On August 5, 2019, India’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, annulled Article 370 of the Constitution, which had hitherto guaranteed the autonomous status of the province known as Jammu and Kashmir (which also included the Ladakh region), in one stroke through a presidential order. The order fulfilled the longstanding and publicly declared aim of the forces of Hindu Nationalism and its Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement that Jammu and Kashmir, as the only majority-Muslim state in the Indian union, must not be allowed to exist.

Along with the legal annulments, New Delhi not only bifurcated the region into two parts — Jammu and Kashmir on one hand, and Ladakh on the other — but for the first time in the history of Indian federalism, downgraded the status of the two from statehood to being mere “Union Territories” and therefore much more subordinated to central rule. Of the seven such UTs that already exist in the Indian Union, two have been allowed to have a representative legislative; Jammu and Kashmir will join them, while Ladakh will join the others without such a legislative body.

This action was long prepared. In Modi’s last term before the 2019 general elections, “President’s Rule” had been imposed to deny any possibility of a state government being formed by the main local parties with a strong base particularly in the Kashmir Valley, precisely to prepare the ground for the August 5 order. In the days before that announcement, Modi’s government sent an additional 38,000 troops (much more, according to some private observers) to join the existing force of over 750,000 armed personnel in the Kashmir Valley, worsening the already worst ratio in the world of armed personnel to civilians, standing at around 1:10.