Category: WIDE ANGLE

In his ‘Adventures of Ideas’, Alfred North Whitehead says “the enjoyment of power is fatal to the subtleties of life. Ruling classes degenerate by reason of their lazy indulgence in obvious gratifications”.  In such a state ‘people of power’ fall asleep, for it is in sleep that ‘we’ each turn away from the world about ‘us’ to ‘our’ private worlds. “The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his (her) own.”

This is exactly how it is for most of the political and bureaucratic elite in Jammu and Kashmir. They are just too busy with their own private worlds that they hardly seem to be bothered by what the common, ordinary people have to endure day in and day out. For instance, while the grocers, butchers, chicken-sellers – everybody is on a looting spree, the authorities vested with the responsibility of keeping the unscrupulous under check remain unmoved. The reason being that a portion of the money cheated off the common people by the greedy traders makes it to the pockets of greedy officials manning various agencies.

Well, for the government, here is a little suggestion: why not let some chicken-seller or a butcher or a grocer formally take over a chief of Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs department! In any case the department actually runs on their dictations only and is oriented towards increasing their profits and securing their interests rather than fending for the needs and interests of the common people. So why waste bureaucrats for manning this or for that matter the Legal Metrology departments when even a baker or a grocer could do the job? If the only aim is to safeguard the interests of the greedy businesses, then common sense has it that they could themselves do it better than anybody else could do for them. The move would spare government huge amounts that goes into paying for salaries of officials who have reduced themselves to being a vestigial outgrowth.

Then this might be good for the common people as well. If these departments are given into the hands of businesses, in such a situation the rates may actually come down a little bit for in such a proposition butchers and chicken-sellers or grocers and bakers will be spared of paying the people who otherwise act as their proxies in important government offices. This percentage could easily compensate to bring down rates of essentials by a few rupees.

All this might seem too harsh, but this also explains the popular assertion, an expression of people’s cynicism and hopelessness with the ‘system’ and those comprising and running it. “Government is sleeping,” say many. Even though these expressions, owing to their repeated usage, have become sort of clichés, but faced with hopeless situations so frequently, people can’t help but blame the ruling classes for their ‘slumber’.

In ‘Alice in the Wonderland’, Tiger-Lily explains about the talking flowers to Alice. Tiger-Lily points out that the flowers that talk grow out of hard beds of ground. And “in most gardens”, Tiger-Lily says “they make the beds too soft – so the flowers are always asleep.” Isn’t it true that here too the rulers (and this includes bureaucracy too) have made their beds too soft – too soft – that they too are always asleep? When they wake up, they talk and talk nothing but lies, which only ensures more privileges and more perks – more soft beds for them and their ilk. Contrarily, the common people growing and living in the hard beds of ground talk of their hardship, their suffering and their misery. But nobody cares!

For the ordinary people here, it’s like the chore of the mythic Sisyphis. Their challenge is an endless pushing up of the boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll back; the chore to be repeated endlessly. Whitehead is right, in their enjoyment of power, our ruling classes have degenerated. And thanks to their lazy indulgence, they have perfected the art of pulling wool over the people’s eyes by repeatedly trumpeting ‘all is well’ when nothing actually is.

Unfortunate it is, but true nevertheless that Kashmiri society has, in general, permitted and patronized a suicidal situation here wherein ‘revolution’ has been confused with ‘sure-loser confrontations’. A good mass of society, in fact the most vibrant and productive chunk (the young) has somehow been led into believing that the panacea of the political uncertainty plaguing them and their society lies in throwing stones. So this is what they do, almost religiously — throw stones not only at the ‘government forces’ that represent and protect the ‘political status quo’, but also at the fellow Kashmiris. However, the real cure of this faulty belief lies in splitting the ‘political atom’ so as to separate this exclusive identification of violent physical altercations with ‘revolution’. In fact, the biggest revolution will undoubtedly be people recognizing and accepting the idea that revolution does not inevitably mean hate and war and cannot be brought about by attracting ‘avoidable’ harms to them, certainly not by crowding the graveyards by countless martyrs!

