Can Kashmir Learn From India’s Gen Z Movement?

On August 14, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah warned New Delhi of a potential Gen Z protest in the restive Himalayan region, while cataloguing the lieutenant governor’s endless attritions against his government – most recently the stalling on a reservation report that seeks to redress grievances over the open-merit category. On September 2, Abdullah’s Cabinet ministers descended onto Srinagar’s streets. Placards in hands, which named in bold, black letters the Narendra Modi regime’s repeated political incursions in Kashmir, they marched toward the headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu-nationalist party Modi heads. 

The demonstration was scuppered within minutes, with the police, which reports to the lieutenant governor, dashing on them. After a scuffle, the ministers were shoved inside vans like common criminals.

Scores of television crews and YouTubers captured the excess, but no outrage followed on India’s primetime television that evening. Protest in Modi’s India rarely finds coverage on TV, except when it spirals out of control, like it did during the farmers’ march to Delhi in 2020-2021, or this summer’s Gen Z outburst over medical entrance test paper leaks. But that is less coverage and more of salvage job for the government. Media coverage often seems designed to provoke anger against the protesters, who are almost always depicted as foreign funded and scheming to weaken the country’s territorial integrity. 

The dismantling of the idea of protest painfully and saliently stirs the question: how, then, does one keep a republic? This was a basic question asked by American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. In 1789, when asked whether the Constitutional Convention had resulted in a republic or a monarchy, Franklin famously responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

But Franklin had reason for optimism. He had lived through, even helped shape, a colony’s epoch-making transition into the first modern democracy, after expelling the then most powerful nation of the world. He was likely persuaded that of all the formidable guarantees that this new system bestowed to its people, the right to stir – and throw the government on a retreat – in the face of repression would be non-negotiable. 

Franklin was, of course, speaking without hindsight knowledge of multifarious assaults that eviscerated that right in several democracies. Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s 2018 book “How Democracies Die” provided a despairing elucidation how a band of demagogues succeeded in stymieing democratic push-backs, even as their regimes retained democracy’s outward trappings.

That paradox could not be more noticeable in contemporary Indian politics, especially in Kashmir, where Modi’s government has hubristically mounted campaigns to restrict federal rights. Since downgrading Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to a union territory in the same decision that ended J&K’s partial autonomy in August 2019, the central government has dragged its feet on restoration of statehood. It has, at the same time, coercively erased dissent from Kashmir’s political lexicon.

A plurality of Indians approve of the government’s flagrant projection of force, and not merely because they have fallen for propaganda. Their rejection of dissent is, indeed, a measure of how deeply they are aligned with the BJP’s civilizational project which seeks not just to place Hindu interests on top in everyday political functioning, but to reclaim “Hindu pride” – which can mean anything from renaming roads, buildings, and cities, to erasing Mughal history from school textbooks, to creating conditions to dramatically erode Muslim representation in Parliament. 

In Kashmir, where Muslims cannot be precluded from being elected, power has been concentrated in the hands of a Hindu lieutenant governor (LG), Manoj Sinha, handpicked by New Delhi, through a series of government decrees that threaten India’s foundational underpinnings. Omar Abdullah opined in a recent podcast: “Earlier officers would find ten different ways of doing a task I ordered, now they find ten different reasons why it ought not be done.”

National Conference spokesperson Imran Dar hinted that there could be a design to make the local government unpopular. “The LG’s office is procrastinating unnecessarily on a serious issue related to students’ future… which can do considerable damage [to the government’s reputation],” he told The Diplomat. 

Sinha is an old brass of the BJP from Uttar Pradesh province, the theater of the Ram Janmabhoomi (birth place) movement. The culmination of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitations in a grand temple in January 2024 is Modi’s biggest selling point, besides Kashmir’s loss of autonomy.

Today, India’s secularist opposition coalition is palpably wary about entangling itself in Kashmir issues. That was not the case a few years ago, when opposition leader Rahul Gandhi signed off his Bharat Jodo Yatra in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, on an unexpectedly snowing, freezing January morning of 2023. Back then, Gandhi cited India’s syncretic traditions to re-etch the Muslim majority region more congenially in people’s minds. He talked of the parallels between shunyata, the concept of ego-less consciousness enshrined in Buddhism, and fanaa, the Sufi concept of annihilation of individual ego before God. 

