Sanity first

Old and overused though, but I can’t find any better example than a melon to describe our story. In relation to knife this poor fruit has to bear the cut anyways. We Kashmiris are such fate-condemned melons that whatever falls on whatever, we take the fall. Who pricks whom, we bleed.

No loss of life is a celebration. Human blood is too sacred to be danced over. And who else knows it better than us who have seen nothing but blood all these years. Here we lament the loss of human lives at Puwlama and there in Jammu we are being punished for the sin we have no idea about. How can mobs be allowed to go mad like this? Are pellets our privilege only? Mobs are mobs to whom no law no order matters, but what is the police doing. Imagine crowds resorting to violence in Kashmir and count the dead. Such riots remind us of a chilling identification method of people during partition. Rioter would pull own the trousers of the victims and decide whether to kill one or to set one free. Here the number plates acted like circumcision marks deciding the fate of the vehicle. That is sad. Breaking into residential houses and vandalizing a particular community won’t do justice to those who lost their lives at Puwlama.  Where then lies the difference between one type of terror and the other. 

   

Protesting against terror by terrorizing the innocent is a double tragedy. In such crisis Kashmir has always been a place of peace. Recall the recent years when the entire valley was burning with violence, but no heat was felt by our visitors and guests. Amarnath yatra went on peacefully. Kashmiris offered their services so that their visitors come safe, stay safe and leave safe. Such spirit of accommodation is the real revenge you take on terror. But what is happening in Jammu deepens the wound we are carrying for so long. 

And now the TV studios. Any sane person will be outraged at how media is fanning the flames of fury and hate. The revenge song played over and over again sounds not just meaningless, but violent. Sanity seems to have flown away from the television newsrooms where studios have turned battlegrounds. Except some sane voices which get drowned in the noise of war hysteria, the rest have brandished their swords against a presumed enemy called Pakistan. The blast we heard here is the music Pakistan has been facing for so long. Their response is not a war against India as they too know their own chickens are coming home to roost. They are grappling with the same crisis which their neighbor accuses them of fomenting. Trumpeting `surgical strikes’ will only worsen the infection that has engulfed both the nations. The real way to deal with the situation is to put all provocations on pause. Who could imagine that the recent statement about `breaking the back of militancy in Kashmir’ will recoil with a ferocity like this.  See what has gone wrong and where? See what can be plugged and how? Pave the way for peace, elections can wait.

It’s a tinder-box and we all have a responsibility to keep it from flaming out. The slogans like `blood for blood’ and `measure for measure’ can win you votes, but in the process you lose sense and we lose calm. Wisdom lies in saving the survivors not heaping the dead over dead. 

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