Two condolences, one message

Devandar Singh Rana died at such a young age, 59. Anyone who has seen him, enjoyed his company, if only for a while, can vouch for his vivacious personality. To his family it is a shock indescribable. To his friends, in politics and outside, it must be a lingering wound. First condolence.

Across the Line, Moulvi Muhammad Ahmed Shah passed away. He was the son of the iconic figure of Kashmir’s socio-religio-political landscape, Maulana M. Yousuf Shah. An old man by all counts, nevertheless, a bereavement for his family and friends. Second condolence.

The two, Devandar Rana and Muhammed Ahmed were separated by many unbridgeable markers – of faith, of geography, of politics. Yet something happened in their death that connects them: the message that beyond the identity markers there is a greater universe called mankind. Human relationships shouldn’t be subservient to political differences, to identity markers, to ideological chasms, to historical narratives, and to strategic hate.

Omar Abdullah and Devandar Rana were at the moment in adversarial camps. But the way Omar expressed his grief on this occasion can only be called graceful and humane. Umar Farooq and Farooq Abdullah are placed in rival camps, so to say. Just some years back, we firmly framed them in a binary: Unionist-Separatist, Electoral-Boycotist, or Accessionist-Sessionists or Resistance-Loyalists. In that binary we effaced the human touch that holds a society. Farooq Abdullah visiting Molvi Umar Farooq and offering condolences, can be seen as loosening of that binary. Other political leaders like Mehbooba Mufti and Altaf Bukhari also visited - good. Our habit to see everything through a ‘political’ prism has disabled us in many ways to locate ordinary human acts in the framework of ordinary human acts. Politics of Perversion.

For any human society to sustain as a human society the societal grace -Lehaz- is inviolable. But sometimes violent disruptions rip it apart. Kashmiri-Muslim society has experienced that ripping apart. Amongst us are people who still wouldn’t hesitate calling all this hypocrisy, opportunism and lack of commitment to some fixed ideal. That being a given, if we have to restore ourselves as a collective, regain that societal depth, it is crucial to consciously work for the restoration of this societal grace. It is embedded in the age-old tradition of feeling for other, and expressing it in manifest forms. It is inbuilt in all prophetic traditions, and our moral worth is measured on this scale only.

We had now lost it for long. Unfortunately. But ours is not the only society that passed this phase of disruption. All human societies, small or big, have gone through these convulsions. The biggest such disruption was the partition of sub-continent into India and Pakistan. The violence at that scale defies mental grasp; how could a neighbour kill a neighbour, how the chastity of families living for centuries together was violated by each other? All because that fundamental connect joining humans in a society into one pulsating piece of life was snapped. What followed was placing the blame in other’s compound. It probably helped in warding off the guilt that could only drill into your interiors for generations.

Thank God, our society, in all these turbulent times, didn’t derange to those limits. Nevertheless, we had our own share of seizures. There are events where the loss of human in us was total and brazen. We also used the shield of blame. shifting the culpability. What was actually done by us, we explained to others as being a consequence of some grand happening. What was manifestly done by us we insisted was done by ‘unknown’ and ‘agencies’. We distributed the human suffering along many denominators: community identity, political affiliation, and ideological leaning.

Then something bigger than all these differences put cumulatively hit us from without. Suddenly we realised that the differences were self-inflicted. The first serious act to transcend those differences was the way Kashmiris voted in the assembly elections. But that can be seen as tactical. What makes the two condolence messages important is that it can grow into an organic and lasting act. Something that can help us regain the grace that qualifies us as a human society.

Something else also happened during these days. And that too fits in the same frame. It was the obituary session in the J&K Assembly. Both Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were remembered. No matter who says what about whom, if we see a human in each other, we will heal the wounds that are bleeding for decades now. Our challenge is to overcome this madness that insists on declaring someone as enemy and then justify the violence that follows. We are all humans, from one extreme to another, from one end to another, from one interest to another. Difference, if conducted well, can add to the richness of human relationships. Our misfortune is that we turn difference into the only defining marker.

May the two, Devandar Rana and Muhammed Ahmed, rest in peace. And may we all live in peace.