|| ZUHAIB YOUSF MIR
If one looks at the chronological order of great speeches that our country has witnessed I think no other speech beats the aptness in terms vision, emotional incitement and the timing than the very famous speech, “The Tryst with Destiny”, by our first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Over the past 68 years, if we see the overall picture, in the Indian subcontinent the underlying ethos of this speech reverberates in every state,district, area, lane and corner and more so after every 5 years. The speech connotes the ideas of strengthening jurisprudence,democracy, Freedom of expression, accommodating dissent, pluralism and life with dignity.
These ideas are still at the heart of the contemporary debates in India albeit a regime that wants to paint everything with the same colour. No doubt it was a great speech but the astounding fact and the phenomena that went unnoticed as far as the context of Jammu and Kashmir is concerned is that J&K was neither the integral nor the occupied territory of India at that point of time. So factually the content of the speech and timing were irrelevant to the state conforming to the then circumstances.
In my opinion therefore, the denial of justice, which was a norm under the British, circumvention of the freedom of “expression”(that couldn’t find utterance under the raj) and life with absolute indignity that every Indian was destined to have, is still the norm in this part of “Delayed India”. This stagnated condition is again manifested in the incidents that have unfurled during the last month and the deleterious effects it has caused in the minds of people, reinforcing the negative image of Indian constitutional authorities yet again.
The two reprehensible events namely the NIT incident and the very notorious Handwara killings (once more) that took place in the wake of great expectations from the newly formed government were detestable. Both the incidentswere abominable but the way they were handled was expectedly miserable. NIT incident tells us very clearly that this phenomenon is nothing but a norm as to what is happening in the Universities across India, the right wing wants to establish might in the institutions assuming the backing of the right wing government at the center.
One such organizationJammu Kashmir Study Circle (JKSC), an RSS-supported body active in the region, claimed that it was not a Kashmiri versus non-Kashmiri issue. “Not all Kashmiri students are against those who come from outside to study here. Not all Kashmiris rejoice at India’s defeat in cricket. The NIT incident shows that separatist elements have made their way concertedly to top educational institutes and they must be weeded out,” said a JKSC spokesperson. “They must be weeded out” itself makes it clear they cannot let a point of view foster if it goes against what they think is to be true no matter how devoid is it from reality.
These forces slowly want to slide in to the institutions and propagate what they think is right.One really needs to ponder on the fact that Cheering for a team that defeated India by some was a routine affair here and within a few hours, everything would be back to normal as if nothing had happened. Why such a ruckus this time unless some external force is enticing it. Also, this clash between two groups of students was covered on the national television; a rarity as far as incidents in Kashmir is concerned.
The HRD ministry also directed a team to Srinagar to ensure that non-Kashmiri students were safe and their demands were met with. The woundscaused to the students by the police were disseminated on TV and there was much moral anger at what was clearly a case of brutal use of force. Contrary to this the killings during the protests over the molestation of the girlin Kupwara were reported as just a death figure and the human stories behind the tragedy were simply ignored. Comparing the two incidents, we see how prejudiced the position of the conventional media becomes in the cloak of national interest.
Is this the way to address the issue of alienation in Kashmir? Even the state machinery needs to look into this incident if it has any intention to set the Kashmir problem on some positive track as it is one of the postulates of the agenda of alliance. To ease up tensions police released video of the girl that the local guys and not the army in fact molested her. The national media very quickly latched on the video of uncertain provenance and the girl’s statement made under unknown circumstances.
Virtually none of the channels which rushed to cite the video as proof that the army had been given a “clean chit” bothered to raise questions about the propriety of the police making the victim of a sexual offence record a video statement and then leaking this (and thus her identity) to the whole world. “Its Ironical when the Pakistani army released a videotaped statement by an Indian national accused of being a spy, the Indian media was quick to discount its contents since it was a custodial recording and it was impossible to know what pressures had been brought to bear on him.
However, no such caution was exercised in interpreting and circulating the girl’s custodial statement” an article on the wire said. The issue of importance is not the death of the protestors and the people who are responsible for it but sadly the entire attention is now on the fact whether the girls was molested or no and if she was then who did it?
Lets assume that the reason for protest was untrue, what justifies the firing by the armed personnel and killings of innocent people even if they were protesting? If Kashmir is an “integral part” of India, where in India are protestors shot and killed apart from this state? Cut down Internet, cover and show things on media what suits your position is not going to make Kashmir an integral part of India.
I hope “a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”. But just this time the utterance has to be found by the people who represents us and I hope the ideas of justice, democracy, Freedom of expression, accommodating dissent, pluralism and life with dignity as practiced in the Indian heartland are whole heartedly practiced in this part of the very great nation called India.
(Zuhaib Yousf Mir MSc Economics University of Edinburgh )
(Editor’s note: Views expressed by the author are his own, Kashmir Leader doesn’t subscribe to any of his views)
