India’s Kashmir administrator sells ‘renaissance’ in Chicago as rights groups document repression at home

CHICAGO (MNTV) — Before an audience of engineering alumni here this week, the federally appointed administrator of Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir described a land reborn.

Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha told the IIT (BHU) Global Alumni Meet on Sept. 7 that India was emerging as a “confident, compassionate, innovative and unstoppable” power.

In Jammu and Kashmir, he said, the six years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked the region’s special constitutional status had been “nothing short of historic.”

“This is not just progress but a renaissance,” Sinha said. Jammu and Kashmir, he added, had moved “from shadows of fear to the light of opportunity, from isolation to integration, and from despair to destiny.”

It was part of a broader pitch about what Sinha called “India’s moment” — a rising power seeking investment, institutional partnerships and greater engagement from its diaspora. He specifically urged alumni to help “share an accurate narrative of India’s transformation” abroad.

In the territory he administers, however, that transformation looks very different to many of the people living through it.

Sinha has governed Jammu and Kashmir since August 2020, appointed a year after Modi’s government stripped the Muslim-majority region of the limited autonomy it enjoyed under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, dissolved the former state and divided it into two federally administered territories.

Even after Assembly elections restored an elected government headed by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in October 2024, New Delhi retained extensive authority in the Lieutenant Governor’s office over police, public order, senior civil servants, prosecution, the Anti-Corruption Bureau and other critical areas.

The result is an unusual two-tier system of government. An elected chief minister and cabinet administer several civilian departments, but the Lieutenant Governor, appointed by New Delhi, retains authority over institutions that exercise the most consequential coercive and administrative powers.

The political and administrative reordering that followed has reached nearly every lever of public life — land, government employment, voting rights, universities, the press, mosques and political dissent.

Experts say its cumulative effect has been to weaken the political and institutional position of Kashmiri Muslims while concentrating greater power in New Delhi.

And behind the language of development and normalcy lies another part of the post-2019 record: years of preventive detention, anti-terror prosecutions, restrictions on journalism and assembly, communications controls and allegations of torture and extrajudicial abuse documented by international rights organizations and UN experts.

Emptying offices

Start with who runs the place.

Across the civil administration, police and boardrooms of the region’s major institutions, senior positions once held by locals have increasingly gone to officials drawn from outside the territory.

The Jammu and Kashmir Bank, long one of the region’s flagship institutions, became a particularly stark example in a study by the Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK), a Kashmiri legal advocacy organization.

The group said the bank’s board and 12-member management committee had no Muslim representation apart from an additional director appointed in 2023, describing the wider institutional transformation as a process in which Muslim representation was being systematically diminished.

The churn at lower levels has been sharper still.

By late 2022, at least 41 government employees had been dismissed, all but one of them Muslim, according to figures compiled by LFK. Many were removed under Article 311(2)(c) of the Constitution, which allows authorities to dismiss public employees without the customary inquiry when the government invokes national security.

A Special Task Force comprising police, home and law officials was established to identify employees for action under the provision.

Detention as instrument of control

The transformation has also unfolded through the police station and the prison cell.

Human Rights Watch said in 2024 that Indian authorities continued to carry out what it called “repressive policies” in Jammu and Kashmir, including arbitrary detention and other serious abuses, while hundreds of Kashmiris — among them journalists and human rights activists — remained imprisoned under preventive-detention and counterterrorism laws.

Two laws have figured repeatedly.

The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, or PSA, allows detention without charge or trial for periods that can extend to two years. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA, gives authorities extensive counterterrorism powers and sharply restricts the ability of defendants to secure bail.

Amnesty International said in 2024 that the laws were being used to carry out arbitrary detentions and create a climate of fear among journalists, lawyers, political activists and others critical of government policy.

Even Jammu and Kashmir’s own High Court has repeatedly questioned the use of preventive detention.

Human Rights Watch documented cases in which detainees were rearrested under fresh allegations after judges granted bail or overturned earlier detention orders.

In one case, the High Court observed that the authorities appeared to treat preventive detention as if it were “answerable to no one.”

The crackdown widened dramatically after unknown gunmen killed 26 people, mostly tourists, near Pahalgam on April 22, 2025.

UN human rights experts, while unequivocally condemning the attack, said subsequent security operations resulted in reports of around 2,800 arrests and detentions across Kashmir.

Some detainees, the experts said, were allegedly held for days without charge, kept incommunicado, denied access to lawyers and relatives, beaten or otherwise subjected to torture and ill-treatment. Others were transferred to prisons outside Jammu and Kashmir, making family visits and legal access more difficult.

The experts also raised allegations of suspicious deaths in custody and punitive demolitions of homes belonging to families of suspected militants.

They described demolitions carried out without due process as potential collective punishment and noted that India’s Supreme Court had already ruled against similar punitive demolitions elsewhere in the country.

