INDIA'S PALESTINE:

The present government has maintained that it wants to scrap the Article 35A enshrined in India's constitution that bars Indians from buying land in the disputed region. A case to scrap the Article aimed at protecting the demography of the Muslim-majority region is also being heard in India's Supreme Court.

Each time the hearing comes up at the Indian top court, there is a shutdown in Kashmir and people wait in silence and complete attention to hear the outcome, for it is perceived in Kashmir that the scrapping of the Article would be a landmark moment in the region, that will only increase the confrontation between New Delhi and Kashmir, setting course for a stronger resistance and deadlier violence.

In Kashmir, it is not only the pro-independence Kashmiri leaders and activists that are being targeted by the Indian government. As it fails to win any real ground, New Delhi seems to have turned on its "own people" too. After the February 14 bombing, the Indian government also removed the security cover of several leaders, including some pro-India politicians as well..

Waheed Parra, a young Kashmiri politician with the People's Democratic Party, is one of them. Parra's party shared power with the Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and ruled Kashmir between 2015 and 2018, till BJP pulled out of the alliance, bringing the disputed region under direct rule from New Delhi.

Parra, like all other Kashmiri "pro-India" politicians, is seen in Kashmir as a "collaborator" who gives some semblance of legitimacy and "a handle to the axe" to India's rule in the region. Always at threat from the rebels and often even from people, Parra had six security guards and a bulletproof vehicle till last week. Now he has none.

"It was criminal on part of India to leave me like this at the mercy of the militants, it was almost like telling me to find out how many hours I would last," Parra told Al Jazeera. "Only because I speak of dignified peace and human rights of Kashmiris. Even that is unacceptable to them, even when I speak within the Indian constitution."

Parra is from Pulwama in the south of Kashmir, the same district where Dar, the suicide bomber came from, and where the worst bombing on Indian armed forces also took place.

He says he is vulnerable without the security cover considering the kind of work he did, like "arranging 6,000 Kashmiris for a visit of the Indian Home Minister [Rajnath Singh] to Kashmir," a no small feat considering the anti-India sentiment in the region.

"India kills the militants, blinds the protesters, jails the Hurriyat (pro-independence) leaders, and humiliates us," Parra says. "It [India] has only vindicated the stand of those leaders and people who refused to engage in its electoral process and boycotted their elections. We [pro-India politicians] have been used and discarded."

Parra and the politics his party and other pro-India parties in the region espoused - of getting a few concessions from the Indian government, a "healing touch policy" to show the humane face of India, and of a dialogue with India even when the dialogue was an end in itself - lie in dust on the trampled ground in Kashmir.

Parra too sees the writing on the wall, which is more violence from the Indian state and a violent resistance from Kashmir, and the fact is not lost on him that what happens in Kashmir may no longer stay in Kashmir. War hangs on the horizon perpetually, till the oldest running conflict in the world is not resolved.

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