With Article 370, I too revoke my hate: For three decades, I suffered as a Kashmiri Pandit woman. That stops today
For years, I went to Kashmir as an outsider, despite being a Kashmiri, the laws of the land having stripped me of my state subject, no govt willing to care. But now, I can finally go 'home'.
The solutions to the most complex historical problems could lie in the simplicity of just having the will to solve them. The scrapping of Article 370 will go into history as a case in point.
But that does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that simple decisions are easy to take. It needs a maverick to turn the tables on history.
As a Kashmiri Pandit, I had been seething with resentment, anger and political disillusionment, for three decades now. The exodus had filled my heart with the poison of indifference towards the political system that was alive — but bereft of soul. The governments, both local and at the Centre, had lost my respect when half a million Kashmiri Pandits became refugees in their own country and nobody batted an eyelid.
No activists, no liberals, no opposition leaders had any appetite for democratic principles as they so vociferously exhibit today.
I felt equal resentment towards the protagonists of Aazadi in Kashmir — the so-called leading lights who thought Kashmir needed autonomy to flourish.
I always wanted to throw at their face the gruesome stories that my grandmother narrated about what she called the Kabaili hamla of October 1947 (Pakistan's Pashtun tribal militia crossed the border, plundered villages and raped women on the way). A state that could not survive two months of autonomy without being attacked by a group of tribals was seeking to become autonomous and survive Pakistan and Afghanistan, maybe even China, for its strategic position!
How does that sound to any thinking mind?
Add to this hate list, the pseudo-intellectuals and liberals who wanted the people of Kashmir to suffer poverty, under-development and a huge resource crunch — just so as they could hold onto their ideological farce of self-rule.
And, above all, I have special dark feelings for the families that kept Kashmiris in abject poverty to make sure that they never had the time to notice or register the riches around their own seats of power. The commoner was kept busy standing in the queue for kerosene or LPG while politicians and their kin shopped for furs and minks abroad.
They fed the Kashmiri youth into the fire of unrest and fuelled the futures of their own dynasties with the funds that they were flush with to destroy Kashmir.
I have grown up hating this and more.
But today is the day when I can give up this hate and resurrect. I never left Kashmir. I have been going there every single year — but as an outsider, with the laws of the land having stripped me of my state subject.
But from now, I shall go 'home'.
And from my multiple visits, I also know that today, it is not just the vindication of Kashmiri Pandits but also those Muslims in Kashmir who want to give their children a normal and safe life. They want development, jobs, tourism, good education and better healthcare. They want to belong. I hope the Centre takes it as a mission to handhold this state (sorry, Union Territory) to the peak of economic and cultural health.
I think it’s finally time to give up the hate, shun the resentment and cease to be a political atheist to say: Thank You, Mr Prime Minister.