Almost six weeks ago, when Kashmiris were in the middle of their ‘dream’, thirty-nine lawmakers from Indian parliament visited Kashmir amid mourning and a curfew-induced calm. As if the visit was to change the DNA of cops and troopers, the cycle of killings stopped. People got awakened before their dream would lead to the long cherished ending. Now, we are divided into two sets – one set regrets over the lost ending and the other wonders how to write the ending of our own, of course without again pulling over the quilt.
Dreaming is easy but scripting your own ending if awakened halfway is a rarity. Charles de Gaulle in Europe and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Asia aptly represent the quality of carrying forward the incomplete dream to a real-world ending. Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) too owes his literary success to an unfinished dream, which he later devoutly completed after throwing off his bedclothes. It’s an interesting story.
Having suffered almost two decades of failure, one night Stevenson had a terrible dream. Frightened by his outcries, his wife awakened him. “Oh, why did you wake me up?” he exclaimed, “I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He had just reached the moment of Dr. Jekyll’s first transformation and he was eager to see what manner of evil man might evolve before the sleep would be broken by his wife Fanny Osborne. But Stevenson employed his brilliant imagination and set out to write his own ending.
He wrote the first draft and threw it into fire after Fanny argued over the absence of metaphor; he began anew with appropriate allegory. Stevenson was so enthusiastic that he blended his dream with the conceived ending in next three days. The work came about as a novella, “Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It is about a passionate, noble scientist who ventures into splitting his bad self and names it as “Mr. Hyde” but it is not long before the personality of Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll’s affairs.
This nineteenth century epic was an instant hit. The title later became part of the language, with the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” implying a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.
How Stevenson turned a dream-without-ending into an opportunity is a food for thought. History, geography or geopolitics apart, the idea of Freedom is after all a romance, a dream. We have been having this dream ever since long. When the dream was peaking, Sheikh Abdullah awakened us. He then chose to write his own ending in 1953. Baffled, he preferred sleep in 1975 and left the job of writing the ending of the dream to the next generation. Now, people again had a dream but they were awakened and are now being led to a “proper” ending. That ending will look “appropriate” and “genuine” as long as the dreamers don’t set out, like Stevenson, to write their own ending. How profound was Wordsworth when he said, “Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending”
When a frail Kashmiri, according to a local maxim, was beaten by a street goon, he shouted back: my big brother will kill you. During past six decades Kashmiris have been receiving wound after wound but every time they are deluded into believing that the ‘Big Brother’ (America) will avenge their sufferings and force the ‘street goon’ to leave them off. Curiously, the ‘Big Brother’ has often looked the other way, and many in Kashmir, chiefly the ‘Hurriyatists’ (let’s admit Hurriyatism exists), still believe that ‘India hoodwinked’ Him.
Most of the local observers shared with Hurriyat this hoodwink theory when New Delhi appointed a panel to explore new contours of its relationship with J&K. Indeed the appointment of low-key individuals to perform a bigger task appeared a non-military offensive from New Delhi. Yet, the Kashmiris lapsed into the lyricism of resistance rather than attempting to carefully understand the move. Hurriyat must remember that it cannot always hide its political incapacities behind the readymade pretext that India had played a ‘dirty trick’ to ‘hoodwink the world community’ – the world community in Hurriyat jargon is a convenient euphemism for United States. So far, the Hurriyat politics in Kashmir is defined by several such platitudes such as South Asia will burn if talks are delayed, India will break up without resolving Kashmir or the movement is at a crucial juncture. But the most clichéd of all is ‘India is hoodwinking the world’. Can India really hoodwink America on Kashmir? We need a little elaborate answer.
Rewind to 1989 when the Kashmir movement turned violent. Gun-totting boys would conduct daredevil actions against India’s ill-prepared CRPF and stage armed parades on Aug 14 to observe Pakistan’s Independence Day. India did not want to let America know how Kashmiris were defying her rule in Kashmir when William Clark took charge as U.S. ambassador to India. During the welcome briefing to Clark, Delhi chose to ‘hoodwink’ the world community by brushing aside Kashmir and projecting Punjab, where the militancy had almost died down, as India’s major worry. But, the ‘hoodwink operation’ came to a naught because Walter Anderson, head of political desk in the Embassy, had already prepared a detailed note on growing disaffection within Kashmir and predicted the dangers. Clark had gone through Anderson’s note and corroborated it with other intelligence sources before he flew from Washington. India could not hoodwink America on Kashmir militancy. Phew!
