The latest report by India’s own Concerned Citizens’ Group (CCG), produced after its eleventh fact-finding mission to Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), is not merely another human rights document. It is an insider’s indictment—an unintentional confession that strips away the carefully constructed narrative of “normalcy” and exposes the mechanics of occupation operating beneath the façade of democracy. What Kashmiris have articulated for decades through protests, prisons, and appeals to international forums is now echoed, in restrained bureaucratic language, by voices emerging from within India itself.

At the heart of the report lies a striking admission: IIOJK is being governed under what the CCG describes as a “colonial-type diarchy.” This phrase alone is damning. It acknowledges a system where elected representatives exist in name but not in power, while real authority rests with a Lieutenant Governor answerable directly to New Delhi. The depiction of an elected Chief Minister as a “half CM” is not rhetorical exaggeration; it is evidence of a governance structure designed to hollow out democratic representation while preserving the optics of electoral legitimacy.

This is not decentralization, nor is it federalism. It is democratic theatre. Power does not rise from the ballot box; it descends from the Raj Bhavan. The report’s comparisons with British-era colonial practices are instructive, but even these fall short. What is unfolding in Kashmir today is not a residue of colonialism—it is its modern reinvention. Legal instruments, surveillance technologies, and administrative decrees have replaced overt imperial rule, enabling a twenty-first-century version of settler colonialism that operates efficiently and quietly.

The CCG also raises concerns about the new reservation and domicile regimes, though it stops short of naming their true purpose. These policies are not neutral welfare measures; they are tools of structural exclusion. When a clear demographic majority is forced to compete for diminishing opportunities while new constituencies are cultivated through administrative fiat, the result is not inclusion but disenfranchisement. The overwhelming concentration of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe certificates in Jammu is not coincidence—it is policy by design, reshaping the political and social landscape through paperwork rather than force.

This demographic engineering constitutes a form of warfare without tanks. It may lack the spectacle of armed conflict, but its effects are equally enduring. International humanitarian law is clear on the illegality of demographic manipulation under occupation, yet the report only gestures toward this reality without confronting its full implications.

Perhaps nowhere is the nature of control more evident than in the report’s section on media repression. Journalists in Kashmir operate under a regime where truth itself is treated as a security threat. Demands for personal documents—salary slips, property records, even marriage certificates—are not regulatory measures; they are instruments of intimidation. When the Directorate of Information functions from the Governor’s residence, journalism ceases to be a public service and becomes a monitored activity.

The prolonged incarceration of journalist Irfan Mehraj, trapped in an endless cycle of delayed hearings, illustrates that repression is not accidental—it is systematic. Labels such as “Over Ground Worker” are deployed not to identify criminal conduct but to criminalize dissent. In such an environment, reporting facts becomes an act of resistance, while silence is rewarded as loyalty.

Economically, the report documents a region subjected to collective punishment. The collapse following the Pahalgam episode, the rotting produce on highways, and the dispossession of local businesses are not outcomes of mismanagement alone. They reflect a deliberate prioritization of military logistics over civilian life. Orchardists’ staggering losses are not acts of fate; they are foreseeable consequences of an economy forced to function under occupation. Poverty, in this context, becomes another tool of control.

One of the report’s most revealing acknowledgments is the existence of what it calls a “volcano of suppressed anger” among Kashmiri youth. What the state describes as radicalization is, in reality, political awakening. Mass detentions, surveillance of religious leaders, and the criminalization of peaceful dissent do not extinguish resistance—they manufacture it. The shift from despair-driven coping mechanisms to organized political expression is not extremism; it is consciousness.

The judiciary, too, comes under quiet scrutiny. By deferring constitutional violations on the basis of executive assurances, courts normalize the abnormal. Elections conducted without meaningful authority are not empowerment; they are containment strategies designed to project legitimacy without relinquishing control. Democracy is tolerated only when it produces pre-approved outcomes. This insider validation must now be mobilized—not archived. It should be placed before UN Special Rapporteurs, used to challenge judicial complacency, and leveraged to pressure international institutions that continue to reward impunity. Silence from the international community is not neutrality; it is complicity.