Always too eager for the future,we Pick up bad habits of expectancy

The evolutionary theory of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had shaken the moral prospects and the pillar of faith supporting the society. Matthew Arnold, an English poet of great fame, obviously got worried because the existence of God and the whole Christian scheme of things were cast in doubt.

Significant fallout of this loss was chaos and confusion that engulfed the entire region and no one understood how to overcome the Darwinian onslaught; everybody, in his/her own way, tried to “struggle and fight” but without any good results. Feeling the pulse of the nation and brooding over the dilemma of the people who found no way out, Arnold cried:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Philip Larkin, another famous English poet, reprimands people for cherishing future desires at the cost of their present. He says:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

We Kashmiris are no better than the faithless Victorians who Arnold found struggling and fighting like the “ignorant armies [that] clash by night”, and that Philip Larkin castigates for ignoring their present and working for some unknown future. The Victorian England suffered from disillusionment and Kashmir, too, faces the same predicament! 2010 summer was really unusual in the sense that it changed the discourse in the streets. Stone-pelting and stone-pelters became buzz words and people believed, or were made to believe, that through stone-pelting we could change course of history. Without looking to the outcome, we plunged into fire for a future which nobody is able to comprehend.

Summer unrest has cost us 111 lives. Four months of chaos and mayhem in the streets echoed with the same age-old slogan, Azadi, which made most of the stone-pelters, virtually the Arnoldian “ignorant armies” clashing, of course not only during night, “on a darkling plain”, but more during the day. And, when stone-pelting was responded to by bullets by the security forces, causing heavy loss of life, Kashmiris, by and large, started brooding over the purpose for which stone-pelters got swayed by emotional outbursts (call them seasonal outbursts). The lull that followed the unrest, especially after Obama’s India visit, has surprised many. They ask: Was stone-pelting engineered for Obama only so that he could talk about Kashmir with India, and when he did not, stone-pelting lost its relevance? If it is so, our seasonal-outbursts are leading us only to disasters which we need to mourn in the same way as Arnold is mourning the loss of faith in his poem. I don’t know why the Government became so nervous about a question calling for an assessment of stone-pelters. I have been told that those students who answered the question had no good words for stone-pelters; they did not find any heroism in stone-pelting.

Our seasonal-outburst has deprived us of many youngsters who many believe were not stone-pelters. Whether or not they were stone-pelters, a legitimate question that needs to be answered is, why do these outbursts take place in summer months only when Kashmiris could earn their living by hosting tourists? Who is responsible for devastating the tourist trade here when visitors throng Himachal Pradesh and other hill-stations in India at the same time? Instead of blaming one group or the other in Kashmir, we should blame ourselves for resorting to mindless means to achieve a very difficult goal. We should know, and understand, how unfortunate this nation has been in not having a good leadership that could guide people to some achievable goal. What have we achieved out of stone-pelting? Has Azadi come to us or have UNO Resolutions on Kashmir gained any new momentum? bijli, sadak, pani and employment have once again become more important than the slogans that Kashmir streets reverberated with during the last summer. Today, downtown youth are not coming forward for stone-pelting but are thronging the employment drive initiated by the same police who they accused of killing stone-pelters! Who are we following and what are they leading us to? Does anybody have time to think and respond? Much as I would love to tell them that their methods are disastrous and their speeches are misleading, can I do so?

Voices of concern have started raising and that is very encouraging. I could be a coward but why should our leaders be? If stone-pelting was the panacea for us, we wouldn’t have been in a messy situation today. Therefore, all of us deserve a stone to be pelted at for we are equally responsible for bringing Kashmir to a never-ending chaotic situation! Summer comes, I become an Azadi-lover and autumn and winter months make me think of my age-old problems—power, roads, water and unemployment. History should have taught us a lesson but, unfortunately, we refuse to learn. The Amarnath land row that had brought entire J&K to a disastrous situation ended with loss of life and the piece of land that had caused the row. And, later on, when the assembly elections were announced, people thronged polling booths as if nothing had happened before the elections. Shouldn’t that have been a good signal for our leadership not to resort to an exercise that would yield no results? Instead, a not-so-unusual incident in Machel was allowed to result in an unprecedented stone-pelting situation that killed many youth but yielded no results! What did we gain from Amarnath land agitation and what did we achieve from stone-pelting? Our economy, our education and, above all, our peace of mind got shattered.

I have no knowledge of the forces from without that might have been behind the last summer-unrest but I am sure no stone was imported from across the border; they were indigenous and in the hands of innocent and ignorant Kashmiris who easily get swayed by emotive slogans. We wasted more than two decades in dreaming about plebiscite which ultimately turned into fighting elections. After a lull of more than a decade, we started our struggle with a bang that has now changed into a whimper. The periodic, spontaneous or otherwise, outbursts are no better than providing purgation to some hidden psychological disorders which only psychiatrists can diagnose. As a common Kashmiri, I know that neither the very volatile situation in the 1990s nor the turbulent days of Amarnath land row or the last summer-unrest have provided the much needed solace to disturbed minds that Kashmir is facing today.