In May 1990, the U.S. dispatched an experienced intelligence officer, Robert Gates to Pakistan where he would try to convince authorities on ending the ‘Kashmir operation’ in lieu of a guarantee that India would be asked to initiate some ‘CBMs’ and an “effective intelligence support from the U.S. to monitor the LoC.” Pshaw! The ‘Big Brother’ was rather hoodwinking Pakistan.
In fact, America’s Central Intelligence Agency had started to pry intelligence from the region way back in 1970s, soon after India and Pakistan started acquiring nuclear arsenal. In July 2004 a Brazilian journalist Sao Paulo wrote in the monthly Caros Amigos (meaning Dear Friends) an exhaustive analysis on the dispute titled Kashmir: Occupied, Partitioned and Disputed. The report says, “There are as many CIA agents in Kashmir as there are Al-Qaeda members (in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan)”.
Such suspicions were visibly corroborated by the fulltime intelligence operation of FBI in Kashmir between July 1995 and May 1996. A group of foreign tourists had been kidnapped while it was trekking at South Kashmir’s Pahalgam heights. Veteran U.S. diplomat Howard B Schaffer disclosed past year how the U.S. Army’s “Crack Delta Force” and elite British and German counterterrorism groups were mounting secret missions in Kashmir to hunt the kidnappers. The CIA papers that were declassified in 2004 have revealed that the CIA sleuths had interrogated some arrested militants of Harkat-ul-Ansar, the group they suspected had masterminded the abduction under the front name of “Al-Faran”. And, the think tanks are still debating whether CIA knew in advance what was happening on the heights of Kargil.
These references prove that the Americans don’t need Hurriyat caveats against India as they get down focusing on Kashmir? They know enough of it, more than Hurriyat and perhaps India. Before tossing up the hoodwink theory Hurriyat camp should have recalled that Loy Anderson was the first U.S. ambassador to India who visited Kashmir way back in 1950. And, a year later, Frank Graham whom the United Nations Organization had appointed as special negotiator on Kashmir, too was an American. Hurriyat expelled Shabir Shah in 1996 for lending audience to Frank Wisner, then U.S. ambassador to India. Was it afraid India may hoodwink U.S. if Americans engaged separatist leaders?
Howard B Schaffer was part of the state department’s South Asia mission and used to frequent Kashmir since 1960s. Writes he: “In pursuing an active U.S. role in Kashmir settlement American officials have stayed well informed about Kashmir developments. They have been in touch with all the organizations concerned with Kashmir and been privy to back-channel talks.”
In this backdrop, the platitude of ‘hoodwinking America’ appears laughable; it shows incapacity of separatist camp to tackle certain political challenges. When you dismiss a government action as something to hoodwink a superpower you absolve yourself from a desired response, a need to critically understand the move. If India needs just a retired journalist and a trendy academic or for that matter a shamelessly rigged election to hoodwink America, then better be with India to safeguard Jammu and Kashmir from any future invasion. The Brazilian monthly has also quoted some NATO policy documents which say, “After 11 September 2001, the United States does have a legal justification to invade J&K.”
When the state acknowledges only 17 out of 111 killings , that too subject to a lengthy, unending probe, Hurriyat and those peddling its hoodwink theory, better come out of their tea-party delusions. Ever since 1995 – when the government of India chose to initiate dialogue with five militants who had shunned arms – Kashmiris have been fed on mere noise of the dialogue while the economic and political benefits have been reaped by the ruling class in the state’s neighboring regions.
In response to the four-month unrest in Kashmir that saw 111 deaths and inexplicable tragedies,Delhi has appointed sitting executives of Planning Commission to rehabilitate the economic and social security concerns of people in Jammu and Ladakh. This implies ‘direct aid’ via Planning Commission. And for Kashmir, the government of India picked up some ‘thought engineers’. No wonder if Azadi is being subjected to rigorous debating across India because Professor Radha Kumar has enough skill to reinterpret this so far objectionable word to suit India’s foreign policy needs. And the ‘Big Brother’ will keep watching.
This is the time to shun this India-hoodwinking-America stuff from the menu of Hurriyat politics. The ‘Big Brother’ much in the Orwellian sense has all along been around us, but “He” is already friends with the “street goon”.
Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement. Riyaz Masroor Many years ago, a Kashmiri lawyer had to cut a sorry figure in a European capital where he was invited to speak on the human rights situation of J&K. It was fashionable those days to speak in ‘thousands’ and ‘lakhs’. Separatist leaders would say ‘thousands have been martyred’ without quoting figures. The lawyer followed suit and thus spoke to the learned audience: “Thousands have disappeared in Kashmir, most of them while in custody.” The participants were moved by the word ‘thousands’. At the end of the session, an HR activist approached the speaker with the request: “It’s really a grave issue, can you cite three examples so that I study the whole thing.” The lawyer, as per his own admission, had no handy references so he chose to avoid the query till next morning and forwarded three examples only after seeking them via phone from Kashmir. The lawyer returned home with his lifetime lesson: Shun rhetoric, gather realities. No wonder, the same lawyer is now Kashmir’s leading human rights defender. In June 2008, when the Kashmiri separatists started the epic campaign against a government decision to transfer around 100 acres of land to a Hindu Shrine Board, Hurriyat Conference was reborn. Not just in the sense that it revived its lost contact with masses but in the sense that it started speaking on real issues harming Kashmiri interests. The campaign forced the government to revoke the order and the land title was restored. Bar Association and Hurriyat celebrated the revocation of order as a ‘victory for Kashmiris’. It was for the first time since 1989 that Hurriyat had opposed any government order , got it revoked through peaceful campaign and later celebrated the ‘victory’. And yes, the peaceful method cast moral isolation upon the authorities who would lob tear-smoke shells on unarmed civilians. But for that unfortunate economic blocked forced on Kashmiris from Jammu, this small victory would have served a long way in reorganizing Kashmir’s rights movement into an orderly resistance. Nonetheless, 2008 marked a significant transition; the transition from violence to reconstruction, from rhetoric to creativity. In all these years, when had Geelani said India earns Rs 36000 Crores annually from Kashmir through taxes and food imports? When had Mirwaiz wondered over absence of water and power in rural Kashmir saying people pay taxes against no amenity? When had we experienced a different Geelani who wants to substantiate his claims of Indian occupation through figures? A Hurriyat (G) pamphlet, whose authenticity may be debatable, records the volume of land occupied by Indian army in different districts, it says more than 350,000 acres of land has been grabbed. The issues which in yesteryears were a plain no-no for Hurriyat leaders have suddenly come alive for them. They are reacting to government decisions and processes – a decade ago such reactions were considered taboo. Hurriyat (all shades including JKLF) is increasingly becoming democratic in its conduct and response to the socio-political issues. For example, never had Hurriyat asked people to participate in a process directly controlled by New Delhi. In 2001, they called for outright boycott of census but are now urging people to stand up and be counted, though with a word of caution. It is definitely a welcome transition. By simply shutting our eyes whole world will not turn black. It would be foolhardy to say that post 2008, Kashmiris began to hate militant violence as a means of resistance; they cannot unless the means of repression remain intact. But we cannot overlook the fact that the culture of peaceful and democratic resistance has taken root after 2008 uprising. Many would agree that the post-89 resistance against Indian rule in J&K was clearly modeled after the legendary Tehreek Mahaz Rai Shumari (Plebiscite Front Movement). Whole architecture of Hurriyat politics could easily be gleaned from the 22-year PF movement that was spearheaded by many big names but actually inspired by then popular leader Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who remained in jail for most of those two decades. Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement. Isn’t it a fact that while Sheikh would bask in the glory of rising popularity his detractor and then Prime Minister of J&K, Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was eroding the autonomous status of the state? For that matter, PF movement too was an abstract activity that kept people aloof from what was happening around them. Interestingly, if in past Sheikh’s PF movement had got consumed into rhetoric, now Hurriyat is trying to remodel itself over realities rather than rhetoric. The heightened alertness about census and the new recruitment law is a glaring proof of that. If Hurriyat has abandoned the ‘secondhand ideas’ and chosen to embark a new route of democracy and peace, shouldn’t one welcome it as a positive transition? Mian Abdul Qayoom, President of Kashmir Bar Association, could not understand the nuances of this argument when this writer spoke to a seminar titled “Census and reservation bill – a bid to darken our future” organized by Geelani-led Hurriyat Conference on 22 May 2010. “I completely disagree,” he said and employed all his acumen to disprove the transition highlighted by this writer. Ironically, the lawyer who on his return from Europe had admitted a flaw and got down to work only to create a huge bank of realities was present in the seminar. It would, perhaps, take another session to make Mr. Qayoom understand that the transition does not necessarily mean from bad to good, it is also from good to better. Is there any harm in admitting that things have changed? Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides the answer: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” Feedback: riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com
Riyaz MasroorThe noisy Tuesday was virtually the first day of Durbar in Srinagar; Monday had gone into calm, hassle free reopening and gossip. Irked by the deafening sirens, gridlocks, flag cars and road barriers, I vomited out my anger before a friend who happens to be a police officer. “Why should large contingents escort even insignificant persons,” I asked angrily. “After all, who will take care of Mom Balpuri’s naughty cow?” the officer hurled a counter question.
