'If terrorism has ended, who is doing the killing?'

Two labourers died in a brick kiln in Kulgam region of the occupied Kashmir last week, and with them, briefly, died New Delhi's favourite narrative - Kashmir is at peace.

Deepak Ratray and Bopinder, migrant workers from Chhattisgarh, were shot dead at close range by a gunman on July 31, 2026. The government's response arrived in a typical tone and manner - a swift pointer toward The Resistance Front, a group Indian investigators describe as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba. But the killing itself cuts against everything Delhi has repeatedly told the country and the world – that terrorism has been rooted out of the Valley, that the borders are sealed, that normalcy has finally arrived. Two more dead bodies in a "pacified" region is not a detail that fits quietly into that story. It contradicts it. Refusing to let that contradiction pass unremarked, former chief minister Farooq Abdullah stood before reporters in Anantnag and challenged New Delhi: "If terrorism has ended, who is doing the killing?" He further inquired: "Why does it keep happening precisely when Kashmiris rise to demand their rights?" The attack came days after a statehood demonstration at Jantar Mantar.

Abdullah did not treat that timing as coincidence. Increasingly, neither does the Valley.

Kashmir's present crisis of legitimacy began with the manner of the region's accession itself. At Partition, Jammu and Kashmir was a Muslim-majority princely state ruled by Maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu of the Dogra dynasty, who did not seek to align with Pakistan. Facing an invasion he could not repel alone, he turned to India for military help. India agreed, but only on condition that the state accede to it first, and with the promise that Kashmir's final status would later be decided according to the wishes of the Kashmiri people themselves. That promise was echoed soon after in United Nations resolutions calling for a plebiscite. Neither India's own commitment nor the UN's has ever been honoured. Seven decades on, no plebiscite has been held, and the region remains divided by a Line of Control that still splits families and villages. Both halves continue to absorb the cost of a dispute that the people themselves were never allowed to resolve.

What followed on the Indian side was decades of promised-but-eroding autonomy under Article 370, until August 2019, when New Delhi revoked that status unilaterally, stripped the region of statehood, split it into two Union Territories, and imposed what remains one of the longest communications shutdowns ever recorded in a democracy. This is not a claim requiring inference; it is documented. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued its first-ever report on Kashmir in June 2018, cataloguing torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances and excessive use of force by Indian security forces, alongside separate structural concerns on the Pakistani side. Its 2019 follow-up recorded that civilian casualties over the preceding year may have been the highest in more than a decade, with around 160 civilians killed in 2018 alone, the majority attributed to Indian security forces and armed groups. Human Rights Watch, responding to that report, noted that neither government had acted on the earlier recommendations and that India's rejection of the UN's findings signalled an unwillingness to confront its own record.

The picture since 2019 has not improved; by most independent accounts it has hardened into policy. Amnesty International's 2022 briefing, marking three years since the abrogation of Article 370, documented what it called a sustained legal siege on civil society - journalists, lawyers and activists subjected to repeated interrogation, arbitrary travel bans, revolving-door detentions and restrictive media policies, compounded by an initial 552-day internet shutdown and the forced closure of the Kashmir Press Club in 2022. This is the texture of what Delhi calls normalcy: fewer headlines, not fewer grievances.

It is this gap between the official narrative of pacification and the documented reality of continued repression that makes the Kulgam episode politically combustible. A government cannot simultaneously claim total operational control of its borders and plead an intelligence failure whenever civilians die in a manner that embarrasses its statehood-denial policy. One of those two claims is false.

No one can say for certain who carried out the Kulgam killings, because India's official response rarely goes further than pointing at Pakistan. So the question stands on its own, regardless of who eventually turns out to be responsible - why does trouble, big or small, keep erupting exactly when Kashmiris rise to demand their right to statehood? At some point, the pattern stops needing extra proof. A government that benefits politically from a restless Kashmir has little real incentive to ever let it settle.

This is the deeper meaning of Youme Istehsal (Day of Exploitation), observed every year on 5 August - a reminder that the events of 2019 did not end on that day but an ongoing condition in which political rights are suspended, narratives are engineered, and "normalcy" is performed rather than lived.

The way out of this cycle is not another round of accusation and denial between Islamabad and New Delhi, however tempting that exchange has become for both capitals' domestic audiences. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq's call for dialogue over confrontation points toward the only route that has not yet been seriously tried: one in which Kashmiris are treated as principal parties to their own future rather than as a security problem to be managed or a talking point to be deployed. Nearly eight decades after a monarch's signature decided the region's fate without its consent, that would be a modest place to finally start.