Srinagar: Kuldip Nayar, renowned journalist, author and human rights activist passed away on Thursday in Delhi. He was 95.
Nayar, who had also been the part of back-channel diplomacy between India and Pakistan, was critical of government of India’s Kashmir policy, underlining that it was flawed and that the Kashmir problem cannot be solved by use of force.
“The Government must open channels of dialogue with all stakeholders. It may confront problems in this regard but it must continue the dialogue process,” Nayar had said in one of his interviews in May last year.
Nayar was also the author of 15 books including “Beyond the Lines”, “India after Nehru” and “Emergency Retold”. In 2015, he was honoured with ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ for his contribution to journalism at the eighth edition of the Ramnath Goenka Excellence awards. Nayar also served as High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom in 1990 and as a member of the Rajya Sabha in 1997.
“Those who are saying all the time that Kashmir is an integral part of India are wrong in the sense that the state of Jammu and Kashmir enjoys autonomy as enunciated in Article 370 which says that except the three subjects—foreign affairs, defence and communications—the other articles of the constitution that gave powers to the Central Government would be applied to Jammu and Kashmir only with the concurrence of the state’s constituent assembly,” Nayar had said in an interviews on February 2016.
