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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

The wider lessons from Jammu and Kashmir, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs
The wider lessons from Jammu and Kashmir
K. Shankar Bajpai
Has the concept of India lost its cementing force? The passing of power from all-India political parties to regional factions is rationalised as part of our natural, even desirable, transformation from an over-centralised state to the federal structure better suited to our size and diversity. But the new power-wielders — alas, like the older ones — have behaved with such apparent indifference to the interests of the nation as a whole that their parochial obsessions and short horizons create increasing dangers for national unity and security. These dangers are made worse by the frightening decline in the ability — or willingness — of the instruments of state action to do their duties. Perhaps the most pernicious danger to unity as well as progress that our political evolution has created is the virtual collapse of the efficiency and conscientiousness, leave aside the morality, of the politico-administrative complex charged with governance. Challenges arise from caste, regional, or ‘ethnic’ particularisms, and from socio-economic grievances. The increasingly petty purposes of the new — and old — political forces are also as destabilising.

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