It is Monday following bloody Sunday. When Javed, a young boy was killed. While Muhammad Rafiq Bangroo was being given burial. The former shot. The latter beaten to death. The J & K police, the security forces are bound to maintain peace and uphold order. For which, to do the very reverse of it, innocents are terrorized. There is an uprising which is to be quelled by brute force. Newspaper reports Monday top-crying, cover and interior, carry heart-rending pictures. Laughing young Javed on cover of one. And same Javed dead in coffin, carried by mourners to the graveyard, on another. Symbolic of Kashmir’s tyranny in history through ages. Ironically Javed means `longer-living', `everlasting' to be precise. Are we destined to experience everlasting slaughter like this? Would that there was a poet to sing in sorrow of Kashmir’s tormented soul. Maybe there is some hidden historian to record in minutest detail that it was complete hartal on Monday.
Hartal is our only way to show  anger. True to proverbial Kashmiri utterance “ for heartache garlic paste ointment; not to heal but to strike a semblance at least that we have reacted against infliction. Civil curfew is another painful phrase we have coined to give vent to our heart burst. But alas! Hartals numberless and sacrifices countless, still no ray of light anywhere at the end of the dark tunnel. History itself unkind, from time immemorial, has thrown us into a long struggle for self-determination. In our resistance to subjugation, to inhuman treatment at the hands of our tormentors, we are made to suffer worst kind   of abuses of human rights. So much so that this expression of human ‘rights violations’ has become profane, profaned in Kashmir to lose meaning and relevance. Better replace it by some thing else. At least to carry the full text of horror. Will it be ‘kill at will’, ‘ kill at whim’ , ‘kill at pretext’, ‘kill for fun’ or what? Kill whoever comes your way of unjust rule in terms of unjustified stand on Kashmir issue. Kill a stone-pelter or an arm-raising Kashmiri aspirant for free of arms Kashmir. They have taken a u-turn from Ghandisim to Barbarism. They came to save us from the horror of tribal invasion primarily but what have they  done to us ever since?-------crushing us under the jackboot, bone and pulp. A poet had warned the gardener at that time, “ you have your nest on a rose bush. They will bring it down and burn it. You will be forced out of the garden. Tell me how you can undo this?” This is what exactly happened later on and taken unawares we were all left crying, suffering and enchained bleeding. Our daughters desecrated at Shopian, our sons killed at Machil, our teenagers on the Boulevard. Our young killed in Srinagar for the love of bloodletting.  An old beggar shot dead in place of a militant. What can an old man, with his gaze shot back from the Pirpanchal peaks, do when he sees those horrible pictures on the newspapers on Monday June 21 else than weep and cry with a revolutionary poet of the 19th century. “ o! lift me as a wave, as a leaf, as a cloud; I fall on the thorns of life I bleed.” For I breakdown looking at that desperate daughter of Kashmir weeping and wailing so loud to tear apart the heart of a mountain.  In another, a young daughter of Kashmir, barefoot and thin weak arm raised to pelt a stone at a police vehicle. Her brother has been killed for no fault of his own. Kashmir seething in anger. In the reign of Bharat Kashmir is burning, bleeding, dying. The history of Indian administered Kashmir is a history of injuries, abuses and usurpations. Of their cronies amassing huge fortunes at the cost of the bleeding Kashmiris. Coloniser’s old- habit to foster vested interest to rule from the backyard. Democracy across the mountains but everything to negate it in Kashmir. Here in Kashmir this hobbling beldame has thrown up scoundrels to rule the roost. Paraphrasing Ghulam Rasool Nazki might help to bring in clarity the distortion and corruption: “there arose a howling windstorm. The Wular was shaken upside down, downside up. Waves rose high, as if crazy horses had gone berserk.
In the afternoon the storm slowed down but already forcing the pearls to settle at the bottom and dirt and filth rising up to settle ashore.”        
                    This is a civil curfew day. No newspapers from the besieged city of Srinagar have come to my village. What have they to announce else than a heartbreak? It is a curfewed night to choke. But I am afraid hartals won’t do. Stone pelting is bouncing back on us and we die to make news only for a day or two. We have a hartal per death. The road is long and goal afar. We have to organize rather in a peaceful way our resistance, a sustainable struggle to come out of this inferno of misrule, corruption, jungle raj, and loot inherent in a  system of subjugation. One wonders why the two Hurriyat camps do not unite if the goal is one? Why not if it is making India agree to resolve Kashmir realistically? Is that united we fall and divided we stand? But will that carry conviction and be effective? Why should there be more than a dozen organizations? It was one Muslim League  under one leader which achieved Pakistan. Even a collective leadership has to forge unity to look credible and create confidence.
As far as those hartals, why only the business class, the shopkeepers, the students to bear the brunt? Why not the employees in the secretariat one day to go on a hartal against the atrocities perpetrated unscrupulously by the upholders of the law and order? Not for azadi. Leave that kind of thing for Geelani and Mirwaiz and Yaseen Malik------poor man fighting the might of men in uniform with his hunger strikes and signature campaigns.  Doesn’t he know that the Indian ruling class has betrayed Ghandiji. It is the  gross violations of human rights that they can raise their voice for. It is our constitutional right, our right as human beings. Let politics be practiced by the politicians. But our NGO’s, our intellectuals, our columnists, our intelligentsia, our civil society remaining within the bounds of law, can in one voice tell them that this genocide is intolerable, unacceptable. And let me tell my leaders that they should bear with genuine criticism if they want to lead and not to mislead. The road to achieve the goal is through thorns. Take care that now our follies do not go to fade out the ongoing movement in due course of time. Why can’t they persuade  our young that stone pelting  is inviting trigger happy soldiers and policemen to kill us at impulse. They are without mercy. What have we to do? Nothing more than to lose the chains a bit. For that peaceful marches in large numbers in our streets without pelting stones or indulging in violence are a befitting response to the usurpers of our rights. Nobody can deny us what we want if we stand united, organized well into solid and believable resistance, against oppression and suppression. God is with those who help themselves. (Merciful God help!)
Those who tyrannize they shall not succeed. No tyranny shall succeed either today or tomorrow. (Faiz).

Lastupdate on : Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 IST