Kashmir: The Broken Paradise

With Tufail Mattoo, rebellion found a cause. Tufail Mattoo who? A seventeen year old student, who died in a police tear gas shell on the 11^th of June, and whose death sparked off an unexpected agitation on part of hundreds of Kashmiris. No, this is not a religious riot; nor is it a political upheaval. It is not as much about the India-Pakistan divide on the ‘Kashmir issue’; nor so much about a garbed terrorist attack. This is an outburst of emotions you would experience when you have been living in a place where ‘normalcy’ is a term only to be found in dictionaries, where the first colour a child would recognise is khaki, where your own sense of identity is juxtaposed with the identity of the state and the country, where get-togethers mostly take place in the form of funerals. Of course there is a crisis. The crisis is human, and the victims are the people of Kashmir.

It is not just about Mattoo. His death has triggered off a revolt that lies much deeper. The youth of Kashmir are angry, and the anger stems from decades of suppression and passive acceptance. Their anger is representative of the anger of generations. They are frustrated, and why not? The State Government had already given them reason enough to feel cut-off from the rest of the country and this sense of alienation has given rise to a feeling of mass dissatisfaction. The youth agitation grew more because of the manner in which it was tried to be curbed. What logic can one put behind attacking unarmed youth for raising their voices against the powers that be? Oh, wait. They were armed. They were armed with stones! Clearly, that was weapon enough for the security forces to retaliate in ‘self-defence’.

The strange silence of the Prime Minister and the bungling handling of the issue by the State Government have added fuel to the fire. Wajahat Habibullah, Chief Information Commissioner, and a recognised expert on Kashmir matters, feels that it is wrong to put all the blame on the Central Government and this is a case exclusive to Kashmir leadership. A point well-made, considering the fact that the State Government hasn’t taken any initiative on its part to approach the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.

I still remember that tiny glimmer of hope that rose inside me when Omar Abdullah took the oath of office. He had a dynamic vision and his promises had a decent future, at least on paper. But he did not utilise the peace period to win people’s trust and the youth started feeling gradually distanced. This is the point on which the opposition capitalised and in the political fights, the victims were the common people. The inept governance can partly be attributed to a lack of political will and honesty.

Labelling the youth as ‘miscreants’ and ‘stone-pelters’ only provokes them to justifiable anger. Most of the people that died in the youth versus security face-off happened to be teenagers and it is appalling no end to see the lax attitude of the government as it deepens the wounds even more. It saddens me to see Kashmiri youth proclaiming on social networking sites that they don’t want Kashmir to be a part of India any more. The rebellion loses its purpose owing to such distorted constructions and propagates a deep-rooted resentment among the youth, and this is something that needs to be addressed immediately. Mindsets have to be changed, systems have to be overturned. Kashmir can regain the paradise? A far-fetched dream, but not unattainable.