Kashmir and 370: Constitutional Coup Whose Aftereffects Will Linger a Long Time

The Centre’s proposal to revoke Article 370 of the Constitution and demote Jammu and Kashmir’s status from a state to a Union Territory is nothing short of a Constitutional coup. It is a surprise and it is not.

This contradictory observation can be explained this way: the BJP and its predecessor organisations have never concealed the fact that they consider the need to abrogate the article as a foundational philosophy of their party. So it is not a surprise.

But it is one so, considering that it is a drastic and dramatic step which can have consequences both internal and external for India. Presumably, and indeed, hopefully, the government has thought through the consequences of this action.

In itself, this is a deeply undemocratic action in that it has been done without the consent of the governed. It is possible to suppress popular opinion for a while using the police and the army, but whether it will bring long-term peace to the state is a matter of speculation. It is disturbing because the argument used by the government to suppress Kashmiri opinion can be used for any other part of the country.

A symbol of Kashmir’s uniqueness

By itself the proposal will not mean much. Over the decades, Kashmiri autonomy promised under Article 370 had become a myth. It had been eroded under the government of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed and Syed Mir Qasim and did not even recover after the Beg-Parthasarthy agreement of 1975 restored Sheikh Abdullah to the mainstream. Indeed, between 1954 and 1995, the Union government had passed nearly 200 constitutional orders to take away the exclusive powers of the state under its own constitution.

Article 370 was, however hollow, a symbol of Kashmir’s uniqueness to the Indian scheme of things. It may have been neutered, but it still remained a significant symbol of Kashmiri identity. Now Amit Shah and Narendra Modi have struck it down and it cannot but have immediate psychological consequences and even a prolonged period of political unrest.

Home minister Amit Shah, with PM Narendra Modi in the background. Photo: PTI

The demotion of the status of the state is an egregious insult. Far from upholding the state as a unique one in the Indian system, one that was once run by its own prime minister, it has been reduced to the status of a half-state, run by a Lt Governor. Here again, there is the de facto reality that J&K has been more or less run by the Union government since the 1990s, but there was an important veneer of local political activity under parties like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party that made for stability.

By its actions, the government is force-feeding what it believes is bitter medicine to the Kashmiris, and the chances are that its impact will last generations. On the other hand, it could be the beginning of a new process which will tell Kashmiris, “Guys, grow up, the world of UN resolutions and Pakistan is long past. Kashmir has been and will remain a part of India and it would be a good idea if you get used to it.”

Also Read: Jammu and Kashmir: Decoding Article 35A and Article 370

The legal issues surrounding Kashmir’s accession to India are in themselves quite intricate. The constitutionality of the move itself is suspect, since Article 370 can be abrogated by the president, but under clause 3, he can only do so following the recommendation of the state’s constituent assembly, which was itself dissolved in 1956. So some mechanism is needed through which this clause can be satisfied. No doubt, the matter will figure in petitions to the Supreme Court soon.

The international community

Internationally, too, there is an issue. No country in the world recognises Kashmir to be a part of India. They all view it as a disputed area whose final status needs to be worked out through negotiations between India and Pakistan. More important, the UN resolutions of April 1948 underline this point since they argue that the final status of the state needs to be determined through a reference to its people. No one has bought India’s view that the participation of the people of the state in successive elections constitutes an expression of that view.

At the same time, international law means little to powerful states. In the words of Thucydides, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Countries like the US can trash international agreements like the JCPOA with Iran; Russia can occupy Crimea; China can scoff at the UNCLOS and claim a maritime jurisdiction by force or place millions in “re-education” camps; Israel can militarily occupy another nation. So, India can insist on having its way in J&K and the international community will not get their knickers in a twist. But, let’s be clear, they will not endorse India’s undisputed title over the state, at least as of the near term.

There is no doubt that the decision will generate wholesale alienation in the Valley and will almost certainly give a fillip to separatism in the short term. The most dangerous aspect of this could be the reaction of the J&K police forces, who play a cutting-edge role in countering militancy today. If the sense of alienation extends across sections of society, we could see counter-militant activity become more difficult.

The J&K police forces, who play a cutting-edge role in countering militancy today. Credit: PTI.

