Er.Sameer Yousuf
“When employment becomes scarce, justice is argued in percentages and politics decides who pays the price”
Kashmiris have come a long way. Or perhaps, in a more unsettling sense we have travelled in a widening circle, only to arrive almost a century later at a destination that looks uncomfortably familiar. In the 1930s, the streets of the Valley stirred with protests demanding government employment. The grievance then was exclusion, rooted in a colonial-feudal order where the demographic majority found itself marginal in administration and public services. In 2025, the agitation has returned to the same arena. The slogans are different, the vocabulary constitutional rather than colonial, but the anxiety beneath is strikingly similar. Earlier, the fight
was for representation. Today, paradoxically, it is against an ever-expanding reservation regime. This inversion is not ideological confusion. It is historical continuity, and it tells a far more disturbing story about development, employment, and political imagination in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Government Job As The Last Ladder: For nearly a hundred years, the government job has remained the most prized economic asset in the region. It is not merely a source of income but security, dignity, and social status rolled
into one. That such a narrow avenue continues to carry such disproportionate weight is itself an indictment of policy across regimes and eras. Development strategies since Independence have privileged output over employment, visibility over viability, and political symbolism over structural transformation. Roads were built, institutions erected, schemes announced—but the economy failed to generate sufficient, diversified, dignified employment. The result is that growth, where it occurred, did not translate into broad-based socio-economic mobility. When
economic alternatives are scarce, aspiration collapses into competition, and competition, when mediated through politics, turns combustible.
What The Debate Is — And Is Not: It is important, therefore, to state clearly what this debate is not about. The current disquiet in Jammu and Kashmir is not a rejection of reservations as a principle. Reservations are a constitutionally sanctioned and morally defensible instrument of affirmative action. They have
played a crucial role in correcting historical injustices, widening access to education and employment, and democratising state institutions. No serious democratic society can wish them away. What is being questioned, however, is how reservations are designed, how far they extend, whom they benefit, and what unintended consequences they generate. Equity and merit are not adversaries. In the constitutional imagination, they are meant to coexist. Merit is not a euphemism for privilege, and reservation is not a licence to dispense patronage. When either is
absolutised, the system begins to fracture.
From Representation To Reservation| A Policy Trajectory : The present controversy has been triggered by amendments made in 2023–24 to the Jammu and Kashmir Reservation Act, 2004, which have raised total reservations in government jobs and educational institutions to nearly 70 %. This includes about 60 % vertical reservation across categories such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, Economically Weaker Sections, Residents of Backward Areas and border residents, and about 10 % horizontal reservation for ex-servicemen and persons with disabilities. Outside Tamil Nadu, whose 69 % reservation is protected under the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, no state or Union Territory operates at this level. Jammu and Kashmir enjoys no such constitutional insulation. Yet this moment is not an aberration. It is part of a long and uneven history of using reservation
as a tool to rebalance power relations in the polity. Across India and indeed across the world, quotas and group preferences have been employed to manage diversity and correct disadvantage. Comparative political studies show that more than two-thirds of countries use some form of affirmative action based on ethnicity, race, caste, or region. What distinguishes Jammu and Kashmir is not the existence of reservation, but the sheer number of objectives it is being asked to serve simultaneously. Social justice, regional balance, political outreach, security
considerations, and electoral consolidation are all being funnelled through a single policy instrument. When one tool is stretched to meet so many ends, distortion is inevitable.
Post-2019 Expansion: The context of scarcity makes this distortion sharper. Government employment in Jammu and Kashmir operates in a zero-sum environment. The number of posts is finite, and in many sectors shrinking. Every additional percentage point of reservation necessarily reduces the space available to the open merit category. This arithmetic reality turns reservation policy into a
high-stakes political game. Political parties operate within this scarcity, constrained by their social bases and electoral compulsions. Rational, long-term public policy often gives way to short-term distributive politics. Opposition parties mobilise grievance; ruling parties manage coalitions through concessions. Reservation becomes currency rather than calibration. The result is predictable: competitive expansion of quotas, legal vulnerability, and deepening social resentment.
To understand how the present impasse emerged, it is necessary to recall how reservation evolved in Jammu and Kashmir. Reservation here did not begin with jobs. It began with political representation. The Glancy Commission of 1932 was among the first to formally acknowledge the under-representation of Muslims in state services. For decades thereafter, political mobilisation in the Valley revolved around representation rather than structured affirmative action. It was only in the mid-1960s that reservation in government employment entered formal policy. In 1966, the state announced its intent to reserve posts for Scheduled Castes, who then constituted roughly eight % of the population, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Jammu region. A year later, the Gajendragadkar Commission aligned Jammu and Kashmir with national norms on Scheduled Castes. However, invoking Article 370, the state consciously stayed outside the framework of the First Backward Classes Commission and later the Mandal Commission. This decision was not merely political obstinacy. It reflected the state’s distinctive social composition. In the Valley, caste hierarchies were less pronounced, while in parts of Jammu they were deeply entrenched. Instead of adopting a purely caste-centric model, Jammu and Kashmir evolved its own hybrid framework.
