India / Normalcy has returned to J&K: India after US House expresses concern

New Delhi: After a panel of the United States House of Representatives expressed concern over continued lack of normalcy in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), India on Thursday said it would be happy to brief the members of the American Congress about “several positive changes” that had been brought about in the Union Territory over the past one year.

New Delhi refuted the assertion made by the two US Representatives and claimed that “complete normalcy” had returned to the J&K.

The chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Eliot Engel, and the Ranking Member of the panel, Michael T McCaul, wrote to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Wednesday – a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in New Delhi stripped the erstwhile state of J&K of its special status and re-organized the state into two Union Territories.

They expressed strong “bipartisan support” for the US-India relations but noted with “concern” that the situation in J&K had “not normalized” a year after the Modi Government’s August 5, 2019 move on the erstwhile state.

Engel is a member of the Democratic Party and represents New York’s 16th congressional district in the lower house of the US Congress. McCaul is the Republican Representative from the 10th congressional district of Texas.

“There have been several positive changes in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir over the past one year, be it in terms of ensuring good governance or socio-economic development or justice to the disadvantaged sections of the population,” Anurag Srivastava, the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), said in New Delhi. He was responding to a query on New Delhi’s response to the concerns expressed by Eliot and McCall in the letter to the External Affairs Minister.

Srivastava also noted that elections had been held to the Block Development Councils in J&K in October 2019. Besides, the first-ever “Khelo India” winter games had been held in the Union Territory in March 2020, schools had reopened and new educational facilities were being established, said the MEA spokesperson. “There are provisions of better healthcare with new health facilities coming up, infrastructure development has taken place and long-pending projects have been completed,” he added. “So, all this certainly reflects return to complete normalcy.”

He said that the Government of India “continued to be engaged with” its interlocutors in the US, including in the American Congress. “We will be happy to brief the (US) Congress (on positive changes and return of normalcy,” said the MEA spokesperson.