In the long night when the darkness had enveloped the bloody day of June 29, I was unable to convince myself to sleep. Awfully strange thoughts visited me every second and I had bizarre fears calling on me from every corner of my being. Two sleep inducing pills had not been able to shut my consciousness away from the blood smeared and butchered faces that we had just returned to the dust. Every part of my being was asking me why were the three innocent boys killed the way they were? In the courtyard of a residence in the deep corner of the S.K.Colony, some one- and-a-half kilometer away from the K.P. Road, three young boys were killed, two died on the spot, and the other on the way to the hospital. I had seen their blood bathed bodies and bullet massacred faces as they were sleeping on their last bed. How could I wipe the sight from my eyes? Tears rolled down my eyes as the heat of torturing dead images simmered into my being.
When the tears dried up, when my heart began to beat in its abnormally normal course, and when the unknown light had lit my being, then the “whatness” of all events (present and past), flashed before my eyes. It then occurred to me that whatever happened today was a real simulacrum of numberless events that had happened in the past in almost all the corners of the Kashmir. We have lost more than one lac lives to the bullets made in the name of national security. Thousands of young men who had left their homes have never returned back; were they killed or eaten up by the wild animals, we may never know. Many families have lost all hopes of seeing their sons again; many brides were widowed before the mehandi on their hands did fade; we have given birth to many orphan babies, to unnumbered graves and to many psychiatric disorders. But, why are we treated like this? What stuff are we made of that all this inhumanity is perpetuated time and again on our shoulders? After 60 years of turmoil, the world community is still undecided about the real relevance and grievances of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. I must be excused to write world community. Why, in the first place, should the World Powers bother about Kashmiris being treated like wild animals or the way Jews were in the concentration camps of Nazis? “Such stuff happens” is a remark backed by the most Powerful Country about the recent war on Afghanistan. What should we expect about Kashmir? Leave alone the world community, we are looked upon as second citizens in our (many would not agree to call it our) own country. In the capital city of the democratic India, to be a Kashmiri, no matter whether you are scientist, a professor or a common man, is to be an acknowledged terrorist, who is looked upon with the surveillance of a suspicious eye everywhere. When you book a hotel, or start looking for a rented residence, then the identity crises dawns upon, and one starts scratching ones skin and biting ones nails as to who actually we are? Indians? No, we are not treated like the citizens of the other Indian states. They are not killed in fake encounters; they are not killed for picking up a stone in the protest. They are not regarded as second class citizens in the big cities of the country. Who are we then, if we are not like Indians? We are wild animals! And this is what dawned upon me that night.
The moment this “flash of greater experience” lighted my ignorant mind; all mysteries were solved at once. I began to see a measured method in everything we have experienced so far and are experiencing in the present times. My heart felt light as if the bond connecting with the human existence had gone past all posts of relevance. I had no regrets that eleven innocent heads were butchered by the security forces since last thirty days; It doesn`t bother me that eleven parents were left without support for their old age, that their future bread earners were turned eternally silent. Security forces are there for it. They have the mission to restore peace and order in the state where inhuman beings/ wild wild animals live. Thanks to the state administration that it has proved once again that they refuse to acknowledge that people here are Human beings. What is happening in the state from the last month, and more recently what have the people in S.K. Colony, Anantnag witnessed goes on to prove that we are not humans and that is why we are being butchered like this, that is why our brothers and sons are being killed inside the premises of our homes, that is why our homes are stone pelted, window panes broken down by the security forces , water tanks fired upon, and if one asks a question or raises a remark, the voice is made eternally silent. Wild animals are treated like this? Not all wild animals but those who go crazy. Even animals have the right to life, we don`t have that too. We are no longer safe in our own homes. The state administration, particularly the police, the security forces are our real guardians who we must thank for they have taken us out of the ignorant belief that the Kashmiri is the son of Adam.
Therefore, it is not very novel and hard to understand that that we are the wild animals of a state where a teacher is sued by law if he punishes a vagrant student. But our security forces have the unbridled license to punish and kill every voice that raises against the atrocities perpetuated by the state agencies, he can do whatever he likes, he can stop any one on the road side, ask for his identity, slap anyone without reason, put anyone behind the bars with or without any reason and then set him free with the smell of some fresh notes, they can storm houses with bullets and stones, encroach into our personal space, disgrace our sisters, and worst rape and kill them. And when this all happens, our objective electronic media remains dumb and deaf to the barking animals, and shows least concern. But, given all this, we do need such terrifying, frightening, barbaric and hostile forces because, after all even in this, our country does show a real concern to see us cultured or to be more precise tame animals so that the circus is smoothly run before the world community. However, as I came to understand all this, a question is still bothering me? Why don`t we have animal rights? At least the right to life? What frenzy is this on part of our state or the national administration? Yeut Matchar Kyah?
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