One hundred and eighty years, in order

Kashmir is sold

Under the Treaty of Amritsar, the British East India Company transfers the territory of Kashmir to Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu, for 7.5 million rupees. A Muslim-majority population passes to a Hindu dynasty by a commercial transaction to which none of its inhabitants is a party. Every subsequent claim of consent has to be measured against this beginning.

Twenty-two killed at Srinagar Central Jail

Police fire on a crowd gathered outside the jail during the trial of Abdul Qadeer, killing twenty-two people. The date becomes Martyrs’ Day and marks the beginning of organised mass politics in Kashmir. In 2020 the Union Territory administration removed it from the official list of public holidays.

Invasion, accession, war

Armed tribesmen from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier cross into the state on 22 October. On 26 October Hari Singh signs the Instrument of Accession to India; Indian troops are airlifted to Srinagar on 27 October. India’s acceptance is accompanied by the undertaking that the question of accession would be settled by a reference to the people. The first India–Pakistan war begins.

Resolution 47: a plebiscite

Security Council Resolution 47 sets out a three-part settlement: Pakistan to withdraw the fighters who entered the state, India to reduce its forces to the minimum required for law and order, and a plebiscite to be held under a Plebiscite Administrator nominated by the United Nations to determine the will of the people.^[1] The plebiscite has never been held.

UNCIP: both states accept the principle

UNCIP adopts two resolutions amplifying Resolution 47. Both India and Pakistan accept them. The 5 January 1949 resolution states that the question of accession will be decided through a free and impartial plebiscite. A ceasefire takes effect on 1 January 1949.

Article 370

Article 370 is inserted into the Constitution of India, giving Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional position: its own constitution, and a limitation on the Union Parliament’s power to legislate for it without the concurrence of the state.

The elected leader is dismissed and jailed

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir and the region’s dominant political figure, is dismissed and arrested. He spends much of the next two decades in detention. The removal of the most popular Kashmiri leader by New Delhi’s hand is a wound that shapes everything after it.

Simla, and the Line of Control

After the 1971 war and the creation of Bangladesh, the Simla Agreement renames the ceasefire line the Line of Control and commits both states to settle differences bilaterally. India reads Simla as superseding the UN framework; Pakistan does not. The people of the territory are not party to it.

The election that broke the ballot box

The Assembly election, contested by the Muslim United Front against the National Conference–Congress alliance, is very widely held to have been rigged. Opposition candidates and workers are arrested. For a generation of Kashmiris the lesson drawn is that the electoral route is closed. Several men involved in that campaign take up arms.

Governor’s rule, and the Gawkadal killings

Jagmohan is appointed Governor; the state government resigns. On 21 January, Central Reserve Police Force personnel open fire on a protest march at the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar. Reported death tolls vary widely between accounts, from around fifty upwards; it is commonly described as the largest single killing of protesters in the conflict. No one has been prosecuted.^[2]

The Kashmiri Pandits are driven out

Targeted killings, threats and an intimidation campaign by armed groups drive the great majority of the Kashmiri Pandit community — the valley’s Hindu minority — from their homes. Most have never returned. It is a grave crime against a civilian population and it belongs in this record. This site addresses it directly here.

Zakoora, Tengpora, and a funeral procession

Security forces fire on marches at Zakoora crossing and Tengpora bypass in Srinagar. On 21 May, following the assassination of Srinagar’s religious leader Maulvi Mohammed Farooq, Central Reserve Police Force personnel open fire on the funeral procession. Amnesty International records at least forty-seven people arbitrarily killed.^[3]

AFSPA arrives

The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act comes into force. Section 4 permits the use of lethal force; Section 7 bars the prosecution of armed forces personnel without prior sanction from the Government of India. That sanction becomes the hinge on which impunity turns. How Section 7 works →

Kunan Poshpora

During a search operation in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora, Kupwara district, soldiers of the 4 Rajputana Rifles gang-rape around twenty-three women, according to survivors and to the Deputy Commissioner of Kupwara, whose official report records that army personnel committed multiple rapes. The Army and the Government of India deny it. A three-member Press Council of India panel — invited by the Army, composed of journalists, and with no legal standing — visits for two days in June and pronounces the allegations ‘baseless’. By October the police have stopped investigating, declaring the case ‘untraceable’.^[11] The case in full →

Sopore burns

BSF personnel go on what Amnesty International describes as a rampage through Sopore, setting fire to houses, looting shops and killing at least fifty-three men and women. Amnesty published a dedicated case study of the killings three months later.^[3] No one has been convicted.

Bijbehara

Security forces fire on a protest march in Bijbehara. Reported tolls vary between accounts, commonly given as between thirty-seven and fifty-one dead, a large proportion of them students. Thirty years on, no accused has been punished.^[2]

Chittisinghpura and Pathribal

Thirty-five Sikh villagers are massacred at Chittisinghpura on the eve of a US presidential visit. Days later security forces kill five men at Pathribal and present them as the perpetrators; a CBI investigation later concluded the Pathribal killings were staged. Proceedings against the accused soldiers were closed after the Army declined sanction. It is the clearest single illustration of what Section 7 does.

The stone-pelting summer

Following the exposure of the Machil fake encounter — in which soldiers killed three labourers and presented them as infiltrators — months of protest are met with lethal force. More than a hundred people, many of them teenagers, are killed.

