Kashmir's Gen Z Faces Accountability Crisis in Recruitment Scandals

Leh, India Jul 31, 2026 ALN: There is a particular kind of political moment when a metaphor escapes the control of the people who coined it. This summer, a remark from the bench about the ease with which the GenZ dismissed authority - “cockroach” - was meant to be an aside. It became instead the banner under which tens of thousands of students converged on Jantar Mantar, forced a sitting Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign, and extracted from the state an admission that the machinery entrusted with the simplest promise a republic can make to its GenZ - that merit will be tested fairly, had failed catastrophically and repeatedly. The resignation was not a small thing. In a political culture that has made a fetish of never admitting error, it was, briefly, a demonstration that democratic pressure, applied with enough moral clarity, still moves institutions.

It is exactly because that demonstration was real that a harder question now presents itself to Kashmir’s own GenZ. If a minister at the centre can be made to answer for a system of examinations that betrayed the trust of millions, what account is owed by those who preside over an examination ecosystem in Jammu and Kashmir that has, by any honest reading of the record, been no less compromised, and in some respects considerably more so, for considerably longer? The JKSSB’s sub-inspector examination was compromised in 2022. Its junior engineer and finance-account assistant examinations were cancelled after leaks. The Fire and Emergency Services recruitment drive is, at the time of writing, the subject of ongoing arrests by the Anti-Corruption Bureau. Aspirants for the JKPSC’s 10+2 lecturer post allege that questions were circulating in private coaching academies days before the paper was administered. This is not a single scandal; it is a pattern that spans lieutenant-governor rule and elected government, spans parties, and has outlasted every change of administration since 2022. If Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was the price of one national failure, the studied silence around Kashmir’s own paper-leak economy is difficult to justify by any standard except the reflexive tolerance a periphery is routinely asked to extend that a capital is not.

But it would be a mistake and this is where the argument must resist the pull of its own righteousness - to convert that asymmetry into a demand for a single minister’s head. The temptation to ask “why can’t Sakina Itoo resign as Dharmendra Pradhan did” mistakes a structural rot for a personal failing. Jammu and Kashmir’s recruitment apparatus was not built, broken, and rebuilt by one minister or one party. The outsourcing framework that has produced the current controversy over roughly twenty-five thousand disputed appointments was, on the government’s own account, designed during the PDP-BJP coalition of 2015–2018, when departments were stripped of the power to make direct seasonal appointments. The paper leaks that compromised the JKSSB occurred substantially under a Lieutenant Governor answerable to the Centre, not to any elected chief minister. The backdoor appointments in the Jammu and Kashmir Bank - a scandal old enough that a special anti-corruption court only recently found two former bank chairmen culpable - trace back further still, to a period when political appointees are alleged to have quietly displaced over five hundred candidates who had already cleared selection on merit. Every party that has held office in Srinagar or presided over it from Raj Bhavan has, at some point, either authored this culture or inherited it and declined to dismantle it. To demand one resignation is theatre; to demand the dismantling of a system in which every actor has found it convenient to blame the others is reform. Kashmir’s Gen Z, if it is to learn anything transferable from Jantar Mantar, should learn to distrust the catharsis of a single scapegoat exactly as much as it distrusts the impunity of institutions.

Nowhere is this diffusion of responsibility more visible than in the year-long passage of the Cabinet Sub-Committee’s report on reservation. A committee constituted in December 2024 to examine grievances about a reservation architecture that, by the government’s own submission to the Assembly, reserves seventy per cent of government jobs and leaves only thirty per cent to open merit, took until December 2025 to have its recommendations - reportedly proposing to raise the open-merit share to forty per cent and to trim the Economically Weaker Sections and Residents of Backward Areas quotas - cleared by the Cabinet, and the file still awaited the Lieutenant Governor’s assent and the Ministry of Home Affairs’ concurrence as of the middle of this year. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the recommendations, the procedural fact is telling: a matter that touches the immediate material prospects of an overwhelmingly young population has been processed almost entirely behind closed doors, filtered through a Union Territory’s peculiar two-key structure of elected government and centrally appointed administrator, with no meaningful mechanism by which the aspirants whose futures are being adjudicated can see the reasoning, contest the data, or hold anyone accountable for delay. This is not a reservation debate conducted in public; but a reservation debate conducted about the public.

The same diagnosis extends to the classroom itself. An education department that suspended and terminated its own employees over the inclusion of separatist figures as “personalities and legends” in centrally sponsored textbooks was, in the same period, unable to explain how the leak of a lecturer recruitment paper occurred or to offer aspirants a credible account of what would be done about it. An administration capable of swift, almost theatrical action against ideological deviation in a textbook has shown itself considerably less swift when the deviation is corruption in the very process by which the teachers of that textbook are hired. This is not a coincidence of emphasis; it is a revealing statement of institutional priorities, and Kashmir’s students have every right to notice which kind of failure gets a same-day suspension order and which kind gets years of unresolved committees.

To this must be added the issues that do not generate paper leaks or hunger strikes but will, in the medium run, determine more of this generation’s future than any single recruitment scandal: the largely unregulated extraction of riverbed material from the Jhelum, Chenab, and their tributaries, awarded through opaque contracts that rarely return commensurate value to the communities living beside the rivers being dredged; and a Himalayan ecology - retreating glaciers, an increasingly erratic monsoon pattern, flash floods that arrive with less warning each year, that receives ritual acknowledgment in policy documents and almost none in enforcement. A generation that has watched its examinations sold, its reservation policy negotiated in files it cannot read, and its rivers mined by contracts it never sees, is not merely angry about jobs. It is arriving, by experience rather than theory, at a diagnosis that political scientists have long made about the Union Territory’s design: an architecture in which the body most exposed to public anger, the elected government, does not control the instruments - policing, the bureaucracy’s top tiers, ultimate reservation and recruitment sign-off - that would let it fully answer for outcomes, while the body that does control them, the Lieutenant Governor’s administration, is not subject to the electoral accountability that made Dharmendra Pradhan’s position untenable at Jantar Mantar.

This, then, might be the message Kashmir’s Gen Z owes the country’s Gen Z, and itself: that the demand for accountability, once discovered, cannot be allowed to stop at the first resignation that presents itself as convenient. The Jantar Mantar moment worked because it refused to be satisfied with an apology and instead insisted on a resignation. Kashmir’s own movement, if it is to be more than an echo, must resist the equally tempting substitute of a resignation in place of structural repair - must insist not on removing Sakina Itoo or any single office-holder, but on a recruitment system insulated from every future government’s temptation to outsource, a reservation policy whose committees publish their working papers, a mining and ecological regime that treats disclosure as a right rather than a favour, and, underlying all of this, a restoration of the ordinary chain of accountability, an assembly answerable for the departments it nominally runs - without which every future minister’s resignation will remain a gesture rather than a guarantee. Anything less risks repeating, in Srinagar, the very failure the students at Jantar Mantar were protesting in Delhi: mistaking the fall of one office-holder for the repair of the office itself.

Dr Zahid Sultan, Independent Researcher Based in Srinagar Kashmir, India.