It's not political. It never was. It's societal and communal and you have to enter the same arena to fight it on an equal footing.
Village Defence Groups are a great idea but they need polish and prioritization.
Open up recruitment for outsider settlers, hand out small pieces of land, ramp up surveillance, tighten security on everyone entering and exiting Kashmir.
It's some 2 lakh square kilometres, it's not Mongolia.
We have an ally who has practiced the settler methodology since years and keeps winning battles after battles AND wars after wars. They'd be happy to teach us a trick or two.
Individual security is a multi-tool saar.
It can be used to defend against the terrorists and it can also be used to fight against security forces. The dichotomy here is how the Indian state manages these settler groups, should it decide to actually end the status quo in Kashmir. The most simple method would be to never allow any settler cell to collaborate or coordinate or even communicate with other cells. It's not that hard. I really doubt such groups would ever go rogue but better safe than sorry, yeah?
Regardless, patriots don't turn on their nation. It's only Pakistanis who start bombing their own people when they can't cross the border. Considering our history (Congress sabotaging TSD), it's hard to say if the Indian state has an instituitonal tendency to be paranoid about their patriots and/or shower their love to lovey dovey with literal terrorists but BJP is (hopefully) a different story.
Sun lo, Modizi. I'll make a bust of you with my own hands and put it in my courtyard if you do.
I'll even put a glass case on it so it doesn't get dirty. Please, Modizi.
Few nations makes it's law abiding citizens suffer like India. No nation rewards troublemakers and threats to NatSec like India.
No other successful nation does this. They don't compromise with ANY group, on the border or in the mainland.
The Brits armed the Protestant militias in Northern Ireland, the Americans in Texas, the Turks made a bloody safe zone in Syria and armed Arabs to fight back the Kurds from their borders, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Ukrainians are holding off the bloody Russians (who would've guessed?).
Armed groups other than the military and/or police are an incredible tool of war and the military or police will never ever achieve the same level of societal penetration and alteration that a group permanently embedded in said society can achieve.
They can keep hammering the triangular block into the square hole, it's just not going to happen.
This is how Pakistan always manages to keep us on the backfoot. They hit us on a societal level while we fumble with our conventional tools.
The fact that they're losing control of their country is a different matter altogether, mainly because of a lack of stop-loss measure and sheer incompetency. If the Pakis had the vast conventional edge that we have over them and we were the ones in their shoes, they would've utterly destroyed and bibbed our fragments.
Indian establishment shows incredible brilliance in some stuff and are downright autistic in their response to others.
Three decades and a genocide later, we're still fighting the same conflict. Come on, people.
End it.
Disarmament of a people is an essential step for their genocide. The only difference here is, the Indian state disarms it's patriots before the enemy gets a chance to.