Voting was never the whole of it. Democracy also lived in the wan penj, the small shop-front where neighbours drifted in to talk. It lived in the kandur waan, the baker’s shop, where the morning bread queue doubled as the morning news. It lived in the mahalla darbar, the street corner where disputes got settled before they became grudges. Kashmir lost that everyday version first. The formal one arrived later. It was always going to be weaker for it.
Democracy has two lives. One lives in constitutions and polling booths. The other lives somewhere smaller. In a shopkeeper’s stoop. A family argument at dinner. John Dewey called this second life “democracy as a way of life.” He meant it plainly. Democracy was a habit, practised daily, not an event that happens once every five years. In Kashmir, that habit broke. It broke before the formal institutions ever had a real chance to grow up.
This deserves to be taken seriously as political theory, not filed away as a regional grievance. Kashmir shows what happens when political education, political culture and political socialisation are all interrupted at once, by more than one cause, across more than one generation.
Three ideas, one collapse
Start with the words, because they get used loosely. Political socialisation is how people absorb political values. It happens through family, school, media, the people around you. Political education is narrower and harder. It teaches someone to tell a policy from a slogan, and to hold a representative to account. Political culture is what’s left after both. It’s the mood a society carries towards its own political system. Trust. Resignation. Something in between.
Gabriel Almond’s old typology still holds up well. A parochial culture barely notices the state. A subject culture notices it, but stays passive. A participant culture believes, correctly, that its voice moves outcomes. Healthy democracies need participants. Kashmir has been sliding the other way. From participant towards subject. In places, towards something close to parochial withdrawal.
“Democracy dies less often through rupture than through a slow swap: associated living replaced by passive spectatorship.”
Almond and Sidney Verba made a sharper point in their 1963 study, The Civic Culture. Civic virtue isn’t inherited. It’s made, continuously, in schools and local associations. Interrupt that process and citizens don’t stay neutral. They get socialised into something else instead. Grievance. Alienation. A readiness for confrontation over negotiation. Northern Ireland lived a version of this during the Troubles. Kashmir has lived its own version since 1990.
When shutdown became a form of government
The late 1980s brought cross-border-sponsored terrorism into Kashmir. It didn’t arrive as one event. It settled in as a condition. Hartals. Curfews. Street confrontation. Not occasional. A rhythm — loudest in 2010 and 2016, but present in smaller doses through most of the years between.
When shutdown becomes routine, ordinary civic life just stops. Shops close. Schools shut early, or not at all. The wan penj empties out, and so does the kandur waan next door — the bread queue that was also the gossip queue, the news queue. The pharmacy goes quiet. So does the barber’s chair, the grocery counter, the mosque hamam after prayers. Even the yarbal, the riverbank, and the public park thin out under curfew. These weren’t decorative traditions. They were Kashmir’s own version of Dewey’s classroom. When they went quiet, something real was lost. Not just inconvenienced.
A politics with no room for compromise
Into that quiet stepped a hostile separatist politics. It didn’t just compete with the mainstream. It tried to delete the idea of participation altogether. Voting was recast as compromise. Sometimes as betrayal. Politics narrowed to two options: resistance or submission. No room left for the slow, unglamorous work of actual self-government.
This inverts Dewey’s whole argument. He believed democracy’s strength was its tolerance for changing your mind after a real conversation. A politics built on binary loyalty has no use for that. It only wants verdicts.
Not all the damage came from outside. Kashmir’s mainstream parties did real harm on their own. Decades of nepotism. Clientelism. Manifestos promising constitutional guarantees and development, followed by reversal once in office. That taught people a specific lesson: elections rotate faces, not outcomes. Hard to unlearn, once it sets in. It produces exactly the hollowed-out relationship with politics Dewey warned about the kind where voting happens, but nothing like democratic living comes with it.
Enemies working in the gaps
Cross-border proxy networks didn’t create these two wounds. They exploited them.
Three tactics recur in the record. Targeting grassroots leaders directly — panchayat members and mainstream workers assassinated, so durable local leadership never forms. Information warfare — propagandist media built to amplify grievance and discredit anyone who chose to participate. And institutional sabotage and boycotts engineered through coercion, so low turnout could later be cited as proof the elected bodies never had legitimacy. Suppress the turnout. Then point to the suppressed turnout as the verdict of the people.
The formal record shows the same slide, even where institutions existed on paper. Panchayat elections in 2018 and District Development Council elections in 2020 did produce local bodies. But many seats went uncontested in districts hit hardest by militancy, and several elected members later resigned under direct threat. An institution can exist and still fail to teach anyone how to use it.
