On Aug. 5, India announced plans to revoke Article 370, a clause in its constitution that had given the state of Jammu and Kashmir limited autonomy, including the right to craft some of its own policies and to deny outsiders the right to acquire land. In practice, as one of the most militarized places in the world, Jammu and Kashmir had been under the tight control of the central government, but the symbolic power of revoking the article cannot be understated. Presumably expecting a massive public outcry, in the days before the announcement New Delhi deployed thousands more troops to the region, shuttered its schools, and cut off internet access.
As the story continues to unfold, we’ve collected our top reads on how the region got here—and what comes next.
After a period of relative calm in the 2000s, as hopes rose for a peaceful settlement between New Delhi and pro-independence insurgents, things took a turn for the worse this decade. “[A] civilian uprising in 2010 and India’s brutal response signaled a shift in the political climate,” writes Ikram Ullah, a journalist who was in Kashmir. “In the subsequent years, there has been a new surge in Kashmiri youth taking up arms against the Indian establishment.”
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