Kashmir will become India’s Vietnam war: Former Indian SC judge

NEW DEHLI: The former judge of Indian Supreme Court, Justice Markandey Katju, has said that India has sowed the seeds for large-scale guerilla war in occupied Kashmir by stripping the territory of its special status.

Justice Markandey Katju in an article in the international magazine The Week said, “A time comes to speak the truth, and I suppose that time has come and it is I who will have to bell the cat. So here it is: Kashmir will soon become what Vietnam was for the French and the Americans, Afghanistan for the Russians, and Spain for Napoleon.”

Those who are today gloating over their ‘great victory’ of abolishing Article 370 will soon wake up to a nightmare once body bags start coming back in large numbers from Kashmir, like what the Americans saw on the return from Vietnam, he added.

Internet and mobiles are today a necessity, not a luxury. Depriving a person of these for even one day can make one miserable, so one can imagine the plight of people going without them for almost two months; added to this are the curfews and other restrictions, the former Indian judge wrote.

“Remove the restrictions, and popular protests will engulf the whole valley. Continue them, and the pot will boil until it explodes. As is said in Hindi, the situation is such that ‘na nigalte bane, na ugalte bane’—one can neither swallow it nor vomit it.”

The truth is that due to the ill-conceived and short-sighted policies of the Indian governments towards Kashmir for decades, and particularly after the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, almost the entire population of Kashmir is today totally alienated and bitterly hostile to India, Katju said and added that a full-blown insurgency, like that in Vietnam, is bound to emerge soon, and then body bags will start coming back.