: We have heard of people snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. We have heard of people snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. That, in fact, is a common enough trait among Indian sportsmen. But how often do you see somebody snatching someone else’s defeat?
As the entire panoply of India’s political leaders collected at the all-party meeting called by the Prime Minister on the ongoing Jammu & Kashmir crisis, somebody needed to tell them that this is precisely what they had achieved. Collectively our political leadership, particularly the Congress and the BJP, have cooperated flawlessly to snatch a defeat that should have been Pakistan’s and the Kashmiri separatist forces’. A defeat that had looked inevitable, and that both the Hurriyat and its Pakistani handlers had seemed resigned to, until we ourselves, in that incredible fit of self-destruction, started scoring a series of self-goals. It’s been a period of short-sightedness unmatched in our history of governance and competitive politics. Of course, the entire political class knows it has bungled, and bungled in a way that future generations of Indians may never forgive this gang of the cynical and the incompetent who so severely damaged a success achieved in Kashmir after two decades of work, and the loss of tens of thousands of lives.
When you look at the daily television spectacle of rioting and sectarian street-power in Jammu and the Valley, remember, for a moment, how favourable the situation had looked just a month earlier. Militancy was almost entirely in control, the Valley was bustling with tourists, Hurriyat was so down and out that its most hawkish separatist, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, was cursing Pakistan for abandoning his cause and we were all looking forward to an October election, anticipating an even better turnout than the 43 per cent the last time. That election, hailed in the Valley and also by the global community as Kashmir’s fairest-ever, was a brilliant achievement for India. It served, more than anything else, to strengthen India’s case, to give the growing constituency of moderate realists in Pakistan an argument for settlement, and to give our own Kashmiris a feeling of self-determination as well as self-respect.
It is shocking, therefore, that the party that was most responsible for that great achievement should have taken the lead in ruining it now, on the eve of the October election. Whatever the merit of its argument over the Amarnath issue,...
