J-K crisis: Is it time to listen to Kashmir?

BLAME GAME: Parties are blaming each other for the fiasco in Jammu and Kashmir.

          

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After days of unrest, Jammu and Kashmir was peaceful on Tuesday. But the peace is deceptive. For the first time in over a decade, separatist slogans are being openly shouted out in Srinagar.

A dispute whether land should be given or not to the Amarnath Shrine Board has now become a full fledged crisis about the future of Kashmir in India. On Tuesday, Kashmir was peaceful as people resumed normal life. There were lines outside ATMs as markets opened and heavy traffic on the road. But Jammu continues to simmer, rocked by protests.

"Jeeve Jeeve Pakistan. Bharat teri maut aye," ("Long live Pakistan, death to India,") ranted over five lakh people who marched to the United Nations office in Srinagar and shouted these slogans.

Meanwhile, the Government looks helpless and Kashmir is drifting dangerously away from India. Is Kashmir only a matter of time? Is it time to hand out a separate status to the Valley on a platter?

CNN-IBN asked that question on its show Face the Nation. On the panel of experts, to debate the question were PDP President Mehbooba Mufti Sayeed; BJP Spokesperson, Arun Jaitley; and National Spokesperson for the Congress Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

Time For Plebiscite?

BJP has been saying that the ongoing crisis in J-K is a dispute between the separatists and the nationalists. But eminent writers like Arundhati Roy have been saying that Kashmir needs azadi (freedom), columnists like Vir Singhvi and Swaminathan Aiyyar have been saying India cannot continue holding Kashmir by force, that there should be a referendum, a plebiscite.

Arun Jaitley outrightly rejected the idea of a plebiscite. He stated that India can do without Arundhati Roy but cannot cut Kashmir away from it.

"The point simply is that you had a certain set of wrong policies which culminated into a situation where the whole movement which started for a separate status in 1950. Its journey has been towards separatism. But I think even today, any country worth its salt is going to allow its territory to be compromised with and India shall not under any circumstances compromise with its territory," he stated.

It's true that the space for the nationalist forces, the national mainstream parties in Kashmir has been narrowed down in the last few weeks. But that is a recent phenomenon. There was a phenomenon a few weeks ago where the stakes were larger but the wrong policies of the government have narrowed down that playing area.

Not calling Arundhati Roy or Vir Singhvi anti-national, Jaitley said that countries are nor governed by the views of writers who write in a flow of the movement but run by governments that want to hold the country together at all costs.