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As Baramulla’s Dak Bungalow hosts an interfaith, intergenerational dialogue radiating into a pan-Kashmir outreach across ten districts, the case for Mulakat rests on a harder argument than reconciliation alone — on naming precisely what was imported, what the state has restored, and what only society can now rebuild.
There is a particular resonance to the old Dak bungalows of Kashmir. Built as way-stations of hospitality along the Valley’s historic routes, they hold within their deodar beams and tin roofs a memory of encounter that predates the vocabulary of violence the region inherited after 1989. The Dak Bungalow in Baramulla witnessed caravans on the old Jhelum Valley Road, the displacements of 1947, and, from the late 1980s, the arrival of a militancy that was never wholly indigenous in its ideology, financing or command structure. On 19 July, this building is reclaimed for a purpose of the community’s own making: the anchor point for Mulakat, an interfaith and intergenerational dialogue radiating outward into a pan-Kashmir outreach across ten districts.
The case for treating this as more than a local human-interest story rests on a single, underexamined proposition: that what Kashmir lost across three decades was not organic communal breakdown but an imported binary, and that its reversal now depends on distinguishing carefully between what the state has restored and what only society can rebuild.
What was actually lost
It has become conventional to describe Kashmir’s turn toward violence after 1989 in the passive voice, as an eruption whose origins are treated as diffuse or contested. This is analytically imprecise. The proxy architecture that trained, armed and infiltrated militants across the Line of Control did not merely introduce violence into Kashmir; it introduced a binary framework of identity that the Valley’s own religious and social history had never produced on its own terms. Kashmiriyat — the shared devotional idiom of Rishi and Sufi orders, in which shrines were frequented and saints claimed by Muslims and Pandits alike offered no natural vocabulary for the sectarian absolutism that cross-border militancy required to sustain itself. That vocabulary had to be imported: a doctrine that recast centuries of syncretic coexistence as an aberration to be corrected by force.
The consequences were not confined to the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. They extended to the slower attrition of everyday interdependence — the reciprocal observance of Eid and Navreh, the shared use of springs and orchards, the informal trust networks that had absorbed centuries of religious plurality without needing a state to arbitrate them. An entire generation came of age treating pluralism as a historical artefact rather than a living practice. This is the specific, imported cost that any honest account of Mulakat’s necessity has to name.
What the state has restored
None of what follows would be feasible without acknowledging what sustained governmental investment in security, infrastructure and civic administration has achieved over recent years. The stability Jammu and Kashmir now exhibits is not incidental; it is the product of deliberate policy – the dismantling of terror infrastructure, the extension of governance to areas long treated as ungovernable, and a security architecture patient enough to hold gains rather than merely announce them. This stability is the necessary precondition for a gathering of Mulakat’s scale and candour to be attempted at all. A decade ago, an interfaith, cross-district dialogue of this kind would have been operationally unthinkable. That it is thinkable now is a direct dividend of the state having done the work that only a state can do: securing the room in which people might safely sit down together.
It is important to state this plainly, because a certain kind of commentary prefers to treat improved security as background noise rather than causal fact. It is not. Governance created the floor beneath this initiative. But a floor is not a room, and a room is not a conversation which is precisely where the state’s competence reaches its proper limit, and where a different kind of actor is required.
The facilitator’s role, precisely defined
Save Youth Save Future Foundation, which is convening Mulakat, occupies exactly this narrower space. It has secured venues, coordinated logistics, and issued invitations to Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs and Christians, to elders who remember undivided neighbourhoods and to a younger cohort that has inherited only the silence left in their wake. But the foundation is explicit that it functions as facilitator, not author. It can lay the table. It cannot dictate what is said once people are seated, and it’s there to witness our past in motion.
Its message, in this sense, has never been about optics. What the foundation seeks to provide is not a stage but groundwork — an organic platform whose worth lies not in the visibility of an event but in the durability of what it sets in motion afterward. The conviction underlying its outreach is unambiguous: that a society is better served by a belief in living than by any accommodation, however implicit, with death. Over the years, the organisation has built precisely this kind of base — steady, unspectacular, cumulative working to restore pluralism across every register in which Kashmir’s coexistence was once lived: in cultural practice, in intellectual life, in the syncretic, transcendental wisdom of its spiritual traditions, and in political discourse itself.
The responsibility that returns to society
The primary responsibility for what happens now sits with society itself, not with government and not with any foundation. The imported binary that fractured Kashmir’s pluralism was absorbed, however unwillingly, by Kashmiri society, through fear, through silence, through the normalisation of estrangement as though it were the Valley’s natural condition rather than the residue of specific years of specific violence. If that binary was absorbed by society, it can only be dislodged by society, operating within the security the state has now made durable enough to rely on.
There is a further dimension to this responsibility worth naming directly. What three decades of imported violence achieved, beyond displacement and fear, was the slow normalisation of violence itself, its absorption into the ordinary expectations of public life. Reversing that normalisation — delegitimising violence as a language society no longer accepts, is not a task government or any formal institution can perform on society’s behalf. A state can dismantle the infrastructure of violence; it cannot dismantle its normalisation in the public mind. Only society, choosing daily to treat violence as illegitimate rather than inevitable, can do that.
An invitation with no exceptions
It is worth stating what this invitation is not. It is not confined to any particular section of society. It extends to religious scholars and religious leaders, to community leaders and elders, and pointedly to the younger generation — an invitation to sit together and speak of what Kashmir was before the eruption of 1989, and of how Kashmiris, as part of this republic, once shared almost everything in common. That social capital, that social cohesion, broken across 1989 and the years that followed, is now being slowly and steadily reclaimed, with the efforts of the state administration. And beyond Kashmir, this is an invitation to everyone who believes in the future of their children and their parents, in the future of this valley, and in the idea of India — in togetherness, coexistence, and a pluralistic ethos that has run beneath the surface of this land across centuries and generations.
A limited but necessary claim
None of this should be overstated. One day of dialogue across ten districts cannot complete the longer work that governance and civil society must continue to share: the resettlement of displaced families, the redress of unresolved grievances, the consolidation of a peace still under construction. But the correct response to that limitation is not to defer dialogue until every precondition is perfect . It is to recognise dialogue, paired with the security the state has already secured, as the missing piece that converts calm into coexistence. Kashmir did not lose its pluralism by accident, and it will not recover it by accident either. It was fractured through an imported argument about who belonged and who did not; it can only be reconstituted through an indigenous one about who is still willing to sit in the same room. On 19 July, in Baramulla and later, across nine other districts, that argument gets a hearing. What happens afterward belongs to whoever walks through the door.
Irshad Ahmad Bhat is a Research Scholar in Politics and Governance, currently serving as Coordinator and In-charge of the Research Wing at Save Youth Save Future.
Bhatirshad81@gmail.com
