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presidential
presidential polls polls

Home minister
Rajnath Singh meets
Pulwama victims

the Governor but also the Government of India, that protests,” says Naseer Ahmad, a local columnist. “The
you are playing with fire. You want to disempower use of the pellet guns has been encouraged leading
the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir; you want to to partial or complete blinding of hundreds of Kash-
divide them into separate compartments, into Shia- miris. And while this has caused untold sufferings,
Sunni, into Kashmiri-Punjabi, into Gujjar and Pahari”. the media, security and the political discourse in the
However, it is New Delhi’s hard militaristic re- country has chosen to celebrate it. The toxic televi-
sponse to the situation that has caused the most sion anchors have used Kashmiri blood and suffer-
anger and alienation in Kashmir and brought it to ing to raise their TRPs. The conflict has thus led to
tipping point of the kind marked by the Pulwama at- brutalization of the people on both sides”.
tack. According to South Asia Terrorism Portal, more
than 1500 people — civilians, security forces and Where do We go from here
militants — have been killed in violence in the state The situation as of now is very uncertain. Whatever
from 2014 onwards. But 586 of them — 160 civilians, form the tit for tat attacks takes between India and
267 suspected militants and 159 security force per- Pakistan, situation looks set to get a lot worse be-
sonnel - were killed in 2018. fore it improves. India, Pakistan dialogue now looks
It is also in this period that Kashmir witnessed 2016 farther than ever unless something dramatically
mass unrest following the killing of the then Hizbul changes for the better between the countries. But a
Mujahedeen commander Burhan Wani which led dialogue geared towards addressing the underlying
to death of around a 100 protesters and a partial or cause of tension between the two countries and the
complete blinding of several hundred. Forces indis- violence in Kashmir is what is essentially needed for
criminately used the pellet guns to tackle the angry a durable peace in the region, says the noted J&K his-
crowds. The killings and the blindings, in turn, have torian Siddiq Wahid in a piece. “Lost in all the noise
left a massive humanitarian fallout in their wake. and silenced in its wake is any discourse on how
And this, in turn, has deepened alienation and stoked South Asia reached this point and, more critically,
anger against New Delhi, forcing local youth to flock what we are to do about it. All that is heard is demon-
to militancy. isation of Kashmiris and calls for crushing Pakistan.”
“The truth is that over the past four years Kashmir At the risk of sounding clichéd, even trite, the impor-
Valley has been groaning under a no-holds-barred tance of initiating a dialogue on the Kashmir conflict
militaristic policy that is designed to kill the way to is as critical as its absence is dangerous”.
peace in Kashmir. This has involved the killing of not
only the militants but also a harsh response to public letters@tehelka.com

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