Peace first

SO the Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, has had her meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The hope and the expectation that she would be able to extract a substantial Central initiative melted when she deployed the Vajpayee clichés. Instead of any promise of reconciliation, she was apparently served an ultimatum that peace be restored in the Valley within the next three months. That is a rather tall order, now that the schoolgirls have jumped into the stone-throwing activity, and militants are going in for politicians’ assassination. The PDP’s district president, Abdul Gani Dar,   was the third politician to have been killed in a week’s time in Pulwama, one of the four districts of the poll-bound South Kashmir’s Anantnag parliamentary constituency. A hot summer seems in the offing.

The year 2017 presents a new challenge. Security forces can no longer go in for anti-militancy operations uninterrupted; they have to contend with violent stone-throwing crowds. Any retaliation is fraught with wider and deadlier ramifications. A much bigger challenge is that   the stone-throwers — guided by sentiment, conviction, camaraderie, religious and ethnic identity reasons and anger against the security forces — are in each and every neighbourhood. On top of this, the human shield episode has bought an immitigable opprobrium at the international level.

Mehbooba Mufti’s claim that Modi has assured her that like Vajpayee he will look for a “Kashmir solution” within the parameters of “humanity” is nothing new, nor is it exciting. The Vajpayee era is over, and so — it seems — is Kashmir’s appetite for talks, notwithstanding the clamour of the PDP, the National Conference and the Congress. A mutually agreed ground needs to be discovered first. An order can emerge if chaos is dealt with  dexterity. Now when even taking the “first step” has been made conditional to an improvement in the situation, then peace in Kashmir looks like a chimera. Some risks need to be taken — in Srinagar and in Delhi.