The graves are confirmed

On 16 April the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission confirms the existence of 2,730 graves, recommending forensic examination, DNA testing and a Commission of Inquiry; none of the three is implemented. On 2 July the Commission’s police investigation team submits its Enquiry Report of Unmarked Graves in north Kashmir; in the United Nations’ summary of it, the SHRC “identified 574 bodies out of 2,156 bodies”. The dead had been buried as unidentified infiltrators. At least 574 were local.^[10] The graves →

Burhan Wani, and the blinding

The killing of the militant commander Burhan Wani triggers the largest uprising in years. Security forces respond with pellet-firing shotguns. Between mid-2016 and the end of 2018, Srinagar’s main hospital records 1,253 people blinded by metal pellets.^[4] The weapon →

The first UN report

OHCHR publishes the first United Nations human rights report on Kashmir, covering June 2016 to April 2018, and calls for the Human Rights Council to consider establishing an international commission of inquiry. India rejects it. The coalition government in Srinagar collapses that month and direct rule follows.

Pulwama

A vehicle-borne improvised explosive device strikes a convoy at Pulwama, killing forty personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force.^[5] India carries out air strikes at Balakot on 26 February; an aerial engagement follows. Kashmiri students and traders elsewhere in India face reprisals.

The second UN report

OHCHR publishes its update covering May 2018 to April 2019, finding that neither state had acted on its recommendations, and recording that in nearly three decades of AFSPA not a single prosecution of armed forces personnel had been sanctioned.^[6]

Article 370 is read out of existence

Constitutional Order 272 alters how Article 367 is to be read so as to change the operation of Article 370; Order 273 gives effect to the abrogation. It is done while the territory is under direct rule, its political leadership detained, and all communications cut. The legal mechanism, step by step →

The state is dissolved

Parliament passes the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, splitting the state into two Union Territories — Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh. A state of the Indian Union is downgraded to centrally administered territory. On 16 August the Security Council holds closed consultations on Kashmir, its first in decades.

The longest blackout a democracy has imposed

All communications are severed: landlines, mobile networks and internet. The region experiences 213 days with no internet and some 550 days of partial or no connectivity — the longest shutdown then imposed by any democracy. 4G is restored on 5 February 2021, roughly eighteen months later.^[13] The blackout →

Who may belong, who may buy

New domicile rules replace the permanent-resident regime protected by Article 35A, opening domicile certificates — and with them land and job rights — to categories of non-residents. In October, land laws are amended to remove restrictions on the purchase of land by non-residents. Changing the map →

The documenters are arrested

Khurram Parvez, coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and the man most responsible for the torture and mass-graves documentation this site relies on, is arrested by the National Investigation Agency under the UAPA. The journalist Irfan Mehraj is arrested in March 2023. Both are held for years without charges being framed.

The Supreme Court upholds it

A five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously upholds the abrogation, holding Article 370 a ‘temporary provision’ and Orders 272 and 273 lawful. It also directs that statehood be restored and elections held. The judgment →

An election, without a state

The first Assembly elections in a decade. The National Conference–Congress alliance wins a decisive mandate and Omar Abdullah becomes Chief Minister. On 17 October the new cabinet’s first act is a resolution asking the Union Government to restore statehood ‘in its original form’. Jammu and Kashmir remains a Union Territory, with a Lieutenant Governor appointed from Delhi holding substantial powers.

Pahalgam

Gunmen kill twenty-six people, most of them Hindu tourists, at Pahalgam. Witnesses report the victims were identified by religion before being shot. A four-day armed conflict between India and Pakistan follows; India names its campaign Operation Sindoor. Casualty claims from those four days are contested and state-sourced on both sides.^[7]

2,800 detained

Sweeping operations across Jammu and Kashmir result in the arrest and detention of around 2,800 people, including journalists and human rights defenders, under the Public Safety Act and the UAPA. Homes are demolished without court orders. Around 8,000 social media accounts are blocked. In August, twenty-five books are banned and bookshops raided for publications said to ‘excite secessionism’.^[8]

Fourteen UN experts

Fourteen United Nations special-procedure mandate holders issue a joint statement condemning the Pahalgam attack unequivocally and then setting out the violations that followed: arbitrary arrests, suspicious deaths in custody, torture, lynchings, punitive demolitions amounting to collective punishment, and disproportionate restrictions on expression. They call for the immediate unconditional release of all those arbitrarily detained.^[8] The international record →

Released, but not free to go home

The Delhi High Court grants Khurram Parvez bail on 10 June 2026, after four years and seven months in custody without his trial reaching the framing of charges, holding that such prolonged incarceration with no prospect of an early conclusion justified release despite the UAPA’s bail bar. Irfan Mehraj is granted bail on 18 July. Both are released on 23 July 2026 — required to remain in Delhi for trial, and barred from travelling to Kashmir.^[9]

Where the record stands

Jammu and Kashmir has an elected government and no statehood. Article 370 is gone and judicially confirmed gone. The unmarked graves of north Kashmir have not been exhumed or identified. As at the United Nations’ most recent assessment of the question, the Government of India had never granted sanction to prosecute a member of the armed forces for a human rights violation in the territory, and no sanction has been publicly reported since.^[12] The plebiscite the Security Council called for in 1948 has not been held.