Peace at stake

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti delivered some home truths about the prevailing volatile situation in Kashmir at a joint press conference with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Srinagar on Thursday. Candidly, she said the boys engaged in stone-throwing protests were not on a toffee-or-milk-buying spree. They had attacked Army camps with stones and petrol bombs, and that had consequences. The children and adolescents of impressionable age, already angry with the system, are being instigated by calls for jihad and martyrdom from loudspeakers at mosques. The overwhelming presence of security forces fuels their rage.  The instigators use the young as shields during attacks on Army camps. The larger reprehensible objective is to showcase Kashmir as a dispute for the resolution of which young Kashmiris are laying down their lives. It also helps them draw international attention. Anyone showing them the mirror is, therefore, viewed as an enemy.

The most contentious was Mehbooba Mufti’s remark that only 5 per cent troublemakers had held as hostage the remaining 95 per cent Kashmiris who also wanted a solution but through a peaceful process. She should have known that the press conference being held in a high-voltage situation wouldn’t be a smooth affair. Her agenda of peaceful and political solution, she should have anticipated, would be an anathema to those engaged in a violent hate campaign ever since the PDP entered into an alliance with the BJP to form a government in March last year. Her outburst diverted the attention from Rajnath Singh’s positive announcements of withdrawal of pellet guns and a dialogue offer to all to the Chief Minister’s temperament trouble. 

Understandably, during a crisis a leader is under pressure. But she should not have allowed this to disturb her calm, especially when a delicate peace process was at stake. Had she followed her father, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s footsteps, she would have drawn the comparison between 2010 and 2016 with a cool head and disarming words. Mehbooba Mufti herself is an unrelenting advocate of dialogue and a political solution to the Kashmir crisis. Her angry utterances drowned the import of the larger message.