Editorial: No more rhetoric please
Criticizing the Indian establishment and the intelligentsia is a favorite past time of many leaders, be it separatists or the mainstream politicians. However, the issue assumes some significance when a member of the ruling party tries to raise his voice.
On Monday State’s Finance Minister, Dr Haseeb Drabu said that the Indian thinkers and policymakers never engage in Kashmir. He said that they are unable to understand and often misinterpret the real problems confronting the State and its people.
While delivering a keynote lecture ‘Growth Prospects for Jammu & Kashmir’ at the 6th foundation day of Pune International Centre (PIC), the finance minister lost no time by announcing that the Indian thinkers and policymakers never engage in Kashmir and they are, therefore, unable to understand and often misinterpret the real problems confronting the State.
The finance minister was candid in admitting that the apathy of Indian thinkers and policymakers in understanding the trials, tribulations and social evolutions in Jammu and Kashmir is one of the reasons for the pestering problems confronting the state.
Ironically, this face of Kashmir’s association with mainland India has been a point of debate over the past two years now.
It is a fact that the disengagement of Indian civil society is a corollary of Indian intellectual’s apathy towards the state. The mood is becoming grimmer with every passing day and pseudo intellectuals who claim to be of Kashmiri origin along with other hate mongers are leaving no stone unturned to demonize Kashmiri society and it beliefs base on the principle of age traditions of mutual coexistence.
Kashmir has been left far too much to be looked through security prism only. There is no independent thinking on why people in Kashmir are reacting the way they are. JK had the finest, most radical and comprehensive reforms in many sectors and these reforms find no mention by the Indian thinkers. The reason is that the non state players and actors are not allowing development of a culture of all inclusiveness in today’s highly radicalized environs.
But, raising fingers on the India intelligentsia is not going to solve our problems. What the state’s finance Minister has tried to achieve by saying this, he alone can deliberate, but we need to ask those who wield power in the state as to what have they been doing to set a change process into motion.
The party that the finance minister belongs to broke all political traditions in the state and aligned with a right wing party raising false hopes among the masses that things are headed for a big change. However, on ground the situation is turning murkier with every passing day and the rulers are watching all this with helplessness.
Today, what we are witnessing in the state that massive polarization is taking place and the state continues to watch in desperation. Just to quote an example, on Saturday last what happened in Jammu should have been a wakeup call for the government as armed men continued to roam free on the roads in Jammu on the eve of birth day celebrations of the late Maharaja.
But the politics of compulsion and sticking to power let the ruling party eat a humble pie. This should not have happened and more so, the government should have acted on this, because silence on such crucial issues will let the ethos and tradition of mutual understanding and brotherhood wither way.
KV Correspondent