The response baffled me. What the hell is some Balpuri’s cow to do with the mess the Durbar has brought out on Srinagar’s fast narrowing roads. But, as probed further, Mom Balpuri appeared a character portraying the Kashmir’s ruling class, and his cow a metaphor for the social liabilities of this class. Small wonder, these liabilities are being taken care at the cost of public convenience. Alas! Balpuri’s cow did not get enough care.
Ghulam Muhammad Ganaie was perhaps the only bet for National Conference in Budgam’s Khansahib constituency when it fought elections in 1996. He was the party’s block president and was more famous by his nick name Mom Balpuri, probably after his native village Balpur. Despite being a grass-root worker, this rustic, simpleton farmer would wonder why a bevy of gun-wielding Personal Security Officers (PSOs) would follow him like his shadow, though he later came to know that he was a ‘protected person’ after NC got the crown.
Mom Balpuri had a cow that he was very fond of. He would cherish even his cow’s naughty antics – it would cross over to neighbour’s paddy field, hit a kid or two or snap the rope and shove into some grocery shop. Youth of Balpur still remember how Mom Balpuri would struggle to prevent his pet from hurting others. After becoming the ‘protected person’ Mom Balpuri would chase the freaky cow while his PSOs would follow him, wielding guns. He would rebuff them to help him leash the cow by surrounding it rather than following him. “But how can we do that sir, we cannot move to your front, we have to be at your back and guard you.” This would put off Mom Balpuri because the cow would run even faster sensing not just Balpuri but several men with guns following it. This went on till 17 March 2001 when the assailants murdered Balpuri at his residence. His PSOs must be sad why they could not help him leash his cow, or save him from the assailants.
What Mom Balpuri in his pastorally honest sense would want his PSOs to do is being done by almost all the PSOs who are attached to VIPs and VVIPs. Then it was only the matter of comforting an ill-tamed cow, now it is about almost everything – rearing children, ferrying them to school, going shopping with the madam, mowing the garden, attending telephone calls, fixing meetings and much more.
From all ministers to lowbrow politicians, PSOs are flanking every individual who has something to do with the ruling regime. There are PSOs who go for extended leave, take vehicle from the ministerial staff and roam around in his home town, flaunting his false errrr real power across his neighbourhood. Who is paying for all this luxury? Masses.
Coming back to roads, Our VIPS travel with a false sense of being superior to the rest. Their well-guarded vehicles zoom through busy roads with frightening speed. Later in the afternoon, as I started to check the day’s happenings a citizen journalist came to me with a startling complaint.
“Please inform SP traffic that PRO of the Works Minister G M Suroori has left office with a PWD vehicle 9330 JK 02 L (Bolero). He is now enjoying in his village, patrol bills will be paid by the government,” he informed. I simply passed on the information to Police high ups, just to satisfy the citizen journalist, though I was sure the complaint will be junked. But I began wondering if the PRO was taking care of Suroori’s or his own ‘naughty cow’?
Mom Balpuri was not to blame when he saw himself in the security ring. The ruling regime wanted to leave an impression in the area that they have the ‘presence’. The PSOs would serve as an advert of POWER; people with smaller problems would be psychologically drawn to Mom Balpuri, considering the Police escort he had around him round the clock as an indication of POWER. The innocent old man, Mom Balpuri was isolated from his earthy lifestyle and squeezed into the new frame of POWER.
Fourteen years after the PSOs scared that naughty cow in Balpur, the VIP culture has spawned a new social class comprising everyone who is followed by a security van and flanked by gunmen. People belonging to this class believe they have the first right to move on the road. Policemen or Traffic Cops have no teeth to regulate their movement or discipline them.
Democracy, they say, is a great leveler. But here the democracy, believed to have returned in 1996, has further fragmented the life. There are people with LINKS to power. There are people with ACCESS to POWER. There are people with CHANNELS in bureaucracy and then there are people who have the BUSINESS with the POWERFUL. Masses are at the bottom of the pyramid.
