Jammu and Kashmir votes again: the 2024 Assembly election

Jammu and Kashmir had not held an Assembly election for a decade when it voted in three phases on 18 and 25 September and 1 October 2024. The election was the first since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, which had ended the former state's special status, and since the reorganisation of the state into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The Supreme Court had directed that Assembly elections be held, and the election was therefore watched as a test of whether electoral politics could resume in the union territory.

The National Conference-Congress alliance won 48 of the 90 seats, crossing the majority mark of 46. The National Conference itself won 42 seats and the Congress six, while the Bharatiya Janata Party won 29 seats, all from the Jammu region, the Peoples Democratic Party won three, and independents and smaller parties shared the remainder. Omar Abdullah, who had won both Budgam and Ganderbal, became Chief Minister, taking oath on 16 October 2024.

The geography of the result mattered. The National Conference's strength was concentrated in the Kashmir Valley, while the BJP's strength was concentrated in Jammu, producing an Assembly that reflected the union territory's regional divide. The result also showed the limits of reading a single election as a verdict on a single issue: voters in different regions weighed statehood, development, security, and local governance differently, and the alliance's victory did not settle the statehood question.

That question remained open after the election. Omar Abdullah and his government pressed for the restoration of statehood, while the union territory continued to operate with a Lieutenant Governor holding significant powers, particularly over police and public order, under the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019. The division of powers between an elected Chief Minister and a Lieutenant Governor therefore became a continuing feature of governance in Jammu and Kashmir, not a question resolved by polling day.

The election's significance is thus twofold. It restored an elected Assembly after a decade, which is itself a democratic milestone, and it left the constitutional future of the union territory unresolved, to be decided by Parliament and by the courts rather than by one Assembly result alone.