Wednesday, September 7, 2011

"Creative policies needed to resolve Kashmiri alienation"


A placid summer and a peaceful Ramzan should have been the endgame of insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir but the sense of ‘alienation is too deep’, says former bureaucrat and now author Wajahat Habibullah, advocating creative policies from the central and state governments.

As the alienation of people in the conflict region grows, what the Kashmiri people need is respect, said the former Indian Administrative Service officer and winner of the Rajiv Gandhi Award for Excellence in Secularism.

‘A truly representative government in Kashmir can come with full public participation in all elements of governance and fullest accountability of the government to the people, particularly questioning youth at all levels,’ Habibullah told IANS.

Caught between conflicting claims from India and Pakistan, the state is today riven by ethnic strife, crisis of national identity, friction between national and local governments and by rival claims to territory.
Habibullah’s book, ‘My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light’, published by Penguin-Books this month, probes the web of issues like religion, ethnicity, demand for free speech, cultural identity and flawed policies which lie at the roots of the conflict in Kashmir.

Habibullah uses his long personal insights into the state and its troubled history to analyse the flawed government policies, social polarisation and radical religious politics that have vandalised the fragile social fabric.

Full report here News One

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