Dear Prime Minister, nothing about Jammu & Kashmir is as your party sees it
Economist and activist Jean Dreze, who has co-authored books with Nobel laureates, such as Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, was in the headlines for a placard he carried to a protest rally in Delhi earlier this week. His placard challenged the government’s most critical justification for its controversial move to scrap Article 35A and read down Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The placard displayed statistics that compare J&K with Gujarat, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah’s home state. Dreze clearly showed how Gujarat lags behind J&K on a raft of development indices.
Although Dreze’s data beautifully punctures the government’s claim that J&K’s special status was a hindrance to its progress, Modi in his address to the nation on Wednesday night repeated the same argument, based on dubious claims. For instance, his claim that J&K lags behind other Indian states in matters of health services, education and so on, is patently incorrect.
Figures recorded in the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) has extended the debate further and shown that J&K already excels many other Indian states on several human development counts. Once again, this underlines that all talk about how “development” will reach J&K after Article 370 is made redundant is sheer humbug.
The propagation of false information brings home the fact that the government has gone very far to generate legitimacy for its decisions in J&K. In his address to the nation, Modi also said that his government had “fulfilled the dreams of [BR] Ambedkar as well as [the then Home Minister Vallabhbahi] Patel”.
( Read the full article here : https://www.newsclick.in/index.php/shyama-prasad-mukherjees-role-official-myths-jk-busted)
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Is it only about Human Development Index? You are misleading Indian Public, which you did since Independence. What about economic development? What about the rights that a Kashmiri girl loses if she marries a non Kashmiri?
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Mr Piyush, thanks for showing interest in the article and your comments.
The logic of ‘economic development’ sounds very convenient to justify the abrogation of article 370 in a unconstitutional manner. Well, for arguments sake if one agrees to it, then what was the hindrance to ‘economic development” of the so called BIMARU states – definitely there was no such special status in place.
Secondly, who is misleading Indian public ‘since independence’ needs longer debate but as my article shows – at the moment – the custodians of this country are busy peddling alt facts to justify their decision which very much suits their political agenda.
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You can’t expect Sanghparivar to digest truth,for they are fed up with falsehood and habituated to spread it.
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