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A revised reservation policy brought in by India’s BJP-led central government attempts to shift Jammu and Kashmir’s politics to the ruling party’s benefit, and has left the union territory’s newly elected administration in a tricky spot

IN DECEMBER last year, the government of Jammu and Kashmir announced the formation of a panel to review the Indian union territory’s policy for reservation in government jobs and public educational institutions. The move came in response to growing unrest over the policy, implemented in March 2024, while the region was still administered directly by India’s central government in New Delhi. The Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference party, who had assumed office only two months earlier, promised a time-bound review that would be completed in six months. But as the deadline passed, there was little more than silence from his government.      

From the time it was introduced, the new reservation policy has faced significant opposition, particularly in Kashmir. Earlier in December, students had taken to the streets in Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir, urging the newly elected government to rationalise the reservation quotas for particular groups. The National Conference-led administration has been walking a tightrope on this issue ever since. 

During the budget session of Jammu and Kashmir’s legislative assembly in March, Sajad Lone, the president of the People’s Conference, raised a series of questions about reservations, reigniting the long-standing debate. Data presented by the government in the assembly revealed a stark regional disparity among the beneficiaries of the policy since April 2023. For instance, in the Scheduled Caste category, all 67,112 beneficiaries are from the Jammu region, with none from Kashmir. Similarly, in the Scheduled Tribe category, 459,493 individuals from Jammu have benefitted, compared to just 79,813 from Kashmir: a ratio of almost 6 to 1. The data attested to what Kashmiris had feared from the policy – further political and economic disempowerment of the Kashmiri population.

Jammu and Kashmir has already suffered a series of blows since 2018, when its previous elected state government collapsed. The state was put under Governor’s rule, then President’s rule, before the union government under the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) abrogated Article 370 of the constitution, stripping it of autonomy and splitting it into two union territories. This left Kashmiris disempowered and disenfranchised – something greeted with glee by the BJP and the Hindu Right, which have long painted Kashmiri Muslims as a threat.

The new reservation policy has been an attempt by the union government and the BJP to reorganise the demographics of Jammu and Kashmir – earlier India’s only Muslim-majority state – to its benefit. The policy has left Abdullah’s union territory government in a sticky spot. It is now buying time to announce a decision on the quotas.

THE NEW RESERVATION POLICY bears testimony to what has gone wrong in Jammu and Kashmir over the past five years. Since 2018, when it was placed under central-government rule, and since it lost its statehood and special semi-autonomous status in 2019, Jammu and Kashmir has been subjected to numerous insidious legislative and executive manoeuvres. New laws, regulations, policies and decrees have been aimed at expanding the Indian government’s control over legal and quasi-legal matters within the newly designated union territory. This process has served not only to consolidate New Delhi’s authority over what was previously a relatively autonomous state but also to further expand and solidify the BJP’s electoral prospects. 

The reservation policy leaves only 40 percent of seats in public educational institutions and government jobs for the general or unreserved category, despite this category making up 69 percent of the total population of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir according to the 2011 census. This share effectively drops to 30 percent by accounting for all vertical and horizontal reservations. Vertical reservations refer to the allocation of seats based on social categories such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes. Horizontal reservations apply across these vertical categories to ensure further representation for sub-groups like persons with disabilities, and ex-servicemen.

With an 8-percent quota for Scheduled Castes, the policy reserves a total of 28 percent of seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, despite these groups making up only about 18 percent of the population. Notably, Kashmir does not have Scheduled Castes, as the Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir) Scheduled Castes Order of 1956 restricts Scheduled Caste status to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. This further skews benefits in favour of Hindu-majority Jammu over Muslim-majority Kashmir, as evidenced by the distribution of the beneficiaries in the Scheduled Caste category. Even in the case of Scheduled Tribes, Jammu has a relatively higher share compared to Kashmir, with the former home to 60 percent of the local Scheduled Tribe population and the latter to 40 percent as per the 2011 census. 

With the new policy, 15 new caste groups were included in the OBC category, and their reservation share was increased from 4 percent to 8 percent, as recommended by the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission. However, government data does not reflect any specific beneficiaries within the OBC category.

The expansive reservation quotas instituted by the BJP-led central government are widely seen as part of a strategy to expand and consolidate the party’s voter base, especially in the Jammu region. The introduction of a 10-percent reservation for the newly recognised Pahari ethnic group within the Scheduled Tribes category, alongside the existing 10-percent reservation for the Gujjar-Bakarwal community, singularly demonstrates this. The Paharis were initially subsumed within the 10-percent reservation allocated to the Gujjar-Bakarwal community. However, following opposition from Gujjars, who argue that the Paharis are generally more economically privileged, a separate 10-percent quota was carved out for them.

In Kashmir, an overwhelming majority of the population falls under the unreserved category or under the Residents of Backward Areas (RBA) category. The Jammu and Kashmir Reservation Act of 2004 explicitly states that the total share of reserved seats in any circumstance shall never exceed 50 percent. The Act and the rules under it originally allocated 57 percent of seats for the open category, 20 percent for RBAs and 23 percent for other reserved categories. This distribution was grounded in constitutional principle and adhered to the pan-India upper limit of 50 percent of available seats being reserved under quotas, as established in the 1992 case Indra Sawhney vs Union of India. Moreover, the RBA reservation share has been cut from 20 percent to 10 percent as part of the new reservation policy.

The data shared by the government in the budget session revealed more imbalances in outcomes from the policy. The new reservation policy allocates 4 percent of seats to the Actual Line of Control and International Border categories, which is for residents living within six kilometers of the Line of Actual Control and the international border. In the Actual Line of Control category, 94.3 percent of those included were from Jammu, compared to just 5.7 percent from Kashmir. Under the International Border category, no beneficiaries were recorded from Kashmir, while 551 individuals from Jammu received benefits. The new policy allocated 10 percent to the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS). Significantly, in the EWS category, only 7.7 percent of the beneficiaries in were from Kashmir, while 92.3 percent of them were from Jammu, according to the data from April 2023.  

