The Jammu and Kashmir government has quietly dropped Urdu from revenue recruitment rules, igniting a battle over language, identity, and who controls the administrative memory, reports Mir Rameez Raja
For well over a century, the land of Jammu and Kashmir has been read, measured, and governed in Urdu. When Maharaja Pratap Singh replaced Persian with Urdu as the court language in 1889, he set in motion an administrative architecture that would outlast his dynasty, survive partition in 1947, endure the extension of central rule, and persist through the abrogation of Article 370.
Every Jamabandi, the village-level record of land ownership, every mutation entry, every inheritance dispute, every boundary demarcation, was committed to paper in that language. To work in revenue in Jammu and Kashmir was, by definition, to read and write Urdu.
That compact has now been broken.
On April 10, the revenue department quietly released draft recruitment rules for non-gazetted posts in the Jammu and Kashmir Revenue Service, opening them to public objections for fifteen days. The document made no dramatic announcement. It simply stated that the minimum qualification for direct recruitment to the posts of Naib Tehsildar, Girdawar, and Patwari would henceforth be “graduation from a recognised university.” The previous rules, framed in 2009, had added a crucial rider: graduation with knowledge of Urdu. That rider is gone.
Already In Pipeline
The change did not arrive without forewarning. It was the culmination of a political and legal campaign that had been building since June 2025, when the Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board invited applications for 75 Naib Tehsildar posts and, as always, specified that the second paper of the written examination would test the candidate’s working knowledge of Urdu.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had long viewed the requirement as discriminatory toward candidates from the Jammu region who had not grown up reading or writing the language, protested loudly. Senior BJP leader and Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma met Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, arguing that making one of the five official languages a compulsory eligibility criterion “violates constitutional principles and administrative impartiality.”
The Central Administrative Tribunal’s Jammu Bench agreed: in July 2025, it stayed the Urdu provision and directed the recruitment board to accept candidates proficient in any of the five official languages, Hindi, Kashmiri, English, Dogri, or Urdu. The draft rules published this month formally institutionalise that judicial direction.
The BJP’s Ashok Koul was careful to frame the change as inclusion rather than exclusion: “Urdu has not been removed. It has been removed as the sole mandatory language. Since J&K has five official languages, candidates should know of any one to qualify.”
The valley, however, is not persuaded by the framing.
The People’s Democratic Party has been the sharpest in its condemnation. PDP spokesperson called it “a deliberate attempt to sideline and erase Urdu from the administrative framework of the region.” Party president Mehbooba Mufti said removing Urdu from revenue services would “create practical challenges in handling existing records and weaken the continuity of governance.” Her daughter and party leader Iltija Mufti went further this week, directly accusing the National Conference-led elected government, which has remained conspicuously quiet on the matter, of complicity. “People have not given you so many votes so that you can attack our language. You are attacking our identity,” she said, demanding an immediate rollback.
The silence of the National Conference, which governs Jammu and Kashmir in tandem with the Lt Governor’s administration, has itself become a political statement. When the controversy first erupted in mid-2025, the party’s chief spokesperson, Tanvir Sadiq, had been vocal, arguing that Urdu was not associated with any class, region, or religion but was “a historical and administrative language used in Jammu and Kashmir for over 130 years.” He had also pointed to what many legal and administrative experts consider the core practical problem: “The shajras, ancestral land records, have long been written in Urdu, and it is not possible to change all those documents now.” That argument has not disappeared; it has simply been swallowed by political calculation.
Administrative Memory
Urdu is the actual language in which the administrative memory of the region is encoded. The pre-partition land records at Srinagar’s Muhafiz Khana, including the original records of the part of Kashmir, falling on the other side of the LoC, are in Urdu. The first official land settlement, the Bandobast Qanooni, initiated in 1887 and completed by 1894, is in Urdu.
Removing language knowledge as a requirement does not change what those documents are written in. It is this gap, between the bureaucratic present and the archival past, that critics say the government has failed to address. Even if new records are eventually maintained in multiple official languages, the hundreds of thousands of existing entries in Urdu will still need to be read, cross-referenced, and interpreted by the very officials the new rules will recruit.
The Jammu and Kashmir Urdu Council, which met in emergency session following the draft’s release, was direct: this, it said, was “the second major attack on Urdu,” following the CAT’s 2025 stay. Urdu, the Council reminded the government, has been “the guardian of the civilisation of Jammu and Kashmir.”
The speed and quietness with which the change has been implemented, embedded in a technical draft notification, not announced from a podium, has struck many observers as deliberate.
The wider political context is impossible to ignore. Since 2020, when Parliament passed the J&K Official Languages Bill that ended Urdu’s 131-year status as the sole official language, the language has been in slow administrative retreat, displaced in practice by English in elite communication and by Hindi and Dogri in the Jammu region’s public sphere. The revenue recruitment rules, dry and bureaucratic as they appear, are the latest front in a contest that is fundamentally about which communities the state of Jammu and Kashmir is being redesigned to serve, and which memory of the land it intends to keep.
Post Script
Nasir Aslam Sogami, adviser to Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, ruled out any possibility of delinking the Urdu language from revenue records in Jammu and Kashmir. Even Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah spoke many times on the issue insisting that the Urdu is not being dropped. He said the issue is being raised by opposition to divert the attention from the crisis they are in.
