The Fake Killings in Kashmir

When I was reading Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown there were some passages that I read with tinges of latent skepticism not because I found them mendacious but they were too disturbing. In one section he describes how the Indian army executes a vindictive, ruthless attack upon a peace-loving Kashmiri village of bhands. The jawans (Indian army soldiers) not only destroy the village, they also rape the protagonist’s mother and torture his father to death. Shalimar the Clown becomes a terrorist to extract revenge.

For a long time I kept thinking about what alienation does to you and what havoc these stray spurts of brutalities can orchestrate. I hate terrorism, I hate it from the greatest depths of my rationality and I can never condone acts of terrorism, but the focus of my rumination right now is not how insidious terrorism is but why some people become terrorists (and the counter-argument would be, why most don’t, but that’s another issue).

If a few days ago I had read about the fake killings in Kashmir I’d have said, “Well, these guys ask for such incidents because they give in too easily to violence and when so much bloodshed is happening such accidents are prone to take place.”

But the more I think about such “accidents”, the more I, in a bizarre fashion you may think, think about such things, the more I seem to understand the philosophy of violence. This is more so while I’m reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal in which he describes how the sepoys butchered European women and children and how like insects they ran helter-skelter when attacked by the British and how their acts ushered the complete ruination of Delhi. Given a chance, and accompanied by a mob, even an “ordinary” citizen turns into a demon and perpetrates acts that can make you retch.

Violence instigates violence and no matter how we argue about the goodness or the badness of certain religious communities and sects, the ground reality is, violence breeds violence. It’s not about whether violence is good or bad, the point is that it happens, and you water the buds of violence by shedding innocent blood.

And this violence, however it manifests, reaches our towns and cities and haunts us for generations. Thousands sometimes have to pay for the reckless follies of a few.

To be frank I don’t have many sympathies for the Kashmiri people because their tears are only reserved for their dead, and not for the ones their sons, brothers and husbands kill with regularity. They never take a stand for the causes of other communities (for instance, the Kashmiri pandits). My only concern is, when the army kills and rapes the innocents, the justified anger turns into a fertile ground where various terrorist organizations sow the seeds of violence and reap the harvest gleefully. Why give them such fertile ground? And why should human-rights violations happen in our country whether it’s Nithari or Jammu and Kashmir?