Separatists are crying hoarse that the eight percent reservation in government jobs for scheduled caste candidates would affect the state’s demography. The chief minister has reassured them that it was not the case. But the fact is the demography has long changed. The VIPs are eating into the social space of the masses that are now worse than the underclass of a totalitarian state. A Kashmiri threatening another Kashmiris’ social identity, no hartaal for this please!
First published in Rising Kashmir 8 May 2011 (Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)
What does London Conference on Afghanistan, beginning January 28, mean to us? This crucial question requires an elaborate answer.
Kashmir shares an interesting relationship with Afghanistan. Not just because Afghans ruled the ‘paradise on earth’ for 67 years but because peace in Kashmir is inversely proportional to war in Afghanistan.
In 1979, when Russia’s Red Army forayed into rugged, war-torn Kabul, Kashmir was basking in a newly-bought peace under Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah. The decade of Soviet occupation in Afghanistan was marked, in Kashmir, by relatively poised regimes except for a brief trouble under G M Shah, who had toppled Farooq Abdullah’s government in 1984. Back then Pakistan’s official media would gloat over the Afghan Jihad but people responded not beyond listening to radio dispatches from Peshawar or Kandahar.
But that was soon to end. Russia’s exit plan was conceived little later than mid eighties. Before that plan could be executed Kashmir saw the resurrection of separatist movement. A large coalition of separatist groups, Muslim United Front, ran for state elections in 1987. The poll was brazenly rigged to prevent MUF, purported to comprise anti-National Conference vote bank, from assuming power.
Most of the modern historians unwittingly believe that the electoral fraud of 1987 has actually rooted the cult of violence in Kashmir. That may be a reason but not the reason. It was very well known that Pakistan had been bankrolling Afghan Jihad and in the event of Soviet retreat the forces of violence were being unleashed across the subcontinent, partly due to the compulsion such operations incur and partly to keep Indian army bogged down in Kashmir. Had there been no rigging in 1987, Russia-made AK 47 rifle would still make its debut in Kashmir; because the Afghan front had now cooled down. The poll debacle only hastened the process and provided a readymade excuse to the supporters of the armed uprising.
However, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the violent explosion of 1989 as entirely a ‘proxy war’. Pakistan, no doubt, supplied the guns but India’s long running apathy toward local emotions had been so acute that it induced a ‘will to die’ in the otherwise docile, easygoing Kashmiris. Proxy wars can be easily defeated if the population is free from any sense of deprivation, occupation or discrimination– let’s call it the 3D crisis.
If Kashmir had started limping back to normalcy in the early years of past decade, it was not only due to 9/11 strike on US. Neither was it because India had woken up to the need to accommodate the Kashmiri concerns about deprivation, dispossession and discrimination, yes the 3D crisis. The nine-eleven had, in fact, triggered a new war in Afghanistan, this time America sticking in the quicksand.
It is interesting to note how Afghanistan and Kashmir share a strange war-peace relationship. As NATO, with the help of Pakistan army, began their share of Afghan mission in 2001, Kashmir started showing signs of calm. Much like the 1979-89 decade the 2000-2009 witnessed lull in Kashmir violence and among other things a sudden reemergence of pro-India politics.
The reason why the Afghanistan conference that began in London on January 28, will have direct bearing on Kashmir is that it has been organised to legitimize the fresh call for engaging Taliban and sharing Afghanistan’s political and economic power with them. The call is simultaneously coming from Islamabad, Kabul and Washington. No wonder why J&K’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has given out a matching call urging militants for negotiations.
The crucial London summit should, therefore, not be mistaken as yet another conference on counter terrorism. It rather represents America’s radical switchover vis-à-vis its latest war. General McChrystal, US Army’s Afghanistan Chief, has made no bones about the need to negotiate peace with Taliban. Even an average analyst would see this statement as a stark admission of ‘defeat’. Remember, four-star general of a superpower army does not speak in air; the opinion that war in Afghanistan is increasingly becoming unwinnable has been sinking within the military discourse of Pentagon and its allies for past few years. If you cannot secure the palace of your loyal president in Kabul even as you fight the insurgents with full might for nine years, you better switch to plan B. Obama is already on way to implementing this plan B, which includes ‘re-empowering’ Taliban in lieu of peace ( or may be a graceful exit).
