Kashmir will soon get a government, but those blinkers are going to stay

Put yourself in the shoes of a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist who has spent months in a training camp in Nangarhar and then made an arduous journey to Kashmir through the international border, crossing a riverine, hiding for hours in the hollow of a truck, hoping that he reaches a safe house before he is spotted by Indian security forces and shot dead. He has taken this risk to fight for a people his trainers referred to as ‘mazloom’ (oppressed) Kashmiris. After a day or so, he steps out, clean shaven, wearing Adidas trainers, in the main market of Shopian, only to see men of his age riding atop a car, wearing Modi masks. This is the same town where even police officers hardly ventured out in the aftermath of Burhan Wani’s killing in 2016.

Post-370 Kashmir is getting ready for the first phase of elections on Sept 18, a decade after the last one. But what has not changed is the propensity for conspiracy theories. Since the 1950s, the Muslim majority in Kashmir has tried to pass off every event that it doesn’t want to own up to with a simple, ingenious phrase: Markaz ki chaal, or the conspiracy of the Centre. It could be anything, from the unseating of a chief minister to young women celebrating their dogs’ birthday in the posh Rajbagh area (under the influence of New Delhi), which was then held responsible for the devastating floods of 2014. The current conspiracy theory is about the fielding of independents. To be fair, the Centre cannot wholly claim its innocence. But not once does a Kashmiri look inwards and wonder about how many characters he cosplays at the same time: in one, he demands a cold storage for his apples in Delhi; in the other, he unfurls a Pakistani flag. In another role, he mourns a slain terrorist, while the previous evening he may have given away the terrorist’s location to the Army. When the Kashmiri gets up in an election rally to utter for a millionth time Iqbal’s ‘Hazaron saal nargis apni benoori pe roti hai/Badi mushkil se hota hai chaman mein deedawar paida’ (For a thousand years, the narcissus has been lamenting its blindness/ With great difficulty the one with true vision is born in the garden), it’s enough to make Narcissus walk from the numerous graveyards in the Valley and say: ‘For God’s sake, let me be lightless, I don’t need any deedawar among you’.

The ‘outside’ people who have been part of the system in Kashmir laugh about the bluster a Kashmiri uses to explain his turnaround. A police officer remembers how a man landed up in his office in South Kashmir, a few days after Burhan Wani was killed. He wore a BJP gamcha over his sadri (jacket). The situation was extremely tense at that time, and, for a moment, the officer feared that the man may be a suicide bomber. But he had come to pay a friendly visit, not out of courtesy, but to ask for police protection. “I asked him how he would leave my office with the BJP’s lotus around his neck,” the officer says. In response, the man smiled and took off the gamcha, putting it inside a secret pocket of his jacket. And then he left. In all likelihood, the man would have even read a ‘fatiha’ (prayer) for Wani.

It’s the same sorcery that is currently on display across political parties in Kashmir. Imagine one politician selling you the dream that once in govt, Article 370 will be brought back. Imagine another who was begging intelligence agencies to give him a chance (to align with New Delhi) as he was being arrested in August 2019 suddenly talking about the aspirations of the people. Imagine a third ,who was displaying Indianness for the sake of a tiny political office in Srinagar, suddenly speaking in a far more zealous religious tone than a Jamaat candidate.

A govt will be formed in Kashmir, but it will not cure the Kashmiri majority of its blinkers. Kashmiri society is torn apart by rampant drug abuse. Domestic violence, unheard of earlier, is on the rise. Psychiatrists cannot deal with the sheer number of patients. Kashmir needs a modern-day leader who will show them the mirror, but before that holds it up to himself. Otherwise, one ecosystem will be replaced by another, and it will do nothing for those who want to live a dignified life without fear.

In the earlier ecosystem that nurtured separatism, one heard of ‘editors’ who would seek a bottle of Chivas Regal in exchange for an opinion piece in their newspaper. In today’s Kashmir, they have been replaced by new errand boys of nationalism who frequent the cafes in Srinagar, and who have been taught to utter ‘Jai Hind’ as a greeting. While the mathematicians of the Modi govt put together their numbers, they must remember one thing: this Jai Hind is one of convenience, not conviction.