Two things need to be said right away about the tragic and desperate situation in Kashmir.
The first is that, contrary to what some people might claim, attitudes to Kashmir have changed throughout India. Some years ago when a devastating earthquake rocked Kashmir, separatist leaders, the Hurriyat and even many mainstream journalists who covered the state, protested that the rest of India seemed remarkably unconcerned.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq went on TV to point out that had such devastation occurred elsewhere in India, much more assistance would have been offered by ordinary citizens. And liberal journalists said how ironic it was that even though the vast majority of us said that Kashmir was an integral part of India, we did not treat Kashmiri people as being fully Indian and deserving of the same concern as, say, the people of Gujarat (which had also been devastated by an earthquake.)
Say what you will about the situation this time around but nobody can claim that those of us in the rest of India have been unmoved by the tragedy. The concern is pan-Indian and I have not seen or heard anyone suggest Kashmiris are less deserving of our assistance.
Why should this be so? My guess is that the lack of terrorist incidents, the return of relative normalcy to much of the Valley, the sharp increase in tourism to Kashmir from the rest of India and the quietening of separatist rhetoric has made us all forget the bitterness and hostility of the last two decades.
This is – by any standards and from any perspective – a welcome development.
"And if Kashmir had really been the independent country some of them want, half the population would have drowned in these floods." |
The second thing that needs to be said is that the army has made every single Indian proud. I am not one of those who blindly supports everything the army does (and even the army does not expect blind support from citizens in a liberal democracy) and I do not dispute that when there are complaints of human rights abuses, they must be probed. (The army agrees and has launched many such probes of its own.)
But can any objective observer fail to admire the heroism, sacrifice and dedication of the Indian army during this crisis? The last time around, Kashmiris claimed that Indian authorities were not interested in their welfare. This time, however, it is other Kashmiris who have failed them. The state administration has simply vanished. Eyewitnesses say the local police are nowhere to be seen.
If it were not for the army and other instruments of the central government, thousands of Kashmiris would have perished in these terrible floods. Often the jawans risked their own lives to save Kashmiris. And every Indian must have felt a surge of pride to hear the army announce that soldiers would not return to their barracks as long as even one Kashmiri was trapped in the deluge.
Which brings us to the big question: where do we go from here? As far as the rest of India is concerned, we’ve done our bit. Kashmiri separatists must know that on the other side of the border, the Pakistan government has rarely made such efforts to rescue or save its own citizens. And if Kashmir had really been the independent country some of them want, half the population would have drowned in these floods. It is the Indian state that came to the rescue of its own citizens.
And yet, so far at least, separatist leaders have been reluctant to accept the obvious or to give credit where it is due. They have invested so much in painting the Indian army as a brutal occupation force that they cannot afford to accept the reality that it is the army that saved thousands of Kashmiris from certain death. They cannot accept that the so-called independent Kashmir of their dreams would have been washed away by the floods.
Instead, the likes of the Mirwaiz – once so vocal about how the rest of the India had ignored Kashmir during the earthquake – now take refuge behind weasel words and direct their ire at the administration, hoping to deflect attention from the massive effort made by the rest of India to help Kashmir in its time of need.
The separatists have spent too long preaching hatred and playing India against Pakistan to be able to change their tune now. But let’s hope the people of Kashmir finally begin to see us as we see them: as citizens of the same nation, united in hope, and always there for each other in times of trouble.
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