S H Mohammed’s opinion piece, “Security, Stability or Statehood,” (Greater Kashmir, 24 May 2026), offers perhaps the clearest public articulation of the thinking that underpins the Centre’s position on restoring statehood to J&K. It presents a coherent, security-first case for retaining the Union Territory framework as a “stabilising national-security architecture” rather than a temporary administrative arrangement. The argument is neither without merit, nor without supporters at the decision-making levels.

There can be no disputing his premise that J&K occupies a uniquely sensitive frontier. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that it had a special constitutional status. Nor can the decades of insurgency, cross-border terrorism and institutional weakening which created genuine vulnerabilities be wished away. 

Yet the article ultimately rests on a myopic binary: security versus statehood; the former must precede any meaningful restoration of representative governance. This sequencing assumes that political aspirations can be held in abeyance while administrative control delivers order. 

To treat political legitimacy as subordinate to administrative control is untenable. It is also unsustainable because effective governance ultimately requires a degree of congruence between how a society organises itself socially and how power is distributed politically. When that congruence is absent over long periods, stability becomes brittle — dependent on continuous external enforcement rather than self-reinforcing consent. On the ground, with every passing day, the prolonged separation of political legitimacy from administrative authority is itself eroding the foundations of durable governance and, over time, of security as well. The current UT model institutionalises a hierarchy that is difficult to sustain in a democratic polity. An elected government possesses popular legitimacy through assembly elections yet remains structurally subservient to a central apparatus whose authority is derived from New Delhi. 

Ironically, this asymmetry is not new. For most part of seven decades till 2003 (except for 1977) elected governments operated under heavy central influence even while the formal shell of Article 370 remained intact. After Sheikh Abdullah’s dismissal, subsequent regimes........

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