Opinion If integration of Kashmir is to mean anything, it must include people, not just territory

The Pahalgam attack and the Red Fort blast were grave lapses of national security. These add to the long list of security lapses that Jammu and Kashmir has seen during the BJP regime, despite big claims of “wiping out terrorism” and bringing in “normalcy”. Such incidents should trigger accountability. Instead, what followed has now become familiar, routine, and normal, but at the same time, profoundly revealing.
The ruling government has abdicated accountability and replaced it with suspicion. Not suspicion of systems that have failed, but suspicion of a people. Kashmiri Muslims are forced into a familiar ritual of fear and uncertainty. We are reduced to our geography, as if our identity itself is evidence.

This pattern is not accidental or even spontaneous. It is manufactured by a particular ideology. It is an assertion of the idea that Kashmiris are a threat to the integrity of the Indian nation. This nation promised Kashmiris a special status, but today it views the entire population as a national enemy of the “Hindu Rashtra”. This has primed a social imagination in which entire communities are cast as proxies of threat.

The Prime Minister and the Home Minister leave no opportunity to remind the nation that Jammu and Kashmir has been “integrated”, that there is no terrorism, and that development and peace now define our region. They leave no opportunity to insist that the abrogation of Article 370 sowed the seeds of a “Naya Kashmir”.

They have indeed created a Naya Kashmir, in which Kashmiri students, businessmen, and other groups residing across mainland Indian states have turned into targets of hate for crimes they neither committed nor condoned, or simply for belonging to a land that is an “integral part of India”.

Every incident is followed by the same script. The state speaks of unity and strength, of the rhetoric of “karara jawab”, while society is allowed to police Kashmiris, in universities, markets, railway stations, workplaces, and homes. Vigilantism flourishes not despite the state narrative, but because of it.

I refuse to accept this as normal and consider it my duty to point out to this “playbook” of weaponising fear to hide failures. It is ironic that today, a Kashmiri must remind the people of this country that the Constitution that we were promised does not permit guilt by association. It does not allow collective punishment.

Recently, Kashmiri traders who sell hand-embroidered Kashmiri garments by going door to door across Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, and other states were targeted by people associated with RSS offshoots such as the Bajrang Dal. Even videos were recorded by those committing these hate acts; traders were told to chant slogans of a particular religion, presumably to satisfy egos and to prove their Indianness. Today, these Kashmiri Muslims increasingly find themselves placed in positions where they are compelled to repeatedly appease the anxieties of the majority.

Very recently, when a young woman shared a video on social media saying that she had been denied accommodation by a landlord solely because she was a Kashmiri Muslim, there was no outrage. It has been normalised to a point where it does not even merit deliberation. People just scroll past it.

We are well-acquainted with political ignorance, yet the pervasive indifference toward these realities marks a fundamental transformation in the character of the Indian democracy. The denial of a home is now framed as “caution”. Exclusion is dressed up as “security”. And in this dangerous shift, basic rights are quietly reclassified as privileges that can be withdrawn without explanation or shame.

This exposes the rhetoric of “integration”. “National security” has been unceremoniously turned into a dog-whistle through a carefully crafted politics of deflection. Instead of asking why intelligence failed in Pahalgam or how security was breached near the Red Fort, the ruling establishment finds it easier to circulate suspicion downwards towards students, traders, workers, and women whose only “crime” is their identity.

If integration means anything, it must include people, not just territory. If equality is real, it must extend beyond speeches, slogans, and jumlas. And if the Constitution still governs this country, no person can be reduced to a permanent suspect because of where they come from.

Yet this is precisely what is being normalised. In a recent multi-agency mock drill at the Qazigund station, terrorists were depicted wearing pherans — a deliberate visual shorthand to mark threats. At the same time, the pheran has been freely adopted across north India as a winter fashion statement, worn without fear or consequence.

India is comfortable wearing Kashmiri culture, but is deeply uncomfortable with Kashmiri bodies. Our clothes are celebrated when detached from us, and our presence is policed when we wear them. This is not integration, but rather appropriation without belonging. Our culture is not merely borrowed; it is stripped from us, while the people who live it are reduced to objects of suspicion.

A nation that demands loyalty from one community while denying it dignity is not strong. It is insecure. Kashmiris are not an internal enemy to be managed, monitored, and mistrusted. We are citizens who are entitled to privacy, liberty, and equality under the law. Anything less is not integration. It is domination. And it is non-negotiable.

The writer is the National Conference Lok Sabha MP representing Srinagar