What was removed
Article 35A, added by Presidential Order on 14 May 1954, empowered the Jammu and Kashmir legislature to define ‘permanent residents’ of the state and to reserve to them rights in land, public employment and settlement.
Whatever one thinks of that arrangement, its function was not obscure. It meant the demographic and economic composition of a Muslim-majority territory inside a much larger Hindu-majority state could not be altered by outside purchase or settlement. It was the constitutional lock on the composition of the population. The legal history →
It ceased to operate on 5 August 2019, alongside Article 370.
What replaced it
| When | Instrument | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2019 | C.O. 272 / C.O. 273; Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 | Articles 370 and 35A cease to operate. The state is reconstituted as two Union Territories. The permanent-resident regime loses its constitutional basis. |
| Mar–May 2020 | New domicile rules for Jammu and Kashmir | ‘Domicile’ replaces ‘permanent resident’ as the operative status, on criteria that extend eligibility to categories of people who were not permanent residents — including those resident for a qualifying period, and certain central government employees and their children. Domicile certificates carry entitlement to land rights and government employment. |
| Oct 2020 | Amendments to land laws | Restrictions on the purchase of land by non-residents removed, opening land in the territory to buyers from elsewhere in India. Provisions relating to agricultural land and to transfer for development purposes were also altered. |
| May 2022 | Delimitation Commission final order | Assembly constituencies redrawn: six additional seats to the Jammu region and one to the Kashmir valley — a shift critics argue alters the electoral arithmetic against the valley’s majority. |
Taken together: within roughly fourteen months, the rules governing who may become a resident, who may buy land, and how electoral weight is distributed between regions were all rewritten. They were rewritten while the territory had no legislature, by a central government, in a period that began with a total communications blackout. File 08 →
The argument, stated carefully
This is the file where an advocacy site is most tempted to overreach, so the claim here is deliberately narrow.
What this site does not claim. It does not claim that a demographic transformation of Jammu and Kashmir has been accomplished. It does not put a figure on how many domicile certificates have gone to people who were not previously permanent residents, or how much land has changed hands, because it has not found a reliable, independently verifiable source for either. Under its own standards it will not print an unsourced number, and this is a subject where invented figures circulate freely in both directions.
What this site does claim, and what is documented: the legal protections that prevented such a change were removed, and the mechanisms that could produce one were created, by a central authority, without the consent of the territory’s population or any legislature of its own. Whether the demographic outcome follows quickly, slowly, or not at all, the power to bring it about was transferred from the territory to New Delhi. In a disputed territory whose final status is, on the UN framework, still to be settled by its inhabitants, altering who its inhabitants are is not an incidental administrative reform. It changes the identity of the electorate in any future settlement.
Why the international dimension bites here
Where a territory’s status is unresolved and its permanent population is the body entitled to determine that status, measures by the administering power that alter the composition of that population are of a different legal character from ordinary domestic land reform. It is the reason this file exists separately from the rest of the dossier: the other ten files concern how people are treated. This one concerns who counts as the people. The legal case →
Demolitions: displacement by another route
There is a second, faster mechanism, and it is current. The fourteen UN mandate holders recorded in November 2025 “punitive house demolitions and forced evictions and arbitrary displacement, targeting families of individuals perceived as supporting the militants, and carried out without court orders or due process.” Their conclusion:[1]
Such actions constitute collective punishment and defy the 2024 ruling by India’s Supreme Court, which found that such demolitions are unconstitutional and violate the rights to life and human dignity, which includes the right to protection against arbitrary displacement.
UN Special Procedures, 24 November 2025
Human Rights Watch records the same practice in its World Report 2026, noting that authorities demolished the homes of alleged militants in defiance of a Supreme Court prohibition.[2] The signatories to the UN statement included the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing (Balakrishnan Rajagopal) and the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (Paula Gaviria) — the two mandates whose subject matter this is.
The experts also recorded demolitions in Gujarat and Assam, where thousands of Muslim homes, mosques and businesses were destroyed, and that nearly 1,900 Muslims and Rohingya refugees were expelled to Bangladesh and Myanmar, often without due process — which they identified as a breach of the international obligation of non-refoulement.[1]
Punitive demolition is displacement, applied to a family rather than a population, without a court order. It changes the map one household at a time.
Sources & notes
- UN OHCHR Special Procedures, UN experts alarmed by Indian counter-terrorism operations violating human rights in Jammu and Kashmir, 24 November 2025.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, India chapter.