Take Rajnath's line: Reach out to Valley

It is telling that the Cabinet Committee on Security, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which met on Wednesday to take stock of the Kashmir situation after the horrible shooting of Amarnath yatris recently, is still treading the sterile beaten path. The government shows no signs whatever of thinking on its feet and innovating. This is not likely to reverse the situation in Kashmir.

The security scenario will look up only when the people are with New Delhi in the context of Pakistan and its sympathisers in the Valley, who are the most active political elements in Kashmir. Although their numbers remain small (but increasing), they are today in a position to mobilise and bulldoze others into actively joining them or at least acquiescing in their actions. This is because they exploit the alienation of the people, which can only be removed or relieved by a conscious design by the Centre of winning over the people.

In short, there is no alternative to a political approach to resolve serious questions. This is so all over the world, and in every state of India. So why should it not be the case in Kashmir? The RSS, however, doesn’t see it that way, and therefore the BJP government at the Centre doesn’t see it that way.

Its general secretary Ram Madhav said on television on Wednesday that if any section of the population has a complaint or grievance, they should approach the local administration — the collector, SP and the like. Nothing underlines the poverty of understanding of the ground reality in Kashmir as the simple-minded obduracy reflected in such an articulation.

Only a day earlier, Union home minister Rajnath Singh had appeared to distance himself from this ignoramus position, and show a larger understanding. He paid handsome tribute to the spirit of “Kashmiriyat”, the syncretic cultural values that inform the daily lives of the people in the Valley, after a civil society coalition (with Kashmiri Muslims in its entirety) came out on the streets of Srinagar to condemn the killing of Amarnath yatris.

He took another bold step. He declared that all Kashmiris are not terrorists. This was a breath of fresh air, and a deviation from the approach on which the government’s Kashmir policy is predicated. But it’s now evident that the home minister’s words have no takers in the upper reaches of the government.

The deliberations of the CCS make it quite plain that the home minister’s musings are not a seed which is destined to germinate. Kashmir has been placed on “the highest alert”. Terrorists will be hunted down. This is good. But this will not lead to the situation simmering down unless a path for constructive politics is cleared as well.