New post (223) : Kashmir perspectives : By "a migrant".
Reproduced below in support [but without the author's permission.]
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HOPE VS HOPE
OUR’S ALIVE, THEIR’S LOST
Alka Lahori
We are into 23rd year of exile where pain has turned panacea and wait for return longer, yet slender thread of Hope keep the memories of home alive. Home is where heart is and heart is where Hope is-- Hope of a sweet reunion with Home, or with own self, the ‘soul’ which refused to ‘migrate’ and has since remained trapped within the four walls, and every night, when conscious self goes to sleep, is wandering from corner to corner, meadows and cowsheds, as if looking for its lost nears and dears.
Exodus Day ( Jan 20th) brings alive the horror of that fateful night when loudspeakers perched atop mosques blared ominous messages for us ‘ Merge or Purge’, ‘we want Pakistan, with your women folk but not you’, ‘ we want Nizam-e-Mustafa’ etc. How I wish I were a painter, I would have recreated and frozen the pathos of the situation like this—Fleeing KP men, harried and dumbfound, barely holding the loosening turbans on to their heads, and tail end of KP women’s upper layer of long traditional head gear ‘Tarang’ flying in the air clutching girls tightly to the waist, frantically waving and imploring unresponsive bus driver and passing vehicles to take them to next safe destination; and gun toting Muslim neighbours cheering, jeering and spouting ... ‘final nail in your coffin’.
Indeed, final nail in the coffin it was meant to be. As a matter of fact they had been at this ‘hammering’ job for quite a long time— 1931, ‘51,’75 till the final push of 90’s, creating the Great Divide and turning it into between Them and Us.
Perhaps (mis)led by the theory that everything is fair in love and war, but the situation neither fitted in the bill of strict love nor war. It was outright brutal, it was treacherous and it was betrayal, which goes against the norms of the game of love and war. Almost every KP, who fled under the dark cover of that fateful night has a ‘Brutus, Yee too” story to tell. Blindfolded and gang-raped, Mrs. Ganjoo could recognize the voice of her neighbour as one among the culprits; it was the female neighbour who pointed Bal Krishen Ganjoo to militants hiding in a rice bin on his attic; it was again at the instance of their neighbours that militants came calling at Pt. Sarwanand Kaul Premi’s house only to create bloody mayhem later. It was either a neighbour, a close friend, a confidante or an office colleague who acted a la ‘Brutus’ to drill the ‘final nail’.
The night saw the murder of all that existed between Them and Us-- goodwill and trust, built over centuries of bonhomie and togetherness. After all the hapless community living on social fringes had yielded all the space, economic and political, in return for an unspoken and unwritten bond for a security cover if anything untoward happened. But the ‘Brutus’ act had undone that bond and broken the trust, and both went their separate ways.
But dead do resurrect from gave, as do the living dig a grave for themselves. For us these 23 years have been the journey of re-awakening and self-discovery, of rekindling faith in self and moving from despair to hope, from strength to strength and regaining self-esteem, we so carelessly had given up at the altar of communal harmony and India’s secularism. It has been a journey of great realization that we still have it in us to turn adversity into opportunity and write big success stories while in a state of exile. So in more than one ways we have turned tables on our coffin makers and doomsayers, who had written us off as people who would not survive the scorching heat of plains and melt away into dark corners of history.
And 23 years down the line, for them, as people, it has been a case of Situation Lost, where most of their dreams have come unstuck, hopes dashed and credibility down to dumps. The ‘movement’ they flagged off with gun-salutes has fizzled out midway, the gung-ho about a tango dance with Pakistan has gone awry, war cry for Azadi is non-starter; even unofficial partial Islamic system has brought more social malaises and miseries in its wake-- thrown up an ultra elite Upper Middle Class who merrily defy its code of conduct and rural poor following extremist ideology. Kashmir today is riven in middle and many layers down on economic and class lines-- a short distance away from what Pakistan is today, ready to explode.
END
The "tormented" have - arisen from the proverbial ashes !
While the "tormentors" are clutching at straws blowing in the wind.........
Charlie Brown