Gandhi’s exhortation failed. In the April-May 2024 national elections, the BJP won both parliamentary seats in adjoining, overwhelmingly Hindu Jammu, and thereafter swept the region in the provincial election. The message that Gandhi, his Congress party, and its allies inferred was that prioritizing Muslim minorities’ grievances would be an invitation to derision and defeat at the ballot box.

That explains their current silence – not just on Kashmir but on many other hot-button issues of concern to Muslims, such as the incarceration of activist Umar Khalid, or even Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s “bulldozer thuggery” that largely targets Muslims. 

After Modi won his second term in 2019, he joked about the Congress’ inhibition. “In this election, not even a single political party could dare to mislead the country by wearing the mask of secularism,” he said. 

Waheed Para, a senior leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says there is no reason to be “too dependent on the national parties” to advance J&K’s cause. He cited Ladakh’s successful push for negotiations with New Delhi, which was predicated on regional solidarities. However, Para pointed out that “the mandate is with the chief minister and we do not want to undermine that by taking initiative, though Mehbooba Mufti unsuccessfully wrote to him.” Mufti, a former chief minister herself, is the PDP president.

In December 2023, Modi’s government told the Supreme Court that it would restore Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood after elections were held in the region. It reneged on that promise, but no censure has ever come from the judiciary.

That abandonment by the central institutions makes an urgent case for political unity to be fostered within Kashmir. When you cannot rely on institutions, when you cannot rely on the national mood to soften, when the country’s secular allies are looking the other way, you have to rely on each other. This local unity, as Para pointed out, is what got traction for Ladakh’s own demands. 

To everyone’s bafflement, Kashmir is not doing that. Its political landscape is battered by daily one-upmanship – at public events, over carefully crafted podcasts, and more energetically on X, where some politicians choose to parade their superior moral fiber every day.

The common ground is the articulation of open scorn for the chief minister. Some of it is well deserved. Abdullah and his party promised 100,000 jobs to J&K’s unemployed youths besides restoration of Kashmir’s federal guarantees. On both counts its record is dismal, though that has to be judged in the context of his diminished authority. At any rate, reducing these fraught times into acerbic daily bulletins on a local government doesn’t help Kashmir. It helps individual ambitions. 

When Omar Abdullah assumed office two years ago, he knew his path would be arduous. What he faced was not just a pugnacious lieutenant governor’s hindrances to his office but the ideology that enabled such obstructionism. Hindu supremacy operates from 57,000 separate cells across India, and has more than 1.5 million volunteers spreading the ideology throughout India’s educational, political, and cultural spaces, intensifying tacit pressure on minorities, especially Kashmiris, to get used to their marginality. 

After taking office, Abdullah focused on repairing ties with New Delhi, hoping a calibrated navigation might be the key to negotiating federal concessions, or at least the flow of federal funds. Abdullah was right about the funds, but wrong about everything else. The BJP was prepared to cede nothing to him. It has gone too far promising an ideological pinnacle to its core constituency: the installation of a Hindu chief minister in Kashmir. The relegation of the Kashmiri Muslim leadership is necessary groundwork for that goal. 

Abdullah’s failure to be alarmed in time allowed a range of politicians to provoke public backlash against him, while casting themselves as J&K’s true champions. That posturing brought them instant adulation from Kashmir’s overwrought population, which wanted to pin its hope somewhere. These politicians have been sharing their resentment on everything from the Modi government’s controversial waqf legislation, to burgeoning liquor shops in Srinagar, to the Israel-U.S. war on Iran, but even more so about Abdullah’s National Conference’s linguistic timidity on these very flashpoints.

That is undoubtedly the right thing to do, but there is a problem. Kashmir’s self-appointed champions almost always deploy their dissidence from the protected perch of X, or to camera crews, not once outside the BJP’s headquarters or outside the Raj Bhavan, which would involve subjecting themselves to the police’s rough handling. For all the mixed reactions about their politics, Abdullah and Mufti are the only prominent politicians who have shown that grit – Abdullah when he forced his entry into the martyrs’ memorial in July 2025, and Mufti when she took the fight against encroachment to New Delhi’s streets in February 2023.

There are no dearth of people who are enamored with the new “dissidents.” But there are also those – small businessmen, entrepreneurs, academics, rural voters disengaged from the internet’s firestorm of opinions – who point out that emphasizing the need for dissidence is not itself dissidence. Upbraiding a disempowered local government for its lack of dissidence is not empowering. No one has yet articulated a sustainable political roadmap to actually achieve J&K’s goals, starting with restored statehood. 

That leaves Kashmir with motley emotions: fear, skepticism, despair, perhaps even a crestfallen urge in some to conform. Yet Sinha, the lieutenant government, depicts Kashmir as, in his own words, “at the threshold of a new future.” Roads, tunnels, and highways are being overhauled on a staggering budget. A digital economy and start-up culture are being imported from India’s metropolitan cities. Sinha sees a “cultural renaissance” unfolding, urging writers and thinkers to showcase “visionary craftsmanship.” 

Others see lived experiences obliterated with a crackdown on collective memory – Sinha banned 25 books last year. Sinha’s bureaucrats hear foot-tapping by an influx of tourists and movie crews; others hear collective gasping underneath that ebullient surface.

Despite this profound temptation to mourn, that cannot be the way forward. No political power is insurmountable in the long term. That universal principle should goad people to organize against it, while preserving hope, human will, solidarity for each other, and incorporation of those who are already fighting, in order to more coherently tap undercurrents of public disillusionment.

The aptitude to take everyone on board despite deep disparities is what distinguished the recent students’ protest led by the “Cockroaches” – a moniker from India’s chief justice that the Gen Z adopted in a mimicking rebuttal to him – from the Congress party. Unlike the Congress’ insistence on ideological purity, the Cockroaches allied with whoever shared a sense of betrayal by the paper leak. Boys and girls from tier one cities’ middle class households who have unrepentantly rejoiced each time a Hindutva goal post was achieved were as much an ally as hardened ideologues clad in Marxist-styled khadi kurtas and screaming Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “hum dekhenge,” a bugle against fascism.

This is not an ideal assembly, but it could be arguably a safeguard against electoral extinction. The Gen Z movement unleashed a tidal wave of uncertainty within the BJP’s stable by firing from its core supporters’ shoulders, creating a psychological advantage the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress’ ideological binary hadn’t achieved in 12 years.

There is a lesson embedded in that combat model for the Kashmiri leadership, especially the National Conference. With no dependable allies in India’s secular coalition or in the judiciary, the only plausible trajectory is to arouse restlessness over denial of statehood in Jammu, and put the BJP in the same predicament that it faced during the Gen Z protest.

A journalist close to to the J&K government told The Diplomat that “Omar has given up on Jammu.” But pessimism is not politics. Finding possibilities is. That is why a politician cannot give up on people even when they disappoint. The first step is to correctly evaluate the public mood.

The Congress’s decimation in Jammu is not a symbol of of its locals’ unwillingness for change, or their contentment with union territory status. Jammu hasn’t given up on those goals. It has given up on the Congress, which has been theme-hopping from caste census, to patriarchy, to a war against corporates, all of which are as abruptly abandoned as they are espoused. The party is also alienating as it seeks absolute ideological steadfastness from the voter without offering anything concrete.

The National Conference must make inroads in Jammu. And not just among the social and geographical peripheries that are usually left to it by the Congress, which contests almost all the seats in the region. Abdullah has a few advantages. Despite years of the BJP’s vilification, the average Hindu household doesn’t doubt that he or his family are moderates.

But the overture to the disaffected BJP voter should not rely on the Congress’ failed appeal to conscience. The NC should use the most enduring and powerful of all incentives to vote: selfish interests, and the capacity of politics of populism to turn it into allegiance. Despite the hollowing out of his office, Abdullah as the elected executive still has reasonable bargaining power to build social and economic solidarity networks. 

A winning coalition would include business communities who feel threatened by an influx of outsiders, academic and cultural luminaries who thrive on patronage, disgruntled students, unemployed youths, dissenters within BJP’s over-filled organization, and everyone else who has the social and political capital to amplify the NC’s case as an alternative. 

But for any return to normalcy to be accomplished, or even attempted, J&K must stand united. The other option is to fragment and get used to marginality as the country’s right-wing so obviously desires.