“If Sardar Patel had been the first Prime Minister of the country then entire Kashmir would have been ours,” thundered PM Modi in Parliament in a belligerent attack on Jawaharlal Nehru’s failures in Kashmir. But while Nehru was forced to accept the partition of Kashmir, the Modi government is creating a far bigger crisis. Nehru may have lost only a part of Kashmir’s territory, but Modi is in serious danger of losing the hearts and minds of almost all Kashmiris.

As videos of Kashmiri students being beaten up in Haryana go viral in the Valley, mistrust of India was never greater than it is now. The middle ground is disappearing in the Valley with even moderates no longer inclined to give the Indian state the benefit of doubt. Modi’s aggressive Hindu rashtra with its policy of all guns and no roses is creating militants in every hamlet.

Nehru, the passionate secularist who regarded Kashmiris as his own people, repeatedly rushed to Kashmir, trekking through its villages, swimming and surfboarding in Negin lake, galloping along Sonmarg and Gulmarg, exhorting India’s chief ministers through letters to ensure that India’s secularism was well protected so that the Kashmiri would feel secure in India and not be tempted towards Pakistan. Nehru knew that to build bridges in Kashmir, India must hold fast to secular ideals and never let nationalism be mixed with religion. Whatever his diplomatic blunders, the Nehruvian state was constantly benevolent and sheltering of Kashmiris. This enduring legacy was proudly invoked by the late J&K CM Mufti Sayeed when he declared in 2015, “I am a politician of the Nehru era.”

Modi, however, believes the entire era from Nehru to Manmohan Singh was a dark age of blunders and weakness and the “glory” years of India began only in 2014 . Yet where Manmohan Singh was able to successfully “soften” the Indo-Pak border by encouraging cross-border trade and people-to-people contacts, this government has created an unprecedented violent turbulence.

A total of 263 soldiers were killed in Kashmir in 2014-2017 in contrast to 177 in the previous four years, and the number of civilians killed in 2017 has been the highest in the last four years, at 57. In the Manmohan years even the 2008 Mumbai terror attack did not see the kind of catastrophic escalation of violence in Kashmir as we are seeing now, the latest being on Sunjuwan army camp in which five jawans have died.

The Modi government is getting Kashmir badly wrong. Yes, elements in Pakistan’s army remain determined to inflict a “thousand cuts” on India but the Modi government’s so-called “muscular” policy — its wannabe Israeli stance pretending Kashmir is the Gaza Strip — is a horrible misreading of what the situation demands. Trapped in the RSS worldview whose core belief is that Kashmir is a piece of land to be conquered and subdued by revoking Article 370 and that every Kashmiri Muslim is anti-India, the Modi government is failing to create an urgently required political process in Kashmir. More innocents will keep dying unless this happens.

Unnatural from the start, the BJP-PDP alliance stands revealed as a failure, the hostile Hindu supremacist “Jammu mindset” only deepening the chasm on both sides. Any attempt by CM Mehbooba Mufti to reach out to Kashmiri sentiments such as withdrawing of FIRs on stone pelters is met by howls from the BJP in Jammu. In 2015 when Kashmiri truck driver Zahid Ahmed was killed over cow slaughter rumours, New Delhi maintained a studied silence. For Kashmiris, a stone-hearted regime in Delhi is increasingly an object of blind rage.

Modi sarkar must now make an extraordinary and risk-taking move. It must realise, as Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh did, that there’s no ready solution to Kashmir, there is only a process that explores solutions, the process itself an enabler of normalcy. Small gestures make up the larger mission. New Delhi must get rid of the spooks and statusquoist babus who make up New Delhi’s security-speak-dominated “Kashmir Ministry”. Instead it must set up a people’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the lines of post-apartheid South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for J&K should comprise both Indian and Pakistani democratic peacemakers. This commission must be headed by a known apostle of peace like Gopalkrishna Gandhi, and must begin immediate reconciliation and truth-telling. A recent civil society dialogue in Anantnag showed how desperate Kashmiris are to vent their sorrows at injustice. Through a commission like this a shot of hope would be injected into a bleak, bloodied landscape. India would be lauded by the world, and a signal would be sent out that even though Modi sarkar rejects Nehru, at least it embraces Gandhi.