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Articles

Srinagar headed for traffic terror this season!

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Majid Hyderi While Kashmir is bracing up for business season, the summer capital of Srinagar is headed for a major chaos on the already congested roads. This time it won’t be routine traffic jams but worse: the ‘traffic terror’. The prediction doesn’t need any rocket technology; sometimes common sense is enough. In a bid to avoid any mishap, a high level committee led by Divisional Commissioner Kashmir Dr Asgar Hassan Samoon has decided to close down the arterial Jahangir Chowk-Ram Bagh corridor in the wake of ongoing construction of the…

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Lessons from NIT Row

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Shujaat Bukhari The crisis that unfolded at National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Srinagar after West Indies defeated India in T20 World Cup semi-final snowballed in no time. It turned out to be the first challenge for Mehbooba Mufti’s government that had taken over only two days before that match. The demands put forth by the non-local students who heavily outnumber the locals are unusual to have come from campus of an educational institute. When the semi-final ended in India’s defeat, the reaction from both sides was on expected lines…

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Delhi wants Kashmir without the Kashmiris

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Garga Chatterjee Put students, television, cricket match, Kashmir and India into a mix and what you typically get is violence or intimidation against Kashmiri students in universities across the Hindi-belt. That is usual. That is how it is supposed to be. Sometimes the Kashmiri students have even been banished from the university or thrown out of their hostel overnight. None of these makes “national” headlines. However, after the recent T20 semi-finals, with the same mix of students, television, cricket match, Kashmir and India, the events that followed made it to…

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NIT Row: Why double standard?

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Initiate action against non-local students too Gowhar Naz National Institute of Technology (NIT), Srinagar was founded as a Regional Engineering College (REC) in 1960 and was under the control of Government of Jammu Kashmir till 2004. In 2004, REC was renamed and taken over by central government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Admission to the said college began to be based on a national examination, open to students from outside Jammu Kashmir that gradually changed the composition of students in the institute. Nearly 3000 students currently study at the…

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“ Shift India Out Of Kashmir ”

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By B L Saraf ‘ Take India out of Kashmir ’ has been the refrain of separatist discourse for quite a time . Some in the Valley have taken to the gun to achieve the ‘ object ‘ . They almost succeeded in 1990 when institutions and commercial units associated with India , including radio and the TV , were ordered out of the Valley . It took GOI years to relocate them back . What a trick of the fate that what militants couldn’t achieve then , now ,…

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Saffron league at NIT

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By DAR WASIM Well known illustrator, Jim Benton has rightly said, “School prepares you for the real world… which also bites”. It all started in the Hyderabad University, then reached JNU and now is spreading in Kashmir. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failures on development and good governance fronts, the right wing and his Hindu nationalist supporters started attacking premier institutions invoking the “nationalism” card. Rohit Vemula paid the price of being a dalit and JNU students were arrested for speaking the truth about his ‘institutional murder’. The crime of these…

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The Show Must Go On!

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By Basharat Ali The security bandobast, in and outside National Institute of Technology (NIT) Hazratbal, Srinagar. A Kashmiri student studying in India finds a mention in news these days. For raising a slogan, for cheering for his favourite cricket team, for not cooking beef, or, for simply being a Kashmiri student in India, anywhere in India. This Kashmiri student is not one individual but numbers in thousands. But since these thousands have many common threads, one of them is being a Kashmiri, we can talk of them as a single…

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In a NITshell

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Mehmood ur Rashid What happened at NIT, Srinagar can be neatly sliced into two. First, the spontaneous, second, the sponsored. The spontaneous part of it is the expression of jubilation by the Kashmiri students when West Indies defeated Indian cricket team in the semifinals of T20 world cup. The reason for jubilation was not the victory of West Indies, but the defeat of Indian cricket team. And this is nothing new to Kashmir. This has always been so. I remember in my boyhood days when Pakistan lost to Australia in…

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J&K’s Energy Sector: A Vital source of Future Economic Growth

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J&K can become a major energy producer provided there’s proper management of our hydropower resources The Jammu & Kashmir State is blessed with sizeable resources which, if suitably harnessed on priority, could transform its economy and bring socio- economic development not only in the state but in the whole region. Among the major natural resources, water as a resource forms the base for its hydroelectric power and has strong potential to generate as a critical input not only for its economic activities but also as a large source of state…

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Politicising NIT affair

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Mohsin Manzoor Janwari The writing on the NIT Srinagar institute wall is quite clear. Even a T-20-cricket match between other than India and Pakistan can also become a political statement and a mode of rebellion against India. It is believed that most of Kashmiri “sentiment” is engrained deeply with the Pakistani cricket team after partition; but local Kashmiri students support for team playing against India in recent T20 series sounded “enemies-enemy is-a-friend” to non-local NIT students. This triggered their clashes with local students followed by furling of Indian and Pakistani…

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