It also needs to be understood that revolutionary ideology is not confined to any specific limited formula and certainly no single individual could claim to possess that formula. Therefore, no individual or a group has a right to put people in the harm’s way by making them believe that a certain self-inflicting behavior is going to yield them salvation, when even the hindsight has it that it is not that simple. Provoking someone else’s children for suicidal defiance because of faulty belief in a particular means or tactics is outrageous!

“Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing,” says Saul Alinsky. This means that those who are, or claim to be the leaders of a ‘revolutionary movement’, must have certain degree of control over the flow of events. If they have it, their role as leaders is justified; if they don’t, then they are simply not there. No leader is worth his/her salt if he/she simply follows the waves of public rage without actually being able to regulate and channel it towards some ‘desired outcome’, which more than anything else has to be good for the general welfare of the people who are the basic source and hence intended beneficiaries of that revolution.

Leaders have to be able to gauge public moods well in advance as much as they have to anticipate and foresee the reactions of the adversary so as to minimize the costs for the recipient population and maximize their benefits.

It’s true that revolutions usually have ideologies that spur them on. But it is also important to understand that in the heat of conflict “ideologies tend to get smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and keys to the paradise”. This is dangerous because dogma is enemy of human freedom and must, as such, be watched carefully at every twist and turn of the revolutionary movement. And certainly no movement that revolves around the promise of greater political freedoms can be expected to reach the “logical conclusion” because certain dogmatists are leading from the front and the population is constantly fed unrealistic assertions about their ‘rigidity’ being the single greatest virtue that would deliver them from the clutches of the status quo. Real revolutions are brought about not by the hot, emotional and impulsive passions; they are possible on the basis of calculated and purposeful action drawn on the basis of an awareness of the realistic relationship between means and ends and how each determines the other. “The greatest hope for mankind lies in acceptance of the great law of change, for the clues to the rational action lie there in understanding of the principles of change.”

Rigidity is no virtue in politics, flexibility is. And flexibility does not necessarily mean sell-out, because, after all, different people, in different places, in different situations and in different times, think differently. This is how human brains are programmed to be. So, different people’s solutions and symbols of salvation have a tendency to be different. No one has a right to claim absolute copyright of truth, or revolution for that matter. This is where the political consensus becomes necessary. But no consensus is possible unless dogmas are done away with – ‘it’s my way or the highway’ kind of thinking is discouraged and the worthwhile suggestions on how to fertilize social change are heeded, irrespective of which group or individual is putting them forth.

DIFFERENCE, though an inherently natural and important behavioral characteristic, is also a dangerous trait in socio-psychological make-up. Beginning as a minor difference in (of) opinion, left unchecked and uncontained, it takes no time in acquiring monstrous proportions of difference of (in) interests. Once interests — be they selfish personal ones, or the social, political, cultural, religious, economic or strategic — are seen at loggerheads with those of the others, conflict is the only and an inevitable outcome. No doubt then, as William Ury puts it: “dealing with the differences is today one of the greatest challenges facing human beings.”

But what we are seeing happening these days is that the differences of opinions and worldviews are actually being exploited to breed conflict. And what is really unfortunate is that it is not only the regular “conflict entrepreneurs” running global networks of crime or politico-religious extremism who are doing it, the media too is doing it more openly and brazenly. This is why when someone talks of growing Islamophobia in the West or for that matter in India too as one of the underlying causes of “reactionary violent extremism” from the marginalized and pushed-to-wall Muslim populations, some television channels latch on to it to showcase their communal bias, and their illiteracy about the politics, international relations and conflict.

The conflict of interests between various communities in India is as old as the country itself. But in the face of the state’s failure in recognizing and addressing the sources of this communal strife, the polarization has only been growing with each passing day. And with the rightwing BJP capturing the centre-stage of Indian politics, its parental and sibling outfits in the far right have suddenly become moral vocal about their politics, creating a corresponding unease and fear among the religious minorities. Seeking its relevance in the changed situation, media has chipped in by replacing the reality with a constant stream of wild and self-serving fiction. It is simply legitimizing the worst prejudices of the masses and the paranoia of the outside world.

