This continent-sized country with a necessarily complicated history of nation-building is no stranger to difficult moments. One such moment is upon it now. Kashmir, says an increasingly vocal corner in the national debate — it’s of course great that a debate is happening — is posing difficult, perhaps unanswerable, political/ territorial questions because the impetus is all within. Really? Then how come just a few weeks before Kashmir was so off the news that peace, and therefore further dividends, had become boring stories? The principal reason that situation has transformed into the present crisis is that while Kashmir has been volatile before, the Centre has never been as weak as now. Not even when weak coalition governments ruled India. Just recall very recent history.

First, a governor who was not even appointed by this government was allowed to handle Amarnath badly. Then, the implications of giving in to the Valley hardliners were not drawn. Then the Jammu protest was not met by immediate state response in terms of not allowing highway blockades. Then a senior representative of this government offered the Valley’s agitating entrepreneurs not the promise that highways will be cleared but that paramilitary will buy their apples. An assurance that obviously signalled to the Valley hardliners that there’s a huge deficit of political/ tactical will at the Centre. No prizes for guessing who the senior representative was. The same gentleman runs the ministry that allowed all the other lapses. In Shivraj Patil’s heroic ineffectuality we have the symbol and part of the substance of this government’s terrifying inability, when occasions have demanded, to exhibit national will. Kashmir’s practiced agitpropists have sensed that at no time as now has the Centre been so sold on the idea that doing nothing in time and issuing vacuous statements at all times are good strategies.