Kashmir is in a bad shape right now and as an Indian it worries me. It worries me to see young kids, who ought to be shaping their future, dying. It worries me to see young men and women hurling stones on Indian army and sustaining life threatening pellet injuries in return. It worries me to see a 30,000 strong crowd in the funeral procession of a terrorist, in contrast to a meagre 3,000 odd support for a dead CM of the state (elected with a lot of promises almost an year back). It worries me to see yet another Indian Army personnel ambushed, stoned and killed.
But make no mistake, if anyone dares the Indian Army, calls upon its people to ambush and kill the men of Indian Army, he is inviting the wrath of the entire nation. If those hurling stones are kids, those injured by pellets are some misguided youth, so are the men of the Indian Army. They bleed and along India bleeds along with them. With every Indian Army personnel killed, killed are the hopes of an entire family (mind you, most of them are from rural and extreme economic backgrounds). Want to empathise, empathise with these men, who are there because their duty reckons them to, armed with bullets they do not want fire, facing an enemy they do not want to kill, but the enemy sees them as their oppressor and would leave no chance go to harm them.
What for?
I do not wish to write a post on Pakistan. They do not need an Indian to count their problems for them and recount their horrors for them. Their newspapers are full of them and their everyday life is living testimony of how hatred can swallow the hopes of an entire nation. I want to remind those Kashmiris, the 30,000 of them who attended Wani's funeral possesion, to be diligent in their choices. A Country where the two Nobel Prize winners ware denounced, one because of his religious choices, and the other for speaking against extremism, and a country which rendered millions Muhazirs just because they were born on the other side of the line, will not welcome them as its own. The Baloch are a living example of that non-acceptance. The atrocities on Kashmiris in POK is not for me to report. I do not need to re-iterate the act of Lashkars in 1947 or the Operation Gibraltor of the 70's, those wounds are still fresh.
The world currently is a very dangerous place. Freedom or unification on the basis of religion has turned this world into a ticking time bomb. Trust is a scarce. The choice that those misguided youth of Kashmir need to make is very precarious. Freedom is a choice of both the body and the mind. However, redrawing geographic lines on the basis of religion only has not served the world well. There are a few out there who want to establish a Caliphate, killing and raping, for their religion and rest of the Muslim world is having to explain it to others that those men do not represent their faith. Their faith is much more than a few opium powered men wielding AK47. Islam is a faith of peace and tolerance. The next time a Kashmiri youth picks up a gun to kill, he has to chose the face of his religion he wants to be a representative of.
Independence or freedom is natural justice, its a right of a human being or any animal for that matter, but cost of that freedom ultimately determine the course of such freedom. The entire middle east saw one uprising after the other, one freedom movement after the other but were they liberated after all. In the name of freedom, smaller Countries in Africa have been mere colonies of European Powers delegated through evil dictators. A geographically strategic state as that of Kashmir will become another pawn in the bigger games of India, Pakistan, China and USA. Its a position India cannot afford to have.
India on the other hand needs to be careful on how it treats Kashmir. Apart all the provocation from across the border, the Kashmir problem has been dealt with very poorly by the Indian establishment. There is a need to understand the real problem of Kashmir (which only the Kashmiris can tell, and that includes the displaced Pandits too) and address it and stop making Kashmir another diplomatic tug of war between the two nations. They are our people. Violence is not a solution to Kashmir, it has never been the solution to anything. You do not smack a baby who cries. You hold him, cuddle him and comfort him and ascertain of what ails him. The Kashmir cannot be India's with some Kashmiris looking at India as their enemy. Kashmir cannot be another Gaza. A country which has a collective ambition of growth and development cannot afford to have its people engaged in war against itself. It cannot have people working against its interest and a vast workforce rendered ineffective due to civil unrest. They need to brought together. Dialogue is a cliched term in these conditions but some effective means need to sorted to initiate some meaningful conversation. Dialogues should be our first option and the only option and hope the things do not come to a last resort. Kashmir needs books and laptops in the hand of those kids, not stones.
They are our kids and they need to trust us and the trust can not be won by bullets or pellets.
To sum it up ... my poem on Kashmir on my last blog.
http://monologues-of-a-misplaced-bihari.blogspot.in/2016/07/blog-post.html
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