“Lurking beneath the surface of every society is the passionate yearning for a nationalistic cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver,” says Christopher Hedges in ‘War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning’. In the face of current political situation in India, what is perceived as a “nationalistic cause” has seemingly erased the anxiety of individual consciousness as more or less every section of the society, including media, seems to have “abandoned the individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise”. When this “crusade” is being embraced by the ‘entire’ society, the myths are bound to predetermine how everything is perceived.

Though a visible pro-right bias has been there all along, but since the rise of Narendra Modi, there has been a manifold increase in media partisanship as well. This is why today any dispassionate analyses of most of the television channels points to this bias and slant in favour of a particular community and naked prejudice against certain others.

Every society, ethnic group or religion nurtures certain myths, often centered around the creation of the nation or the movement itself. These myths lie unseen beneath the surface, waiting for the moment to rise, to define and glorify followers or members in times of crisis.

For the rightwing saffron brigade, this seems to be the “moment” they have been waiting for. National myths, writes Hedges, “are largely benign in times of peace, they are stoked by the media,” preached by religious groups or “championed in absurd historical dramas that are always wildly popular during war.” So in the wake of visible polarization in India across the religious lines media is simply igniting the “national myths”, besides giving some people and groups a nobility and greatness they never possessed. We have seen this happen in former Yugoslavia where nationalist propaganda was pumped out over television which provoked not only ancient hatreds but also rivalry and finally war between various ethnic groups; it happened in Rwanda where radio incited enmity between Hutus and Tutsis to ignite the history’s worst genocide wherein 800,000 Tutsis were killed in just 100 days; and India cannot be an exception if measures are not initiated in earnest to stem this rot.

Here too, media has been coerced, cajoled and corrupted to follow a particular line bereft of all objectivity. So the facts have already become as interchangeable as opinions. The facts that are inconvenient are discarded or denied and even the obvious inconsistencies are ignored not only by the media but even the people in general who were intoxicated by the newly found sense of national pride and “identity”. I am sure — and the history provides hindsight as well –- a day will come when all these myths will implode, and people will start questioning the motives and actions of all those who are creating these myths. Media cannot escape blame for its share of complicity then.

Raouf Rasool

“Padshaham Drag Wouth, Ada Palaav Khiyew!” This is exactly how it is for the political bosses who treat us to hollow rhetoric — of whooping figures and romantic fantasies. Every now and then we are told what the magnanimity of New Delhi looks like – most part of the Prime Minister’s Rs 80,000 crore package announced for J&K “has already been expended” – although a parliamentary panel last week punctured holes in this claim when it pointed to the tardy pace of fund release under this package, and also went on to say that only a paltry sum has been released and expended thus far, and that too without much “visibility”. This is how the business of whopping figures actually goes in Kashmir.

By the way how many people in Kashmir know how many thousands make a crore? The moment one gets into the area of lakhs and above, say a crore, the ordinary people are completely out of touch, and no longer interested, because the figures have gone above their experience and hence are almost meaningless. So the figures no longer impress anyone here for the simple reason that the ordinary people’s hindsight has nothing of the sort which would lend any meaning to huge financial figures.

There can’t be a bigger challenge to an ordinary Kashmiri’s intellect, imagination and creativity than finding and locating the areas where these visibly mammoth sums have been or are being invested to bring about any betterment in the life situations of common people. Money has been and is no doubt being invested, but its benefits are confined to a limited coterie of people who plan, sanction and execute various projects, usually more on the paper and less on the ground! For a place which is continuously refusing to budge from being the second-most corrupt state, no amount of politically-loaded financial rhetoric is going to bring about any change unless and until something is done to stop the pilferage of public funds. This obviously needs a massive political will, which won’t come about unless the political leadership itself is willing to be corruption-free.

Those placed on other side of the political mainstream are no different when it comes to communicating with the people on a general basis without fracturing messages into specifics of people’s experiences. Their assertions too are just rhetoric and carry very little meaning. This simple difference can be explained by the fact that there is a huge difference between being informed of the death of people killed in each bout of public unrest here – which have unfortunately become a statistic – or the death of a close friend or loved one or a member of one’s family. In the latter it is the full emotional impact of the finality of tragedy that lends it meaning. But this simple logic is unfortunately not so easily understood by our political bosses, who, cutting across the board, have perfected the art of meaningless rhetoric so much so that common people are bombarded with it 24×7 and 365 days a year.

