Summary

The state subject category is a critical part of Kashmir’s history. It gained global traction in August 2019 after India’s far-right Bhartiya Janta party unilaterally abolished the state subject laws embedded in Article 35A of the Indian constitution that permitted only the longtime inhabitants of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir to purchase land and seek employment in the state. This category’s history stems from the Kashmiri Pandit community’s tireless agitation in the early 20th century in response to outsiders’ encroachment on their jobs. Consequently, the Dogra princely state formed the Jammu and Kashmir State Subject Definition Committee in 1927, differentiating mulki “people of the land” from gairmulki “people not of the land” and privileging mulkis in land ownership and employment. This legal category remained operative after the first India–Pakistan war of 1948, which led to the division of the princely state into India- and Pakistan-administered territories. Local governments on both sides of the ceasefire line, later called the line of control, retained the state subject category and made it a part of their state constitutions.

In India-administered Kashmir, the state subject category has polarized public opinion. The Kashmiri nationalist leadership negotiated a special status for Kashmir within the Indian Union. Article 370 granted Kashmir full autonomy, and Article 35A constitutionalized the state subject category and provided the residents of Jammu and Kashmir special citizenship rights. In the early 1950s, India’s centralization policy eroded Kashmir’s autonomous status, while the Hindu nationalists demanded complete integration and an end to special citizenship privileges. Non-Muslim minorities, most, if not all, aligned with Hindu-majority India and supported the abrogation of the state subject category, as it was a hindrance to Kashmir’s complete integration. Ironically, this posture of Kashmiri Hindus stood in stark contrast to the state-subject agitation led by their early 20th-century predecessors for protecting their communitarian interests. Conversely, Kashmiri Muslims insecure about their fate in Hindu majority India made the State Subject category the essence of their political identity and firmly believed that the discontinuation of this legal category would alter Kashmir’s demography and minoritize their community. The historicization of the state subject question reveals how the categories of majority and minority constructed by the British colonial powers continue to define power dynamics in Kashmir and shape and reshape political postures and relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims.