In two decades, the word conflict has become an alibi for almost everything that goes wrong in our society. Ask any sane person why our roads are messed up with traffic and pat comes the answer: conflict. Ask him why people are getting more avaricious and less social and he will still blame conflict without batting an eyelid.
No doubt conflict plays an important role in shaping our psyche as a member of the society, but to blame it for our own falling is being escapist.
Recently when people of Pampore, a small town near Srinagar famous for its saffron fields, confronted a material supplier for illegally extracting soil from saffron fields, he simply said, we live in a conflict-torn state where nobody cares for humans lives, what difference does it make whether we have saffron or not!
Given the situation in Kashmir it has become easy to defend oneself and shift the entire blame on conflict.
But despite living in an active conflict zone people don’t cease to be humans. In most of the conflict zones across the world social institutions never become causality, rather they get strengthened and help people to unite for the greater good. However, in Kashmir things move just in the opposite direction. We, as a society, collectively have taken so much advantage of this ‘conflict tag’ that everything that is wrong in us we blame it on our circumstances. It has, over the years, evolved as an easy escape route for all our sins that we otherwise should be punished for.
But if anyone has overused, or misused or abused ‘conflict’ for his/her benefit repeatedly, it’s the government employees and none else. It is this class of people who are supposed to serve people against an assured sum called monthly salary that they get no-matter what. But what they do in return is really interesting. They take refuge in conflict so that they don’t have to work. They make every sort of excuse to stay away from their responsibilities by taking an escape route of ‘conflict’.
Interestingly government employees are the first ones to respond to any strike call given by separatists from time to time. They are the ones who discuss conflict and its consequences threadbare in their office spaces, during office hours, so that they can use it and misuse it according to their connivance. They are the ones who want everything to come to a standstill (except their salaries) till conflict is not resolved. But life has to go on no-matter what.
One cannot stop living like a normal human being just because we live in an active conflict zone. After all it moving forward is the only way out of conflict. Else we will be left behind.
