Extreme right-wing elements have attacked the properties of Kashmiri people and other Muslims in Jammu, the state’s winter capital.The official figures suggest that around 250 militants were killed in 2018 alone. Small wonder then that the security forces have had to work overtime. In the 1965 and 1971 wars, Kashmiri Muslims had handed over Pakistani infiltrators to the police.. It has deteriorated unconscionably over the past four years, as the Centre has encouraged anti-Muslim communal politics to gain salience in the Valley.In order to underline the nation’s unity at a moment such as this, the government should have actively disseminated the idea that the people of Kashmir were victims of violence, and had nothing to do with the fidayeen attack. They suppress the fact that their brand of politics has led to a bitter harvest.Typically, the security situation in Kashmir is a subset of the political circumstances. The 20-year-old who ploughed his explosives-filled car into the CRPF convoy was by all accounts recruited only a year ago.As we contemplate recent events, aside from the debilitating crass politics on display, two negatives stand out. In reaction, Valley Muslims observed a shutdown on Sunday.Yet the intelligence professionals failed to link the latest JeM video to the unduly long CRPF convoy that the government was planning to move up the Jammu-Srinagar highway. To them all Kashmiri Muslims are terrorists and Pakistanis, when the opposite is actually the case.
Pathankot, Uri and now Pulwama have occurred over the past few years, as dangerous ideologues have been given a free pass. The politics of hate succeeds only when amplified by a quiescent media. Nor is the rising curve of fatalities in the forces highlighted. At the behest of student and social outfits, which were earlier active in cow vigilantism and "love jihad" criminalities, hundreds of Kashmiri students in Dehradun and elsewhere have been turned away by their colleges.Whatever the promised Indian response to Jaish-e-Mohammad’s recent fidayeen attack on a CRPF convoy in Kashmir’s Pulwama district, which took dozens of lives, it is by now evident that India is not united in dealing with the terrorist outrage. Earlier, in 2016, the CRPF had come under attack on the same road, at Pantha Chowk, not far from Awantipora. It does appear that JeM has given communal elements in India the perfect gift as the Lok Sabha elections draw near. They should have. This is touted as the efficiency of the Central government. The complex politics of Kashmir is not reducible to a Hindu-Muslim binary, as communal elements here and the Pakistani State seek to do.Its architects are extremist politicians who dare to lecture the country on nationalism and patriotism. And the hyperactive official communications machinery as well as the BJP’s social media armies have not bothered to help ordinary people make this crucial distinction.Unfortunately, J&K governor Satya Pal Malik too disregarded his constitutional status — which enjoins on him to remain above the fray — to target mainstream politicians without any reason at a time when the state is under Central rule, the local politicians having been evicted from government in questionable circumstances.This is the background in which we seek the understanding of other nations in the Wholesale Hosiery Knitting Machine Factory wake of the Pulwama attack.