However, with the passage of time, India has transformed Kashmir into a military camp and all the promises made to the Kashmiri people by Nehru and Mountbatten have been forgone by the successive regimes of Indian politics. More has been said than done for Kashmiris. Kashmir has, particularly in the last more than a decade, witnessed scores of soul-deadening incidents. All methods of human rights violation have been adopted by the Indian troops and the militant outfits. The brutality has put to shame the likes of Hitler and Chengez Khan. Ruthless interrogations, illegal use of forces, disappearance, rape, and custodial killings have become regular phenomena in Kashmir. Meanwhile, death of thousands of young men is upsetting the sex ratio, economy is in depression, education has gone down, child labour has become rampant, and many other social evils have cropped up. The paradise of Kashmir has not just been lost but ruined and peace in the vale has been broken into 'pieces'. Ironically, the electronic media of a democratic Indian state portrays the situation in Kashmir as 'normal'.
Common Kashmiris die a thousand deaths each day and nobody pays heed to their miseries.
On the contrary they are treated merely as slaves who have been deprived of their fundamental rights. The concern of the army and militant outfits is to keep Kashmir; the means are not their concern. The militants lob grenades at security personals and in the bargain the blood of innocent Kashmiris is spilled over the green valley. Kashmiris are, as Arundhati Roy once said, " sandwiched between security forces and militants." It is a high time for all the Kashmiris, particularly the new generation to wake up and think about the prospect of Kashmir and Kashmiris. What Kashmir requires today is a leader who has no attachment with money nor the lure for power; a leader, who would be committed to bring peace to the grief-stricken valley. Unfortunately, at present there is hardly any leader worth the name and that has added to the miseries of Kashmiris.
There have been innumerable direct bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan, on or including Kashmir in the last five decades, but unfortunately all these discussions have not yielded any result, and rightly so. Robert G. Wirsing has rightly stated that " India and Pakistan are far from free to settle the Kashmir dispute in their own terms." (Kashmir in the Shadow of War).
Despite the fact that Kashmir was never a property of either India or Pakistan and there can be no question of deciding the fate of Kashmiris without their consent, Kashmiris were, ironically, ignored in the dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad to resolve the Kashmir dispute. However, it is a good gesture that both the countries have realized the importance of Kashmiris representation in the dialogue process.
The problem of Kashmir would only be resolved through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite. But holding of Plebiscite with only two options (union with either Indian or Pakistan) is not now acceptable to the bulk of Kashmiris. The ideal solution for Kashmiris, as Prof. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema of Pakistan asserted, would be an "independent status for the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir". Steps like starting a bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad, laying down railway lines, or giving hefty economic packages won't solve the problem of Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan should make U.N Resolutions the basis of solving the problem. U.N. resolution, after all, was responsible to ultimately solve the international disputes in South Africa and Angola. India and Pakistan must keep the interest of Kashmiri people paramount and take serious and resolute initiative in order to make things better for the common mass of Kashmir and settle the Kashmir issue once and for all.