There has been speculation about officers adhering to a stricter set of criteria in Kashmir than elsewhere when granting EWS certificates. Whether or not that is true, the statistics available only heighten fears of the long-term disempowerment of Kashmir. “The entire reservation system is rigged against the Kashmiri-speaking population, as well as against the Scheduled Tribes or Economically Weaker Sections living in Kashmir,” Sajad Lone said during his address in the budget session of the legislative assembly. He added that the reservation policy was being used as a tool “to exclude the Kashmiri-speaking population from the power structure and reorder the social hierarchy” in Jammu and Kashmir. 

By pushing reservation quotas up to cover between 60 and 70 percent of seats, in defiance of Indira Sawhney and the Jammu and Kashmir Reservation Act, the BJP had its eyes firmly set on the political dividends of appeasing Hindu-majority Jammu. Its failure to secure a majority in Jammu and Kashmir’s 2024 assembly elections – the first since the abrogation of Article 370 – may be a temporary setback, but the BJP appears to have already laid the groundwork for a rupture in earlier social and political alignments within Jammu and Kashmir’s complex political landscape.

IN 2023, the union government amended the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, which split the former state into two union territories in 2019, to reserve nine out of 90 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly for the Scheduled Tribes. In the 2024 assembly election, the BJP secured all seven seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes. However, the party failed to win any of the six seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes in the Jammu division, including in the districts of Rajouri and Poonch, which have predominantly Muslim populations and are home to a large concentration of the Gujjar-Bakarwal and Pahari communities. 

Despite recent gerrymandering that merged several assembly segments from Rajouri-Poonch with the erstwhile Anantnag constituency to create the new Anantnag-Rajouri seat, the BJP failed to capitalise on the Gujjar and Pahari vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha election too. This reorganisation was expected to make these communities a decisive factor in determining the victor in a constituency that was previously part of the Kashmir division. Still, revised delimitation significantly enhanced the electoral significance of Jammu in the legislative assembly elections. The BJP won five out of the six newly created constituencies in the Jammu division. This victory boosted the party’s total tally in the assembly to 29, a significant rise from its previous total, of 25, in the 2014 legislative assembly elections. 

Despite having a larger population than Jammu, Kashmir was allocated only one additional constituency in the delimitation process, raising concerns about potential shifts in political representation and the balance of power between the two regions. According to the 2011 census, Kashmir comprises approximately 55 percent of the union territory’s total population, while Jammu accounts for around 45 percent. Naveed Mir, a doctoral researcher studying the constitutional trajectory of Jammu and Kashmir, believes that both the delimitation process and the changes to reservation policy after the abrogation of Article 370 follow a clear pattern that empowers Jammu and helps the BJP consolidate its voter base there. “This strategy contrasts sharply with how the BJP initially justified the abrogation of Article 370 as a move toward equality and integration,” Mir said.

Another major legislative change that has added to the sense of diminishment among Kashmir’s Muslims is the introduction of a new domicile law in 2020 granting domicile status to non-Kashmiris and their descendants in Kashmir, making them eligible for land ownership and government jobs. This is a direct consequence of the abrogation of Article 370, which had previously protected local land rights and public employment as a Kashmiri prerogative under Article 35A of the Indian constitution. 

WHETHER OR NOT the BJP’s strategy proves successful in the long run, it presents a political trap for Kashmir-based regional political parties. If they undo the changes in the reservation policy, it could create new social and political faultlines – or what Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, a member of parliament from Srinagar, has called a “class war”. Mehdi, of the National Conference, was a prominent figure in the December 2024 protests along with two leaders from the People’s Democratic Party, Iltija Mufti and Waheed Ur Rehman Para – the latter a member of the legislative assembly. 

The National Conference-led government now finds itself in a catch-22 situation. It appears to have benefitted from the Pahari vote in both the assembly and Lok Sabha elections, performing well in constituencies with Pahari populations, and so has electoral reasons not to oppose the new reservations. But it will have to balance this political gain with the larger impacts of the new reservations in Kashmir, with the Kashmiri population firmly opposed to them.  

A writ petition was filed at the Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court in November last year challenging the new reservation scheme. The National Conference government conceded to public pressure following the student protests in December and formed a cabinet subcommittee to review the new policy. Decisions from both the court and the committee are still awaited. 

AurifMuzafar, a Kashmiri lawyer, cited data on reservation certificates to highlight the declining representation of Kashmiri Muslims in state services – a trend that has been exacerbated by the reservation policy. “Aspirants from the Kashmir region now face more stringent tests and unprecedented cutoff limits to qualify for various stages of examinations conducted by the Public Service Commission and the Services Selection Board,” he said. He compared the phenomenon to how Muslims were denied access to education and employment under the reign of the Dogra dynasty, the Hindu kings who ruled Kashmir before India’s independence.

India has historically used reservations to promote equality of opportunity across its highly varied and unequal citizenry via affirmative action. But the BJP-led central government has manipulated and weaponised reservations to further the social, political and economic marginalisation of Kashmiris, and to promote societal and political divisions for its own political gain – a strategy reminiscent of the poisonous colonial-era methods of divide and rule, and a vicious misuse of the ideals of social justice. 

Burhan Majid is a legal scholar and a doctoral fellow at NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad. He is a recipient of the Indian Equality Law Fellowship 2022 (University of Oxford) and VRU-WCL Short-Term Fellowship 2023 (Humboldt University, Berlin).

This article was originally published on Himal.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.