Union home minister Amit Shah’s statement is not completely off the mark when he said in the parliament on Wednesday, November 20, that normalcy has been restored in Jammu and Kashmir. Ahead of the August 5 announcement, fears had built up especially in the Valley that there will be a mass reaction if the Centre attempted to fiddle with the special status of Jammu and Kashmir conferred by the Article 370. These fears were compounded by the statements of the now incarcerated political leaders. A former J&K CM had warned that not only the hand that touches the erstwhile state’s special status but the whole body will turn into ashes. A sitting member of parliament went a step ahead and threatened to lead mass protests in Kashmir if the Article 370 was touched. Many other leaders, including from the separatist and business community, made similar statements on the eruption of rage in Kashmir if the special status was revoked. Now we are into fourth month since the central government virtually wrote off the region’s autonomy by scrapping provisions of the Article 370 and J&K has been divided into two union territories. Whatever our ideological motivations, this is the reality which we can’t change. As against the predilections of the former CM, the hand that wrote off the special status of Jammu and Kashmir hasn’t suffered even a bruise. A couple of unfortunate deaths notwithstanding, including a suicide in which the J&K Police has ordered a probe, not one person has been killed by security forces during retaliatory action against protesters, as home minister Shah pointed out in his speech in the parliament. In fact, if we consider the scale of anger that spilled on the streets of Kashmir in recent past, there have been no protests. With normalcy slowly returning to the Valley, educational institutions have opened and business activities are picking up. There is a sigh of relief in the air that this latest spell of tensions in Kashmir hasn’t led to senseless bloodshed. God forbid, even if 300 or 400 civilians had been killed since August 5, Kashmir would have been where it is today; broken, dispirited, yet aching to move on. But it would be a blunder to mistake the resumption of life’s daily activities in Kashmir with the return of normalcy in its true sense. That Internet continues to remain suspended in the Valley is sufficient to determine whether normalcy has been indeed restored!