Is this an opportunistic move or a planned one? At one level, it is the fulfilment of the BJP’s  long-standing demand for abrogating Article 370. At another, it takes advantage of the times where the global hegemon is itself shaking the international system and is unlikely to get involved in the region it is trying to leave. Further, the change in the American position on Jerusalem and the recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights could well have been examples that inspired the government.

A leap in the dark

Like  many dramatic political moves, it is a leap in the dark, and probably its authors are aware of this. But in the scale of politics they are playing, their approach has been “nothing venture nothing gain”. In that scale, their ambition is to go back in time and reverse engineer India’s political and cultural trajectory. So yes, they have been responsible for disasters like demonetisation, but maybe they have taken a deliberate decision to gamble with the state with the belief that move will be hailed by the constituency that really matters to them – the majority Hindus.

The fact that the move has been welcomed by a clutch of parties ranging from the Biju Janata Dal to the YSR Congress party, and even the Aam Aadmi Party, is an indicator of the political dividend that the BJP can reap from the action. There should be no doubt that the move will be hailed across India, since a certain amount of Kashmir fatigue already afflicts the country and the attitude is that “Things have not worked for 70 year, maybe it’s time for some drastic measures”.

But it will be some time before people realise that such “killer moves” like bank nationalisation or demonetisation, usually come with a price that is not apparent at the outset. More than that, when people are involved, change through a measure of consent is usually a better way out than the secretive process through which it has been brought about.

The Wire August 6, 2019

Why India should view Trump's idea of mediation with caution

Had it been any US president other than Donald Trump making the claim that he was approached by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be a ‘mediator’ between India and Pakistan on Kashmir, it would have signalled a major policy earthquake. But since it was Trump, it will go into his list of misleading statements, false claims and outright lies, and be soon forgotten.But the reasons for jangled nerves in New Delhi are genuine. Building close ties with the US because of China’s rise is an item of faith today. So is the belief that China is preventing India from assuming its rightful status as the primary South Asian power. But the US was the first mover here.

It queered India’s pitch in the 1950s by entering into a military alliance with Pakistan.

This not only blocked a bilateral settlement process, but also persuaded Pakistan that it could actually have effective parity with India in South Asia, something that led to the 1965 war.

The US merely followed the lead of Britain in pushing the UN resolutions of 1948 making a dispute out of India’s complaint of Pakistani aggression in Kashmir. US admiral Chester Nimitz was even appointed ‘plebiscite administrator’ in a move that proved premature.Subsequently, Owen Dixon and Frank Graham attempted mediation, but they got nowhere. At this point, the UN itself abandoned the issue, saying that bilateral negotiations were the best way out.

But that was not the end of the story. In the wake of India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian war of 1962, the US came to India’s aid and realised that there was no way it could befriend both India and Pakistan, unless the issue of Kashmir was resolved. So, the John F Kennedy administration embarked on the US’ most ambitious effort to settle the Kashmir dispute.

Backed by Britain, the US pushed India and Pakistan into direct negotiations. In five rounds of talks in 1963, the two countries laid down their positions — maximum and minimum. The Pakistanis, led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, ‘agreed’ to concede the Kathua tehsil, if they got the rest of Jammu & Kashmir.

The Indian team led by Swaran Singh was ready to concede some tehsils of the Kupwara district, leaving rest of the borders as they were.

None of this worked. So, US ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith sought to force the issue in a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru — the US suggested a partition of the Valley down the Jhelum. Nehru blew his top and that was the end of the negotiations.

The US did not revisit the issue again, although there was a brief flurry in the 1990s when US Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel seemed to question the Instrument of Accession. Neither has the UN. And now we have Trump, ready for the whole hog — not just mediation, but even arbitration.

The international community’s support for bilateral discussions has been accepted by Pakistan itself through the Simla Agreement in 1972, and is not born of high principle but practical experience. But there is a lesson here for the Modi team who think that the US alliance is a panacea for India’s foreign and security policy ills.

Like all powers, the US pursues its interests. Notwithstanding all the disclaimers, if US interests demanded mediation or arbitration, you can be sure they would have pursued it.

However, in the wake of Trump’s claim, Alice Wells, the senior official dealing with South Asia, tweeted the official US position, ‘While Kashmir is a bilateral issue for both parties to discuss, the Trump administration welcomes Pakistan and India sitting down and the United States stands ready to assist.’ There is a nuance here staring at you in the face.

