targets. Once institutionalised, exclusion expands, mutates, and ultimately unsettles even those who once benefited from its logic.
It is against this backdrop that Lone’s critique of the political mystification following 1953 acquires deeper resonance. His challenge emerges not merely from ideological dissent but from accumulated political fatigue. It confronts a culture in which suffering was ritualised rather than examined, where grievance became performance while governance remained insulated from accountability.
Parallel to this trajectory lies the long-standing unease of Jammu. Its concerns regarding development, resource allocation, and political marginalisation predate the present moment by decades. The region has consistently argued that its economic contribution and strategic significance were subordinated to a Kashmir-centric political elite. Promises of regional balance were repeatedly deferred, often in the name of unity that, in practice, served only a narrow circle of power brokers.
Across regions and communities, therefore, the architecture of grievance reveals a striking continuity. Only its voice changes. The same institutional framework that marginalised the Pandits later generated resentment in Jammu and now produces anxiety among sections of Kashmiri Muslims. This continuity makes clear that the crisis is not fundamentally communal; it is institutional and moral.
This recognition becomes sharper when placed alongside the experience of the Kashmiri Pandits. They were never granted the dignity of choice. Their displacement unfolded without dialogue, consent, or acknowledgment. Fear replaced politics, silence replaced recognition, and an entire community was rendered refugees within its own homeland. Their absence was normalised even as their trauma remained unresolved.
Yet the present moment also gestures toward new intellectual possibilities. Contemporary debates, including engagements with the work of Meera Nanda and reflections offered by scholars such as Ajay Gudavarthy, signal an effort to renegotiate questions of modernity, belief, and democracy within lived experience. These conversations seek to move beyond rigid ideological binaries and reopen spaces of political imagination long foreclosed by inherited dogma.
The older culture of performative grievance now appears exhausted. Its slogans no longer generate meaning with the same intensity. In its place is emerging a more grounded politics, attentive to everyday life, employment, education, dignity, and civic participation. The central question is slowly shifting from who governs to how life is lived under governance.
Belonging is no longer imagined solely through resistance. It is increasingly negotiated through presence, participation, and shared civic experience. The mystification that once enveloped political identity has begun to thin.
Within this evolving moral landscape, nationalism itself undergoes redefinition. It is no longer experienced merely as ideological assertion but as shared habitation. Loyalty need not be theatrical; belonging need not be uniform. Citizenship can be sustained through responsibility rather than performance.
Secularism, too, is being rediscovered not only as constitutional language but as social practice. It survives less through doctrinal insistence and more through everyday accommodation. Indian society has endured not through absolute agreement, but through its capacity to live together amid difference.
What emerges, then, is not certainty but conversation; not resolution but transition. Out of fractured silences may yet arise a more humane politics; one grounded not in absolutism, but in consent, recognition, and the shared ethics of habitation. The conversations, therefore, must continue.
Prof. Ashok Kaul, Retired Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu University