A classic example of the failure to communicate because the leader has gone completely outside the experience of the people is the attempt by a ‘preacher’ to indicate to the ordinary, poor people the bankruptcy of their prevailing values. “Take my word for it – roads, schools and hospitals are just meaningless as long as you are not free, you don’t possess piety. If you are not free to decide your political fate, what will you do even if your children are educated, you own a well-to-do house and a car, have money in the bank and other luxuries of life – that just won’t bring you happiness.” The response without exception is: “Yeah. Let’s be the judge of that one – we will let you know after we get it all.”

For the past some time now, and particularly after some shady recruitments in Khadi and Village Industries Board (KVIB) and elsewhere came to light, National Conference (NC) working president Omar Abdullah has been accusing the PDP-BJP government of “destroying public institutions” in the state by sidelining legal and established recruitment processes. The trend, he says, is marring the merit and leaving future of the youth in the hands of “corrupt politicians”.

Even though there is lot of merit in Omar Abdullah’s allegations, but then this is something that has all along been a characteristic feature of governance here. Omar Abdullah himself cannot escape this blame, for the sheer reason that his own government – when he was Chief Minister of J&K from 2008-2014 was no different. His government also did everything it could to destroy public institutions not only through shady recruitments but by all other means as well.

Corruption and nepotism is certainly not exclusive to the current dispensation, it was the order of the day during Omar Abdullah’s tenure also. In his government too, appointments didn’t happen on merit. One can go on counting countless instances during his stewardship wherein merit was simply sidelined, not only in the lower-rung officialdom but even in top institutions including even the universities just to accommodate blue-eyed persons and the kith and kin of the then ruling elite – the NC-Congress combine.

So it is not that the corruption in recruitments, for instance, is something unique, and is happening now only; this has been there all along. The problem with the kind of political culture prevalent here is that every single actor wants the people to believe that s(he) and their party are sided with the angels while as all others are just crooks and thugs! But the reality is that in Kashmir’s political amphitheatre there are no sacred cows. Power comes with certain privileges and perks, and always with sufficient leverage to break and bend rules to secure one’s ends. Thus far there is not a single party or individual worth even name who could claim moral high ground on this count.

So while there is some substance in his allegations, but coming in from someone like Omar Abdullah certainly takes away much of punch and appeal from it. The reason being that when he had a chance and could have created a different template, he did not! So today whatever he says to target the current regime can be flipped over inwards towards him and his government too – and there he is also seen cutting as very sorry figure!

Omar Abdullah claims “when our government was in power, we gave due credence to all the set procedures and every recruitment was as per merit.” One can’t help but laugh away at this assertion with absolute disdain — because this is nothing but a brazen lie. His government has been no different than the current one, or for that matter the previous ones headed by his father or grandfather or someone else. Unfortunate though, but it is true that successive governments in J&K have all been involved in corruption and nepotism, and in other shady deals which have subverted the set norms and procedures not only in matters of recruitments but on all other counts as well.

Lord Acton’s famous words – “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – are kind of prophetic for Kashmir’s political culture. Here the absolute freedom to bend and break rules and indulge in all sorts of corruption comes naturally and necessarily with political power. And our politicians of all hues and leanings have always made best of this windfall. In fact general public’s ‘frame of reference’ is completely blank for want of a political figure or a party which could be assigned the aura of infallible integrity in matters of governance, including of course affecting the recruitments on merit. Indeed one of the major causal factors for continuation and prolongation of political conflict in Kashmir is high incidence of corruption and almost absolute lack of transparency in governance here.

William Ury once said: “dealing with the differences is today one of the greatest challenges facing human beings.” True, what we are seeing happening these days is that the differences of opinions and worldviews are actually being exploited to breed conflict. And what is really unfortunate is that it is not only the regular “conflict entrepreneurs” running global networks of crime or politico-religious extremism who are doing it, the media too is doing it more openly and brazenly. This is why when someone talks of growing Islamophobia in the West or for that matter in India too as one of the underlying causes of “reactionary violent extremism”, some television channels latch on to it to showcase their communal bias, and their illiteracy about the politics, international relations and conflict.

