Lieutenant General ( Retd) Kanwal Jeet Singh Dhillon said that Kashmir binds Pakistan together and the region gives the country’s establishment an excuse from focusing on its ‘failures’.
Talking at the program ‘The Ranveer Show’ the retired Indian army commander said that Pakistan wants Kashmir to remain destabilized and unhappy.
“Pakistan wants to keep projecting the Kashmir card so that the people don’t ask them the question about their domestic failures. Be it political, economic, military or whatever diplomat issue the country is facing. So the thing that binds them (Pakistan) together is Kashmir. They want Kashmir to keep burning,” the retired Indian army general said during the talk show.
He said that in 1990, when India opened up to the world economy and the world became a global village, it was also the time when militancy started in Kashmir.
When asked about the early years of 1990s when the armed struggle against the state started, the retired general said that after the migration of Kashmir pandits the overall demography of Jammu and Kashmir changed.
“So when it happened in 1989, when it started, I was there in 1988. I’ll tell you that when Kashmir pandits came out of the Kashmir valley the population demographic changed,” the retired general said.
He said that Kashmiri Pandits were associated with the education department while they were part of other businesses of the society too.
“With Pandits leaving, the education in Jammu and Kashmir collapsed. The village schools which were made of wood those days were burned down by militants. The students stopped to get a good education because good teachers had left Jammu and Kashmir. There was a serious problem,” the retired general who has also commanded the strategic 15 Corps based in Srinagar said during the talk show.
He said after the militancy started to die down in phase manner then Hurriyat started to give shutdown calls.
“Every second day used to be a lockdown in Kashmir and the schools were always shut. The children would not go to school for 200 to 250 days in a year,” he said.
Commending the present political dispensation of Bharatiya Janata Party on reading down the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, the retired general said that the change has brought industries and job opportunities for the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
“Now because of Articles 370 and 35-A, the industry or the multinational corporations were not allowed to come into Kashmir for establishing industry. So the job opportunities were less, economic growth was less,” the retired general said.
He said that Kashmir is a tourism oriented society. “With a lot of hoteliers, a lot of transport, business, and shopkeepers, they lost their income due to shutdowns,” he said.
“Here, there was economic growth happening, job creation happening. And what happened in the end when the boy could not get into a good university, good college, he was like a canon folder for the militants to be recruited and this is exactly what Pakistan wanted,” he said.
He said that Pakistan did not want these young Kashmiri boys to get good education, good jobs, so they will not ask for what Pakistan is asking. “So the whole ecosystem which worked towards it and now after August 5, 2019 this has changed and a lot of investment has gone to Kashmir,” he said.