Srinagar: Prominent educationist Vijay Dhar on Wednesday termed the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status as the “best thing” to have happened as Kashmiris were “looked down upon” owing to it.
“You might not have faced it but I have faced it from the people of other states,” said Dhar, chairman of the Delhi Public School (DPS) Srinagar, addressing an Army organized seminar at the Badamibagh Cantonment Board in Srinagar.
Speaking to Kashmir Observer on the sidelines of the event, Dhar further said: “people from other states would taunt and tease us.”
Commenting on the position of regional parties that the state lost its identity with the revocation of the special status, Dhar said: “If you are a shawl wala and go outside, people give you more respect if you are a Kashmiri.”
“Your identity can’t be with an article of the constitution. Your identity is your Kashmiriyat.”
Even as Dhar said that the notion that Article 370 offered subsidies to the people of Kashmir was a misconception, he maintained that there was nothing good that the now deoperationalised constitutional provision had for J&K. “For the new generation, he claimed, Article-370 “means nothing”, he claimed.
Article 370 was defanged and the state was bifurcated into two union territories by the Union Government on 5th August 2019 amid a clampdown that saw the longest shutdown of the internet and the detention of thousands across the region, including nearly the entire political class.
The two-day seminar, being organized by the Army’s Srinagar-based Chinar Corps, on “human rights violations by terrorists and how they affected Kashmiri citizens”, was attended by army personnel and a select group of journalists and local activists. A second session is scheduled on October 23.
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