Editorial 'INTIFADA IN KASHMIR?' in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 31INTIFADA IN KASHMIR? July 2010 issue

INTIFADA IN KASHMIR?

The trite wisdom that a knife can be used for life-saving surgical exercise as well as for murderous assault applies equally to stones too. That is what one witnessed during the Palestinian intifada (‘shaking off’) against the Zionist State, which is being copied by our Kashmiri protesters now. And the lithic missiles anywhere are no less harmful than knives and sometimes as fatal as bullets too. Since the last one month or more Kashmir valley is again agog with agitations, this time in the ‘stony phase’. The unfortunate death of a nine year old boy, due to a tear-gas shell, served as further incitement to more incidents of stone-throwing in which mainly young persons, with no gender discrimination, participated and scores of police officers were also injured. The rubber and lead fired by the police, and possibly in some cases their own stones misdirected, have already taken more than a dozen lives of protesters or curious watchers and the valley is virtually in flames. Clearly a method is there behind this madness and it is reliably learnt that making martyrs has also become a lucrative business. The domestic power struggle between Abdullahs and Muftis is also said to be an important cause. However, one should not forget the root cause – the international India-Pakistan Dispute on the status and fate of Kashmir. Fundamentalist Muslims in Kashmir are as stubborn and crazy as those in other countries and had, in the name of their liberation struggle, the guts, and also no compunction, to cruelly and successfully carry out an ethnic cleansing in the valley, right under the nose of the mighty Indian Army, by expelling lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits, the original Hindu inhabitants there, and are now itching to do the same even to the armed might of the state. No doubt they are assisted to the hilt by the neighboring Pakistan but the question is how long we Indians are going to pamper these ‘spoilt children’ – by pumping lakhs of crores of taxpayers’ moneys to ‘develop’, ‘educate’, ‘suppress’ and ‘integrate’ them and also sacrificing thousands of lives – who anyway seem to be beyond any reform on the last count. We feel it is high time that India and Pakistan bilaterally, or better under international mediation, sit together, seriously negotiate and settle the dispute – if inevitable, even by some sort of partition of the accursed State §§§