As the pattern sine 1979 goes Kashmir needs to prepare for a fresh bout of disturbance. A new ruling coalition largely dominated by Taliban would not just represent America’s ‘tactical surrender’, it would embolden Pakistan. Pakistan army, as a host of news reports suggest, has all along been involved in Afghanistan insurgency by proxy. Now, if America is taking Pakistan on board and offering political power to Taliban, it only signifies Pakistan army’s second ‘victory’ since it connived with US to defeat the former superpower USSR in the same Afghanistan. Moreover, if Obama-Karzai-Zardari trio has its way in forging a pro-Taliban regime in Kabul, the forces that were running the show there, may be tasked to reorient themselves. China’s troubled Xinxiang won’t make a choice owing to Beijing’s solid ties with Islamabad and the of late ‘patch up’ with US. So, will it be Mission Kashmir II?
It is difficult to say with certainty that the ‘Afghan wave’ would be finally made to spill over to Kashmir. But the major policy transition in US and Kabul makes it appear all too likely. India may be alive to the military challenges such a scenario could throw up but the question is has it been able to eliminate the ‘will to die’ from within the Kashmiri population.
If the incidents that occurred in past few weeks are any indicator, the 3D crisis seem running deeper than it was in 1989. Earlier we didn’t see people staging demonstrations during gunfights. Is it really hard to discern why Kashmiris would opt for violence if yet another anarchic moment came their way?
Kashmiris have never fought a war of choice. In all these 421 years of 3D crisis, they have always fought wars of survival. New Delhi cannot bring saints and monks together to curse Afghanistan that never-ending war inflict the country so that Kashmir remains peaceful. Afghanistan’s peace has always entailed war in Kashmir only because the ground here has all along remained fertile. Now, if India wants to eliminate the reasons for Kashmiris to revolt again, it should not wait for formal US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A word of caution: All the guile has been used up since 1947. Rallying Kashmiris around a mirage would be difficult now. Something real, yes real, need be done before the ‘Afghan wave’ touches our shores.
Riyaz Masroor On the eerily quiet day of January 26, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), locally called CRP, chose to shun the 20-year-old practice of unfurling Indian tricolour at Srinagar's commerical center, Lal Chowk . Troops have been observing this practice ever since BJP’s Murli Manohar Joshi dared to reach Lal Chowk in 1991 and after alighting from an armored military vehicle unfurled the national flag atop the Clock Tower popularly known as Ghanta Ghar, a conspicuous city symbol. In this backdrop, the practice of hoisting tricolor, on national days such as January 26 and August 15, that too barely half a kilometer from Bakhshi Stadium, where the main function is held, reeked of a jingoistic political symbolism. This business hub, it must be noted, has a political significance. It was here that in 1947 India’s first Prime Minister rubbed shoulders with Kashmir’s popular leader Sheikh Abdullah while promising the right of self-determination to the people of J&K; it was here that in 1975 hundreds of thousands of people received him after he entered into a deal with Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, then Indian premier; and it was from here in 1994 that the pioneer of Kashmir insurgency, Muhammad Yasin Malik, declared his transition from violence to nonviolence and struggle for democratic rights. In the light of this historical record, Lal Chowk represents political evolution. Murli’s flag-hoisting recipe, actually, wanted to undo this tradition and make Lal Chowk appear as a symbol of military conquest. Having remained witness to significant political evolutions, this trade hub also bore lot of violence and saw lot of bloodshed. In April 1993 the troops allegedly set ablaze a huge shopping complex following a gunfight with militants. Besides killing of scores of civilians in the crossfire, around 200 shops and five commercial buildings are reported to have gutted in that devastating fire. Inayat Khan of Dalgate is only the latest victim. Following his murder allegedly by CRP sleuths early this month; local traders staged demonstrations seeking removal of CRP men from the ruined Palladium Theater. The Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has announced a Rs 2 Crore plan to revive the "pristine glory" of Lal Chowk. Will that happen while keeping the garison-like image of this historic place intact. The chief minister must get down to first things first: remove CRP from Palladium, demilitarise Ghanta Ghar, put a ban on laying concertina wires on Lal Chowk roads etc..can you do at least this much, Mr. Omar!
I belong to a beautiful place on earh, Kashmir. I am a straight forward person who likes to exchange ideas and make friends. I don't have a rigid worldview except for this that I want a world based on real justice. But at the same time I don't oppose globalisation and am bit reserved to call it neocolonialism.
