India Abrogated Kashmir's Special Status in 2019. Seven Years Later, Everything the Supreme Court Ordered Has Happened Except One Thing

On August 5, 2019, President Ram Nath Kovind signed a constitutional order, C.O. 272, that let the government amend Article 370 without the consent of Jammu and Kashmir’s own constituent assembly, which had not existed since 1957. Both houses of Parliament passed a resolution the same day. On August 6, Kovind signed a second order, C.O. 273, making the article’s substantive provisions inoperative. Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status, in place since 1949, ended in the space of two days. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, passed alongside it, split the state into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, neither with the powers a full state has.

The blackout that followed

The government moved before the announcement, not after. Phone lines, mobile networks, and internet access across the Kashmir Valley went dark from the evening of August 4, and by some counts around 3,800 to 4,000 people were detained in the weeks that followed, including roughly 200 politicians and around 100 separatist leaders. UN human rights experts called the communications shutdown “a form of collective punishment” and demanded it be reversed. It was not fully reversed until February 2021, eighteen months later.

The government’s stated reasoning was to prevent unrest and violence while the change took effect. Whether the scale of the response was proportionate to that goal is a judgment the courts and human rights bodies have continued to argue about years after the fact; Amnesty International was still calling for stronger human rights protections in the territory as recently as December 2023.

What the Supreme Court actually ordered

Ram Nath Kovind’s orders faced 23 petitions in the Supreme Court, and on December 11, 2023, a five-judge bench upheld the abrogation. The court’s reasoning treated Article 370 as a temporary, transitional provision from the era of accession rather than a permanent guarantee, and it declined to rule on whether splitting a state into union territories was itself constitutional. But it did not leave the territory’s status entirely unresolved: the judgment ordered elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly by September 30, 2024, and called for the restoration of full statehood “at the earliest.”

A delimitation exercise redrew the territory’s assembly constituencies in 2022, producing 90 seats, 43 in Jammu and 47 in Kashmir, including nine reserved for Scheduled Tribes for the first time. The elections themselves were held in three phases in 2024 and met the court’s deadline, with turnout of roughly 63 percent overall and as high as 69 percent in the final phase. The National Conference won 42 seats, the BJP 29, and Congress 6; Omar Abdullah became chief minister on October 16, 2024, of a union territory rather than a state.

Statehood is the part that has not moved. On September 25, 2026, nearly two years into his term and almost three years after the Supreme Court’s order, Abdullah moved a resolution in his own assembly calling on the central government to restore it, telling the house that delimitation and elections had both happened as promised and statehood had not.

Three figures for the same investment claim

Government and industry accounts of what the territory has gained economically since 2019 do not agree with each other any more precisely than the political story does. One widely cited figure puts post-2019 investment at roughly 80,000 crore rupees. A more specific industry-department accounting puts realized investment from 1,984 industrial units that have actually begun production at 9,606.46 crore rupees, generating an estimated 63,710 jobs. A separate figure reported in 2025 cites 10,516 crore rupees in investment since 2019. None of the three is the same number, and none of the reporting reconciles the gap.

Tourism tells a similar story of recovery from a low the reporting doesn’t always mention was partly self-inflicted. Domestic tourist visits, hit hard by the 2019 lockdown and then by the pandemic, were recorded at 25.19 lakh in 2020 before climbing to more than 2.35 crore by 2024. International arrivals went from 1,650 in 2021 to 65,452 in 2024. Daily flights into Srinagar rose from 35 in 2019 to 125 in 2024. The scale of the rebound is real; so is the fact that 2020’s low base reflects both the aftermath of the abrogation and a global pandemic that suppressed travel everywhere, a distinction that gets lost when the numbers are presented as a single upward line.