It is confusion all around. And, confusion always comes in with a sufficient degree of unaccountability – a bliss for the unscrupulous, who thrive and prosper in the absence of any checks on their tyranny and despotism. Blame it on the prolonged political turmoil, Kashmir has steadily morphed into a state wherein nobody wants to be held accountable for anything. So the confusion has automatically got the social sanctity of continuity.
For the past several weeks now, the state and its different agencies have been a party to this confusion. Several orders, though few of them were later disowned by the government, have added to the confusion and panic in the Valley. And today the situation is such that nobody is in a position to predict as to what is going to happen in next few days or weeks. Those who actually have the requisite knowledge to clear the airs of current uncertainty, and wherewithal to unmask the ugly truths, have deliberately chosen to patronize and promote further confusion because it suits them and their politics.
This is precisely why nobody is really sure what is happening now, or what is in store. Nor is anybody in a position to anticipate or predict as to what will be the next trigger for adding to the already thickening chaos and panic. In such a situation, the common people are feeling the heat, and feel pushed to the wall. All they can think of and are doing right now is they are shoring up the food stocks in their homes, laying hands on whatever they can.
Without going into anticipating as to what is going to happen, it goes without saying that nobody can condone the kind of anarchy that the confusion and panic is creating here. Politics behind the current Kashmir situation aside, somebody in the ruling establishment will have to take the responsibility of explaining situation to the people. An entire population couldn’t be forever held hostage to the politics of uncertainty.
Now coming to the political leaders – both regional groups as well as the major parties in mainland India have confined themselves to the routine, run-of-the-mill kind of statements, without actually moving beyond rhetoric to catch the proverbial bull by the horns to ask as to what is happening in Kashmir, and why.
Henry James once wrote: “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
This is exactly how it is here — each and every sphere of life in Kashmir, including even the ordinary and the mundane, are so overly politicized that if people themselves do not take care to read through the tricks that are played on and with them, they are sure to be led into the harm’s way by those who have somehow managed to appropriate places ahead of the general flock! And what caps their miseries is that those at the helm will never rise to the occasion to talk of peoples’ fears and miseries in the wake of current situational turbulence. Instead they will always try and throw blames on visible and invisible political adversaries so as to further their own politics. This has happened in the past, and today also after decades of turmoil, which should normally have brought in good degree of political maturity, nothing much seems to have changed indeed.
