Centralised control keeps federalism at bay in South Asia, but Art. 370 provides a formula for good governance all over because it comes closest to providing representation to group identities.
Kashmir has remained a disputed South Asian flashpoint for over half a century, a period that has seen three rounds of open war and more abiding low-intensity proxy hostilities. The human casualties of the Kashmir conflict continue to mount, even while it bleeds the economies of the two countries. Fuelled at one time by the Cold War, the dispute has long since outlived the superpower rivalry and now has all the potential of engulfing the two newest nuclear-weapon states in a devastating military confrontation.
A resolution of the problem of Kashmir, one which would allow it autonomy through full implementation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, would not only defuse this singular threat to peace and security, it would also carry with it an answer for so many problems of governance elsewhere in South Asia. Kashmir, thus, would be converted from a Subcontinental flashpoint into a model for a political re-structuring of the region that will at last deliver social and economic advantages to the people.
Peace prescription
As things stand on Kashmir, there seems to be an increasing preference for an operationally unachievable military solution. Political negotiations are being made to seem unpatriotic. Internationalisation of the dispute, originally pushed by India, which took it to the Security Council, and later by Pakistan attempting to invoke third-party mediation, has proved equally unproductive. The interests of the centralised state, rather than the concerns of Kashmiris, have dictated the policies of Islamabad and New Delhi. Now completely delinked from the zero-sum relationship of the Cold War superpowers, the Kashmir problem has turned into a zero-sum game between India and Pakistan.