Kashmir is intensely opinionated – about everything except itself. From Nitish Kumar’s political manoeuvres to Gaza’s ruins, from Israel – Palestine to faraway ideological battles, the Valley’s drawing rooms, WhatsApp groups, and social media timelines overflow with outrage. Yet, when it comes to Kashmir’s own collapsing springs, choking rivers, vanishing snow, drug-ravaged youth, land encroachments, garbage-strewn streets, and administrative paralysis, the same voices fall inexplicably silent.
This is not awareness. This is avoidance.
Kashmir has perfected the art of emotional outsourcing – exporting its moral energy to distant causes so it never has to spend it at home. Global outrage is safe; local accountability is dangerous. One demands slogans; the other demands effort.
It is easy to mourn Gaza from a warm living room. It is hard to ask why the village spring has dried up. It is easy to debate Bihar on television. It is hard to confront the councillor who allowed illegal construction on a wetland. It is easy to post flags and hashtags. It is hard to pick up a plastic bottle and not throw it into a stream.
So, Kashmir chooses easy.
This selective blindness is not accidental; it is cultivated. A society constantly looking outward is a society spared the discomfort of self-examination. And Kashmir has grown deeply uncomfortable with mirrors.
Look around. Rivers have turned into drains. Wetlands have been flattened into housing colonies with pretentious names. Hills have been shaved, forests thinned, and snow catchment zones built upon without restraint. Garbage piles up on roadsides with such regularity that it has become part of the landscape – almost cultural. Drug addiction has crept from margins to mainstream. Unemployment festers. Schools exist without learning, degrees without jobs, governance without consequence.
Yet none of this generates the sustained outrage that a foreign conflict does. Why? Because local problems implicate locals.
Talking about Palestine does not require questioning your own littering. Criticising Israel does not force you to confront illegal construction by your cousin. Debating Nitish Kumar does not require asking why your municipality has failed for a decade. Distant causes allow moral posturing without moral responsibility.
The political class understands this psychology perfectly – and exploits it shamelessly.
A distracted population is a compliant population. As long as people are busy shouting about global injustices, they will not ask uncomfortable questions about local failures. So, leaders happily join the chorus of external outrage, tweet the right sentiments, issue the right statements, and pose as moral guardians – while doing absolutely nothing to enforce environmental laws, urban planning norms, or basic civic discipline.
Illegal constructions flourish because enforcement is selective. Encroachments survive because violators are voters. Waste management collapses because accountability is politically inconvenient. Forests disappear because timber mafias enjoy protection. Snow vanishes because slopes meant to retain cold are carved into concrete.
But instead of confronting these realities, Kashmir prefers to rage about the world. This is not compassion. It is escapism.
A society that cannot fix its drains but lectures the globe on justice is not enlightened – it is evasive. A population that demands rights everywhere but responsibilities nowhere is not politically awake – it is morally lazy.
And let us be honest: the common Kashmiri is not an innocent bystander in this decay. People litter and then complain about pollution. They encroach and then curse governance. They celebrate shortcuts and then mourn collapse. Laws are broken casually and criticised selectively. The phrase “saeri che karaan (all are doing)” has become Kashmir’s most dangerous philosophy.
The political class, meanwhile, perfects the role of silent accomplice. Laws exist on paper, not on ground. Enforcement appears only when it is safe or symbolic. The poor are punished, the powerful are protected. The result is a Valley where everything decays slowly, quietly, and permanently – while television debates rage about everywhere else.
This obsession with external causes also creates a false sense of virtue. It allows people to feel morally superior without doing anything moral. Posting outrage becomes a substitute for participation. Noise replaces work. Emotion replaces discipline.
The irony is cruel: Kashmiris fear being judged by the world, yet constantly perform for it – on social media, on television, in protest rhetoric – while neglecting the very place whose dignity they claim to defend.
A society that ignores its own problems eventually becomes one.
Here is the bitter truth: Kashmir does not suffer from lack of awareness. It suffers from selective blindness. It does not lack compassion. It lacks courage – the courage to look inward, to accept complicity, to demand enforcement, to change habits, to prioritise home over headlines.
Until Kashmir learns to care as passionately about its own rivers as it does about distant wars, until it argues as fiercely about local governance as it does about global politics, nothing will change.
Outrage is easy. Repair is hard. And that choice, more than any external force, is what is hollowing the Valley from within. It will continue to degenerate the Valley.
