The alliance between India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the regional People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to govern Indian-administered Kashmir is the most hopeful development in the region in a quarter of a century, writes Professor Sumantra Bose on the BBC website.
The anti-India insurgency that erupted in Kashmir in 1989 has abated over the past decade, but the situation remains fragile and volatile – the Kashmir Valley, in particular, remains beset by simmering unrest.
The state is home to about 13 million of the disputed territory’s 18 million people; the rest live across the heavily militarised Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
The Kashmir conflict has three main dimensions:
- the sovereignty dispute between India and Pakistan as both claim the region in its entirety
- the estrangement of the Kashmir Valley’s population from India
- the differences between the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley and Hindu-dominated Jammu region
The BJP-PDP agreement offers the potential to apply the healing touch to the second and third dimensions.
Read the full article on the BBC news website here.
Image credit: composite from wikimedia PDP & BJP logo images.
About the Author
Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His latest book is Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy (reviewed here).
I fear this is the most primitive understanding on the region. The actual conflict remains between people of Kashmir and the Indian state that maintains control of the region through the extensive militarization of the region while the people demand their popular right to self-determination. The coming together of PDP-BJP is no hope but rather a further affirmation of the polarizing communal politics of India that wants to hold on to Kashmir through ‘Hindu’ mythology and brute force.