Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, on Thursday, demanded that India should start engagement with Pakistan if wanted to resolve the Kashmir tangle. Emerging from the meeting of the Kashmiri leaders with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mehbooba Mufti cited the recent ceasefire pact India and Pakistan entered into.

Mufti also said quite vociferously that she told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the abrogation of Article 370 was illegal and unconstitutional. ...

BOTH these demands represent an unsavoury, unholy and absolutely unpatriotic Pakistani influence on the mindsets of some political leaders in Kashmir. These demands show in full measure how distorted Kashmir politics had got in the past seventy years when many political leaders in India subjugated their mindsets to Pakistani dominance of thought and distortion of ideals.

As the Government tries to sort out the complex Kashmir problem, it has to contend with such untenable demands. As for the demand about seeking Pakistan’s engagement in resolving Kashmir issue, the Government has a clear stand that no outsider -- which Pakistan is -- has any stake in India’s internal matters. Ms. Mehbooba Mufti and other, however, often mix up things when they cite examples of India’s negotiations with Pakistan on issues such as trade or ceasefire, to name a few. They are the issues to be sorted out at the negotiation table. But Pakistan has no locus standi in Kashmir and therefore cannot be gotten engaged on that count. Pakistan has no moral or constitutional right to dabble in India’s internal matters.

This is the stand the whole of India has taken as regards Kashmir. Every Indian agrees that Pakistan is at the root of the Kashmir problem and must be kept out if the problem has to be sorted out properly.

That is the reason why the whole of India recoils at the very suggestion of a few Kashmiri leaders in favour of inclusion of Pakistan as a stake-holder in Kashmir. In fact, people often demand that leaders like Ms. Mehbooba Mufti should be tried for treason when they propose Pakistan as a stake-holder in Kashmir. They also ask for a stern action against leaders like Dr. Farooq Abdullah who talk of restoration of Special Status in Kashmir with the Chinese help. Such a treason cannot go unpunished, the people insist. Who will refute that popular, patriotic sentiment?

Similar is the people’s approach to the allegation that the abrogation of Special Status to Kashmir is illegal and constitutional. How can that be so when India’s Parliament went through the elaborate process of debate and discussion on the issue at the end of which a division of vote cleared the abrogation of Special Status. The carving out of the two Union Territories -- Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh -- out of the former State was also achieved through a similar parliamentary process when majority of members passed a resolution to that effect.

How can this process be called as illegal and unconstitutional? If the Government has followed every legal and constitutional step correctly, how can that process be called null and void?

To such questions, the Kashmiri leaders have no answer.

Despite this reality, some Kashmiri leaders have often harped on the two demands. In eventual times, the Government may think of granting statehood to Kashmir if the situation turns out to be normal in full measure. But abrogation of Special Status is one issue on which no negotiations can ever take place. For, even when the arrangement was first brought into effect, the Government -- headed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru -- had said that it was a temporary provision. The current Government has done nothing more than withdrawing that temporary arrangement since it found that it was no longer needed.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of today’s cantankerous Opposition politics in India is that there is a disdain for the legitimacy of parliamentary process. The agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) or against the new farm legislations or against the decision to implement National Register of Citizens (NRC) stemmed from this mindset -- of defying the legitimacy of the parliamentary processes and practices. And each time such agitations are launched, the Opposition has only one stance -- refusal to accept the parliamentary legitimacy. That is how the Opposition stands against the CAA, the NRC, the Instant Triple Talaq cancellation, the abrogation of Special Status.

In the process, it does not realise that it is actually subverting the sanctity of Parliament or the Constitution that legitimises the highest law-making body of the land. This uncouth tendency has grown so much that it even tends to demonstrate a clear disrespect to the judiciary as well -- as was clearly highlighted by the statement of Congress leader Mr. Rahul Gandhi. That statement was never uttered in any precinct of the courts, but the Congress leader used it as his tool to berate the Prime Minister.

This disrespect for the Constitution, this distortion of the Statute and its content, this defilement of institutions such as Parliament have unfortunately become integral parts of Opposition narrative in the country. Nothing can be more unfortunate than this.

Ms. Mehbooba Mufti is also indulging in a similar game -- of distorting and defiling of the Constitution, which is not just a book but a framework of how a civil society lives within the parameters of decency, discipline, decorum and dignity of the institutional architecture of India’s democracy. Of course, she is not alone in that league -- there are many others who have only brought bad taste to the mouths of average Indians. But such a behaviour needs to be punished the hardest. Period.