And he Did it !

If there is one lesson of the past 19 years, it is that conscience remains the truest guide. "A man does what he must,". Today Omar Abdullah proved what he says, the dead cannot be brought back but it will defiantly send a message to people who think elected governments are remote controlled by Delhi.

Many of my fellow bloggers have been so very against the present dispensation and the recent killings was one of their excuse to launch a diatribe against the CM , one of the bloggers had started a countdown game. No wonder he thought that running an elected government was as easy  as writing a blog. Although I am sure all of us condemned what happed in bomia, but we do not want Kashmir to be talbanaised, so in  a democracy everything happens under the umbrella called “LAW”. It has never happened in the history of Kashmir’s insurgency that the army has admitted that they are at fault and taken action against their JCO and some junior officers. Atleast give this credit to the CM, he made a beginning.

I am sure we have wasted enough years hoping for the impossible. The world geography has been changing every fifty years. May be it does someday. Till then let us opt for peace and progress. In the changed global context boundaries are disappearing and narrow nationalism is fast losing its appeal. Economy is preceding ideals and ideologies. We have entered an era where hollow slogans and destructive emotionalism have absolutely no relevance. It’s high time that people start taking decisions. As they rightly say “You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. 

Simmering Discontent .

A friend of mine sent me a link to a beautifully written article by a london based writer favoring separatism and claiming that election 2008 were farce, in a live situation created by the learned writer,he brings in a character called “Gulla” who thinks Mr Omar Abdullah undermined the election and said that election were just to build roads and bulidings. No further comments on that ?. There was a time if someone wrote that Kashmir was a disputed territory he would either be maimed for life or sent to Tihar. We have come a long way since the 50s and that proves the resilience of our democratic system. I differ on several of his observations. As a student of politics I feel sovereignty has lost much of its meaning in the present day changed global canvass or else why would America be in Iraq and Afghanistan or almost everywhere. Strategically Kashmir is every important and nothing will suite US interests better than Kashmir being independent. That will cut off the Karakoram Highway and not give access to China to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Then they can easily contain India, China, Russia and secure their economic interests in the Mid East. For Gods sake we don't want to get trampled in between.

The present situation was precipitated by even separatists for very narrow political ends. It misfired. Probably they did not foresee that it will bring the people to the ballot box and bring your sepratist leaders's to jump in to the electoral fray. The shrewdness has been replaced by naivety and political astuteness by uncanny adolescence. Kashmir once again is a loser.

You will very soon get to read such sordid stories of a new separatist leader planning to contest election .And yet, the society accords these parasites recognition and legitimacy. Pitiably, we seem to have accepted this phenomenon as a part of life and are scared even to raise our voices. we have heard sermons for past 20 years and when our leaders make lofty pronouncements it sounds as if they r abusing the entire society. And if something meaningful is said or done, you dismiss it by contempt (Read also the learned writer’s outburst against the present CM) The fact is that separatists have lost their credibility because all of them suffer from foot in the mouth disease. They don’t seem to realize tat they cannot play Gods and change everything overnight by mere rhetoric. Democracy is a mater of attitude n faith. Though it may vary from place to place n form one person to another, the benchmark continues to be “Of the people, by the people, for the people”. And what do we get instead, the gullible being hoodwinked by separatists.

The society is going through a very fast churning. Insurgency may have consumed part of one generation, but it has brought some awakening to the rest. The redeeming feature being that it is educated, perceptive and highly sensitive. It understands its role in the changed global context. It recognizes hypocritical religious bigots who had hypnotized it by the extremist mantra. It knows that resilience alone is the key to his success. Given an opportunity, it may dump the whole lot of the present garbage in the incinerator of history and evolve a system that we all will be proud of. Difficult but not impossible!

A Mothers Lap !

.......on women's day

 

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world. There are many ways and words to explain what a mother is like but what is more important is whether we really obey one.

 

In this part of the world we have seen enough bloodshed, crime and criminals but generally it has always been a woman who has borne the brunt of the 19 years of tumult.

 

If we look at any house in the Rural Kashmir one can find thousands of Mothers, Half widows or young females have found themselves living under such de facto house arrest since the tumult began. They have been forced into this situation time and again leaving them at the mercy of religious or fundamentalists who have made it sure that they do not prosper .If you talk to women throughout Kashmir , from the brave few who have really started to free themselves from the intractable quagmire they are into, some of which are now being targeted by fundamentalist groups "They call it right to live ?" .The females of our society be it a mother , a wife , a sister or a daughter have stories about husbands and sons, fathers and brothers   who disappeared into mass graves and torture prisons under god knows who,  than tales of cousins and neighbors who have gone missing since 90's. If this was not enough then the sexual violence which even now haunts all of us, its simply shameful   yet we call ourselves the citizens of a great democracy. These days the sheer unpredictability of violence is what makes the fear so pervasive. Then, women may have been afraid to step out of line, but now they're afraid even to step outside their homes alone.

 

What people on all sides of this conflict fail to realize is that the ripple effect of all these cases of human rights violations is that the whole fabric of society gets torn apart. The infamous sex scandal, in my opinion, is a direct consequence of oppression by different agencies. There have been in excess of 100,000 deaths in the 19 years of violence; and twice the numbers are in jails in various parts of India. Many of these victims left behind young families with little or no financial security. In most poor households in Kashmir, it is the husband or father who is the sole bread-earner in the family, and his unfortunate death or arrest brings devastation to the family. Not only is the next of kin emotionally devastated, but they usually also have little or no economic security, which compounds their grief.T he loss of the husband or father is even more heart-wrenching if he is survived by young daughters or a young wife. No sooner the victim of the security forces is buried or arrested, the women of the household come to realize the enormity of their loss. They have to find work and feed the family. Support from the extended family and friends is usually meager. This is when sharks in the government and police stoop to the lowest a man possibly can; they prey on these innocent victims by promise of class IV jobs, or release from jail of their loved ones, or outright solicitation of prostitution.

 

The above observation, even though most of us would want to be incorrect, cannot be much deviated from the truth. No one ever predicted that the insurgency would precipitate prostitution as one of its off-shoots. The usual knee-jerk reaction is to blame all those involved for not doing enough to prevent this scourge from rearing its head. There can be many opinions about who the victims of prostitution are, but very few will disagree that it is a consequence of oppression by security forces, indifference by successive state governments and above all being neglected by the society .

 

As they rightly say, All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health. Although my intention was not to bring the issue of violence against women but we have seen enough and the mental trauma that is evident from the face of an average mother, a sister or a daughter , should be an enough indicator to all humans that we really need to respect a female in a shape of a mother,and not only celebrate the woman's day