If US interests require Americans to ‘assist’, they will most certainly do so. Neither our putative ally nor anyone else recognises Kashmir to be anything but a dispute that needs to be resolved. Nothing beyond that.

Economic Times July 23, 2019

Fresh look at our backyard

A neighbourhood policy never stands still. Diplomacy and dialogue can manage and, sometimes, resolve problems, but the friction of proximity always ensures that something or the other needs to be fixed, tweaked or altered. And so it has been with India and its neighbours.

Having gone through one cycle that featured everything from blockades, as in the case of Nepal, the Doklam confrontation, and the resolution of land and maritime boundaries with Bangladesh, the Modi government is now entering another, with newer issues, challenges and opportunities.

Modi’s first term began with a bang when he reached out to India’s neighbours, including Pakistan. But the ‘good neighbour’ policy began to falter. It first hit the shoals of Nepal, when an Indian move aimed at teaching Kathmandu a lesson lengthened into a five-month blockade that has had a long-term negative impact on our relations. Ties with Pakistan were next. Modi’s move to display his friendship with Nawaz Sharif on December 25, 2015, was torpedoed by the Pakistan army which unleashed its proxies to attack the Pathankot air base a week later.

Relations with the Maldives were already fraying when Modi took office, but the arrest of former President Mohammed Nasheed led to the cancellation of the PM’s visit as part of his four-nation Indian Ocean tour in March 2015, and a decline reversed only by President Yameen’s defeat in the 2018 general election. 

Relations with Sri Lanka saw an upturn with the defeat of Mahinda Rajapakse in the January 2015 elections. India reportedly played a role in organising the coalition to take on Rajapakse. But soon it became clear that his successor Maithripala Sirisena was not about to move Sri Lanka away from its close ties with China.

Bhutan and Bangladesh, however, remained close to India. Sheikh Hasina’s electoral ascendancy, achieved in the 2014 and 2018 general elections, has brought an era of peace and cooperation between the two countries, even if democracy in Bangladesh has had to pay the price. Doklam has created internal fissures in Bhutan, but its monarchy remains firmly aligned to India.

And then, of course, there is China. Here, too, there was turbulence. Xi and Modi’s reciprocal visits in 2014 and 2015 failed to achieve much. The result was a steady drift that ended with the confrontation in Doklam in 2017. It was only when the two sides realised how destabilising this could be that they drew back and decided to change course through a new dialogue mechanism of unstructured summits, begun in Wuhan in April 2018.  

By now it should be clear that India faces a long-term competition with China in our own South Asian and Indian Ocean Region (SA-IOR) backyard. This may once have been motivated by Beijing’s vulnerabilities in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Malacca dilemma and a desire to keep India in its place, it is now being driven by China’s economic expansion, one that needs newer and bigger markets, including India itself.

Poor policy choices and domestic turmoil have prevented India from unleashing its own economic transformation, one that would give it the wherewithal to compete with China. As a result, we are dependent on who wins an election, a Sirisena or a Rajapakse, a Solih or a Yameen, a Deuba or an Oli, rather than economic or military power that can shape the behaviour of our neighbours.

The challenge of Modi’s current cycle is not so much in the smaller neighbours, but the larger ones—China and Pakistan. Of these, the China track seems to be working well with the second Wuhan-type meeting scheduled in October. What India has to worry about is suffering collateral damage as the US-China trade and technology competition gathers pace.

That leaves Pakistan, easily the most difficult of India’s neighbourhood relationships. The election of Imran Khan provided an opportunity for a fresh start, but one which was frittered away by the BJP’s need to maintain a hostile posture towards Pakistan because of the coming general election. This received an unexpected boost with the Pulwama attack, something that the government exploited brilliantly to win the elections.

But now, New Delhi needs to step back and think. Pakistan has just worked its way back into the good graces of the US, by facilitating the putative Afghan settlement that could see the return of the Taliban into the Afghan mainstream. With its western strategic depth shaping up, Pakistan could either stir up trouble in J&K, or perhaps decide after its futile experience that there is little to be gained in that direction.

The signals are there. Pakistan has arrested Hafiz Saeed, closed down militant camps in POK, shut off the infiltration tap since the beginning of this year and removed Khalistani activists from its gurdwara committees. Not all of these are aimed at staving off the Damocles sword of the Financial Action Task Force and Donald Trump. But perhaps the penny has at last dropped into the minds of Pakistan’s deep state that the jihadi armies are past their ‘use by’ date.

The US has, of course, being pushing publicly and vociferously in this direction. But there are reasons to believe that so is Beijing. This is a delicate juncture for China. It is locked into what could be a life-and-death struggle with the US for markets, technology and influence. The last thing it would want is an India—which has already been shifting towards the US in the past five years—solidify its relationship with the US to the exclusion of China. As for Pakistan, this could well be its last chance.

The Tribune July 23, 2019

Strategic shift, maybe: Could Pakistan be on the cusp of deciding to become a normal state?

India-Pakistan relations stand at a cusp. Pakistan is approaching the sweet spot in Afghanistan where Taliban is set to join the mainstream. After being seen as the villain of the piece, Islamabad is being cast as a guarantor who will ensure that the country will no longer operate as a centre of global jihad. Earlier this month, Islamabad not only sacked pro-Khalistan leader Gopal Singh Chawla from the Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PSGPC), it also went along with India’s insistence that the pilgrims to Kartarpur be given permit free entry to the shrine. Not so well known is that Pakistani infiltration across the LoC into Jammu & Kashmir has virtually come down to zero in 2019. And this includes months in which melting ice actually facilitates it.

It would be easy to put this down to the post-Balakot effect. But taken together with other issues, it would suggest larger forces at play. One is certainly the US which has a major interest in exiting from Afghanistan and ensuring that its departure is not marred by an escalation of violence. This goal has lubricated Prime Minister Imran Khan’s path to Washington DC. Without US goodwill, Pakistan would not have gotten the $6 billion bailout that it recently received from the IMF. Even so, the sword of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) hangs over Islamabad demanding that it fulfil its action plan on money laundering and terror financing. In the last meeting in June, Pakistan managed to avoid being blacklisted. But it remains in the grey list and if it does not complete its action plan by October 2019, it faces being denied loans by a group of powerful countries including the US, China, UK, France, Germany and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

This has resulted in another salutary action by Pakistan – the arrest of Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and 23 of his accomplices for terror financing and money laundering. This has hit its target in the US, where President Donald Trump believes that his administration’s pressure has led to the action. And finally, there is the Kulbhushan Jadhav verdict which has been hailed by both Khan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It offers the two countries a way out of an issue that retains the potential of poisoning their relationship. From the time he assumed office last year, Khan has the declared intention of seeking peace and dialogue with India. New Delhi was sceptical, in part because the ruling party found it electorally useful to maintain a hard line with Pakistan. Their instincts proved to be correct when the Pulwama terror attack and the Indian counter at Balakot provided an electoral bonanza. Now with the general election over, Modi’s team is in a better position to assess the combination of events we have outlined above. What they suggest is that Pakistan may be on the verge of that strategic shift towards becoming a normal state, one that does not use proxies and terrorists to fight wars with its neighbours.

We say “maybe”, because Pakistan has come to this point many times earlier and pulled back with incidents like the Mumbai attack of 2008 or the Kargil war of 1999 or the bombings of Indian facilities in Kabul. But this time, it is being led by a prime minister who is much more in tune with the army than his predecessors. More important, the pressure for change is coming not just from the dire condition of the Pakistan economy, but also countries like China and the US. New Delhi would be well advised to look at the situation with an open mind or risk being left out of the flow, as in the case of Afghanistan. Modi has articulated a vision of a $5 trillion economy by 2024. You can be sure we will not be there by the designated date, as long as the India-Pakistan relationship remains as toxic as it is today.
Times of India July 20, 2019

At Each Other's Throats, US and China Defy Pragmatism and Compromise

Early in July, some 95 well known China watchers, academics, former officials, economists, including M. Taylor Favel, Michael D. Swaine, J. Stapleton Roy, Susan A. Thornton and Ezra Vogel wrote an open letter to President Donald Trump and the US Congress expressing their concern over “the growing deterioration in US relations with China” and their belief that US behaviour was majorly contributing to this situation.

This has triggered a debate in policy-making and academic circles over America’s China policy. Neil Bush, son of former President George H.W. Bush criticised the “America first” style of the Trump Administration which he said should stop regarding China as an existential threat.

Well known journalist John Pomfret argued that there is no need for the US to return to its gentler policy.

