Jammu & Kashmir’s integration with India is Irrevocable

IT is indeed a momentous movement as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said rightly after over two thirds parliamentarians endorsed government’s initiative in correcting the 70 years old blunder by integrating Jammu & Kashmir with the rest of   India and converting Jammu & Kashmir and Buddhist majority Ladakh into two separate Union Territories. The Lok Sabha, Indian parliament’s Lower House, on Tuesday, August 6, followed in the footsteps of the Upper House in revoking the controversial    Articles 370 and ending the special status given to Jammu & Kashmir on October 17, 1949, by the then government for the intent best known to it. Indian  lawmakers  by overwhelming majority have  also  scrapped  another obnoxious Article 35-A which was promulgated  by the same dispensation   through a Presidential order which has not benefitted any section of the natives  except some vested interests, fundamentalists  and their hangers-on  .There is  no  denying  that the  majority  of the general  populace  had been compelled to  live in isolation when the  world is becoming  a globalized village  due to rapid   development of science and  technology.Kashmiri women were deprived of their parental assets or property for wedding  non-natives. Economic development as claimed by Home Minister Amit Shah, who piloted the bill in parliament, was hampered as corporate houses or investors from outside the state were prohibited from possessing land and employing skilled workforce from other states. There are disparities between the districts of Kashmir division and those of Jammu division. In the MPI and its sub-components, the 10 districts of Jammu lag behind those in Kashmir division, except Jammu and Samba districts. As The Print recalls Pakistan has nurtured a hard-line ‘Kashmir bazor Shamsheer’ (Kashmir by the sword) lobby that portrays India as an existential threat to Pakistan – a view also supported by the country’s politically dominant military”. All the four India-Pakistan wars in 1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999 were initiated by Pakistan resulting India’s victory. Pakistan continues to pursue anti-India    policy at national and international forums by misinterpreting UN’s   Kashmir resolution. Undoubtedly Article 370  was  inhuman  as it kept the people of the sensitive border state segregated from the rest of Indian citizens and frustrated any attempt at improving quality of professional and non-professional education as skilled  manpower  was reluctant to take up responsibility  in the absence  of bare minimum necessity  of owing land  to set up an institute.   United State of America and ASEAN, a grouping of South-East Asian nations, comprising several Buddhist majority nations, are yet to react negatively to J & K’s reorganization as endorsed by the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. This reorganisation does not affect either the international boundary or the Line of Control (LoC) and the move is aimed at good governance. Beside, the move is to ensure socioeconomic benefits that go to the people of India also go to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, particularly the disadvantaged sections of the population there, as government asserted Parliament. The reorganisation of a state is not a new concept in India and Jammu and Kashmir is the 12th to be reorganised as per people’s wishes and ensure to readdress the long standing complaint of   regional imbalance .The  people living in Jammu region  and Ladakh had been complaining of  raw deal from the  Kashmir valley based  leaders for decades. Reorganization will be successful if it lead to economic development and bring in more investment to the region as pledged by the government. Members of the Kashmiri Pandit community obviously are elated saying the articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution were unwarranted in the first place and only impeded complete integration of the state within the Union of India. The community hoped that these constitutional amendments will enable them to get justice and reclaim their ancestral homeland in Kashmir from where they were displaced since the early 1990s.As some Kashmir experts say in the long run the reorganization will be extremely beneficial for the people of Jammu and Kashmir without impacting its peculiar ethnicity. Dalits, OBCs and minorities will no longer remain deprived of reservation   policy in education, employment and the health- care. The government has volunteered an arduous task to ensure justice to all sections of the pluralistic J & K society  which  must be  granted the status of a state  and the proposed  legislative  assembly  must also  be constituted  through free and fair  elections soonest. Another most important task  for the government  is to win the natives’ trust and   confidence  by defeating  nefarious  propaganda  especially  against  the  security  forces  and  others  engaged in law and  order  assignment  giving   intensification  of  negative and emotional  campaign  by  an interested loby intent on  maligning  India at any cost (courtesy :https/ musingsofaseniorjounalist @wordpress.com)