Seven years is long enough to stop calling something recent and start calling it a pattern. On 5 August 2019, Parliament read down Articles 370 and 35A, stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, and split it into two Union Territories. The justification offered then rested on security, development and integration — and, crucially, on a promise: that Union Territory status was a transitional arrangement, not a permanent settlement. Seven anniversaries later, the transition has not ended. What was billed as interim has hardened into a semi-permanent constitutional condition, and the question that ought to trouble every citizen who values federalism is not whether Article 370 will return — that argument, rightly or wrongly, has been closed by the Supreme Court — but why statehood, promised without qualification, still has not.

The Court’s own words should have settled the matter. In its 11 December 2023 judgment upholding the abrogation, the Constitution bench recorded the Union government’s assurance that statehood would be restored and directed that Assembly elections be held no later than September 2024. Elections were duly held — three phases, turnout touching 64 percent, the highest in decades, conducted without the shutdowns and boycotts that scarred Kashmir’s electoral history. An elected Chief Minister was sworn in. On every visible metric, the government could claim to have kept its word. Except the one metric that mattered: nearly two years after that election, Jammu and Kashmir remains a Union Territory answerable to a Lieutenant Governor rather than a state answerable to its own legislature.

The gap between promise and fulfilment is not oversight; it is policy. The Union Home Minister has, on several occasions since the 2024 elections, said statehood will come at an “appropriate time,” conditioned on further improvement in the security situation — a formulation notable for supplying no date, no metric and no mechanism by which........

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