Stand on the shore of Dal Lake in the early morning, and it is easy to understand why people fall in love with Kashmir. The light, the mountains, the quiet. Beauty here is overwhelming. And so, for many who live in the Valley, it is a very particular kind of hope: that ordinary life might finally be lived without fear hanging over it.

This is a feature about that hope, and about the questions that still stand between it and reality.

The comeback is real.

Kashmir has been through a hard stretch. In April 2025, the terror attack in Pahalgam shook the tourism industry and the confidence of travellers. Authorities moved quickly to tighten security, and the Valley has since seen a recovery. Reports from early 2026 described near-full hotel occupancy at popular destinations like Gulmarg and Pahalgam, with strong domestic tourism and visitor numbers projected to beat previous records. Those figures were projections at the time, and we have not independently confirmed the final 2026 totals.

The longer pattern is just as telling. Tourism, once crippled by frequent shutdowns and violence, reached record highs in 2022, 2023, 2024 and early 2025, according to published analysis. For families who run houseboats, shikara rides, shawl shops and small hotels, each of those seasons mattered far more than any statistic can show.

A vote, and what it did and did not settle

The 2024 Assembly elections were another milestone. They were the first in the region since its reorganisation into a Union Territory, and their peaceful conduct was presented as a historic return to representative government. Voting is an important sign of engagement, but it is not the same as peace, and the people living here know the difference.

After Pahalgam, senior security officials warned against reading it as a return to widespread militancy. At the same time, analysts cautioned that peace in Kashmir comes in stages, with detours and setbacks, and that “normalcy” there is a journey, not a destination.

The question of statehood

If everyday life is one half of the story, politics is the other. Jammu and Kashmir remains a Union Territory, and the question of when, or whether, statehood will be restored is very much alive. In late September, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah asked the Centre at a public forum what the right time to seek statehood would be. He objected to the idea of tying statehood to the end of militancy, arguing that such a condition would effectively hand the decision to forces outside India’s control. The Assembly has passed a resolution seeking full statehood, whose wording deliberately left out Article 370, Article 35A and special status so that it could focus on that single demand.

The Centre’s side of this argument is for it to make, and we have not seen a fresh statement from it in the material we reviewed. What is clear is that statehood has become the measuring stick that many people use for how much has really changed.

What everyday life feels like, and what it doesn’t show

Visitors often come away with an impression of a place at ease: packed markets, full hotels, snowfall photographs. But a tourist’s week in the Valley tells only part of the story. Residents’ sense of safety, their trust in institutions, their economic prospects and their feelings about political voice are harder to measure. We have not found verified 2026 data on militancy-related incidents or civilian casualties, so we aren’t making claims about them here.

Why peace is more than the absence of violence

Ask people in Kashmir what peace means, and the answers vary. For a hotel owner, it might mean a season without cancellations. For a student, it could be a job that doesn’t require leaving the Valley. For a parent, it is simply the certainty that a child will come home. These are modest hopes, and that is exactly the point. They describe a life where fear isn’t the default setting.

Whether Kashmir gets there depends on more than security. It depends on jobs, on political representation, on how the people of the Valley feel they are being heard, and on whether the current calm lasts through the next difficult moment.

What to watch

Three things will shape the answer in the months ahead: how the tourism season holds up, how the statehood debate moves, and whether the quiet of the last year turns out to be durable. None of them has a simple answer, and anyone claiming one deserves some scepticism.

What happens next

The coming winter and the next round of political developments will be the real test. 

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