Hear all voices from J&K

The demand of the People’s Alliance for Gupkar Declaration, known as the Gupkar Alliance, that the pre-August 5, 2019, constitutional position of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir be restored, is under the consideration of the Union government, if the statements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his senior colleagues on several occasions are anything to go by. The government may have its own reasons for delaying a decision on it but it cannot afford to overlook another demand of the alliance — it should not take the silence in Jammu and Kashmir as normalcy. Nor should it give the people and their leaders an impression that humiliating them is a matter of pride for the government, as the spokesperson of the alliance put it after a meeting of its leaders on Tuesday. There are people who interpret their demands in some other way and call them “anti-national activities” and try to harass the leaders, according to the alliance. This must stop, it has demanded.

It has been more than two years since Article 370 of the Constitution has been hollowed out with a promise that the border state will see a golden era of peace and development but not much has happened in the state. On the other hand, what the people of the new Union territory have witnessed is the highhandedness of the mighty Indian State seeking to impose its will on them. Every arm of Indian democracy failed them — be it the Parliament, the executive or even the judiciary, which has till now refused to take up the cases filed against the dismantling of the article that linked the erstwhile state with the rest of the nation. Worse, it has never found time to hear the habeas corpus petitions citizens there have filed in the constitutional courts way back in 2019.

Jammu and Kashmir is a historic issue and none expects an overnight solution. But making the people there feel humiliated cannot be part of a strategy to bring peace. The government must realise it.