The creation of India and Pakistan were pyrrhic victories for their denizens because the political, socioeconomic, psychological, and culture havoc wreaked by that momentous event is reflected in those pogroms, ethnic cleansing, proliferation of nuclear weapons, poverty, and riots that continue to cause seismic tremors in the Indian subcontinent.

In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been gravely violated.

For Pakistan, Kashmir represents the infeasibility of secular nationalism and underscores the need for an Islamic theocracy in the subcontinent.

The partition of India in 1947 legitimized the forces of masculinist nationalism and enabled hatred for the "other" to irreparably mutilate a shared anti-colonial legacy and cultural heritage so systematically that the wounds inflicted by the partition are yet to heal.

I have often noticed that the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan, attribute to Kashmiris an inferior intellect, a lineage, and a mystique that has allowed the dominant regime to manipulate the Kashmiri "Other" as a stereotypical and predictable entity.

The culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse population of Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir has been unable to reach a consensus on the future of the land and the heterogeneous peoples of the state.

The Constitution of India seeks to guarantee respect for the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral process. But time and again, provisions of the Constitution of India have been flagrantly violated in Kashmir, and the ideals that it enshrines have been forgotten.