The conflict of interests between various communities in India is as old as the country itself. But given the state’s failure in recognizing and addressing the sources of communal strife, the polarization has only been growing with each passing day. With the rightwing BJP capturing centre-stage of Indian politics, its parental and sibling outfits in the far right have suddenly become moral vocal about their politics, creating a corresponding unease and fear among the religious minorities. Seeking its relevance in the changed situation, media has chipped in by replacing the reality with a constant stream of wild and self-serving fiction. It is simply legitimizing the worst prejudices of the masses and the paranoia of the outside world.

“Lurking beneath the surface of every society is the passionate yearning for a nationalistic cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver,” says Christopher Hedges in ‘War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning’. In the face of current political situation in India, what is perceived as a “nationalistic cause” has seemingly erased the anxiety of individual consciousness as more or less every section of the society, including media, seems to have “abandoned the individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise”. When this “crusade” is being embraced by the ‘entire’ society, the myths are bound to predetermine how everything is perceived.

Though a visible pro-right bias has been there all along, but since the rise of Narendra Modi, there has been a manifold increase in media partisanship as well. This is why today any dispassionate analyses of most of the television channels points to this bias and slant in favour of a particular community and naked prejudice against certain others.

Every society, ethnic group or religion nurtures certain myths, often centered around the creation of the nation or the movement itself. These myths lie unseen beneath the surface, waiting for the moment to rise, to define and glorify followers or members in times of crisis.

For the rightwing saffron brigade, this seems to be the “moment” they have been waiting for. National myths, writes Hedges, “are largely benign in times of peace, they are stoked by the media,” preached by religious groups or “championed in absurd historical dramas that are always wildly popular during war.” So in the wake of visible polarization in India across the religious lines media is simply igniting the “national myths”, besides giving some people and groups a nobility and greatness they never possessed. We have seen this happen in former Yugoslavia where nationalist propaganda was pumped out over television which provoked not only ancient hatreds but also rivalry and finally war between various ethnic groups; it happened in Rwanda where radio incited enmity between Hutus and Tutsis to ignite the history’s worst genocide wherein 800,000 Tutsis were killed in just 100 days; and India cannot be an exception if measures are not initiated in earnest to stem this rot.

Here too, media has been coerced, cajoled and corrupted to follow a particular line bereft of all objectivity. So the facts have already become as interchangeable as opinions. The facts that are inconvenient are discarded or denied and even the obvious inconsistencies are ignored not only by the media but even the people in general who were intoxicated by the newly found sense of national pride and “identity”. I am sure — and the history provides hindsight as well –- a day will come when all these myths will implode, and people will start questioning the motives and actions of all those who are creating these myths. Media cannot escape blame for its share of complicity then.

“As a young man in early nineties, most of my actions were, instead of rational thinking or logic, programmed by the adrenaline rush in my body. But today I am different; I have learned to tolerate dissent, and I am tolerant of even the worst of my detractors.”

This is how one of Kashmir’s ‘leaders’ rationalized his personal ‘evolution’. Interestingly, his description of himself could be taken as a sort of mirror, which also reflects how exactly most us are. Years of overly politicized situation have taught all of us many lessons — in very hard way. Needless to say that Kashmir has evolved a great deal in terms of how people understand politics. But it is also true that those who should actually have grown up, whose political growth matters more than that of the common people, are continuously refusing to grow. They lack the grey matter to grasp and understand change, and they deliberately play naïve because status quo suits them. Although majority of people are no longer impressed by the locus classicus of their brand of rhetorical jingoism, yet those specializing in this politics are in no mood to let it go. They have sort of taken it as a given that whether anybody likes them or not, heeds them or not, they would nevertheless sit on people’s heads as ‘leaders’, and refuse to budge.