The paradox of the wan penj
Here’s where Kashmir gets genuinely strange, and where lazy talk of “apathy” falls apart. Sit in a wan penj, or in the kandur waan queue at dawn, or in a barber’s chair, or over a samovar of tea and wazwan talk, and raise Iran, the Gulf, or the latest turn in American foreign policy. You’ll get a fluent, opinionated, often well-informed conversation. Walk down to the yarbal on a summer evening, or a park on a Sunday, and it keeps going among strangers. This is not a disengaged society. It’s an engaged one, aimed outward.
Raise the district hospital instead. Or the roads. Or youth unemployment. Watch the energy drop at the pharmacy counter, at the grocery till, even in the mosque hamam after prayers, where local matters were once argued over as readily as scripture. This isn’t mainly fear, though fear plays its part. It looks more like learned helplessness, built up over years of representatives who promised structural change and delivered factional theatre instead. Global politics is a safe outlet. Nothing is asked of the listener beyond an opinion. Local politics has taught the same listener that opinion changes nothing there.
Dewey’s warning is almost literally illustrated here. He said democracy dies less often through rupture than through a slow swap: associated living, replaced by passive spectatorship. Kashmir hasn’t lost the capacity for political thought. The wan penj and the kandur waan prove that, every morning. What’s happened is that the capacity has moved house — to a place where it costs nothing, and changes nothing.
When leaders trade policy for insults
Public discourse among Kashmir’s own political figures hasn’t helped. Personal attacks. Public feuds. Rhetoric standing in for policy argument. That responsibility sits mainly with the mainstream leadership. They’re the ones meant to set the tone, and pull it back towards substance when it slips. What we’ve watched recently, and go on watching, is not a good sight.
Meanwhile the real emergencies wait. Drug addiction among the young. Chronic unemployment. Environmental strain on a region whose ecology is already fragile. These get a fraction of the airtime handed to factional bickering. Citizens who tune out aren’t being unreasonable. They’re reading the incentives correctly.
The quiet death of trust
Robert Putnam’s idea of social capital – the networks and norms that let a community coordinate for mutual benefit – is the right lens for this last piece of the damage.
Decades of conflict and polarisation have worn down interpersonal trust in Kashmir. The listening spaces are smaller now. The wan penj, the kandur waan, the mahalla darbar, the mosque hamam, the yarbal – once informal schools in hearing out someone else’s grievance now more often confirm a settled view than test it. Dialogue has hardened along ideological lines instead of staying open.
This matters because Dewey cared about shared inquiry, not shared conclusion. That was democracy’s real content, for him. A society that has lost the habit of listening hasn’t just become more divided. It has lost the mechanism by which democratic societies catch and correct their own mistakes.
Where this is heading
None of this is fixed in place. But fixing it means taking Dewey seriously as a plan, not a quotation. Read together, the requirements amount to a single, coherent programme rather than a checklist: mainstream political discourse has to shift from rhetoric towards measurable outcomes; institutional integrity and accountability have to be restored, so that corruption is checked and manifestos are honoured rather than discarded after the count; the disruptive reach of cross-border proxies into democratic space has to be neutralised at the level of the local leader and the local institution, not just the border; and, underlying all three, everyday civic life from the household to the city ward has to be re-engaged, so that democratic habit has somewhere ordinary to live again. None of these stands alone. Institutional accountability without local civic revival produces clean elections that nobody trusts. Civic revival without institutional accountability produces energetic participation that changes nothing. The four have to move together, because Dewey’s whole point was that they were never really four separate things. They were one habit, practised in different rooms.
That habit starts with the family, where disagreement first gets modelled as survivable rather than dangerous. It continues in schools, which in Kashmir have leaned too hard on rote learning and too little on debate, and where restoring real student unions would do more than another curriculum rewrite. It continues in the wan penj, the kandur waan, the barber’s chair, the pharmacy counter, the mosque hamam, the samovar table, and the yarbal — spaces that need protection and revival, not nostalgia. And it continues in student activism, which, kept free of violent capture, is the natural training ground for leaders who argue about policy instead of loyalty.
None of this lets institutions off the hook. Grassroots leaders and civic organisers need real protection from coercive outside interference, or accountable local leadership will never take root. Citizens need to see, again and again, that engaging locally changes something locally. Trust doesn’t come back because it’s asked for. It comes back because it’s earned, case by case.
“Democracy survives only in the unglamorous rooms where people practise it daily, not in the moment they mark a ballot.”
Kashmir hasn’t lost its appetite for politics. Anyone who has sat in a wan penj arguing about the Gulf knows that. What it has lost is the belief that politics close to home is worth the same investment as politics watched from a distance. Dewey would have recognised this immediately. He spent his career arguing that democracy survives in the unglamorous rooms where people practise it daily, not in the moment they mark a ballot. Rebuilding Jammu and Kashmir’s democratic health starts in those rooms. One classroom. One household. One yarbal evening at a time. The institutions at the top can wait their turn.
The writer is a research scholar and be reached at bhatirshad81@gmail.com.
