Article by Aditi Dubey
When a population raises a grievance, a government must answer it. The nature of that answer, more than any speech or slogan, reveals the nature of the state that gives it. Across the Line of Control that divides Jammu and Kashmir, the same basic question has been put to two different administrations in recent years. The people have asked, in effect, for the essentials of a decent life: work, power, a fair price for bread, a voice in their own affairs. The two answers could not be more different. On one side, the answer has taken the form of investment, infrastructure and the ballot. On the other, it has taken the form of the baton, the tear gas shell and, too often, the bullet.
This is the contrast that deserves attention, because it is not a contrast of rhetoric but of response. Anyone can promise development. What distinguishes a functioning state from a failing one is what it does when its people press it, and whether it treats their demands as a matter to be addressed or a threat to be suppressed.
One Answer: Building
On the Indian side, the answer to the question of development is a matter of record. The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir has seen its domestic product rise substantially over the past five years, its per capita income grow, and a majority of its budget directed towards social and economic development, as recorded in the audit of its finances. Investment has reached production, employing tens of thousands. The Valley has been connected to the national railway for the first time in history. New institutions of medicine, management and technology have been established. Grassroots elections have returned power to village councils, district bodies and, in 2024, an elected assembly. The record and its supporting figures are set out in the government’s own documentation.
This is not to claim perfection. The security threat remains real, as the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 showed with terrible clarity. Investment has flowed unevenly, with the Jammu division drawing more than the Valley. Growth has not yet reached every home. These are genuine shortfalls, and an honest account records them. But there are shortfalls in a construction project. The direction is towards building more, connecting more, including more. When people on this side of the line have pressed their demands, the response, whatever its imperfections, has been to expand what the state provides rather than to fire on those who ask.
The Other Answer: Firing
Now consider how the same essential demands have been answered across the line. In Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, a civil society coalition known as the Joint Awami Action Committee, formed in 2023 from traders, transporters, lawyers, teachers and students, has pressed a set of strikingly ordinary demands: subsidised wheat flour, fair electricity pricing and an end to political privileges the people do not share. The response has been a pattern of force that has recurred, and worsened, over three years.
The sequence is documented. In May 2024, six days of protest over the price of flour and electricity left several people dead, including a police officer, before the administration announced a subsidy and the protests were called off. The relief proved temporary. In late September and October 2025, after the coalition broadened its charter and the talks broke down, the region again saw deadly unrest. India’s own government record notes that on a single day in Muzaffarabad in September 2025, at least two people were killed and twenty-two injured when security forces opened fire on residents demanding basic rights, with internet and mobile services suspended across the territory.
The most severe phase came in 2026. The administration banned the Joint Awami Action Committee under an anti-terrorism law, arrested scores of its members and sealed its office. In the unrest that followed the long march the coalition had called, the toll mounted sharply. According to the latest data, the brutal crackdown by occupying Pakistani forces has resulted in the tragic deaths of at least 90 civilians, with many more injured.
Addressing a press briefing, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal condemned the “wanton killings”. He stated that the Pakistani establishment has responded to public discontent with “bullets, blackouts, intimidation, and repression”. Dismissing the ongoing local elections in the region as a “complete farce” and a “hollow exercise,” Jaiswal noted that Pakistan is merely seeking to manufacture legitimacy and camouflage an illegal occupation. A near-total media blackout accompanied the crackdown, so that the killing could proceed with as few witnesses as possible.
While figures coming from a press operating under severe constraint cannot always be independently verified, the staggering toll is now corroborated by official Indian assessments. The essential pattern—force met to economic demand, escalating over three years to bans and mass killing—is documented consistently across many accounts. India has strongly urged the international community to see through the veneer of Islamabad’s hypocrisy, scrutinise its actions, and hold Pakistan accountable for the atrocities committed against civilians.
What the Two Answers Mean
Place the two responses side by side. On one side of the line, demands for a better life have been met, imperfectly but genuinely, with railways, hospitals, universities, investment and elections. On the other, demands for flour, fair electricity and a political voice have been met with tear gas, mass arrests, an anti-terrorism ban on a civil society group, an information blackout and repeated firing that has left dozens dead. The question put to both states was substantially the same. The answers reveal two entirely different conceptions of what a state owes the people it governs.
It is worth being clear about what this comparison does and does not claim. It does not claim that the Indian side is without fault, or that every grievance in the Valley has been resolved. It has not, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What it claims is narrower and firmer. A state that answers a demand for bread by building subsidised supply, and a state that answers the same demand by firing on the crowd, are not two versions of the same thing. They are opposites. And the people of the region, who can see both sides of the argument from where they stand, are increasingly saying so in their own voices.
The deepest measure of a government is not what it builds in good times but how it treats its people when they are angry and in the street. On one side of the Line of Control, that test has been met with concrete and the ballot. On the other, it has been met with the bullet. No commemoration, and no accusation hurled across the line, can change what the people on each side already know from their own experience. The answer a state gives to its people is the truest statement it ever makes about itself.
