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The long-drawn armed conflict in Kashmir has claimed thousands of lives and made the economy bleed, and has posed grave threats to the country’s security. It was in 1989 when the insurgency was born, as an indigenous movement against the corrupt governance and autocratic rule of Sheikh Abdullah. EXTERNALLY, too, Kashmir has long been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan; the two countries have fought four wars over the valley. The insurgency has RUINED the normal functioning of the state, and has forced New Delhi to notify the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) as a “disturbed area” and invoke controversial and draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) to maintain peace. Though New Delhi tried to occasionally reach out to Pakistan and even to Kashmiris over the years, but for some brief periods of hope, peace has not prevailed in the Kashmir Valley.

Following the precedent set by his predecessors, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, Prime MINISTER Narendra Modi has also tried to reach out to Pakistan. For two years from his swearing-in ceremony in 2014, Modi made overtures to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict over Kashmir. He invited Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, for his swearing-in ceremony, and made an unscheduled landing in Lahore on Christmas 2015 to greet his counterpart on his birthday—a move that defied diplomatic convention and stunned foreign policy experts.

However, the excitement over a possible turnaround in India-Pakistan relations was short-lived. The beginning of 2016 saw a terror attack on the Pathankot Air Force Station, involving five Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists. Months of tension followed the attack, escalating in the subsequent months after the killing of popular militant leader Burhan Wani in an anti-insurgency operation in August 2016. Within hours of the encounter, streets in South Kashmir became theatres of violent protests and stone-pelting. Burhan’s killing reignited the calls for azadi and jihad and opened the floodgates for homegrown insurgency, as scores of the local youth joined terror groups. Pakistan was quick to exploit the situation, stepping up infiltration of trained terrorists to carry out attacks on Indian military installations. The target of the first terror strike was the 12TH Brigade of the Indian army in the Uri sector on 9 September 2016 in which 17 army personnel were killed and 20 others were injured. In response, India retaliated by conducting surgical strikes on suspected terror launchpads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The escalated conflict in Kashmir created two situations. Amidst the fatigue of the past several decades and after trying out various unsuccessful ‘soft measures’ to mitigate the conflict, the state came hard on J&K – adopting measures such as the ‘Operation All-Out’ in its quest to establish peace. Second, the BJP-led government used the escalated conflict in the Valley as an excuse to fulfil the dream of its ideologue Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to abrogate ARTICLE 370 and Article 35A. Mukherjee, who died while leading a protest against the special status of J&K in 1953, had stressed that there cannot be two constitutions, two prime ministers, and two flags in one nation.