Neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis ever wanted to lose control – and that is what would happen if the Jammu and Kashmir issue would be settled amicably. But much of this issue of control and corruption also has less to do with politicians on either side of the border than with the two armies - both get highly funded with unaccountable money that helps to keep their home fires burning. But for that they have to keep Kashmir burning and that is why I knew long ago there would never be a solution to the Kashmir imbroglio.

However, over the decades, the state had settled into a groove with democratically elected governments and separatists not making much headway. Now, I am afraid, the Kashmir valley might be alienated again for no people can be integrated with a nation at gunpoint.

Kashmir, as a Muslim majority state, has always been important to India as a living example of the negation of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's two-nations theory.

However, one tends to forget that the two-nations theory was first propagated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and even before him by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. I have always insisted that if the kind of upper caste majoritarian paranoia of Mukherjee and his cohorts had not prevailed, Bengal would never have been partitioned and so, never, would have India.

But Mukherjee, as the founder of the Jan Sangh, is after all the progenitor of the current dispensation which, though propagating Akhand Bharat from the rooftops, nonetheless acts in a fashion that could inevitably lead to another partition of India – not just to the west but also the east which also has many states with special status like Jammu and Kashmir, where there is more insurgency than Kashmir ever had and whose people are more ethnically different from India but of one with China. These factors will inevitably put pressure on India's fabric to our own detriment.

But I guess it is the word “special" that irritates the current dispensation more and is the key reason why the government has violated the terms of the Constitution in Jammu and Kashmir.