The despatch of over 3,500 Central paramilitary, BSF and other troops to Handwara in the Kashmir Valley on April 16-17 after continuous stone-pelting on Indian Army personnel and pickets over a doubtful molestation charge of a minor girl by an army jawan, is an indicator that civilian unrest in the northern periphery state of Jammu & Kashmir is going from bad to worse. A few days earlier, riots had broken out on the campus of the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar — the state’s showpiece engineering college — over the issue of raising the national flag on campus. This reasonable request of out-of-state students was vehemently opposed by Kashmiri-Muslim students of NIT and youth mobs in the vicinity of the institute. A protest staged on campus by non-Muslim and ‘outsider’ students, prompted a brutal attack on the protestors by the state police in which 115 students were injured, some severely. These instances of student and civilian unrest are merely the latest in a series of continuous civil disturbances in J&K and the Kashmir Valley in particular, for the past 68 years since independence. Regrettably, even after J&K being accorded special status in the Constitution of India and receiving cumulatively higher per capita grants from the Central government than any other state of the Indian Union, the Muslim majority of the valley remains obstinately communal, and has refused to fall in line with other states and govern itself according to the secular Constitution of India. On the contrary, communal hostility and violence drove over 200,000 Kashmiri pundits (Hindus) out of their homes in the valley into squalid refugee camps in Hindu-dominated Jammu and Delhi. Quite clearly, this permanently disgruntled and intolerant community is a strain on secular India, and should be given the azadi they demand, with the Kashmir Valley severed and its people expelled from the Indian Union. Although hyper-nationalists deny it, in 1948 India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru promised a plebiscite in Kashmir to ascertain whether its people wanted accession to India or Pakistan, or full independence after the first Indo-Pak war over Kashmir. But subsequently, Nehru himself and successor political establishments in Delhi reneged on this promise on the ground that return of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to India is a precondition. The plain truth is that apart from visa-free access to middle class tourists from India, the tiny Kashmir Valley has little to offer and is a huge drain on national resources because it has failed to attract industrial investment. In the circumstances, it’s time to call the bluff of communal Kashmiri and Pakistan leaders and hold a plebiscite in the valley and PoK under UN supervision. In the likely event of the populace voting for accession to Pakistan or azadi, this territory should be severed from the Indian Union and left to its own devices. India will be better for it. No case for imposing liquor prohibition Tragedy is likely to follow farce across the country as populist politicians with a dim, if any, knowledge of history…
