Recently, the newly appointed Union home minister, Amit Shah, made his first visit to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). It garnered a lot of attention, with the people of the state and keen Kashmir-watchers eager for clues that would indicate how the new incumbent would handle the state compared to his immediate predecessor. I will resist the urge to dissect the visit because that has already been done many times over, and I doubt I will add any fresh insight into what is already in the public domain.
I will, however, seek to put down what I hope to see from the Narendra Modi government 2.0 in the context of J&K in the coming months.
I have made no secret of my disappointment with the way the state was handled between 2014 and 2019. The disastrous alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) pushed the state to the edge of an abyss that we continue to struggle to pull back from. The gutsy approach to Pakistan that we saw glimpses of -- whether in the invitation to Nawaz Sharif for the oath taking ceremony in 2014 or the unannounced visit to Lahore to attend a Sharif family wedding -- were not mirrored by similar ‘out of the box’ measures in J&K.
The promises held out in the ‘Agenda of Alliance’, authored to facilitate the PDP-BJP alliance, remained on paper only, with not one meaningful step taken to convey any seriousness to implement it. To make matters worse, after the terrible summer of 2016, the then chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti, lost the political space to extract any thing from the Modi government.