By: Shadab Bashir Editorial Kashmir Thoughts
With the arrival of spring Kashmir is looking tremendously beautiful, visitors are coming in hordes from different part of the world. Hoteliers, Shikara-walas, Shawl-walas, and many more can be seen haggling with holiday-makers. Serpentine queues of vehicles are giving tough time to drivers and passengers, but probably this is the only place in the entire world where traffic jam is a metaphor and analogy of peace for politicians and for those who are at the helm of affairs.
Our politicians have entirely different parameters of defining peace. Performing elections on gun point, imposing curfew after killing a youth, arranging concerts for a musician like Zubin Mehta, and caging the sentiments of those who remind them of history; all these things are a “peace process” for them.
Perhaps, surprisingly external and internal mechanism of a so-called peace process complicates the prevalent situation of Kashmir. They release white pigeons in air as a symbol of peace, but at the same time they train their guns and trigger-out bullets on common Kashmiris. Both the things cannot be tolerated, and it is really a hypocritical approach.
One can analyze that they do not what permanent peace with dignity rather they long for a silence that too for a limited time. And as far as local politicians are concerned, they do not probably have any misconception about Kashmir problem yet they want to create illusions. They try their all potential of politics to please their bosses at New Delhi.
It is an unguided debate swirling around Kashmir that why Omer Abdullah as a Chief Minister is not colliding head-on with New Delhi to revoke draconian laws like AFSPA and work of the betterment and dignity of Kashmiri people. Perhaps, in reality, destabilization of Kashmir valley continues and Muftis or Abdullahs are quite powerless to stop it.