Both regional and national elections were held in India’s troubled Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) region in 2024 for the first time since its autonomy was drastically downgraded in 2019. But despite successful elections in the region plagued by complex territorial disputes and enduring insurgencies, early signs suggest that decades-old patterns of political allegiance remain largely unchanged.

J&K, formerly a princely state with a Hindu ruler with a majority-Muslim population and three distinct cultural regions — Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh — has been claimed by both India and Pakistan since 1947 when a brief war left each controlling a portion of it. It has been the focus of both China–India and Pakistan–India wars, as well as the subject of UN resolutions calling for a territorial plebiscite. An insurgency began in Kashmir in 1989 with covert support from Pakistan and has continued with varying degrees of intensity to the present day.

In 2019, the newly re-elected government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi repealed Article 370 of the Indian constitution which had given J&K special status and allowed the state its own constitution. This had long been promised by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but the government went further by dividing the state into two regions and downgrading both to union territories. An appeal to the Supreme Court failed in December 2023.

For the next five years, both union territories — J&K and Ladakh — were administered by the central government as it sought to stamp out the insurgency and improve its own standing in the region. Incidents of stone-throwing in 2019 declined steadily to zero by 2023 and other types of protests and violence declined sharply. This paved the way for the first national and regional elections in 2024.

Elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the national parliament, were held in April and May 2024. The newly truncated J&K has five seats in the Lok Sabha — two in Jammu and three in Kashmir. The BJP, contesting only in Jammu, won both seats there and beat the Indian National Congress (INC) by wide margins. But despite the BJP’s efforts to rally support for third parties in Kashmir, the INC-aligned Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) won two of three seats.

The Lok Sabha results influenced the INC to ally only with the JKNC for elections to the J&K Legislative Assembly in September 2024. The alliance won despite some controversial measures that had improved the BJP’s chances, including redrawn constituency boundaries, which the JKNC criticised as equalising Jammu and Kashmir’s representation despite Kashmir’s larger population.