“Reservation politics will remain explosive so long as government jobs are the exclusive means of social climbing. Lasting progress requires economic transformation over social engineering. In Kashmir, a century-long obsession with public sector roles has yielded only anxiety; true resolution lies in balancing equity and merit rather than forcing a choice between them.”
Committees chaired by Justice J.N. Wazir in 1969 and later Justice A.S. Anand in 1977 identified backwardness not merely in social terms but also in regional and structural ones. This led to the recognition of categories such as Residents of Backward Areas, residents of border areas and bad pockets. The underlying logic was that geography and historical neglect could be as disabling as caste. This framework was consolidated in the Jammu and Kashmir Reservation Rules, 2005, which fixed cumulative reservation at 56 %. By any standard, this was high. But it was internally coherent, historically grounded, and contextually tailored. It reflected an attempt—however imperfect—to balance caste-based disadvantage with region-specific deprivation, while still preserving a meaningful space for open merit. The abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 disrupted this equilibrium. One of the stated objectives of the constitutional change was to extend the full ambit of social justice to communities previously excluded by the state’s exceptional position. In principle, this objective was unexceptionable. In practice, alignment with the national reservation framework occurred through addition rather than rationalisation. Existing state-specific reservations were largely retained, while central categories were superimposed upon them.
Between 2020 and 2024, a series of changes reshaped the reservation matrix. Pahari-speaking people were first included under the Other Backward Classes category, receiving four % reservation. This was followed by a far more consequential move: their inclusion in the Scheduled Tribe list, which effectively doubled the ST quota in Jammu and Kashmir from about 10 % to 20 %. Simultaneously, the OBC quota was expanded to 8 %, fifteen new castes were added to the OBC list, the reservation for Residents of Backward Areas was reduced from 20 % to 10 %, and the Economically Weaker Sections quota of 10 % was retained. Each of these steps could be defended in isolation. Taken together, they produced a hybrid framework that layered functional reservations based on caste, tribe and now language over structural reservations based on region, border and economic status. Arithmetically, the result is a reservation regime approaching 70 %. Socially, it generates overlap, exclusion and resentment. The Pahari inclusion has become the focal point of this discontent, but the problem runs deeper than any single category. Language, by itself, has never been a criterion for Scheduled Tribe status in India. Tribal recognition is based on a combination of geographical isolation, socio-economic backwardness, distinctive cultural practices and historical marginalisation. The Pahari case raises several concerns. The first is overlap. Paharis are concentrated largely in the Pir Panjal region and areas adjacent to the Line of Control. These areas were already covered under reservations for residents of Backward Areas and border residents. The new ST layer does not address an uncovered disadvantage; it duplicates benefits.
Regional Imbalance, Merit, The Question of Justice: Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current regime, however, lies not in its intent but in its
outcomes. Data placed before the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly reveals a stark regional skew in the distribution of reservation benefits. One hundred % of Scheduled Caste beneficiaries come from the Jammu region. More than 85 % of Scheduled Tribe beneficiaries are from Jammu. Over 92 % of Economically Weaker Section beneficiaries are also from Jammu. Kashmir, which accounts for over 56 % of the population, receives barely 13 % of total reservation benefits. The beneficiary-to-population ratio illustrates the imbalance more starkly. In Jammu, there is roughly one reservation beneficiary for every ten people. In Kashmir, the ratio is closer to one in eighty-four. The Valley, historically more socially egalitarian and less caste-segmented, is effectively penalised for lacking large Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe populations.
Affirmative action, intended to correct disadvantage, ends up redistributing opportunity away from the demographic majority. This outcome may be unintended, but it is no less corrosive for that. Critics of the current framework are often branded anti-reservation or accused of defending privilege. This caricature does little service to a serious debate. The concern is not reservation itself, but the shrinking of open merit to a residual category. Merit is not an elitist construct. It is
a public good. It ensures administrative efficiency, institutional credibility and aspirational mobility. When merit is reduced to an afterthought, institutions decay and resentment festers. B.R. Ambedkar himself cautioned that reservations must be confined to a minority of seats. When exceptions become the rule, social justice risks turning into reverse discrimination.
Towards Solution: The way forward, therefore, is neither abolition nor indiscriminate expansion. Both are intellectually untenable and politically unsustainable. What is required is redesign. A region- specific, population-aligned reservation framework that reflects contemporary socio-economic
realities offers a more balanced path. Jammu and Kashmir has historical precedent for such an approach, and other states have experimented with regionally calibrated affirmative action. Adherence to the Supreme Court’s 50 % cap, rationalisation of overlapping categories, and the introduction of the creamy layer principle across groups, including Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, are essential to restore balance. Beyond quotas, however, lies the larger and more uncomfortable truth. Reservation debates are symptoms. The disease is an economy that has failed to generate sufficient employment outside the state. As long as the government job remains the sole ladder of mobility, reservation
politics will remain combustible. No amount of social engineering can substitute for economic transformation. A century after the first agitation for government jobs, Kashmir still stands in the same queue—older, more educated, more anxious. Whether it finally moves forward will depend on whether policy can restore a principled balance between equity and merit, rather than forcing society to choose between them. History, patient but unforgiving, has a long memory. It will
judge not the slogans of the moment, but the choices made when balance was still possible.
(The author is Jammu and Kashmir Student’s Association Central Kashmir Coordinator. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
