By Saima Rashid
In my dreams, I am always home. But in reality, I am far from it, in a free land, called Turkey, for my studies. But then, I keep on fighting the feeling of homelessness, despite enjoying all the comforts in the foreign land.
A cozy bed, two beautiful roommates, a big enough room and two calorifiers that keep us warm during this chilling winter, a hall that I and my flat mates share and the small kitchen to offer us a space for making tea and coffee.
Life is good, yet mournful, especially when you realize how fathers are frequently shouldering the coffins of their bullet-torn sons in my homeland.
The other day, I hung up, with a lump in my throat, when a friend informed me about the new killing. I always knew the slain as a happy-go-lucky fellow. He was yet to grow his mustaches, when he fell to bullets. He now lays cold in his grave, like thousands others.
These regular death dispatches from home often make me curse our fate. In those terrible moments, I want me to console those mothers who are relentlessly losing their sons to the trigger-happy troopers. But in exile, so to say, such remote solidarity hardly solace your troubled home.
And therefore, I keep running towards home in my dreams and wake up every morning to the news of death in Kashmir.
Yes, I am from Kashmir, that piece of heaven that seems no less than hell now.
I often wonder, why aren’t we given some attention by the world, when our youth are being obliterated in ones, two, and sevens? When shall the world take a serious note to our sufferings? Or, maybe, I am asking for too much?
Perhaps, the international society thinks we are being killed less in number, and therefore, the indifference!
You know, only 130 civilians were killed in Kashmir this year! They just happened to destroy 130 families only. That’s too less, I reckon, given the massive death count, like in war-torn Syria, which now fares as an international news.
So, what should be the figure of killings in my homeland to qualify for the international society’s attention? 100? Or, maybe, 1000 per day?
The young buds of my homeland are being killed for demanding their Right to Self Determination, as promised by India’s first prime minister, soon after the imperial white men liberated British India from its colonial control in 1947.
Instead of living by the promise of the post-colonial free world, New Delhi decided to become a colonizer of my homeland.
Since then, Kashmiris have been demanding the promised plebiscite. But India terms such demands as “anti-national” activities, and books the activists under the lawless law.
To press for their demand, Kashmiris started armed rebellion against the Indian state towards the end of the Afghan-Soviet War. The mass mobilization renewed the demand of liberation from Indian control in the region.
New Delhi, however, responded the peoples’ movement with iron fist. Some 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed in a military backlash since 1989, while around 8,000 people have been subjected to enforced disappearance, while thousands have.
Today, the young Kashmiris, including scholars and engineers are resisting the Indian control by picking up arms. But the Indian crackdown on the dissidents continues unabated. In this process now, unarmed Kashmiris are also losing their lives.
But India being friends with Israel behaves like a thick-skinned diplomat, who otherwise has presided over the chilling war crimes, like Kunan Poshpora mass rapes.
It was in the night of February 23, 1991, when Indian army cordoned off the twin villages of Kunan Poshpora in Kashmir countryside and barged inside peoples’ homes. They took the men out on a gunpoint and raped their women for the whole night. The youngest victim was six, and the oldest was eighty!
Imagine those beasts tearing off your clothes and getting inside you, as if you are dying thousands deaths at once!
Nobody could do anything. People wrote books. Journalists wrote articles. TV channels made documentaries.
If people know it, many ask, then why aren’t they doing anything about it?
Well, there is a curse in our case. People only condemn the naked dance of death and destruction in my homeland, without doing anything about it.
Back home, most of us once thought that America, the so-called superpower, might come to our rescue. But Washington always played a role of a crisis manager on Kashmir, rather than rallying for the conflict resolution. The regular White House briefings now conveniently skip the mayhem in Kashmir by terming it as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan.
But New Delhi now says there is no issue like Kashmir. Through its Goebellian Propaganda studios that exist in the form of the ultra-nationalist media houses, it makes its people believe that they are fighting some proxy war in Kashmir, that too, over the dead bodies of my people.
And therefore, they kill with impunity, right under the nose of the indifferent international community that continues to maintain a criminal silence over Kashmir.
*Saima Rashid, the author of this opinion piece, is a Kashmiri student pursuing Masters in International Relations and political science at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Istanbul Turkey.
