The former IAS officer said the main reason for not contesting the polls was to focus more on the mass contact programme.

Shah Faesal, who had left the Indian Administrative Service to join mainstream politics in Jammu and Kashmir, has said that New Delhi’s decision to scrap special status and bifurcate it and two Union territories is "a demise of the political mainstream in the state" and "a slap by the Indian state on the face of all those people of J&K who sought a resolution to the (Kashmir) conflict within the parameters of the Indian Constitution".

"I see it as a catastrophic turn in our collective history, a day when everybody is feeling that it is a death knell to our identity, our history, our right to our land, our right to our existence. A new age of indignation has begun from August 5," he told The Indian Express.

Faesal, the first Kashmiri to top the IAS in 2009, resigned from the service earlier this year and set up J&K People’s Movement with an aim to join mainstream electoral politics.

"Putting 8 million people under incarceration, unprecedented curbs on their lives, shutting down the entire communication system, and a brazen show of might of the state and giving out a message that we are ready to kill thousands of youth for the sake of this assimilation is extremely worrisome," he said, referring to the current lockdown in Kashmir.

"Political mainstream had the argument that we are going to protect the special status, that there are still ways of maintain our cultural identity, our political being within the Indian union. This government has demolished that argument because the J&K state has been demolished; those constitutional guarantees have been demolished," he said. "It is the extremist side that will get traction now — those people who always believed that Indian state would never be honest and sincere with the people of Kashmir. It is their win today, no matter how sad it may feel."

View photos About Article 370, he said it had been "hollowed to some extent in the last 70 years and become some comforting fiction". (File Photo) More

Faesal said that the "real consequences of this step will be known when the curfew is lifted. Once it starts sinking in and people start to face the consequences of these drastic steps, day to day incidents of indignations start happening and people feel their land, their identity have actually been taken away from them, I think it is then when the real consequences of this government’s decision would be known. I am scared that Kashmir might enter a new phase of conflict, which we have never imagined."

Stressing the "need to mount a people’s resistance against this government’s decision", Faesal said, "It is going to be a protracted resistance to recover what has been stolen from us in broad daylight."

About Article 370, he said it had been "hollowed to some extent in the last 70 years and become some comforting fiction".

"But this shell still protected a Muslim-majority state that had acceded to India in 1947 based on a few conditions completely against the spirit of the Partition that time when it was expected that J&K, a Muslim-majority state, would actually accede to Pakistan. We had never imagined, I mean the entire political leadership of Kashmir, that such a devastating step would ever be taken. We believed the Government of India had learnt from the mistakes of the past."

View photos Faesal said the local bureaucrats and police officers feel "extreme alarm and extreme sense of upset". (Express Photo/File) More

He continued, "In 1953, when the Prime Minister of J&K was arrested by a junior police officer, that incident alienated the generation of our grand parents. In 1987, when the elections were rigged deliberately, our parents’ generation was alienated. Now this is going to further alienate the new generation of Kashmir. It represents an unprecedented betrayal with the people of Kashmir, breaking down all those agreements on which this relationship had come into existence between the Union and J&K."

Story continues