WASHINGTON: New Delhi’s decision to better integrate Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian union by scrapping its special status is irreversible and might lead to a brighter future for the region, a prominent US analyst has said in the first major endorsement in the western commentariat of the Modi government’s move, which also found implicit support from US President Donald Trump in Houston on Sunday.

“Modi will not turn back from his elimination of Kashmir’s autonomy. That phase of Indian history is over… I’d bet on Modi to transform India, all of it, including the newly integrated Kashmir region,” columnist Roger Cohen wrote in an oped in the New York Times, virtually asking Pakistan to accept the decision and move on just hours before Imran Khan was slated to meet Trump to raise the issue among other matters.

Cohen also noted that “Trump chose to signal approval (of India’s Kashmir move) by standing side-by-side with the prime minister” in Houston, while expressing concern over whether the Trump administration’s indifference over human rights issues offers a carte blanche to leaders like Modi.

“Still, by Kashmiri standards, bloodshed has been limited,” Cohen wrote, rubbishing the Pakistani allegations of genocide in the region. “The question, however, is whether Modi had any choice in Kashmir and whether, over time, the revocation of an article conceived as temporary breaks the Kashmiri logjam, pries open the stranglehold of corrupt local elites and offers a better future. I think it might,” he added.

The endorsement, coming in the weighty New York Times which is traditionally leery of India’s foreign policy, came just ahead of Imran Khan’s meeting with Donald Trump and other world leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting, with the Pakistani leader asserting he will be unrelenting in raising the Kashmir issue.

But Cohen trashed Khan’s approach, saying his reaction has been “wild” and “suggesting Modi has sympathy for the Third Reich, comparing him to a Fascist leader and stating that he may commit “genocide,” is to protest too much.”

“Raising the possibility of nuclear war is reckless. All this suggests his bluff has been called,” Cohen wrote, adding that “ Whether Pakistan really wants a solution in Kashmir, the region that justifies its bloated military budget, and whether it can ever transparently demonstrate that its intelligence services have stopped finding uses for radical Islamism in its various violent forms, remain open questions.”

Indeed, Khan was brazen in once again raising the specter of nuclear war in the subcontinent at a think-tank event on Monday morning, warning that "anything could happen" in the nuclearised region if the world did not pay heed to the Kashmir issue.

Skepticism about Pakistan's concern for human right also trailed Khan’s at the Center for Foreign Relations event, where questions directed at him centered not on the situation in Kashmir, which Pakistan has tried to drum up, but on the dreadful state of women and minorities within Pakistan.

Khan blabbered through boilerplate answers even as he was embarrassed by questions about how he could be blasé about China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims while expressing concern over plight of Muslims elsewhere.

“We talk to them (Chinese) privately (about their treatment of Muslims). I’ve got enough on my plate,” Khan explained defensively.

Khan in fact indicated that he would challenge Trump’s expression of “radical Islamic terrorism” being a threat to the world, maintaining that there was only one kind of Islam and it was peaceful, and there were radicals in every religion.