Human Rights Watch likewise reported that authorities demolished houses belonging to alleged militants after the Pahalgam attack, despite a Supreme Court prohibition on demolition as a form of summary punishment.

Journalists and internet

Independent journalism has narrowed alongside political space.

Human Rights Watch says at least 35 journalists in Kashmir have faced police interrogation, raids, threats, physical assault, travel restrictions or criminal cases related to their work since August 2019. Authorities have also used the UAPA and PSA against journalists, sometimes rearresting them after courts ordered their release.

The pressure has not ended.

In January 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Kashmir-based correspondents working for national Indian news organizations had been summoned by police over routine reporting. CPJ described the summons as part of an continuing pattern of intimidation against the press.

After the Pahalgam attack, UN experts said authorities also suspended mobile internet services in some areas and reportedly blocked about 8,000 social media accounts, including accounts associated with journalists and independent media. They said such sweeping measures raised concerns over freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.

Those measures followed a much longer communications clampdown.

After Article 370 was revoked in August 2019, Jammu and Kashmir endured an internet shutdown and severe restrictions that stretched, in varying forms, for more than 500 days — one of the longest such disruptions imposed by a government anywhere in the world.

Human Rights Watch said the restrictions disrupted medical access, education, livelihoods, family communications and reporting from the region.

Redrawing map

Political representation was changing at the same time.

Ahead of the 2024 Assembly election — Jammu and Kashmir’s first in a decade — a federally appointed delimitation commission redrew constituency boundaries.

Of the seven additional Assembly constituencies created, six went to Hindu-majority Jammu and one to the Kashmir Valley.

The final map gave Jammu 43 seats and Kashmir 47 in the 90-member Assembly, shifting greater electoral weight toward Jammu despite the Valley’s larger population.

Changes to electoral rules also allowed Indian citizens ordinarily residing in the territory — including some government employees, military personnel and workers from other states — to register as voters without the old permanent-resident requirement.

Kashmiri political parties warned that the changes could dilute the political weight of the existing population.

The land

Land is where some of the deepest anxieties lie.

The legal changes that followed the 2019 reorganization repealed or amended scores of Jammu and Kashmir-specific laws, including protections that had restricted outsiders’ access to land and safeguarded certain agricultural holdings.

Then came the administration’s “anti-encroachment” drive.

According to LFK’s 2023 report The Great Land-Grab, authorities identified roughly 178,000 acres in the Kashmir region and another 25,000 acres in Jammu as government land to be reclaimed.

LFK argues that significant portions of the disputed properties include homes, shops and farms occupied for generations, including land connected to earlier agrarian reform and tenancy arrangements.

Some government-controlled land has meanwhile been incorporated into industrial land banks intended to attract outside investment — part of the economic transformation Sinha promotes abroad.

LFK frames the legal and demographic changes as part of a “settler colonial” project in a territory whose sovereignty remains disputed between India and Pakistan.

The group argues that they raise questions under international humanitarian and housing law.

The anxiety over homes gained a new dimension after the Pahalgam attack, when UN experts and international rights organizations documented reports of punitive demolitions targeting the houses of suspected militants and their relatives.

The classroom

Education has undergone its own transformation.

In 2022, the Administrative Council headed by Sinha approved the Jammu and Kashmir Public Universities Bill, intended to create a common framework for the territory’s universities and giving the government broader authority over their governance and administration.

Jammu and Kashmir was also among the early adopters of India’s National Education Policy.

Schools were directed to organize activities including Surya Namaskar, or sun-salutation exercises, while videos of Muslim pupils participating in songs associated with Hindu religious traditions generated criticism among sections of the local population.

That same year, the administration ordered more than 300 educational institutions affiliated with the Falah-e-Aam Trust to cease academic activities.

The trust was linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic socio-religious organization banned by the Indian government. More than 11,000 students were told to transfer to other schools.

Experts viewed the closures as another step in dismantling independent Muslim institutions.

Shrine and mosque

Religion presents another contradiction in the government’s account of equal integration.

Sinha chairs the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board, which manages one of Hinduism’s major annual pilgrimages. Under his administration, state support for Hindu pilgrimage infrastructure has expanded, including pilgrim accommodation and projects connected with temples and religious tourism.

Support for a major pilgrimage is not unusual in itself.

Experts point instead to the contrast with restrictions imposed on Muslim religious life.

Large Eid congregations at Srinagar’s historic Jamia Masjid and Eidgah have repeatedly been prohibited, while the government-controlled Waqf Board has asserted greater authority over Muslim shrines and mosques.

At the same time, the administration has promoted Hindu pilgrimage routes and added the birthday of Hari Singh, Jammu and Kashmir’s last Hindu monarch, to the official calendar.

LFK describes the wider process as the “saffronization” of Kashmir — the increasing insertion of Hindu nationalist symbolism and institutions into the public life of a Muslim-majority region.