An idle mind is a devil’s workshop. Many ‘patriotic’, ‘rational’, ‘sensible’ Indians will believe that to be true once they get through this article.
Kashmir, like most festering problems in India like the Maoist ‘insurgency’ and Manipur, has been easily ignored be those living comfortable existences, who have not suffered to their breaking point at the hands of corrupt authorities, torturing them and milking their tolerance dry. The issue has always been treated with a local anesthesia of sorts, numbing it out because it doesn’t concern us and “we trust people with unprecedented power to take the right decisions for the people without putting their gold plated, vested interests first”.
Until recently, we didn’t give a crap about what the fundamentalists, separatists, social workers or authors were trying to say, because India seemed decades away from a civil war or uprising or revolution that would shake the very foundations of the comfy couch we practice our indifference on. That picture, however, began to change when the oppressed began to say ‘no more’. Our couches now sat on unstable ground that could be shattered to cotton balls and splinters in a matter of years. We needed a strategy to combat this cry for justice. That strategy was ‘patriotism’.
People who cared for their country as much as they cared for the cockroach in their neighbor’s kitchen began spewing patriotic bullshit about ending insurgency and Kashmir being the pride and glory of India. People began to see the saviors of society as the enemy that had to be silenced at the earliest, lest the truth gained too much momentum. Thanks to this new found surge of patriotism, the media decided it was best to ride this sensational wave and blew things out of proportion, instigating the (most of the muddle headed and a few of the) hot blooded youth of the nation to condemn Arundhati Roy’s fight for justice.
Kashmir is part of India, by choice or by militarization. We have spent crores to keep Kashmir - their land, their freedom and their resources belong to us. Even though it may seem irrational, unreasonable and unforgivably selfish, we will shed blood to keep Kashmir, because it is a matter of national pride (and a matter of national security to a certain extent).
Under the British, we were an oppressed people with no justice. Human rights were blatantly violated. Today, Kashmir stands in those shoes. Their dam of tolerance has crumbled under the weight of our indifference to their pain over the decades. The Indian Government has become the British, and we know all too well, how that story ends.
If only we chose to care.
