Meaningless rhetoric…
“Of the Rs 80,000 crore PM’s package, Rs 19,000 crore have already been released for Jammu and Kashmir.” This was the assertion when last time people were told about it. So the ordinary people here were bombarded with huge financial figures. A standard catch-line accompanying these whooping sums they were told that the money is […]
Risking public health
It goes without saying that it is the responsibility of the government and its concerned agencies to ensure semblance of law everywhere within the territorial parameters of the state. Besides the big political and developmental issues, even everything mundane, if it concerns people of the state, too is within the government’s mandate, enjoining upon it […]
‘Shared vision’
During the 1990s, the former Soviet Republic of Moldova experienced severe internal conflict. Having been part of a territory which was part of a country/block involved in the Cold War, and obviously being situated in the vicinity of Europe, conflict in Moldova attracted much international attention and worry and was therefore focus of a series […]
It’s disappointing!
Blame it on unresolved political questions, the exercise of power and authority has all along been very problematic here. Needless to say that in an overly politicized situation wherein huge multitude of visible and invisible forces are vying for and manipulating the sources and agencies of power and authority, popular perceptions and understandings of this […]
Saying is not doing!
Politicians have a knack for saying one thing and doing something else. They master the skills of claiming one position while actually occupying another. This difference of their positions becomes more pronounced when seen and analyzed in context of space and time. For instance, recall what all the Peoples Democratic Party used to say and […]
Rethink geopolitics
“Watching violent images of war and strife elsewhere in the world always invoked a sense of pride and invulnerability in me. ‘Thank God,’ I would say, ‘I am the citizen of this country; it could never happen here.’” This is how an American recounted his reactions in the pre-9/11 days to the war and violence […]
Understand people’s anxieties
Years and decades of systematic disenfranchisement and constant bullying have sowed the seeds of anger and aversion so deep into the popular psyche here that the situation here remains ever-volatile. All it needs is a trigger for the pent-up rage to spill over, out in open, and incinerate everything – the government, its credibility, its […]
Why this cynicism …
The biggest challenge to the ordinary Kashmiri’s memory and intellect is to locate things which the political class – the two regional majors of National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party – claim they did when they were in the power. And it is certainly a Herculean task to locate in the Kashmir’s hill and dale […]
… but why now!
History is witness that any political group when it is formed in the face of stiff opposition, has to fight every inch of its way. Armed a sufficient degree of heroic idealism, it sees everything clearly and forces a set of ideals out of the fire of battle. It will bitterly condemn the existing status […]
Flawed spending
It goes without saying that Jammu and Kashmir has been face to face with a severe social and economic decline here. In post-2002 Jammu and Kashmir, the state governments have remained very vocal about bringing peace through development and this line of action has been shared, endorsed and supported by the Union governments in New […]
