It has never been so hard to have an honest conversation about Kashmir
as they are today?
How, for instance, do we understand, why 20-year-old Ishaq Parray whose academic excellence earned him the name of Newton (after Isaac Newton) aspired to be a doctor, but died a militant. At his modest village home his family showed me his book shelf still stacked with tomes on chemistry & physics and his A-grade report cards. His sister is married to a police officer; his elder brother is unemployed with a M.A degree. But Newton’s father told me militancy had little to do with jobs and opportunities. “Newton was brilliant; he could have got any degree, any job he wanted.” Other parents sent their sons away from Kashmir thinking distance would be a curative- like Abdul Rashid Bhat, the father of Burhan Wani’s successor, Zakir Bhat. Abdul Rashid, a government civil engineer sent Zakir to an engineering college in Chandigarh. He too excelled at studies and his father proudly showed me certificates of national carom championships Zakir had won. None of this stopped Zakir from picking up the gun.
Laptops instead of stones, as the Prime Minister once proposed, won’t change much. The problem is elsewhere. And Kashmir is staring down an abyss.
AAP’s failure to handle education may be a matter of perception. Delhi’s dwindling greens and smog offer a clearer case of loss of interest. The Yamuna, the various gardens and parks, the ridge—Delhi has so much nature worth saving. But the city couldn’t even save its core icon: the ‘Hall of Nations’. It was recently razed to dust overnight though a court had allowed further hearing. The smog will ensure that passers by will not miss the beautiful structure. Its architectural glory must live on in a postal stamp that marked its creation.
The current phase of our aspiration for glory began with the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The Congress was firmly in command of Delhi government. Its elderly leader rejected all criticism of the demolition drive initiated by builders of new structures. In the altered city, AAP’s election victories felt as if a patient was determined to scream despite a broken heart.
You need not be a political pundit to figure out that AAP was a party only in name. It will be equally wrong to conclude that it was a movement. AAP’s second victory was a mid-summer night’s dream. Even in memory, it feels nice to have been fooled, by nobody other than one’s own human right to hope. Historian Rajmohan Gandhi was reported to have said that the atmosphere surrounding AAP’s surge was reminiscent of the 1920s. He was right, though not accurate. After the Commonwealth Games’ disaster, AAP gave Delhi a moment of fantasy. The recent municipal elections imply that the fantasy has passed. If the city wants to exercise its imagination again, it must recreate a sense of community, but this can’t be a political project.