India’s narrative of progress in Kashmir after revoking Article 370 masks worsening unemployment, economic decline, repression, and rights abuses.

In modern politics, stories often outrun statistics. Grand narratives—of security restored, prosperity unlocked, sovereignty defended—carry further than the quieter, more complicated music of data. In Indian-administered Kashmir, that gap between storyline and spreadsheet has only widened since New Delhi revoked Articles 370 and 35A in August 2019. The move was sold as a hinge of history: curb militancy, integrate the region, unleash development. The promise was compelling. The numbers that have followed are far less so.

Officials in Delhi point to a steep decline in recorded terrorist incidents—from 143 in 2018 to 28 in 2021, a drop they tout as proof that the policy “worked.” Even if taken at face value, that metric is hardly the whole ledger. On the ground, unemployment has climbed past 25 percent, private investment has stalled, and the region’s most visible engine of growth—tourism—has sputtered. By one count, only 84,000 tourists visited in the months after August 2019, compared with well over a million a year during 2011–2014. Independent analyses have noted an 86 percent collapse in tourist inflows, while reported average monthly earnings in the sector fell from roughly ₹22,000 to ₹6,000. The government’s preferred storyline stresses order; the data point to distress.

The broader economy tells a similar tale. According to the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, tourism and handicrafts—pillars of household income—have resulted in the loss of more than 144,500 jobs. Total commercial losses exceed ₹15,000 crore, with ripple effects that reach into classrooms and kitchens. Families are living on credit; school fees go unpaid; students leave mid-term. New Delhi has advertised central aid totaling ₹56,000 crore. Still, Kashmiri politicians, including former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, have called those figures fictitious and pointed instead to official data that show contraction rather than lift-off. When the project of “development” becomes an announcement rather than a demonstrable trend, skepticism isn’t cynicism—it’s method.

Policy choices have compounded the squeeze. A new property tax—5 percent on residential and 6 percent on non-residential holdings—landed on households already navigating a stalled job market. Kashmiri Pandit employees have protested unpaid wages since mid-2022. Shifts in land policy have triggered fears of settler colonialism among many residents. Apple growers, among the region’s most iconic producers, report losses in the billions due to inadequate storage, poor logistics, and bottlenecked transportation—problems that require capital investment and administrative focus rather than political theater. In Ladakh, the creation of a separate Union Territory has not quelled discontent; residents of Leh and Kargil want statehood restored, citing broken promises and a lack of job opportunities. Economic stress, unsurprisingly, has found an echo in mental health: clinicians report surges in depression and PTSD, the quiet injuries of a prolonged emergency.

Education has been a particular casualty of the last several years—not only because of curfews and prolonged internet shutdowns, but because of a wider re-engineering of civil society. Consider Jamaat-e-Islami’s Kashmiri wing, a historically reformist movement that, over time, shifted its center of gravity from raw politics to education. Through the Falah-i-Aam Trust (FAT), it operated hundreds of low-cost schools that served poor and orphaned children who had few alternatives.

By 2016, FAT had run 321 schools, enrolling more than 80,000 students. That infrastructure was dismantled with remarkable speed. In March 2019—months before the constitutional changes—the Indian government banned Jamaat-e-Islami under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act; arrests followed. In June 2022, FAT schools were directed to shut, immediately displacing some 10,000 children and erasing livelihoods for teachers and staff. The crackdown was not confined to classrooms. Detentions multiplied. Voices were quieted, sometimes permanently; the custodial death of Ghulam Mohammad Bhat became a grim touchstone for critics of the policy.

The educational pipeline is strained at each bend more broadly. With campuses periodically closed, connectivity throttled, and movement restricted, graduation rates lag: only an estimated 8.4 percent of men and 2.8 percent of women complete degrees annually. Kashmiri students studying elsewhere in India report harassment and exclusion; the Jammu & Kashmir Students Association has pressed for official inquiries into attacks and intimidation. A polity that claims to want to build a knowledge economy cannot afford to treat schooling as collateral damage.

The government’s preferred phrase for its post-2019 management of the region is “normalcy.” But as cordon-and-search operations intensify, paramilitary camps multiply, and drones hum overhead, the portrait looks more like a permanent exception. Security agencies have at times claimed that cross-border infiltration has largely ceased and militant ranks have fallen below 140; yet the continued expansion of operations and infrastructure hints at a state preparing for protraction, not everyday life. Alleged targeted killings of Hindu settlers, beyond their immediate tragedy, serve a familiar propaganda function: they dramatize the threat, and in doing so justify the cure.

Electoral engineering has not eased doubts. The Delimitation Commission’s work—defended as routine technocracy—has been perceived by many Kashmiris as an effort to tilt the field in favor of New Delhi’s allies. Layer on a legal architecture that includes AFSPA, PSA, and a thicket of emergency powers, and Kashmir becomes what it has long been called: the most militarized place on earth. In such a setting, abuses are not aberrant; they are a structural risk. Torture, enforced disappearances, and collective punishments flourish where accountability is rare and oversight episodic.

The tendency to legislate reality is not unique to Kashmir, of course. But the stakes here are unusually high. A state that defines success by the absence of noise will work hard to muffle it. A state that defines development as a press release will measure progress in ribbon-cuttings, not in wages or school completion. And a state that defines dissent as sedition will prefer the spectacle of elections to the substance of representation. None of that erases the very real security challenges the region faces; it merely insists that policy be judged by its outcomes rather than by its rhetoric.

What, then, is the telos of the project? Critics argue that the long game involves demographic transformation under the guise of legality: redrawing constituencies, revising land rules, diluting protections, nationalizing decision-making, and then presenting a “local” government to ratify the new dispensation. Whether or not one accepts that interpretation, the immediate effects are plain enough. A polity is being asked to treat a permanent emergency as if it were everyday life. Kashmiris, meanwhile, continue to do what communities under pressure have always done: resist erasure—sometimes openly, often quietly—by insisting on facts that do not fit the script.

The crucial corrective here is not a counter-narrative but a different method. Start by measuring what matters: employment, household income, sectoral output, school retention, health indicators, and investment formation. Disaggregate the data by district and by gender; publish a complete series; allow independent verification. Resist the impulse to dismiss every negative indicator as propaganda or every positive one as “fudged.” Politics will always tell stories. The point is to ensure that those stories are tested, not simply repeated.

If the past six years reveal anything, it is that governing by storyline is a habit that crowds out learning. Kashmir does not need more adjectives; it needs fewer unknowns. Until policies are evaluated against transparent, durable numbers, the region will continue to live within a claim about itself—one that has yet to materialize in people’s lives.