“Yes I know people no longer share same kind of enthusiasm, but …” and then they will go on concocting reasons to blame everything on the political ‘other’. Instead of acknowledging their own failures, they will blame it on the ‘adversary’. This has all along been an art perfected with great finesse in Kashmir by almost all brands of politics. You would see separatists doing it — blaming both Pakistan as well as New Delhi, and at times “international community” and of course “Indian civil society” also, but never ever would they acknowledge their own follies. Even unionists or mainstream parties do it. They blame everything on the Centre and those sitting right of the centre. They blame it on Pakistan. Government blames the Opposition and latter repays it in kind. With almost every party having sounded the bugle for next year’s elections, these blame-games are growing shriller by the day. For the common people, who are way too mature than their ‘leaders’, they  would only wish these mud-slinging games were organized into something like premier leagues, so that people could enjoy watching it on TV while munching on potato chips and popcorn!

As for the evolution, yes it is true that common Kashmiri has over the years evolved into being very tolerant. Indeed this adjective ‘tolerant’ so fittingly describes the common Kashmiri today that one wonders if at all there is another word that could be such a typical fit. We make ‘tolerant’ jokes behind the backs of our fellow people, about their clothes, their complexions, their manners, speech, families and what not. Even when we do not like most of other people, but we tolerate them nevertheless. We do not like when someone challenges the very basics of our faith, political or otherwise. But instead of saying so we simply tolerate it because we often confuse expression of dissent with lack of “decent mannerisms”. We know we are being cheated by the politics that is played with us, and on our heads, yet we simply tolerate it, for this is what the state systems, as also those pitted against these systems, expect of us. Status quo suits all. No one wants the apple cart disturbed beyond a point. Everyone wants us to be tolerant of their politics and restive about ‘their’ adversary’s. And we as the very tolerant people who take great pride in this tolerance, have made absolute tolerance such a behavioral trait that we no longer feel like trying to change anything. Everything is just fine for we have learned how to tolerate even the intolerable. Long live tolerance!

Every manufacturer, the simple business logic goes, constantly tries to come up with goods that are in great public demand. Personal likes and dislikes doesn’t matter much, because at the end of the day, every business is market-driven, and in order to be successful one has to cater to the requirements of the consumers. Nobody sells motorboats in a desert or cars at sea. Same is the case with almost every kind of service-provider. They have to tailor their services as per the needs and requirements of their clientele. It is actually the needs and orientations of the clients that determine what kind of goods and services must be made available.

Howsoever those in the business may want to brag about it, politics is about the people, their needs, requirements, urges and aspirations. It cannot operate in isolation of the people’s life situations. Therefore, a successful political organizer will always try and fracture his or her politics with minute details of people’s life, something people can relate to and identify with. Any politician talking just rhetoric, devoid of real and identifiable vocabulary, does so at his/her peril, for he/she is then overlooking the basic nuance of politics – communication. A politician could lack anything, and yet be successful, but if communication is not there, then she/she too is just not there.

With this basic wisdom laid down, it should not be difficult to understand why current breed of Kashmir politicians is so out of sync with the realities on the ground. Their main undoing is their inability to maintain rapport with the common people, their needs and requirements, urges and aspirations. Instead of breaking down their rhetoric in terms of something ‘their people’ understand and relate with, they tend to remain so etched up in emotionalism, that most of what they speak and do makes no, or very little sense for the common people. This is perhaps why people simply turn away saying ‘Ah here is the same old stuff …’ when they are, day-in and day-out, treated to same redundant political speeches that brag much and mean very little. They are not interested in the verbal jugglery of NC or Congress or for that matter that of the ruling coalition of PDP and BJP, because they know how pathetically bad each of these parties have been (read are) on the governance front. They are not even interested in the locus classicus of the separatist politics because they have seen it to be a saga of missed opportunities and absolute opportunism. What they are interested in is how this government is able to mitigate their problems and end their sufferings. They are interested in and they certainly deserve good, transparent and sensitive governance.

