The morning train from Katra reaches Srinagar a little after eleven. On the platform at Nowgam last week I watched a grandmother from Kupwara step down from it, having crossed the Chenab on a bridge higher than the Eiffel Tower, sitting, with a cup of tea, in three hours. For most of my life “I took the train to Srinagar” was a sentence nobody in the Valley could say. The line was sanctioned in 1994. Every government since owned a piece of it. This one finished it.
On 7 October 2001, in Gandhinagar, a man who had never sat in a legislature took oath as Chief Minister of a state nine months out from an earthquake that had killed fourteen thousand people. Twenty-five years later he is Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, and there has not been one day in that quarter century when he was not the elected head of a government. No Indian, not Jyoti Basu, not Pawan Chamling, has been continuously answerable to voters for so long. The anniversary invites praise, and praise is the one thing he has never shown any sign of needing. It deserves instead an argument that can be tested.
Here is mine. These twenty-five years are the story of the Indian state learning to reach its last citizen, first in one state and then in all of them. What travelled from Gandhinagar to Delhi was a method, not a mood: saturation targets instead of coverage ratios, technology used as an equaliser, several schemes converging on one household, deadlines reviewed in person. It is the method, more than the man, that explains the numbers. And the numbers that settle the argument are not the government’s own; they are the Census, the Registrar General’s and the World Bank’s.
Remember the country of 2001. Fifty-six households in a hundred had electricity, thirty-six a latrine, thirty-seven a tap, eighteen a gas connection. One child in fifteen died before its first birthday. A bank account was a favour, and a gas cylinder came with a politician’s letter. That was the baseline.
Then Gujarat. In 2003 the state separated the farm feeder from the village feeder and gave the village twenty-four-hour power; agricultural output grew at 9.6 percent a year between 2000 and 2007, by IFPRI’s count, against 2.9 percent for India. The Soil Health Card was a Gujarat card before it was an Indian one. The grievance screen in the Chief Minister’s office became PRAGATI. The Garib Kalyan Mela became the saturation camp every state now runs. Gujarat was the laboratory. India was the canvas.
On the canvas, the household became the unit of delivery. Jan Dhan, mocked as a zero-balance gesture in 2014, holds 59 crore accounts today, more than half of them women’s, and they are the rails on which every later transfer ran. A woman who has sat in those kitchens counts the cylinder in hours returned, not in connections. Ujjwala put 10.57 crore cylinders into kitchens that had cooked on wood. Rural households with a tap went from 3.23 crore in 2019 to 15.85 crore.
Ayushman Bharat has paid for 13.25 crore hospital admissions. Direct transfer has removed 3.48 lakh crore rupees of leakage. The national highway network grew from 91,287 kilometres to 1,46,572; airports from 74 to 165; UPI, which did not exist in 2014, moved 314 lakh crore rupees last year. Infant mortality fell from 39 to 24 per thousand. Three crore rural women have crossed the Lakhpati Didi line. Left-wing extremism, which touched 126 districts in 2013, is confined to eleven. NITI Aayog’s poverty index fell from 29 percent to 11, which is 24.82 crore people; the World Bank’s three-dollar line fell from 27 percent to just over five. Neither figure is the government’s own.
What was the method’s hardest test? I can answer that, because I live inside it. In 2001 Jammu and Kashmir recorded 4,522 terrorist incidents and 996 civilians killed. In 2025 it recorded 35 incidents and 92 deaths in all, the least violent year in more than two decades. Local recruitment into militancy, 125 young men in 2021, was seven in 2024. Stone-pelting has gone. The G20 met in Srinagar in May 2023.
Since 2019, 34,260 people have been elected to panchayats and councils in a territory that for decades had almost none, and 7.85 crore visitors came to the Union Territory in the three years to 2025, against 4.76 crore in the three years to 2018, even though the Valley’s own arrivals halved in 2025 after Pahalgam. The men who send killers across the Line retain the capacity: twenty-six civilians were murdered at Pahalgam in April 2025, and the answer, Operation Sindoor, came on 7 May. Normalcy here is a trend that has to be defended every year, not a settled fact. But the trend is real, and a Kashmiri who denies it forfeits the right to be believed on the rest.
The rest is this. In August 2019 the Valley’s communications were restricted, the internet did not fully return for eighteen months, and the leaders of the mainstream parties, three former Chief Ministers among them, were placed in preventive detention. Those were hard months, and I do not write around them. They were also the reason a change that every earlier turn in this Valley had paid for in blood passed without it. Elections followed as the Supreme Court directed; turnout was 64 percent; an elected government took office in October 2024. Statehood has not yet been restored.
The Prime Minister and the Home Minister have given their word that it will be, at the appropriate time, and the Court asked for it at the earliest in December 2023. When the Assembly voted on 28 September, my party objected to a resolution that reached back to the position before 2019, not to statehood itself. I belong to the party that gave the word, and I have no doubt it will be kept; the security data in this essay is the case that the time is approaching. When it comes, let it come with the Pandits’ return built into it, with houses and not only posts, and with the jobs that keep young men on the platform and off the hill.
Nor should the national ledger be read without its debit side, and a member of the governing party should be the first to read it. Four crore rural households still wait for a tap, and the mission that reached 15.85 crore will be judged on the last four, which are the hardest. The labour survey still finds a quarter of the young in neither work nor training, and no government should be comfortable with that. Manipur tested the state’s reach harder than anywhere else, and the peace there is still being rebuilt.
The second wave of 2021 found the one shortage, oxygen, that nobody had been counting, and the state learned to count it. Demonetisation is still argued over; what nobody argues about is the digital habit it built, which became UPI. By the IMF’s own tables India is third in purchasing power, within a few hundred billion dollars of fourth place in current dollars, and growing faster than every economy above it. An argument that cannot survive its objections is not an argument. This one does, because not one of them is an objection to reach, scale or speed.
So what will outlast him? The rails: identity, account, payment, which no successor can switch off. The direct transfer, which made the intermediary politically expendable. The GST Council, in which the Centre holds one vote in three and almost every decision has been taken by consensus. The doctrine that an attack is answered across the Line. The three criminal codes of 2024, and a temple at Ayodhya built after a unanimous Supreme Court judgment, which are the same confidence turned inward. And one thing larger than all of these: Indians now expect their state to arrive.
In 2001 a tap was a favour. In 2026 its absence is a grievance that a Collector in Nuh expects to be ranked on. That change in expectation is the structural achievement, and a people who have learned to expect delivery do not unlearn it when the deliverer changes. What must now be built into the state is the dashboard itself, so that the deadline holds when the review passes to other hands. The Prime Minister has said that the goal is a developed India by 2047, and that no one man is the goal. The next decade will show whether the method has been made the state’s own, as he intends.
The afternoon train leaves Srinagar at two. I went back to watch it go: students for Jammu, pilgrims, a box of apples wrapped in newspaper, a soldier asleep before the platform had cleared. The state learned, over a quarter century, to arrive. It has not yet learned to stay. That is the work of the next twenty-five years, and it belongs to everyone who will still be here when the man who taught it to arrive is not. The train is pulling out. The platform is ours.
(The Author is Vice President, Bharatiya Janata Party, Jammu and Kashmir. She can be reached at: [email protected])
