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Reassure the army on AFSPA

India is witnessing a bitterly polarised debate over Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s proposal to revoke the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act (AFSPA) from Srinagar and Badgam in Kashmir, and from Jammu and Samba towns in the Jammu region. Abdullah, backed by broad swathes of the media, wants a peace dividend for his people after a year of relative normalcy. This could be provided, he says, by loosening AFSPA, an emergency law that has since 1990 given army soldiers in J&K the legal backing to search, apprehend and shoot to kill. The army, backed opportunistically by the Bharatiya Janata Party, insists that the fragility of the current peace makes it too early to loosen AFSPA. 

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