Political claims are cheap. Any government, on either side of any border, can announce progress, stage a ribbon-cutting and call it transformation. What cannot be manufactured so easily is an audited account. Numbers checked by an independent authority, budget documents tabled before a legislature, figures a state must publish whether they flatter it or not, these carry a weight that speeches do not. On the sixth anniversary of the constitutional changes of August 2019, the most honest way to compare Jammu and Kashmir with the territory Pakistan administers across the Line of Control is not through rhetoric. It is through the ledger.

The exercise is worth doing precisely because the two governments make opposite claims. India presents the integration of Jammu and Kashmir as a story of development and democratic revival. Pakistan presents it as exploitation, and marks a day of protest against it. Rhetoric cancels out. The accounts do not. When the figures from each side are placed next to one another, the picture that emerges is not ambiguous.

THE AUDITED RECORD ON ONE SIDEBegin with the numbers that carry the most authority, because they come from the Comptroller and Auditor General, an independent constitutional watchdog whose job is to scrutinise, not to praise. According to the CAG report on the Union Territory's finances for 2024-25, the Gross State Domestic Product of Jammu and Kashmir rose from around 1.68 lakh crore rupees in 2020-21 to about 2.62 lakh........

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