Nothing is perhaps more criminal in the atmosphere of allegations and counter-allegations between India and Pakistan than the utter negligence of the scorching circumstances in Kashmir over the last 87 days. There is a propaganda war going on between the two countries ever since the Uri incident and “surgical strikes” conducted by India in the territory under control of Pakistan. Television analysts and commentators are nit-picking on the precise definition of a surgical strike, as to whether they imply the use of paratroopers and helicopters, or does it mean the Indian forces entered the territory and exfiltrated after taking out ‘launching pads’ of militants.
There are effusive discussions on whether the surgical strike was of the same magnitude as happened in the case of Myanmar. Some even believe that the whole episode was a spectacular performance whose sole aim was to pacify the Indian audience, which has been whipped to frenzy by a media that has gone overboard in the elaborate and open exhibition of the funerals and last rites of the soldiers. There are verbal duels about the number of kilometres the Indian soldiers entered.
While Pakistani media is parading the captured Indian soldier, the Indian media that has hit a new low in irrational and extremely emotive discussions is busy looking for people who even remotely smell like questioning the ultra-nationalist government and snub him or her in public. No wonder then most of the sane voices have practically disappeared from the scene, and only a few fist-waving generals and rabid commentators are holding sway. The two countries are now, at this stage, as W H Auden said in his famous poem on partition, “fanatically at odds” with each other. In all of this something very horrifying and very tragic is being lost sight of, perhaps deliberately with intentions that are anything but very evil.
As a Kashmiri hopelessly suffocated and trapped in the last 85 days of mass agitation against the state of India, I feel deeply disillusioned and outraged by the media hype over the surgical strike and the celebration over the captured Indian soldier (who will and should be, in good time, returned as has happened in the past between the two nations). It is ridiculous beyond belief how the entire media attention is centred on soldiers on both sides, while no one seems to care about the absolute breakdown of administration of Kashmir in the wake of the death of the militant commander Burhan Wani. Ever since his death soon after the Eid-ul-Fitr all institutions in Kashmir are practically dead, except for security-related offices who are working overtime to ebb the flow of resentment and colour the situation normal through shallow, artificial and counterproductive measures.
A new method being used to control the assembly of people is the shooting of electric transformers in rural and some urban areas. The supply of electricity is cut so that people do not use loudspeakers to ask people to assemble against arrests or night raids. An engineer friend working in the repair section of electricity department of our area told me that his office received 28 transformers of varying capacities with bullet-holes on their metallic bodies. They had to be welded and returned to their original sites before people could see electricity in their homes.
In some places, ambulances have been targeted, and in other places, trucks carrying apple boxes were overturned and tyres rolled over the fruit, a sign of anger at non-stop stone-pelting at security agencies. All educational institutions are closed, and strikes have entered into each nook and cranny of Kashmir. Civil life is regulated by protest calendars issued by the separatist leadership, most of whom are either behind bars or under house arrest. Movement and conversations are governed by the intense militaristic atmosphere in the valley, with additional companies of CRPF and police been deployed for controlling the masses.
There are reports that the state while blacking out the situation on media is actually, as reported by the Business Standard, preparing for a long haul with supplies of winter gear for security personnel deployed to curb the latest uprising. Nothing magnifies the terrible situation in Kashmir than the rumours that government will have to open special schools for blind, Braille schools, for those whose eyesight was taken because of injuries by pellet guns. Watching young boys and girls wearing black goggles with tears flowing out of their eyes is on the one hand heart-wrenching, and on the other reflective of the shameful oblivion to which the crisis has been subjected. If there is any place that demands de-escalation it is not the Line of Control or the working boundary between India and Pakistan, it the current state of affairs in the mainland of Kashmir. Both Uri and the surgical strikes occurred in the backdrop of the unprecedented challenge on the streets and villages of Kashmir. There is no doubt in my mind that if the situation in Kashmir had been carefully handled after the death of the militant commander, the subsequent tension between the two countries would not have materialised. It is the cover-up of the situation in Kashmir that is not just inhuman but also a cause of the current slide in the relations between the two nations. The adamant refusal to pay attention to the existing unrest in Kashmir is directly linked to apprehensions of a nuclear war in the subcontinent.
The local government, patched up after long consultations between two polar opposites of the PDP and BJP, has all but given up on the Agenda of Alliance, a key component of which was the emphasis on dialogue among all stakeholders to the Kashmir problem. With the bourgeoning tensions, the Agenda as well as the credibility of the PDP has disappeared. The disillusionment is more with the Kashmir-based PDP, whose core political agenda is self-rule and with which were associated aspirations of delivering on the slogan that gave it some popular base. Now it is seen as no different from the rest of the parties, hand in glove and helpless under the writ of Delhi.
A major component of the de-escalation of the kind referred to can be executed if the warmongering in media studios is sternly controlled. Anchors baying for blood have to be reined in to lend some good sense to the effort of returning to peace and a prosperous future in the subcontinent. The bottomline though is that peace flows through Kashmir, and the people have to be taken out of the current sense of strangulation and helplessness. Diplomats of both countries sitting in TV studios waxing eloquent about their experiences and knowledge of the situation have no idea about the sufferings of the people on the ground, be it the overnight migrations of people from border on either side or of the people in Kashmir whose normal life has been warped beyond recognition due to a situation that can only be described in calamitous terms. It won’t do to mock at what some of them sneeringly call peacenicks, but it takes a lot of heart and courage to say that diplomatic imagination has failed to give justice to people imprisoned in a very dangerous conflict area. It was expected that with the rise of Narendra Modi, known for firm decision-making capacity, there would be some groundbreaking decisions both internally as well as externally, but it seems we are now no more closer to peace than we were before him.
The writer is an author and a columnist. He teaches at the University of Kashmir, and can be reached at [email protected]