This Thursday and Friday, as we all sit indoors waiting for what happens in the Apex Court of India, is there a case for collective reflection. I know we are going through an insufferable situation for decades now, and this line often hits like a grievous blow. And this is specially true for the moment. On the one hand we are a victim of a terror treatment by our tormentor, and on the other if someone pricks us to reflect over the situation, it sounds like a psychological abuse. Right now we are bodily indoors, may be enjoying some leisure, but our minds are faced with severe torture. It is time someone sympathises with us, not ask questions, that too very uncomfortable.
In a time like this it sounds even preposterous. Sometimes even dangerous. It sounds preposterous because for last 30 years we are invested, in terms of life and entire associations of life, material and otherwise, into a struggle for freedom. This questions means an audacious negation of the huge sacrifices Kashmiri Muslims offered for a future visualised as freedom. It’s also undermining a round the clock, round the year movement that shows no signs of ending. There are people who are in jails for months, years, and for their entire lives. There are people who ruined their careers, closed their businesses, destroyed their possessions for the sake of this freedom. And here is someone, soaked in comfort, negating the entire thing by raising a question. How wicked of him. And if you are very gracious and don’t want to be rude, dismissive, and contemptuous, you might say it’s too idealistic to ask such a question in such tumultuous times. We are neck deep in crisis, and you are asking about future. Add to it the danger that accompanies such asking; ready to serve allegations, motives and judgments.
I’m not a stranger to this emotional landscape. My heart beats with each one of us, beginning my own self. What is this movement if not each one us individually, and all of us collectively. We are all victims. One by one. We have been wronged, and one fraud after another is played with us. We are dispossessed, and one after another our resources are plundered. We are defenceless, and one after another our shelters are bombarded. Who does it to us is all known. Why he does so is also evident. How this all happens is also out in the open. Then why burden the victim for changing his situation. As if he is responsible!
That is precisely the point. He is responsible; responsible for changing this situation, and stop worsening it for himself. He is responsible for laying the foundation of a better future. And if we have the courage to listen, we are responsible for walking into a siege that now refuses to lift even after 7 decades. We are responsible for adding layers to this encirclement. We are responsible to mark our mistakes, and it is our duty to hew the path to exit.
We deserve a break form this torment, but in this world of savage state power there is none who cares. Finally we are to fend for ourselves. At last it comes back to us. We, and we alone are duty-bound to find a way out of this entrapment.
As a human society we deserve freedom from this torture; freedom not just as a temporary relief, but a permanent freedom. Freedom, as we understand the word. As everyone in the world understands it. Freedom that is unqualified, we want. But how does that freedom come!
To an agitated mind it is an indiscriminate dismissal of everything that we as people have been doing all these years. But that is not the case. The moment this question is received with calm, path to thinking receives its first light. And that is the path to freedom. Slavery begins to end the moment mind decides to open. And what is slavery! Akbar Ahmed explains it brilliantly, and in so few a words. Talking about the impact of colonialism on Muslims, he writes that slavery means “negating the capacity to think”. By the same logic freedom is to restore the capacity to think.
Right now the matter is deferred to January, next year, and we now have some time to think over it in a relatively relaxed atmosphere. Why we are hit by crisis after crisis, and each crisis temporarily looks like the only crisis. My sense is that this is the time to raise uncomfortable questions, find answers and paint a clearer picture for ourselves. Hope, not despair is the first line in the long answer to such questions.
Commeting on the current state of affairs in the context of Trump’s rise, an opinion columnist, Roger Cohen, in NY Times titles his column How Far America Has Fallen. He doesn’t blame anyone but America’s own people. “Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level.” Even if we are in despair, with no one to help, someone can confront us and talk uncomfortable truth: How far have you Kashmiris fallen. Cohen writes about the Americans that “they made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge.” Someone can apply the same line to us: “Kashmiris made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge.”
After all our present crisis is the fall out of the choices we made time to time. Through ballot or otherwise. We have struck bargain with multiple devils, and no one can accuse us of not being in full knowledge of what we did.
So time to make good choices. And it is a remarkably wonderful choice to subject ourselves to a ruthless investigation. But with hope, not despair.