Kashmiris have come a long way indeed. From the struggle for government jobs in the 1930s, here they are, almost a hundred years later, still fighting for government jobs in 2025. Earlier, for representation. Now against reservations. This speaks about the strategy of economic development especially in the post-independence period which has focussed on output and not employment in the economy. It is also a comment on the lack of dissemination of developmental gains and upward socio-economic mobility of the majority over the last ten decades. A tellingly tragic tale that the Valley-centric political leadership should ponder over.

The current reservation row – stemming from amendments in 2023-24 to the J&K Reservation Act, 2004 to increase the reserved category quotas to 70 per cent — is yet another episode in the long record of rebalancing the power relations in the polity of J&K. This battle is neither the first nor will it be the last. It is also not unique to Kashmir. It happens all over the country and across countries as well. More than two thirds of the countries in the world use some types of quotas for ethnic groups.

Beyond the merit versus non-merit debate, the legitimate articulations of meritocracy, there underlie many a fault line; some generic and some specific. In the case of reservations, many issues – constitutional, legislative, administrative, regional, social, and economic– are cooking in the cauldron of electoral politics. The arithmetic of reservation is the result of these pulls and pressures of power play.

With the total employment pie being finite and fixed, every percentage point increase or decrease in one category, will be at the expense of the some other. This makes handling the reservation issue a zero-sum game for political parties driven as they necessarily are by electoral compulsions. All political parties face a competitive environment where the gain to one stakeholder necessitates the loss of........

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