Bullet, ballot and silence of Jammu and Kashmir
Updated On: 05 August, 2024 06:52 AM IST | Mumbai | Ajaz Ashraf
Five years since the abrogation of Article 370, a manufactured normalcy prevails in the Valley while militancy menaces Jammu and Ladakh is gripped by existential anxiety
All Party United Morcha supporters demand the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, in Jammu on August 3. Pic/PTI
On the fifth anniversary, today, of the reading down of Article 370, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Jammu and Kashmir policy seems like a bedsheet that is a bit small for a mattress. Tuck the sheet on one side of the mattress, and the opposite side gets exposed. Pull the sheet the other way, and it pops out from under the mattress. This is, in a nutshell, Delhi’s problem five years after it deprived J&K of its special status, demoted it from a state to a Union Territory, and hived off from it Ladakh as another Union Territory.
The streets of Kashmir are ostensibly quieter and calmer: teenagers no longer pelt stones at the security forces, and thousands do not turn up at the funerals of militants slain in gunbattles, chanting, “Azadi, Azadi.” But this transformation is not on account of Kashmiri Muslims discovering their love for Delhi. It is because the cost of expressing discontent or dissent has been made extraordinarily, and unconscionably, high for
its people.
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