For months together now, we are being continuously told that Kashmir’s trouble has a territory and a peculiar commerce attached to it. A few belts in the old city falling under five police stations and a number of school-drop outs living in congested shanties.
As brick-batting becomes a new normal and its dispersal becomes a Kashmir wide phenomenon and killings a routine, it has started many people thinking – is our next generation safe?
Since 1988, when the militancy gushed out of the barrels of the Klashinkovs, barely a year after a botched up election, Kashmir has already buried one complete generation. The economy was destroyed, the social fabric mutilated and almost half a million people were rendered destitute, directly and indirectly. The destruction completed a full circle and a new globally situation clipped the role of non-state combatants. It helped J&K breathe easy for some time.
Efforts should have been there to build on the new scenario by helping society to come out of decades of suffocation, talk and be heard. Rebuilding the infrastructure and rehabilitating the wounded psyche should have been the priority. The society deserved some space to speak up. To tell the travails and tragedies that it has underwent throughout the last two decades in particular.
But Kashmir’s democracy seems to have loaded the dice against the people. Those holding power want to induce the sense of defeat in the society so that it helps their sense of victory. But as the people feel pushed to the wall, they react.
Today’s situation in Kashmir is reminiscent of early 1990s. Mobs – angry and surcharged – coming out of every nook and corner, shouting slogans and clashing with the cops. Police and paramilitary raiding houses and detaining people. Schools locked, hotels empty, businesses jammed and roads deserted.
Terror and torture, strike and protests, curfews and restrictions – same old story. As if history is repeating itself, the system has detained almost anybody with some social accountability. This happened in 1989 as well during militancy’s amorphous days.
A government that seeks and needs massive autonomy to manage the affairs of the state has gone powerless. But It has empowered its appendages to a level where seems to have lost control over them.
Politics seems to become an extension of the security establishment.
Kashmir is not on the edge, it is on the brink of a disaster. The situation is ripe for another generation to get decimated. The onus lies on the people who think the best of their dynamism is yet to be seen!
