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In conflict-affected societies, the authority of the state is tested not merely by its capacity to enforce law, but by its ability to respond to categories of suffering it has historically marginalised. The recent decision by the Jammu and Kashmir LG administration, in collaboration with the civil society group Save Youth Save Future, to identify and support victims of terror is significant precisely because it engages with a constituency that has remained largely excluded from institutional recognition. These victims—dispersed, depoliticised, and often rendered administratively invisible—have for decades occupied a space outside the formal frameworks of relief, justice, or even public memory. This initiative marks an important shift: not in scale, but in orientation. It reflects an understanding that legitimacy in post-conflict governance cannot be sustained through control or infrastructure alone. It must be anchored in a willingness to acknowledge loss, even when that loss does not align with dominant political narratives. By addressing this neglected domain, the state begins—however incrementally—to move from normative abstraction to empirical responsibility. That movement is neither rhetorical nor symbolic; it is administrative, and therefore consequential.
For a state to be ethically credible and politically relevant in a conflict-ridden society, it must be capable of responding to human suffering outside the circuitry of power and patronage. What lends this initiative its force is precisely that it attempts to de-ideologise grief. Victimhood in Kashmir has traditionally been mediated through polarised lenses: framed either as collateral or politically expedient, rarely as an autonomous moral category. This intervention reframes the discourse—it takes the victim out of the narrative of suspicion and reinserts them into the fold of constitutional attention.
The act of identifying terror victims across districts—regardless of religion, region, or residual political perceptions—signals an administrative posture rarely seen in Kashmir: a willingness to confront the consequences of protracted violence not in abstract, securitised terms, but through individual and familial trauma. In doing so, the state reclaims a dimension of its sovereignty that had been hollowed out: the capacity to recognise, to redress, and to reconcile.
What must be emphasised here is that the intervention is neither populist nor performative. It is procedural, detail-oriented, and socially embedded. Drawing on the institutional acumen of Save Youth Save Future, this initiative builds a bridge between state capacity and civil society legitimacy. It brings to mind Amartya Sen’s reminder that development must be seen as the expansion of substantive freedoms. Here, the freedom being restored is existential—the freedom to be seen, to be counted, and to be supported.
Critically, the initiative underscores a larger philosophical proposition: that states cannot outsource the moral consequences of violence, even when the violence is not of their direct making. The idea that the state must go beyond procedural legality finds serious grounding in the political thought of Michael Walzer and Judith Shklar, who argue that modern states are not merely repositories of law and order, but moral actors in a complex theatre of suffering. In Kashmir, where the moral compass of governance has often been bent by electoral expediency, this move subtly but powerfully resets the axis. None of this is to say that the path ahead is easy or complete. The wounds in Kashmir are layered, the losses cumulative. But what matters here is the shift in direction—a move from abstraction to attention, from policy to persons. Justice, as John Rawls reminded us, is not just about outcomes; it is about the recognition of the person as a bearer of dignity. In Kashmir, where stories often compete with statistics, this initiative reasserts that individual suffering matters. That memory should not be a burden borne alone.
What differentiates this intervention from previous compensatory exercises is its rejection of tokenism. It does not treat victims as symbols to be displayed, but as lives to be rehabilitated. The vocabulary of this policy does not rest on charity, but on reparative justice. Welfare politics, particularly in conflict zones, tends to get instrumentalized—reduced to doles or gestures aimed at social pacification. But this initiative is structured less as appeasement and more as restoration—a structured attempt to recalibrate the moral economy of the region.
The role of memory in conflict societies cannot be overstated. States often fail not because they lack coercive power, but because they fail to engage with memory as a domain of legitimacy. The victims of terror—many of them widows, orphans, survivors of targeted assassinations or ideological vendettas—carry a memory that had no institutional interlocutor. This initiative, in essence, is an institutional response to the burden of memory. It acknowledges that healing cannot occur without recognition, and recognition cannot be achieved through indifference.
To those inclined to view this effort with scepticism, as mere image management or technocratic activism, one must respond with measured clarity: even if politics is partially embedded in every policy move, that does not nullify its ethical content. Intent and consequence, in public policy, often part ways. But in this case, the alignment between ethical imperative and administrative execution is too precise to be dismissed as coincidence. It is not a radical reimagination of the state, but it is a return to first principles—the idea that the state must be attentive to the least audible voices in its polity.
The initiative also raises a profound question for the region’s democratic culture: can the state offer justice without demanding loyalty? By choosing not to instrumentalise victimhood, the administration has made space for a rare gesture in Kashmir’s governance—a politics of non-domination. Terror Victims are not required to validate the state’s position; they are simply offered recognition as citizens. That, in itself, is a democratic breakthrough.
Kashmir does not need messianic promises. It needs consistency, dignity, and ethical clarity in governance. The state must not only be seen, it must be felt—not as a shadow, but as a shelter. Through this initiative, the administration has chosen to be present in people’s pain, not just in their obedience. That presence, if sustained and scaled, may well become the cornerstone of a new legitimacy—one born not of silence, but of listening. Not of control, but of care.
In a landscape where violence has often spoken louder than policy, the decision to hear the soft voices of suffering is not just good administration—it is civilisation reclaiming its space.
By: Zahid Sultan (Independent Researcher. Phd in Political Science)
Email: zahidcuk36@gmail.com
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