Condemned to Bleed

What does the killing of seven innocent people at Gagangeer, Kashmir, signify? Many things.

First, it is neither the opening nor the closing of such heart wrenching events. We have had many before, and the bad news is that we will have many hence. As long as the reasons for discord, and the architecture of justification are there, blood will flow. The killing of these seven innocents is not an event but a phenomenon. Gagangeer is not a spot, but a pointer to geopolitics. Today it happened at Gaganger, yesterday at some other place, and tomorrow at some entirely different place. The world has turned into one huge colosseum where the powerful players feed poor slaves to the beast of strategy.

Two, Peace is not thrust. Peace is not a masculine, jingoistic war cry. Clean human relationships engender peace. An ideology founded on the negation of other, a politics fed on historical events, and a power insistent on a centralised, personalised display comprises too huge a clutter.

Third, a world where pictures of decimated human dwellings only end up in increasing the social media traffic, Gagangeer is what - not even a nothing. A world where you can invade Ukraine, where you can bomb hospitals, where mutilated bodies of children are crushed under tonnes of concrete, who do you think you can move by talking about Gagangeer! We have come to a stage where all moral anchors have yielded their place, and power, all naked, is in a wild rage.

Finally, our hearts are dead; even our reason is nearing its end. Leave aside feelings, a thing we now have lost, the willingness to fathom it is also gone. Who kills whom, why, and to what end; in this pleasure of analysis, we have lost the human touch. We have chosen to be dead, why should anyone's death disturb us.

In this Great Game of Great Powers, a greater tragedy has struck the world we now live in. We have lost compassion, and with that the minimal requirements of understanding what suits us as humans and what doesn't. We have lost our humanity. As if killing a human being is like discarding a toy. What can be more tragic?  We have ourselves turned into killer toys-drones.

We have lost something else also. We see humans as Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris. We see them as Muslims and non-Muslims. We see them as Hindus and non-Hindus. We see Hamas but we don't see the children dead under loads of debris. We see Netanyahu, not the ordinary Jew who carries a human heart and bleeds like a human body. We see Iran and the drones it makes. We forget there are people living there. We see Hezbollah, not the lives in Lebanon. We see historical battlefields, forgetting that our neighbourhoods are littered with human bodies. We see Promised Lands, refuse to acknowledge the dispossessed. We want to conquer space, least mindful of what we have made of this earth. We dig earth to make a cause of some lost history, and in the process we dig graves to dump human populations.

Empires, militaries, industrial complexes, big businesses, fantastic ideologies– with such colossal madness how can a human heart survive? And why should some seven lives matter when we have invested too much in our respective madnesses? After all there are greater aims to achieve, far greater ends to meet. Religion, ideology, nation, strategy, business – we have gods here and gods there, and each one to be propitiated with human blood.

The lives lost in this ghastly incident comprise a telling reminder that when some higher purpose, a lofty goal, a bigger strategic end, are mixed into some collective ambition– global, regional, national, ideological, political- human life suddenly sounds like something dispensable. In this scheme of things, what disturbs a nation, a state, the institutions within a state, or the political leadership in a country is not the loss of lives, but on which side of the line it happens. The pain, the protest, the anger- it's all in reference to that Line of Interest. Otherwise. we are all the same. We are all killers.

If we kill in the name of any religion, we are the killers of that religion also. If we commit such a crime motivated by some ideology, let that ideology rot in the depths of ignominy. If we serve some national interest, one can only pray that those who promote it as a national interest are driven to hell. If some strategic end is tied to such ghastly crimes, may those strategies and those ends fail.

To conclude, just a thought, particular to us living in Kashmir. Our condition for the last 5 years is so changed that all those themes and sensibilities prior to that August have disappeared. Those days some of us would defend such acts as an outcome of an 'ugly control', some would just invoke 'unknown gunmen' and turn the gaze away. Some would seethe in anger and burn in their pain. But now it looks like we are in a state of numbness. We are pained, but we don't know what that pain feels like. We condemn the killing of innocents, but we don't know what that means in our situation. We feel for the families who lost their dear ones, but we don't know what that feeling is like to those families. Imagine what has been done to us.

What dark times !