Sigmund Freud has long back talked about people’s urge and need for looking for familiarity, and how easy it is for them to expect only the familiar outcomes even in case of entirely different situations and circumstance. Human cognitive behavior is such that it is, as if, resistant to looking beyond the relational schemas for processing of social (political) information. It has long been one of the grand ideas in psychology that people internalize their relationships with significant others, which influences their experience of subsequent relationships and their sense of self.  Unfortunately much of our politics, particularly in Kashmir, completely neglects the impact of internally represented information — the way people here process it and attach meanings to it. An assessment of people’s relational schemas, their cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of how they have seen and understood New Delhi’s and successive state governments’ behaviour over a period of time and what they expect of them now, could be of great help to understand why there is a terrible disconnect between Delhi and Srinagar even when the former feels complacent about the relative calm having returned here for quite some time now, or why ordinary people (those who are not politically connected with any camps or individuals) are finding it difficult to relate with the local government and its institution. Both New Delhi and the local government here must understand that they have to do something to bridge this disconnect. And for this they will have to move beyond traditional speeches and stances, and instead embark on something that is in sync with the people’s needs and urges, their hopes and expectations.

Even as it is a known fact that all revolutions must have ideologies to spurn them on, however, it is also true that “in the heat of the conflict these ideologies tend to be smelt into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth”. And this is where the tragedy lies, because dogma is the enemy of human freedom and no revolution aiming for people’s ‘freedom’ could afford getting stuck in rigid dogmas. Human spirit, and hence their freedom too glows from that inner small doubt whether we are right. No wonder that the best possible definition of ‘education’ springs from a simple confession – ‘I know nothing’, from where it then progresses to ‘knowing thy self’.

Those who think they know everything and believe with complete certainty that they possess the right knowledge and theirs is the ultimate wisdom of thought and action, are dark inside. Now if this is the trait of an ordinary individual, a commoner, it may not affect many beyond his or her self, and may be immediate family and friends. But if a political leader is infested with the disease, one can only imagine the ramifications – it will darken the world outside with cruelty, pain and injustice.

So a political organizer, instead of getting stuck in rigid dogma, will have to prove flexible enough to ensure requisite maneuverability to his or her politics. This is not to say that such a political leader has to be rudderless; instead the strategic flexibility only ensures better sense of direction and adequate hold over the flow of events. Those who are sure about their swimming skills and know how to control and maneuver in a given situation while riding the waves can afford plunge into the sea; those who rely on and simply resign their fate to the flow of waves, will prove imprudent even going near water!

Humanity’s hope lies in the acceptance of the great law of change. Times change, and with it change everything. It is general understanding of the principles of change that provides clues of rational action and an awareness of realistic relationship between political action and its desired goal. Even if the desired goal may remain static over a period of time, yet the changing times do influence and alter the requirements of means employed for reaching that goal. Indeed no other factor is as important as time in deciding what means are to be employed at which time for a desired political affect.

So a political organizer, instead of getting stuck in rigid dogma, will have to prove flexible enough to ensure requisite maneuverability to his or her politics. This is not to say that such a political leader has to be rudderless; instead the strategic flexibility only ensures better sense of direction and adequate hold over the flow of events. Those who are sure about their swimming skills and know how to control and maneuver in a given situation while riding the waves can afford plunge into the sea; those who rely on and simply resign their fate to the flow of waves, will prove imprudent even going near water!

History is witness that all societies have, historically, discouraged and even penalized ideas and writings that threatened the status quo of thought and action, in politics as well as other spheres of human activity. No wonder when it comes to the literature on the realities of political and social change, we are walking a veritable barren desert. Kashmir certainly has not been any exception in this regard. Here also the ideas, leave aside writings, that threatened the political status quo of both ruling and those not-ruling-but-wanting-to-rule as well as all others on either side and in-between the two, were not only discouraged but also pressured and persecuted. No wonder then Kashmir has been made into a land of ‘agents’, for everybody is framed this or that way so much so that everyone seems somebody’s ‘agent’. So where is the space for a rational and objective discourse? As long as the rational thinking despite its objectivity and strength of argument continues to be labeled as unpatriotic, subversive, spawned in hell, no one would dare think objectively. Even if some do, they won’t spell it out. And those who do, do so at their own peril. God bless those ‘mad’ people who dare say what they feel must be said!