On 22 April 2025, gunmen entered the Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam and killed 26 civilians in broad daylight. The victims were mostly tourists, selected by religion, shot in a popular recreational spot accessible only by pony track. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir since 2008. The grief was real. The outrage was legitimate. And within days, New Delhi had converted both into something else entirely: a pretext for accelerating a system of control over Kashmir’s civilian population that had been under construction long before the first shot was fired. One year on, the 26 dead have been mourned. What has not been mourned, because it has not been acknowledged, is what happened to the living in the twelve months that followed.

Within weeks of the Pahalgam attack, Indian occupation forces had detained approximately 2,800 people across IIoJK. Among those arrested were journalists, civil society activists, students and ordinary civilians with no established connection to any act of violence. They were swept up under the Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, statutes that permit detention for up to two years without charge or trial, that make bail a practical impossibility, and that place the burden of proving innocence on the accused rather than the state.

At least nine homes belonging to families of civilians were demolished, not by court order, not following judicial determination of guilt, but by administrative instruction executed under military supervision. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights formally condemned these demolitions as constituting collective punishment, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions of 1949. India’s own Supreme Court had ruled in November 2024 that property cannot be demolished without due legal process. The demolitions continued regardless.

Nearly 800 Pakistani nationals, many of them women married to Kashmiri men, raising Kashmiri children, living Kashmiri lives, were ordered to leave the territory within days. No due process was offered. No appeal mechanism was provided. Families were separated overnight by administrative decree.

These measures were presented as emergency responses to an exceptional event. One year later, none have been meaningfully reversed; the emergency has become the norm. This is the central truth of the Pahalgam anniversary. The 22 April 2025 attack did not create India’s control architecture in IIoJK; it accelerated and entrenched it. Mass detentions, collective punishment, expulsions, and expanded surveillance all had precedent. The attack provided political cover to make temporary measures permanent. UN Special Rapporteurs warned in November 2025 of institutionalised abuses, urging releases and investigations. Their calls went unheeded, and the international community failed to apply pressure.

Kashmir’s tourism economy, the lifeblood of taxi drivers, hotel owners, guides, porters and handicraft sellers, collapsed immediately after the attack. The Indian government closed 48 of 87 tourist destinations. Hotels slashed rates by up to 70 percent. Houseboats stood empty on Dal Lake for months. For families whose entire income depends on seasonal tourism, the closure was not an inconvenience. It was the question of how they would eat tomorrow.

A generation of young Kashmiris has spent another year navigating an environment where peaceful protest results in terrorism charges, where a social media post can mean two years in detention without trial, where attending a vigil can lead to being charged with waging war against the state. Journalists have continued to operate under the threat of arrest. Human rights defenders have remained in prison. Khurram Parvez, the veteran activist whose arbitrary detention was formally condemned by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, remains in his cell as of this anniversary.

The land law amendments that allowed non-Kashmiri citizens to purchase property in the territory for the first time have continued to operate. Infrastructure projects consuming thousands of kanals of agricultural farmland have proceeded. The demographic and economic transformation of IIoJK, enabled by the legal architecture erected after August 2019, has not paused for the grief of Pahalgam. It has used that grief as momentum.

Every anniversary invites a reckoning. The question this one demands is not whether the Pahalgam attack was a tragedy. It was. The question is whether India’s response to it has made Kashmir safer, more stable or more reconciled to Indian governance. The evidence accumulated across twelve months answers that question with unambiguous clarity.

A territory where 2,800 people can be detained in weeks without charge is not more stable. A territory where the UN formally condemns the state for collective punishment is not safer. A territory where journalists remain imprisoned for practising journalism, where families have been split by administrative decree, where agricultural land is disappearing under concrete and young people are being charged with waging war for attending protests, is not a territory being governed toward any sustainable peace.

India’s official position is that strong action has restored normalcy. For the Kashmiri farmer whose field is now a highway embankment, for the activist in a cell awaiting a trial that has not been scheduled, for the child whose Pakistani mother was expelled overnight, normalcy is not the word that describes their condition.

History will not be satisfied with the distinction between what was done on 22 April 2025 and what was done in its name during the 365 days that followed. It will ask, as it always does, who bore the cost and who made the choice. In IIoJK, the answer to both questions is the same people.

The author is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad.