HAPPY AUGURY
   Date :07-Feb-2021

HAPPY AUGURY_1  
 
 
THE decision of the Central Government to lift curbs on High Speed Mobile Services in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) exactly one and a half years after the abrogation of Special Status to the region has come in at a right time when things were settling down there. The J&K administration has thanked the Centre for the development that would bring solace to young generations in the Union Territory.
 
This step also endorses the Government’s position from the start that it would be happy to remove all restrictions in the region once the situation starts reaching normalcy. It is a matter of happiness that many restrictions have been removed much earlier than popular expectation, demonstrating the Centre’s goodwill and apolitical approach to the challenging of resolving the Kashmir imbroglio of long years. The Government’s decision to abrogate the Special Status and split the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir (with Ladakh as a region) into two Union Territories had come in for sharp criticism from many quarters. It was a battle of differing perceptions, so to say, and the Government acted with utmost patience while handling the challenge. It kept its word that it would remove restrictions as and when the situation permitted since it did not have a politically-driven narrow agenda. Though the Opposition camp and the so-called liberal groups did not believe the Government’s repeated assertions, the Centre did not lose sight of its final goal and kept following the road-map it had drawn for Kashmir as whole.
 
That patience, that ability not to lose sense of balance, made things work better for the Government in particular and the nation in general. In the past one-and-a-half years, the Centre has kept easing restrictions in J&K and helped the situation to return to a near-normal condition in such a short time. It can be said safely now that the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is almost as normal as the other States in the rest of the country -- from the point of view of restoration of citizens’ rights to general political activity including local elections to various facilities and services like High Speed Mobile Services. Given this current stage, there is every reason to believe that Jammu and Kashmir would be like any other region in the country in some time.
 
The most important point to be noted here is that the Central Government led by Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi had been insisting that its aim was to restore a national-level normalcy in Kashmir at the soonest moment. Going by the available indications, it has achieved that goal to a very large extent. It would be only a matter of time that the Union Territory would achieve a near-normal status in the coming times not too distant in future. When a nation faces a challenge as tough and complex as the one in Kashmir, its response, too, has to be equally complex and handling patient. The Centre showed that kind of maturity while handling the Kashmir challenge and achieved its objective in a short time that defied general, politically-driven perception that things would never attain normalcy there. This impression had got hardened because of the notion that whatever had been done in Kashmir for the past seven decades was the only way out of the imbroglio. But the Modi-Government was wise enough to note that the imbroglio was there exactly because of the wrong steps taken by the Government over the long stretch of 70 years. The developments in the past two years have proved that the Government’s assessment was right and its result is now for all to see and feel happy about. Common man in the street is satisfied that Kashmir has got better integrated with the rest of the country and is an inseparable part of the sovereign Indian State.