On an occasion of an international conference in Switzerland in 2001, the Maulana heard an 80-year old Kashmiri participant viewing the beauty around her in awe: “Our Kashmir was as beautiful as Switzerland, but today it stands destroyed.” Thinking of this he states that the blame for the destruction of Kashmir must be placed on the shoulders of those inept Kashmiri leaders who, with their emotionally-driven rhetoric, completely misled their people and pushed them on to the destructive path of militancy. Had they led them instead along the path of educational and economic advancement, Kashmir might today have been a model of progress and prosperity. But these incompetent leaders, with their completely unrealistic dreams and empty slogans, have caused such terrible damage to the Kashmiris that it cannot possibly be undone, not even in a hundred years. Now the time has come for the Kashmiris to completely and permanently abandon the path of militancy, and, instead, to adopt the path of peace and progress. Only then can the dream of Kashmir as ‘heaven on earth’ come true.

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