Features | Politics | South Asia

Can Kashmir Learn From India’s Gen Z Movement?

J&K has lost its statehood, local governance, and even the right to protest. But there is still a way to resist. 

People gather during a protest organized by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, India, demanding accountability over alleged examination irregularities and education reforms, July 19, 2026.

On August 14, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah warned New Delhi of a potential Gen Z protest in the restive Himalayan region, while cataloguing the lieutenant governor’s endless attritions against his government – most recently the stalling on a reservation report that seeks to redress grievances over the open-merit category. On September 2, Abdullah’s Cabinet ministers descended onto Srinagar’s streets. Placards in hands, which named in bold, black letters the Narendra Modi regime’s repeated political incursions in Kashmir, they marched toward the headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu-nationalist party Modi heads. 

The demonstration was scuppered within minutes, with the police, which reports to the lieutenant governor, dashing on them. After a scuffle, the ministers were shoved inside vans like common criminals.

Scores of television crews and YouTubers captured the excess, but no outrage followed on India’s primetime television that evening. Protest in Modi’s India rarely finds coverage on TV, except when it spirals out of control, like it did during the farmers’ march to Delhi in 2020-2021, or this summer’s Gen Z outburst over medical entrance test paper leaks. But that is less coverage and more of salvage job for the government. Media coverage often seems designed to provoke anger against the protesters, who are almost always depicted as foreign funded and scheming to weaken the country’s territorial integrity. 

The dismantling of the idea of protest painfully and saliently stirs the question: how, then, does one keep a republic? This was a basic question asked by American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. In 1789, when asked whether the Constitutional Convention had resulted in a republic or a monarchy, Franklin famously responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

But Franklin had reason for optimism. He had lived through, even helped shape, a colony’s epoch-making transition into the first modern democracy, after expelling the then most powerful nation of the world. He was likely persuaded that of all the formidable guarantees that this new system bestowed to its people, the right to stir – and throw the government on a retreat – in the face of repression would be non-negotiable. 

Franklin was, of course, speaking without hindsight knowledge of multifarious assaults that eviscerated that right in several democracies. Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book “How Democracies Die” provided a despairing elucidation how a band of demagogues succeeded in stymieing democratic push-backs, even as their regimes retained democracy’s outward trappings.

That paradox could not be more noticeable in contemporary Indian politics, especially in Kashmir, where Modi’s government has hubristically mounted campaigns to restrict federal rights. Since downgrading Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to a union territory in the same decision that ended J&K’s partial autonomy in August 2019, the central government has dragged its feet on restoration of statehood. It has, at the same time, coercively erased dissent from Kashmir’s political lexicon.

A plurality of Indians approve of the government’s flagrant projection of force, and not merely because they have fallen for propaganda. Their rejection of dissent is, indeed, a measure of how deeply they are aligned with the BJP’s civilizational project which seeks not just to place Hindu interests on top in everyday political functioning, but to reclaim “Hindu pride” – which can mean anything from renaming roads, buildings, and cities, to erasing Mughal history from school textbooks, to creating conditions to dramatically erode Muslim representation in Parliament. 

In Kashmir, where Muslims cannot be precluded from being elected, power has been concentrated in the hands of a Hindu lieutenant governor (LG), Manoj Sinha, handpicked by New Delhi, through a series of government decrees that threaten India’s foundational underpinnings. Omar Abdullah opined in a recent podcast: “Earlier officers would find ten different ways of doing a task I ordered, now they find ten different reasons why it ought not be done.”

National Conference spokesperson Imran Dar hinted that there could be a design to make the local government unpopular. “The LG’s office is procrastinating unnecessarily on a serious issue related to students’ future… which can do considerable damage [to the government’s reputation],” he told The Diplomat. 

Sinha is an old brass of the BJP from Uttar Pradesh province, the theater of the Ram Janmabhoomi (birth place) movement. The culmination of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitations in a grand temple in January 2024 is Modi’s biggest selling point, besides Kashmir’s loss of autonomy.

Today, India’s secularist opposition coalition is palpably wary about entangling itself in Kashmir issues. That was not the case a few years ago, when opposition leader Rahul Gandhi signed off his Bharat Jodo Yatra in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, on an unexpectedly snowing, freezing January morning of 2023. Back then, Gandhi cited India’s syncretic traditions to re-etch the Muslim majority region more congenially in people’s minds. He talked of the parallels between shunyata, the concept of ego-less consciousness enshrined in Buddhism, and fanaa, the Sufi concept of annihilation of individual ego before God. 

Gandhi’s exhortation failed. In the April-May 2024 national elections, the BJP won both parliamentary seats in adjoining, overwhelmingly Hindu Jammu, and thereafter swept the region in the provincial election. The message that Gandhi, his Congress party, and its allies inferred was that prioritizing Muslim minorities’ grievances would be an invitation to derision and defeat at the ballot box.

That explains their current silence – not just on Kashmir but on many other hot-button issues of concern to Muslims, such as the incarceration of activist Umar Khalid, or even Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s “bulldozer thuggery” that largely targets Muslims. 

After Modi won his second term in 2019, he joked about the Congress’ inhibition. “In this election, not even a single political party could dare to mislead the country by wearing the mask of secularism,” he said. 

Waheed Para, a senior leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says there is no reason to be “too dependent on the national parties” to advance J&K’s cause. He cited Ladakh’s successful push for negotiations with New Delhi, which was predicated on regional solidarities. However, Para pointed out that “the mandate is with the chief minister and we do not want to undermine that by taking initiative, though Mehbooba Mufti unsuccessfully wrote to him.” Mufti, a former chief minister herself, is the PDP president.

In December 2023, Modi’s government told the Supreme Court that it would restore Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood after elections were held in the region. It reneged on that promise, but no censure has ever come from the judiciary.

That abandonment by the central institutions makes an urgent case for political unity to be fostered within Kashmir. When you cannot rely on institutions, when you cannot rely on the national mood to soften, when the country’s secular allies are looking the other way, you have to rely on each other. This local unity, as Para pointed out, is what got traction for Ladakh’s own demands. 

To everyone’s bafflement, Kashmir is not doing that. Its political landscape is battered by daily one-upmanship – at public events, over carefully crafted podcasts, and more energetically on X, where some politicians choose to parade their superior moral fiber every day.

The common ground is........

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