Word: kashmir
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...This time, many Indians seem willing to let them go. "Why are we still hanging on to Kashmir if the Kashmiris don't want to have anything to do with us?" wrote columnist Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times. "Is it time the K-word got out of India, and India out of the K-word?" asked political satirist Jug Suraiya in the Times of India. Novelist Arundhati Roy argued that "India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much - if not more - than Kashmir needs azadi from India...
...These are words that, in India, one rarely says aloud. Through military force, acts of Parliament and two wars with Pakistan, India has held on tightly to Kashmir, and its attachment has always been a bit romantic. It isn't just the beauty of its lush valleys and jewel-like lakes. Kashmir is a test of the Indian national idea. Insisting that Muslim-majority Kashmir should and can be a part of Hindu-majority India speaks to the notion, admirable but perhaps naive, that a coherent, secular democracy can be fashioned out of dozens of different languages and faiths...
...What does it say about India that people are losing faith, or losing interest, in Kashmir? It is a sign of frustration, first of all, with India's political failure to live up to that promise of unity in diversity. Over the years, the Indian government has poured millions of dollars of aid into Kashmir and spent millions more putting down the separatist insurgency. But it fails to understand that peace isn't just the absence of fighting. It's in the political details: withdrawing the half-million Indian troops who still occupy Kashmir, developing the local economy and, most...
...Indian government hasn't addressed these tough issues, leaving Kashmir angry and restive. And so all it took to shatter Kashmir's fragile peace was one blunder - the tone-deaf move this summer to transfer those 100 acres of land near Amarnath. It set off not one but two ferocious protest movements - by Hindu nationalists and by Kashmiri separatists - who have fueled each other's frenzy...
...Indians seem to have come to terms with the idea that the separatists really are Kashmiri - not some proxy force sent in from the shadows of Pakistan. But that only makes it easier to see Kashmir as yet another one of India's secessionist struggles, to be subdued and eventually co-opted. Today, the possibility of losing Kashmir to Pakistan seems remote: Pakistan has its own insurgencies to worry about, and if the people of Kashmir ever get their long-promised plebiscite, it's unlikely that they would choose to trade India's occupation for Pakistan's instability...