The letter put forward seven propositions:

1) That China’s “troubling behaviour” — greater domestic repression, increased state control over private firms, failure to live up to trade commitments and its aggressive foreign policy — raised serious challenges for the world. They did warrant “a firm and effective” US response, but the “current approach to China is fundamentally counterproductive.”

2) That China was not an “economic enemy” or an “ existential national security threat” . And that many Chinese officials understood that “a moderate, pragmatic and genuinely cooperative approach with the West served Chia’s interests.” If anything Washington’s adversarial approach weakened the influence of those officials.

3) US efforts to treat China as an enemy and decouple it from the global economy would damage the US international role and reputation. The US could not slow China’s rise “without damaging itself.”

4) The notion that Beijing would replace the US “as the global leader is exaggerated.” It was not clear whether China thought such a role was “necessary of feasible.” The best response to China was to work with allies and partners to create a more open and prosperous world in which China also had  chance to participate.

5) The US was unlikely to maintain its pre-eminence in the Western Pacific. Reasserting full-spectrum military dominance upto China’s borders was not  workable proposition, a better option was to work with allies, maintain “a defensive oriented , area denial capabilities and the ability to frustrate attacks on US or allied territory.”

6) The signatories acknowledged that while Beijing was seeking to weaken the role of western democratic norms in the global order, it was not seeking to “overturn vital economic and other components of that order”. A zero-sum approach towards China’s role, would only encourage China to disengage from the system and “sponsor a divided global order.”

7) A successful US approach “must focus on creating enduring coalitions” and a “realistic appraisal of Chinese perceptions, interests, goals and behaviour”.

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with China’s President Xi Jinping at the start of their bilateral meeting at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

In response, as it were, the website SinoInsider, run by a group of China experts of Chinese or Taiwanese origin,  came up with a counter view. In their open letter to the president they said that it was important for the Trump administration to stay the course and confront “China’s totalitarian expansionism.”  Their central point was that while China was not an enemy of the US, the Communist Party of China (CPC)  most certainly was.

They attacked the “subversive behaviour” of the CPC and said that the Trump administration’s approach had “effectively curbed and even rolled back the CPC’s steady erosion of the global order.”

The history of the CPC indicated that its eventual goal is not co-existence, but domination.

In their view, the Trump administration’s strategies had created conditions that could bring about “tremendous positive change in China for the Chinese people, the US and the world.” In their view, the current US-China conflict was not just a trade or tech war, “but a critical battle of ideology, value systems and morality.”

Not surprisingly, the open letter was praised by China. The Global Times cited an expert to argue that the difference between the letter and the Trump administration’s approach to China was that while the former viewed “China as a competitor, the latter views China as a pure enemy.” While the former advocated “legal and rational” competition, the latter used “reckless, sometimes even illegal methods, to contain China’s developments.”

In response to a question, the official spokesman Geng Shuang said that “we commend the rational and objective views in it.” He went on to elucidate that China and the US were not enemies, cooperation was the only way forward and that China believed that US-China relations would get back on to an even keel. He said that in his view, “objective, rational and pragmatic” voices would eventually prevail “over paranoid, fanatic and zero-sum game views.”

Certainly, the Trump administration’s handling of China has been impetuous and self-defeating. This was manifest in the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership that led to the loss of American leverage over China. The handling of the tariff issue, too, seems to be more of a soap opera than a serious negotiation.

Maligning Huawei and scientists and researchers of Chinese origin without offering any substantive proof has been another issue. Perhaps the most pernicious tendency has been to take a unilateral approach, ignoring friends and allies.

At the same time, it is difficult to ignore the patterns of Chinese behaviour since the financial crisis of 2008. Whether it was the Sino-Indian border, the South China Sea or the Diayou/Senkaku islands, we have seen greater Chinese assertiveness. The Uighur saga is still playing itself out with a million people put in re-education camps. The difficulties in Hong Kong are a manifestation of this changed situation. It is true that in the wake of the economic crisis, there was a sharp surge as China’s relative power grew, manifested in both economic and military terms. But where it may have been useful for Beijing to encourage strategic trust, it has instead only invoked a sense of unease and even fear.

The debate is likely to remain in the sphere of the media and academics. The Trump administration doesn’t really take expert advice on anything. There are important truths in both points of view, but the trick till now is in them being able to co-exist. However, recent trends suggest a tendency towards brinksmanship defying pragmatism and compromise.

