NEW DELHI: Former Indian home minister and veteran Congress leader P Chidambaram has said that India had lost Kashmir.

In an interview with local media in New Delhi, he said, “We have practically lost Kashmir as no democratic country can keep an entire population under siege.”

He said that by carrying out fundamental changes in Jammu and Kashmir, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has committed ‘constitutional desecration’.

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Chidambaram said the Indian government’s claims about the calm in the Kashmir Valley was nothing but a ‘deceptive calm’.

He suggested that the first step to resolving the Kashmir issue was to engage the people there in a dialogue and an engagement in a bilateral dialogue with Pakistan.

In occupied Kashmir on Wednesday, Indian troops had launched cordon and search operation in Samba and Rajouri districts of Jammu region and the Kashmir valley.

Operation has been launched after an improvised explosive device was found at the gate of Border Security Force battalion headquarters in the Panj Tila area of Samba.

Indian forces also launched fresh search operations in Rajouri district.

Former Indian Union Minister Yashwant Sinha has said scrapping special status of Jammu and Kashmir was suppression of dissent.

Speaking at a protest against controversial citizenship act, in New Delhi, he said the Indian government had claimed to make Kashmir like the rest of India but has ended up doing otherwise.

Yashwant Sinha who had quit the BJP after being sidelined in the party said that the attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University students and teachers has erased the difference between “government goons and government police”.

Meanwhile, armed with hammers, rods, draggers, sticks and stones, the goons associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had broken into Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, in New Delhi and brutally assaulted students and teachers with the Delhi police fully supporting the attackers.

Dozens of the injured students, including 30 critically, were admitted to the hospitals in Delhi.