There is virtual unanimity cutting across all party lines in the Jammu & Kashmir legislative assembly on the issue of retaining Article 35-A of the Constitution of India which prevents non-Kashmiri citizens of the country from owning land or immoveable property, or obtaining government employment in the state. This is at odds with the fundamental rights conferred upon all citizens by Article 19 which includes the right to work and settle in any part of the territory of India, and is final proof that the people of the state or more accurately the Kashmir Valley, are to all intents and purposes irreconcilably divorced from the citizenry of mainland India. 

Seventy years after the instrument of accession was signed by Maharaja Hari Singh conjoining J&K to the newly independent Indian Union of states, the people of the Kashmir Valley, despite being accorded special status under Article 370, seem resolutely opposed to integrating with secular democratic India. Indeed not a day goes by without news of protest, atrocity and loss of life in the valley, where notwithstanding thousands of crores invested in the state’s sustenance and development by the Central government, separatist parties provenly aided and abetted by Pakistan, command the allegiance of the majority of the people. 

Quite clearly, post-independence India’s uniquely secular governance experiment hasn’t worked in the Kashmir Valley — Jammu and Ladakh, the other two districts of the state of J&K are a different story. The ethnic cleansing of the minority Kashmiri pandits from the valley during the 1990s made it painfully clear that while India’s 29 states and seven Union Territories have accepted and practice however imperfectly, the experiment of the democratic secular State, the people of the Kashmir Valley have not, and such governments as have been elected in the state haven’t been truly representative. 

Evidently, the foolish people of the valley are still seized of the religious fervour which prompted the vivisection of the Indian subcontinent and establishment of Pakistan. In the circumstances, the time has come to redeem the pledge of Jawaharlal Nehru to hold a plebiscite (“We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not and cannot back out of it”) under United Nations’ supervision and to respect the verdict. 

Ab initio Kashmir has been subject to exceptionalism. If after seven decades, its people cannot appreciate the benefits of secular democracy, they deserve to be expelled from the Indian Union. Fortunately for reasons of geography, detachment of the Kashmir Valley (135×32 km) is not a difficult decision. Since its people cannot live in fraternity with the rest of India, they should be left to their own devices. Several nation-states have been ceded by Czechoslovakia and Russia, and the heavens haven’t fallen. Likewise the Kashmir Valley and its people should be left to fend for themselves. India will be better for it. 

Speak up for India’s neglected children

Contemporary india’s citizens preoccupied with existential issues and perpetually struggling to realise the ease of doing business within a polity in which the country’s 18 million-strong bureaucracy is a massive impediment to measurable progress, seem to have little time for children. Every opportunity for advancement — particularly for acquiring meaningful education and access to primary healthcare and hygiene — is being denied to the world’s largest child population (480 million). 

With public expenditure (Centre plus states) on education averaging 3.5 percent of GDP (cf. 8-10 percent in developed OECD countries), the greater number of the country’s children are obliged to attend 1.20 million state government primary-secondary schools defined by crumbling buildings, multigrade classrooms, lack of laboratories, libraries and useable lavatories. Compounding these impediments are shoddy, errors-ridden,  incomprehensible textbooks commissioned and printed by Soviet-style state textbooks boards. 

Curiously, the country’s self-serving academics seem least bothered that contemporary India hosts the world’s largest number of illiterates (over 350 million) and that over 50 percent of class V children in government rural primaries cannot read a simple class II textbook. Nor do they seem perturbed that not one of the country’s 850 universities — some of them of over 160 years’ vintage — is ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings league tables published annually by the reputed London-based ranking agencies QS and Times Higher Education. 

With annual expenditure (Centre plus states) on public health averaging an even worse 1.5-2 percent for the past half century, the condition of the country’s 25,000 primary health centres (PHCs) and 35,000 public hospitals — mainly run by state governments — is even more pitiful. The state of government-run hospitals is typified by the BRD Hospital in Gorakhpur (UP) where between August 10-18, over 70 children died due to lack of oxygen supply and/or encephalitis, with causes of these fatalities being disputed between the hospital and UP’s simpleton chief minister who seems to believe that encephalitis — rooted in neglect of sanitation — is a natural phenomenon. 

It’s not as though prolonged neglect of generation next is an insoluble problem. EducationWorld has annually published a detailed schema (April) under which the Central government can raise Rs.4.98 lakh crore for investment in public education and health. But despite the proposal being mailed to the country’s top politicians, economists and academics for debate, there’s been no response. A curious sentiment of oriental fatalism on the issue of children’s welfare and development seems to have overcome the academy and establishment. A bitter legacy of ignorance, disease, poverty and polluted air and water awaits the world’s largest child population.