Camouflaged by the ruling party’s transparently insincere recent platitudes on Kashmir is the Congress Party’s continuing ambivalence to the crisis. Dr Manmohan Singh was our prime minister for 10 years and, during his time, India came close to a settlement on Kashmir with Pakistan, so you’d expect him to have more than a few words to say. Instead, he has been more silent than he was during his last four years as PM. P Chidambaram, who hopes to be the next Congress PM, publicly opined that successive governments of India, including those that included him, had failed to live up to the “grand bargain” of Kashmir joining India in October 1947. Perhaps politicians only make such statements in Opposition; this still could have provided PM Narendra Modi’s government the opening to reach out to Kashmiris, though that clearly was never Modi’s intention. Chidambaram’s own party advised him publicly to stick to the party line: this repudiation came in Parliament, from a J&K Congressman, Ghulam Nabi Azad. There was no clarity on what exactly is this party line.

Yet more protests were witnessed on Friday in Kashmir, which has been in the grip of unrest and curfews ever since the killing of terrorist Burhan Wani in July. Pic/AFP