The Modi-Sharif meeting in Delhi on 27 May, following the swearing-in ceremony and the subsequent debate on the relevance of Article 370 brought J&K briefly back into public debate. India and Pakistan have, since then, reverted to their domestic preoccupations—developmental and governance issues in India; the military operations in FATA to tackle terrorism in the aftermath of the TTP attack on Karachi airport in Pakistan.
J&K, of course, continues to remain the ghost in the room. It can hardly be otherwise having bedevilled Indo-Pak relations over the last six decades. The security establishment in Pakistan and the India-oriented jihadis patronized by it want to keep it that way. The political leadership though well aware of the increasing incapacity of Pakistan to alter established realities in J&K finds itself unable to change its public rhetoric. Yet, one gets the sense that for peoples on both sides, it has now become more a question of how to erode the salience of J&K as the ‘core’ issue preventing economic, social and other cooperation in an atmosphere free from violence or the threat of it that they want to see forming the basis of a new relationship.