Sarpanches to be center of new initiative in Kashmir

With an eye towards possible security fall-out of 2014 US troop-pullout from Afghanistan, Centre is working towards a new initiative in J&K to politically take on separatists in the Valley. Shishir Gupta reports.

Updated on: Jan 22, 2013, 24:32:41 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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With an eye towards possible security fall-out of 2014 US troop-pullout from Afghanistan, Centre is working towards a new initiative in J&K to politically take on separatists in the Valley.

The government’s strategy is to use empowered sarpanches and panches to build a democratic movement in the valley at the grassroots level.

Top government sources said at the heart of the new plan is that even if each of the 33.500 odd sarpanches and panches have just 100 followers, a political movement of more than 30 lakh people is generated in a 120 lakh population state. Clearly, the hard line separatists understand its political ramifications as Tehreek-e- Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani last week compared the sarpanches and panches to Ikhwanis--a counter-insurgency movement of the 1990s--and in effect being legitimate targets of terrorists.

While discussing the ramifications of the US pull-out with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this month, the national security managers were of the opinion that a tranquil Line of Control (LoC) was central to peace in the Valley. It was pointed out that armed militant cadres had declined to some 300 in the state and six terrorists had sneaked in from the Poonch sector during the LoC firing this month. Kashmir separatists also saw a political opportunity when they said that LoC firing was part of the Kashmir problem.

In line with the proposed strategy, the Centre is in favour of giving area and not personal security to sarpanches and panches as giving out one gunman to all 33,000 would neither be efficient nor productive. While the state government continues to mull over incorporating elements of the 73rd amendment to further empower the state Panchayats, the UPA feels that sarpanches and panches could be nominated to the Block Development Councils through an ordinance till such time elections take place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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