Operation Kashmir

I landed in Jammu on July 11 and was lucky to have completed the Amarnath Yatra just before the government announced Operation Kashmir - the repealing of Article 370.

It was coincidental that while I was travelling, so many truths of that land came before me, which made it easy to comprehend what the Modi government announced a week later on Operation Kashmir.

During my journey back home, I met a local Jammu in the train who got talking a lot about the the many years of J&K strife, all praise for the central government for the strict actions they were taking over the past several months. He told me few rich people control Kashmir. They want Hindus out, they give money to the stone pelters and troublemakers, who are the poor people, while their own children study abroad. That was an eye-opener for me. 

Before that, interestingly my flight co-passenger from Dehradun to Srinagar was a Kashmiri Pandit. She told me to be careful in Srinagar. I asked her where she lives. She said she now lives in Rishikesh but she was born, did her schooling and her higher education in Kashmir. 

She said one evening, all of a sudden, the whole family was forced to flee. She said she never had the courage to go back, though her parents do visit their homeland. She needn’t describe the reasons why the family had to leave their ancestral home and their belongings. We know them from so many articles stating how Kashmiri Pandits were forced to flee from their own land.

These were ground realities speaking to me. 

Today, when I heard a seasoned politician like Yashwant Sinha talking on Modi's Operation Kashmir  “Will of the people of rest of India cannot supersede will of the people of J&K”  I wonder who are the people and whose will he is actually talking of? And what was being done by his government over all these decades?

Returning last month from this beautiful land called Kashmir, the time indeed has come to find a solution.