LAHORE, Pakistan — Pakistani kids are taught in and out of school that Kashmir is our “shah rug” (jugular vein). Indians believe that Kashmir is their “atoot ang” (indispensable body part). Urdu and Persian poetry is full of paeans to the beauty of Kashmir. If there is paradise on earth, “it is this, it is this, it is this,” the 14th-century poet Amir Khusro wrote. Since the time of Partition, 72 years ago, India and Pakistan have been fighting wars over Kashmir and calling each other the occupier and the oppressor of the Kashmiris.

Occasionally, there have been halfhearted pledges that the Kashmiri people should probably get to do what they want with their paradise. In 1948, the United Nations Security Council called for a plebiscite so that Kashmiris could decide their own fate. No such thing has happened. I have a couple of friends from both sides of the Kashmir dispute, and they have always said that more than freedom, any special status or merging with India or Pakistan, they would like to be left alone. By both India and Pakistan.

Whatever these and other Kashmiris have wanted, I am certain they didn’t want what they got this week: Kashmir’s special status, and relative autonomy, under India’s Constitution revoked. Some 35,000 more soldiers in the world’s most militarized region, schools shut, offices shut, the internet snatched away, landlines dead. Local political leaders — even those happy to collaborate with the Indian authorities in New Delhi — locked up. A former chief minister of the region said, hours before being arrested, that it had been a mistake to side with India at Partition. And now India is taking us back to Partition all over again by annexing Kashmir and throwing millions of its citizens in a cage.

Many Indians are cheerleading this imprisonment. The actor Anupam Kher tweeted with glee that the “Kashmir solution” had gotten off to a great start. Experts are writing that the Kashmiri people have enjoyed too many privileges all the while questioning their affiliation with India: You see, young men in the Kashmir Valley sometimes chant pro-Pakistan slogans and celebrate the occasional victory of Pakistan over India in cricket matches by waving Pakistani flags.