In July 2001, I was invited to an international conference that was held in Switzerland. After the conference we were taken sightseeing to different places. One of the participants was an 80-year old Kashmiri lady. When she saw the beauty of Switzerland, tears came to her eyes and she exclaimed, ‘Our Kashmir was as beautiful as Switzerland, but today it stands destroyed’.
Who destroyed Kashmir? It was certainly no government that did so. Rather, the entire blame for it must be placed on the shoulders of those inept Kashmiri leaders who, with their emotionally-driven rhetoric, completely misled their people and pushed them on to the destructive path of militancy. Had they led them instead along the path of educational and economic advancement, Kashmir might today have been a model of progress and prosperity. But these incompetent leaders, with their completely unrealistic dreams and empty slogans, have caused such terrible damage to the Kashmiris that it cannot possibly be undone, not even in a hundred years.
To conclude and to reiterate what I have been repeatedly stressing throughout this booklet, the time has now come for the Kashmiris to completely and permanently abandon the path of militancy, and, instead, to adopt the path of peace and progress. Only then can the dream of Kashmir as ‘heaven on earth’ come true.
