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On August 5, Aga Ruhullah Mehdi, the Lok Sabha MP from Srinagar arranged a conference on Kashmir and the reading down of Article 370. Attended by a number of neutral party MPs, journalists, activists, lawyers, the speeches reflected the deep pain within Kashmir. For the Kashmiris, the revocation tore at a compact that for seven decades had defined the relationship between Jammu & Kashmir and the Indian Union.

The reading down of Article 370, the reorganisation of the state into two Union territories, and the months‑long clampdown on political freedoms and communications were defended in Delhi as a corrective — a step toward integration, development and security. For many across India this narrative offered closure. For Kashmiris it opened an aching wound.

Article 370 was not merely a legal anomaly. It was a conditional political compact born of a fraught 1947: Kashmir’s accession to India was contested and contingent, and the special status enshrined local controls over land, property and domicile that recognised the valley’s demographic and political particularities. Whether or not that arrangement inhibited reform, the abrupt nullification of those protections without local consent altered a basic moral and constitutional bargain. That rupture demands explanation and reconciliation, not only legalistic argument.

Familiar rationales offered by Delhi

Delhi offered familiar rationales: special status impeded investment, obstructed governance and allowed separatism to fester. Yet the manner of the reading down – presidential orders, reinterpretations of procedure and the preventive detention of local leaders – signalled a preference for unilateral imposition over negotiated consent. For a population long sensitised to state power and security presence, the result was not just the loss of a clause: it was the lived experience of being denied agency in deciding their future.

Identity and fear of dispossession are central to understanding Kashmir’s response. The........

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