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Mushtaq Hussain<\/p>\nMushtaq Hussain<\/p>\n
The Kashmir dispute cannot be understood simply through the prism of changing political personalities, elections or day-to-day administrative controversies. At its core, it is an international dispute that has remained on the agenda of the United Nations for decades. On April 21, 1948, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 47, addressing the restoration of peace and order and a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. Subsequent U.N. Commission resolutions further elaborated the framework for determining the territory\u2019s future through the will of its people.<\/p>\n
That international dimension is precisely what risks being obscured when the Kashmir question is repeatedly reframed as a succession of domestic political, administrative and social disputes. The central question\u2014Kashmiris\u2019 political future and their right to determine it\u2014is gradually pushed aside while attention is redirected toward a constantly changing set of secondary controversies.<\/p>\n
This strategy is not new. By the decisive phase of 1947, Kashmir\u2019s political landscape had already been profoundly reshaped. The transformation of the Muslim Conference into the National Conference in 1939, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah\u2019s emergence as a major political figure, his close political relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru and the 1946 \u201cQuit Kashmir\u201d movement had all contributed to a dramatically altered political environment. By the time British rule ended in 1947, Kashmir had become central to the larger political struggle over the future of the subcontinent.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s subsequent Kashmir policy repeatedly relied on changing political figures and arrangements to serve changing circumstances. Sheikh Abdullah was once elevated as the principal political face of Kashmir; in 1953, however, he was removed from office and imprisoned, while Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad emerged as his successor. Across the decades, political parties and personalities continued to rise and fall. The faces changed, but the underlying political question remained unresolved.<\/p>\n
That pattern entered a new phase after Aug. 5, 2019, when India revoked Jammu and Kashmir\u2019s special constitutional status. Alongside the National Conference and the Peoples Democratic Party, figures such as Altaf Bukhari and Sajad Gani Lone became prominent in the new political landscape. Mentioning these individuals is not to suggest that any one person bears sole responsibility for Kashmir\u2019s predicament. Rather, their political trajectories illustrate a broader pattern in which successive political actors have operated within a system whose larger objective is to normalize India\u2019s control while marginalizing the unresolved dispute.<\/p>\n
One of the most consequential elements of this strategy is the proliferation of new issues and competing narratives. A longstanding international dispute can be fragmented into arguments over elections, development, administration, security, local rivalries and personalities. Political actors can then be portrayed as competing among themselves, while the larger question of Kashmir\u2019s disputed status recedes from public attention. The danger is obvious: when the debate becomes exclusively about the latest controversy, the original dispute begins to disappear from view.<\/p>\n
The post-2019 period has intensified these concerns. Policies involving land, property, resources, employment and administration, along with arrests, demolitions, security operations and of human-rights violations, have generated profound concern among many Kashmiris. Considered individually, these developments may appear unrelated. Taken together, however, they raise a larger question: Is the objective not only to administer Kashmir, but also to reshape its political and social realities in ways that make the original dispute increasingly difficult to address?<\/p>\n
The role of local political, religious, intellectual and media figures also deserves scrutiny. Some criticize New Delhi while simultaneously cooperating with the political and administrative structures through which its policies are implemented. Some speak of Kashmiri identity and rights, occasionally invoke the political legacy of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah or the Two-Nation Theory, yet continue to participate in the political framework established by India. Such contradictions raise an unavoidable question: Are these genuine policy differences, or are they different roles being played on the same political stage?<\/p>\n
The spectacle becomes particularly visible around India\u2019s national celebrations. On Independence Day and other national occasions, sections of pro-India political and social circles in Jammu and Kashmir often compete to demonstrate their loyalty to New Delhi through official ceremonies, public declarations and highly visible displays of allegiance. What might ordinarily be a ceremonial exercise can become a contest over who can demonstrate the strongest commitment to the Indian state.<\/p>\n
The scenes surrounding Aug. 15, 2026, offered another illustration of this phenomenon. The issue is not whether an individual attends a national celebration. The deeper question is whether political competition in Kashmir is increasingly being measured by the ability to demonstrate loyalty to New Delhi rather than by the ability to defend the political rights and aspirations of the people.<\/p>\n
A parallel concern is the growing use of anti-Pakistan narratives. Labeling movements for public rights in Azad Jammu and Kashmir as separatist and using them to generate hostility toward Pakistan and its institutions risks opening yet another front in the region\u2019s information war. It can further divert attention from the central issue: the unresolved Kashmir dispute and the question of the Kashmiri people\u2019s political future.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s Kashmir policy should therefore be assessed not by the personalities it promotes at any given moment, but by the continuity of the political strategy behind them. The faces change; the political chessboard remains. New controversies should not be allowed to erase the original question.<\/p>\n
The Kashmir dispute is not created by one party, one government or one political personality. It is a longstanding international dispute that has been addressed through U.N. processes and resolutions. The challenge today is to ensure that political fragmentation, competing narratives and manufactured controversies do not obscure that central reality.<\/p>\n
Because changing the faces cannot change the history, erase the international record or extinguish a people\u2019s claim to determine their own political future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mushtaq Hussain The Kashmir dispute cannot be understood simply through the prism of changing political personalities, elections or day-to-day administrative controversies. At its core, it is an international dispute that has remained on the agenda of the United Nations for decades. On April 21, 1948, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 47, addressing the restoration …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":208438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"yoast_head":"\n