Eid Gift

The cold words of commiseration a high member of Kashmir’s political aristocracy had for kin of slain militants the other day were a memorable Eid gift from a clique that lacks for nothing to a multitude that has lost everything. The orphans and widows left behind by the “movement” are first a testament to the absurd nature of the Kashmir leadership and then a witness to its criminal irresponsibility. The cushioned and cocooned existence of most of the leadership allegedly upholding the dignity and honour of Kashmir is a slur and stain on the silent suffering of thousands of families bereft of sons and young fathers who would have been providing for aging parents, wives and children but for a diabolically synthesized argument posing izzat ki maut against zillat ki zindagi. Since then, all maut has gone to the gullible underclass and the frontier peasant, and all izzat, including the sarmaya-e-mehraab-o-minbar, the stage, the platform, and the microphone, not to speak of diplomatic high tables, OIC contact groups and huzzahs of qaun karega tarjumani to the select of the select proficient in the art of playing on sentiments.  

For all these past two decades and more, one has heard fervent calls for local bait-ul-maal for sufferers, and yet, when every call for hartal is heeded, indeed, seized upon, with eagerness and zeal, the appeal for an institution that might have served an urgent practical purpose falls on deaf ears. Every successful hartal is hailed as a referendum against India and its occupation. Could then not the consistently and spectacularly failing appeals for bait-ul-maal , too, be regarded as a referendum of sorts, against the leadership that makes them? A referendum that while Kashmir is more than adept at the hollow symbolism of hartal, it has little use for solid substance that might signify a sense of responsibility?  Truly, a case of the masses reflecting the inalienable traits of their leaders.  Perhaps, it could bring some comfort to the suffering kin of the slain that their loved ones are a handy statistic for leaders to bandy about in the world bazaar for their own political stock. For, has the leadership not inherited the legacy of the martyrs? What if, in the process, the orphans, widows and aging parents of the martyrs have been disowned? Sacrifice, after all, is the by-word in Kashmir, so long as it is someone else.  

The pioneers, some of whom now crow about Kashmir’s transition to non-violence, perhaps, had no idea of the social disaster sure to follow their valiant foot-steps, and are given to glossing over this catastrophe with cunning rhetoric. The self-blindness and self-serving greed reigning in Kashmir ensures that they always draw a full house, with no one prepared, or inclined, to ask why they started something they had no ability to finish. It is one thing to make a u-turn when Afghan-surplus Kalashnikovs fail to evict the Indian military, and quite another to have a moral right over the mantle of leadership. The sonorous and nasalised intonations of zinda qaumein apne shaheedon ko nahin bhooltien might have a shallow and superficial appeal, but smack of venality when put beside the deep reality of Kashmir. It costs nothing to remember those gone, it is only to care for those they left behind that demands moral fibre and a sense of responsibility. 

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