Indian premier set to unveil economic projects during key Kashmir visit

By Hilal Mir

SRINAGAR, Jammu and Kashmir (AA) - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday for the second time since the disputed region's autonomous status was scrapped by his government on Aug. 5, 2019.

He is scheduled to launch power and other projects valued at nearly $5 billion from a village in the Samba district of the Hindu-majority Jammu province, a traditional stronghold of the Hindu right, making this trip the most significant since the Aug. 5 decision.

Modi's visit in November last year -- to celebrate the Hindu festival Diwali with Indian soldiers stationed at the country's borders -- was low-key in comparison.

An official advertisement in local Kashmiri newspapers on Saturday said that the government had received investment proposals worth $6.7 billion. At Sunday's ceremony, the groundbreaking of $5 billion worth of projects will be carried out, with the potential to generate 237,000 jobs, it said.

Since assuming power in New Delhi in 2014, Modi visited the region as many as 20 times -- the most of any Indian premier to the region, where an anti-India insurgency has been raging for more than 30 years.

Modi has been credited with realizing the Indian right's decades-old promise of scrapping the laws that allowed Jammu and Kashmir to have a separate constitution, flag, and legislature that could make laws independently of the Indian parliament.

Another law that empowered the local government was its mandate to define permanent state residents, preventing outsiders from buying property or taking government jobs, which was also scrapped on Aug. 5, raising fears among Muslims -- 68.5% of the population -- that they would be reduced to a minority.

The state was also bifurcated and downgraded into two federally-ruled territories: Ladakh, where China has made territorial claims, and Jammu and Kashmir.

- Statehood status

The Indian government has repeatedly said statehood would be restored to Jammu and Kashmir after an ongoing delimitation exercise is completed and elections are held for a new assembly.

Muslim pro-India politicians, who have been another casualty of the lost political order, have criticized the delimitation exercise as an attempt to provide an electoral advantage to Jammu province by disproportionately increasing its seats in the legislative assembly.

The delimitation is supposed to be completed by early May. India's Home Minister Amit Shah, who is also the BJP's key election strategist, is expected to visit the region soon after Modi, on May 8.

India's ruling Hindu rightwing has blamed the special political status of Jammu and Kashmir for the insurgency and economic backwardness of the region, though pro-India politicians like Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of the region and India's one-time junior foreign minister, have contested these assertions using data from public agencies.

Economic development and the use of iron-fisted policies against any form of pro-insurgency sentiments, analysts say, are the twin strategies New Delhi is keen to pursue in Kashmir post-2019 for its complete merger into the Indian Union.

Projects Modi is scheduled to unveil include real estate in hospitality, housing, industry, warehousing, and film and entertainment besides a "Medicity" with a capacity of 6,000 hospital beds.

Key sectors to be developed, according to the advertisement, are food processing, health, services, cement and minerals, and IT and electronics.

- 'Militancy down'

Modi's visit comes at a time when, according to Lt. Gen. DP Pandey, the commander of the Indian army's Kashmir-based 15 Corps, fresh recruitments into militant groups were decreasing.

"Last year, it was down as well and this year, it has further come down as the people have realized that militancy has only brought misery to them," Pandey told media outlets on Friday.

Kashmir Range Inspector General of Police Vijay Kumar also told the media recently that the number of active militants was down below 200 for the first time in the insurgency's history.

Ahead of Modi's visit, two militants and an officer of the Central Industrial Security Force were killed in a military operation in the Jammu region, while five other personnel were injured on Friday.

Dilbagh Singh, police chief of Jammu and Kashmir, told reporters that the deceased militants belonged to the Pakistan-based outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad. He said the attack was "part of a larger conspiracy to disturb peace in Jammu and sabotage the prime minister’s visit to the region."

Suspected militants shot at and injured two outside laborers in the capital of Kashmir, Srinagar. While such attacks -- more than a dozen workers from various Indian states have been killed -- have been occurring intermittently since 2019, they surged in the past two months.