Erasing Kashmir: India's Demographic Engineering and the Slow Death of an Identity

Erasing Kashmir: India's Demographic Engineering and the Slow Death of an Identity

A Kashmiri man's wife was taken at gunpoint and sent across the border into Pakistan. Their two young children were left behind. She had lived in Kashmir for years, married to a Kashmiri man, raising a Kashmiri family. After the Pahalgam attack of April 2025, India revoked all Pakistani visas and ordered nearly 800 Pakistani nationals to leave.


Muhammad Waleed Akhtar

Due process was not offered. Appeals were not entertained. Families were split overnight by administrative order, and the children left behind will grow up knowing that the state that governs their homeland considered their mother's presence there a security threat worth eliminating.

This is demographic engineering at its most personal. But it is only the visible, human face of a project that operates simultaneously at the level of law, land and political architecture. What India is doing in Kashmir is not merely a security operation or an administrative reorganization. It is the systematic dismantling of the conditions that make Kashmir Kashmiri.


On August 5, 2019, India revoked Article 370 and stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status. That act, executed without consulting a single elected Kashmiri representative, was the first move. What followed was a methodical legal restructuring designed to open Kashmir's land, its demographics and its political future to external control.


In October 2020, the Indian government amended Jammu and Kashmir's land laws, removing the longstanding requirement that only permanent residents of the territory could purchase property there. Any Indian citizen could now buy Kashmiri land. Local leaders responded with alarm. Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister, stated publicly that Jammu and Kashmir had been put up for sale. His concern was not rhetorical. It was prescient.


Official data presented to the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly in November 2025 confirmed what many had feared. Since October 2019, 631 people from outside the territory have purchased land in Jammu and Kashmir. Of these, 253 purchases were in the Kashmir Valley alone, covering approximately 386 kanals of land valued at roughly 130 crore rupees. These are not commercial investments or government projects. They are private individuals from outside Kashmir acquiring Kashmiri land, under laws specifically designed to make that possible, in a territory whose people were never asked whether they consented to this transformation.


The Harvard Law Review, not an organization given to political hyperbole, published an analysis of India's post-2019 changes in Kashmir under the title "From Domicile to Dominion: India's Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir." Its conclusion was that the 2019 changes fulfilled a long-feared scenario in which India would recruit non-Kashmiri settlers to dilute the region's predominantly Muslim population. As non-Kashmiris acquire land and domicile rights under the new legal framework, the analysis observed, India's identity as a settler state comes to the fore.


The parallel the scholars are drawing is not casual. Settler colonialism as a political phenomenon operates through a specific mechanism: legal changes that transfer land from an indigenous population to external settlers, accompanied by the gradual erosion of the indigenous community's demographic, cultural and political weight. Every element of that mechanism is present in what India has done in Kashmir since 2019. The legal barrier protecting Kashmiri land was removed. Outsiders are acquiring that land. Pakistani-origin residents with deep roots in Kashmiri families are being expelled. And the political institutions through which Kashmiris might contest these changes have been systematically weakened.


What makes demographic engineering particularly difficult to confront is its pace and its instrument. It does not arrive as a single catastrophic event. It arrives as a land law amendment, a domicile notification, a visa cancellation order, a legislative reply to a routine assembly question revealing that 631 outsiders have quietly purchased Kashmiri land. Each step is individually deniable as administrative routine. Collectively they constitute a transformation that, if left unchecked, becomes irreversible.


What is being taken from Kashmir is not only land measured in kanals and valued in crores. It is the demographic foundation upon which any future exercise of self-determination would rest. A Kashmir whose population has been sufficiently diluted by outside settlers, whose

Pakistani-origin families have been expelled and whose indigenous legal protections have been permanently dismantled, is a Kashmir whose people will have diminishing practical capacity to determine their own future regardless of what any international resolution or political negotiation might eventually decide. That is precisely the point. And it is precisely why the world should be paying closer attention than it is.

The author holds a degree in International Relations from the International Islamic University, Islamabad, and currently serves as a researcher at Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Islamabad.

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