Recall that 1993 was the last incident to take place in India till the present incident which, incidentally, started off in Nepal. We've had democratic elections there. If there was no export of terrorists and mercenaries from Pakistan and other countries, including countries as far away as Albania, terrorism in the state would have been fully controlled by now, and the state would have been well on the way to reconstruction. There is, today, very little home-grown terrorism in Kashmir. I used to meet the same arguments in Punjab.
People talk as if the terrorists represent some sort of inchoate democratic aspiration.
But once terrorism was defeated in Punjab, the terrorist 'support base' vanished. These are falsehoods that only serve the terrorist cause. Terrorism does not recognise the normal conventions of politics and democracy, and cannot be countered by these. It is a completely immoral and unconstrained use of force and can only be countered by the use of force. For a short while, they had gained a degree of respectability as a result of direct or covert encouragement from the courts.