Being mentioned by the Washington Post or NYT shouldn’t be a barometer of any issue’s importance — more so when it isn’t an American issue. Leaders in the US might be elected for their grandiose visions on foreign policy, but this isn’t the Cold War era anymore and other regional powers are perfectly capable of addressing regional issues.

Your narrative reeks of terribly sourced facts and with (clearly) zero reporting from the ground — no wonder the “Westerners” read accounts such as these and decide to pan India and its’ human rights record.

Much more than the rigged elections of ’87, which the Indian media has rightly brought out and believe me, they have been roundly condemned — the tipping point was India’s first offensively-defensive posture in Siachen Glacier. This great and well executed Operation of the Indian Army, Operation Meghdoot, is what finally sent the Mullah-Military complex into a tailspin and ‘inciting popular unrest’ was the only means left to them. It also obviously helped that the Soviet withdrawal left a huge hole in the Mujahid’s intended deployment. These cause hungry mercenaries were shipped off to Kashmir by their ISI handlers. Otherwise there was no rational reason for them to show up in South Kashmir — a region as alien to them as Sindh.

The media, Western and Indian, have complete rights to question India’s human rights record — but it is severely blown out of proportion. India’s response has never included helicopter gunships or artillery weapons — these would drastically reduce the Army’s casualties but a hostage crisis is still dealt with by sending young army captains and lieutenants in.

I could really go on, including panning your faulty factual recollections of accession, but I only hope your bigotry someday leads you to Pakistan’s treatment of its’ own ‘brother Muslims’ in Operation Zarb-e-Azb.