I have often noticed that the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan, attribute to Kashmiris an inferior intellect, a lineage, and a mystique that has allowed the dominant regime to manipulate the Kashmiri Other as a stereotypical and predictable entity.

The partition of India in 1947 legitimized the forces of masculinist nationalism and enabled hatred for the other to irreparably mutilate a shared anti-colonial legacy and cultural heritage so systematically that the wounds inflicted by the partition are yet to heal.

The creation of India and Pakistan were pyrrhic victories for their denizens because the political, socioeconomic, psychological, and culture havoc wreaked by that momentous event is reflected in those pogroms, ethnic cleansing, proliferation of nuclear weapons, poverty, and riots that continue to cause seismic tremors in the Indian subcontinent.

For Pakistan, Kashmir represents the infeasibility of secular nationalism and underscores the need for an Islamic theocracy in the subcontinent.

In the era of Khruschev the Soviet Union had publicly declared itself a supporter of the Indian stand on Kashmir. In 1962 a Russian veto had defeated a Security Council resolution on the plebiscite issue. By 1965, and after the fall of the Kruschev regime, Russian attitudes were significantly modified.

The culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse population of Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir has been unable to reach a consensus on the future of the land and the heterogeneous peoples of the state.

The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that annihilates the myth of secularism in India.

In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been gravely violated.

The Constitution of India seeks to guarantee respect for the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral process. But time and again, provisions of the Constitution of India have been flagrantly violated in Kashmir, and the ideals that it enshrines have been forgotten.

The much-lauded parliamentary democracy in India has been unable to protect a genuine democratic set-up in Kashmir.