Drawing boundaries, sowing fractures | Perils of J&K’s Reorganisation Bill

The PDP’s gambit exposes how every party in J&K plays electoral chess with communal faultlines

Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party legislator Waheed-ur-Rehman Para has ignited a tinderbox by tabling the Jammu and Kashmir Territorial Administrative Reorganisation Bill, 2026, in the ongoing Assembly session. It doesn't just threaten to inflame communal passions that decades of careful coexistence have struggled to contain; it also illuminates the flawed lens through which J&K’s political parties approach governance.

The Bill proposes two new administrative divisions for the Chenab Valley and Pir Panjal regions, along with new districts across J&K. The stated rationale of administrative efficiency and equitable development for geographically remote, historically marginalised hill communities is not without merit. Large stretches of J&K’s more inaccessible terrain have remained poorly served for decades, and the Bill rightly notes that mountainous geography and regional imbalance have "adversely affected administrative efficiency and public service delivery". On its face, the developmental logic is genuine.

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a virtual communal tripwire. The two proposed divisions carry significant Muslim populations within the Hindu-majority Jammu division. That geography is the political core of the proposal. When the reorganisation of territory maps onto religious demography, the administrative rationale becomes a cover for communal partition. Jammu’s heterogeneous identity, encompassing Dogra, Pahari, Gujjar, and Muslim communities, may not be ancient, but it is real. Redrawing boundaries along demographic lines plants the seeds of balkanisation, and ruptures that fragile cohesion, transforming faultlines into permanent fractures.

The bill is unlikely to pass. The PDP, with a handful of seats, cannot overcome the ruling National Conference’s objections. But the divisive conversations it sparks are incendiary, and the characteristically inconsistent political responses, so far, offer little encouragement.

Some BJP leaders initially condemned the bill as a "Greater Kashmir agenda" that would "sow the seeds of division in Jammu", but many others later came out in its support. The party’s real anxiety is Muslim consolidation within the Union Territory. Yet its concern is less about the genuine grievances of Chenab and Pir Panjal communities than about preserving Jammu as a single unit framed through the lens of shared Dogra culture. The regional solidarity argument is a euphemism for cultural chauvinism.

The BJP has no interest in seeing Jammu’s political weight diminished, but it is equally not averse to keeping old fault lines flickering. In the Chenab Valley, where a demographic wedge, of roughly 40% Hindus and 60% Muslims, creates just enough communal friction to exploit, the party has made steady inroads over the last decade, turning unresolved sub-regional grievances into electoral opportunity. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s clearance of Para's bill without objection raises an uncomfortable question: Does the Centre see tactical value in keeping the pressure valve alive?

The National Conference's response carries its own irony. The NC has condemned the bill without acknowledging that it is objecting to a proposal it once championed. Its own Regional Autonomy Committee report of 2000 recommended a reorganisation of the multi-religious Jammu region along lines with identical demographic implications. Two-and-a-half decades later, the NC opposes the same demand from another party on the flimsy grounds of "financial burden".

The real rationale is plainly electoral. The NC fears the bill enabling the PDP to consolidate its position in the Muslim-majority Chenab Valley and Pir Panjal. The charge that Para is playing to the gallery may not be entirely misplaced, but it comes from a party guilty of the same calculation a generation ago.

The Chenab Valley and Pir Panjal do present genuine cases of neglect. Communities in high-altitude terrain with poor connectivity, limited healthcare, and remote administration have legitimate grievances that have festered for decades. The demand for more accessible administration is justified. But the remedy cannot institutionalise the very communal logic that equitable governance ought to dissolve. Administrative units must be drawn based on geography, connectivity, and service delivery, not on the religious composition of populations.

More importantly, genuine decentralisation requires a real devolution of financial and legislative power to elected bodies at the district, block, and panchayat levels first. New divisions without empowered local bodies are merely new extensions of the same unaccountable administration. For communities in the Chenab Valley and Pir Panjal, what matters is not whether their divisional commissioner sits in Jammu or Kishtwar, but whether a health centre has a doctor, a road is repaired, or a school has a teacher. Those questions are answered at the level of local governance through genuine fiscal devolution, transparent accountability, and the regular holding of local body elections that J&K’s governments have historically treated as cosmetic arrangements.

That the road to genuine decentralisation is harder today than it was in 2000, with real levers of control now vested not in Jammu or Srinagar but in distant New Delhi, makes the challenge even more Herculean. Reshuffling divisional boundaries without first addressing that deeper deficit is to bring home a dangerous theatre.

Anuradha Bhasin is Managing Editor, Kashmir Times and author of 'A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370'. X: @AnuradhaBhasin_.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)