Kashmiris call for end to India, Pakistan divide

[liberalpragmatist]

Source: Times of India

SRINAGAR: Mughlia Begum was just 18 when partition shook the sub-continent on August 14, 1947. In the bloody turmoil, she lost her father Abdul Aziz, who worked in Peshawar as a cook.

Unable to reach the Indian side of the fractured state of Kashmir, he stayed put in the new Muslim nation of Pakistan and remarried, while still trying to return to visit the other wife and four daughters left behind.

<snip>

For the last three years, the guns have gone silent on the heavily-armed Line of Control (LoC) that divides the Himalayan outpost between India and Pakistan.

New Delhi and Islamabad have re-established bus and other links to unite divided families as part of an effort to make the de facto border "irrelevant", in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Begum says that after 60 years, it is an idea whose time has come. "Take it from me; this LoC will not be there. People will dismantle it like the German (Berlin) wall," she said at her cozy house in Indian Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar.

Read more: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Kashmiris_call_for_end_to_India_Pakistan_divide/articleshow/2276539.cms

[Drum]

1. If it turns out to happen,

this reunification might be a badly-needed ray of hope for those---like us!---who believe in peace. Good to know that humans might still remember how to put things together and not just take them apart....

Recommended!

:D

[jmatthan]

2. A pipe dream

One country is a secular democracy, the other a dictatorship with a theocracy behind it.

The twain can never meet, anywhere, including in Kashmir!

India giving up Kashmir would put paid to its secular democracy claim! The sub-continent would degenerate into a free fall!

Pakistan will never allow the Kashmiris their independence as that is not what dictatorships and theocracies promote.

[cosmicone]

3. The only way it is possible

is if the US and west stop supporting Pakistan with military and economic aid. This would balkanize Pakistan into three parts: Sindh, Baluchistan and Punjab. The balkanization will destroy the will of some Pakistanis (primarily Punjabis) to reconquer India like the muslims of the 12th and 13th centuries did.

Once balkanized, Kashmir automatically falls in India's hands and will be prosperous again.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi began the process of balkanization by liberating Bangladesh. Indians would have finished it by now had it not been for Ronald Reagan pumping $40 billion and Bush pumping $43 billion in Pakistani economy.