The Wire July 15, 2019

Apprehensions in the Valley

A short visit to the Valley reveals that the sense of alienation is so total now that even provocations — the arbitrary five-hour ban on traffic on the main highway leading into the Valley for the duration of the Amarnath yatra — has raised only token protest. On paper, the situation is better than the past two years with surface calm and no hartals and stone-pelting.

Officials say that there is a distinct downturn of Pakistani activity and camps have been closed even in the POK area. There are signals that Islamabad and Rawalpindi (they are now joined at the hip) want to resume the dialogue that was rudely interrupted in 2007 with the collapse of the Musharraf presidency. 

But this could well be deceptive calm, akin to the situation on the eve of the Burhan Wani killing in 2016 that triggered mass protests and an upsurge of insurgency. But in this case, it means the new Home Minister Amit Shah seems to be in a different mood, laid out in two successive speeches at the end of June, which indicated that the man, whose administrative experience has been limited to Gujarat, was remarkably ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of a country like India. He spoke about the need to separate the people of the Valley from political parties being run by family elites. Just how he intended to bring this about was less clear, though the talk about panchayati raj had a touch of Gen Ayub Khan’s ‘basic democracy’ about it. Of course, the bottom line was that the government will continue its hardline approach to eliminate the insurgency or ‘terrorism’, as he characterised it.

Equally, he criticised Nehru for the ceasefire of December 1948. But had India actually recaptured the entire state, this would have today meant an addition of 4.5 million, mainly Muslim residents of ‘Azad Kashmir’ and Gilgit-Baltistan into the 12.5 million current population of J&K. The proportion of Muslims in the state could have risen to more than 77 per cent (it is currently around 68 per cent). Whether the BJP would really have been happy about that outcome is something we can speculate on.   

But what has generated disquiet in the Valley was the reference to Article 370 that the Home Minister ominously underlined was ‘temporary in nature’. It is no secret that as a political party, the BJP, and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, have vehemently opposed the provision in the Constitution. Their slogan— Ek Vidhan, ek Pradhan, ek Nishan (one Constitution, one leader and one symbol) — was raised to protest the special status given to J&K. The reality today is that most of the special provisions that really mattered have been eroded. Today, J&K is even more closely held by New Delhi than any of the other larger states. True, there are still unique provisions in the state’s Constitution but these are more by way of being irritants, rather than obstacles to national policy.

By attacking Article 370, the BJP wants even the fig leaf that covers J&K’s nakedness to be stripped away. And that is why Amit Shah’s comment in Parliament has deepened the gloom in the Valley. Some, including police officers posted in the state, are openly talking about the need to take up an entirely new ‘assimilation approach’. This sounds chillingly like what China is attempting in Xinjiang. Just what ‘assimilating’ 7 million Valley residents into the Indian state would involve is difficult to imagine. Presumably, detention camps, mass re-education classes, perhaps even the dreaded Chinese laogai, or thought reform through labour.

The current situation is serious because of the unrelenting negative narrative. In the hype of Balakot, we have forgotten that it was triggered by Adil Ahmad Dar, a local suicide bomber. Forgotten, too, is the rise of allegations of torture by the security forces and the death in custody of a schoolteacher, Rizwan Asad Pandit, in May.

The sense of alienation has kept afloat the local sentiment for militancy which is presently limited because obtaining arms and ammunition is no longer as easy as it was in the 1990s. But the human material is there and if it gets the right combination of incendiary materials, it can be re-lit and explode. Equally dangerous is the fact that those ready to take up arms are no longer talking about azadi or Pakistan — they are fighting for Allah, faith and jihad.

The militancy has now become a South Kashmir phenomenon, as against its northern Valley orientation in the past. It is not surprising that the Pakistani support efforts have been focusing on trying to expand it in Poonch and Kishtwar as well.  

Home Minister Shah comes from a political background that is not particularly well-inclined towards Muslims. But even so, his moves may only be tactical. If so, they are misdirected. Parties like the NC and PDP have done signal service to the country in bringing back Kashmir from the brink.

 If the government wants to halt the slide in J&K, it may be a good idea for Shah or the Prime Minister himself to make a public announcement that they do not intend to touch the ‘temporary’ Article 370, or 35A. If the government is serious about bringing about economic transformation, it should understand that that will not happen as long as long as there is no peace and tranquility in the country and its periphery.

The Tribune July 9, 2019