Bomb Blasts in Jammu

Terrorists Attack in Pulwama on 14^th February 2019

Delhi gets its political climate, and its seasons from its North West and North East borders. The British built the capital in 1912, in order to establish their sovereignty over India, and to be closer to Shimla. Yet, the people of Delhi inheriting all the venom of the past, have always remained loyal to the city, with its dust storms from Rajasthan desert Thar, and the cold winds that blow from the Himalayas, and the view of the Terai as a silver line in the clouds, that greets them when they fly back from the North East.

Delhi - ites are least sympathetic  to or intimidated by terrorists. The call to arms made to college students and to the unemployed, whether in Jammu and Kashmir, or in Assam, or in Jharkhand, or in the various states of the North East leaves the migrant worker to Delhi baffled. The rural population moves to Delhi for work, and in slum settlements, and instant housing prefabricated by noveau riche magnates, they quickly make their living, for the wages are better than where they lived earlier. When luck runs out, they return to their villages for brief periods to recuperate, but they are back as soon as they are employed in the city.

The paramilitary forces who risk their lives in the borders are people who see serving their country as an honourable profession. They are not mercenaries. They come from farming families, and thousands compete against one post, which also represents gainful employment. It involves repayment of debts, education for their children, and the hard won gains of having gone to courts to settle the matter of pensions payable to them. The paramilitary is part of the grid operations of the Army, Police and State and Centre representatives, who discuss the mode of operation, in places where civil war is imminent.

Needless to say, the citizen’s forum is always active on behalf of the people who are being monitored. Wherever rape or injury has been committed, there is immediate reporting by journalists. The documentation of war crimes are part of the occupational obligations of many Human Rights Organisations, who make this data available. The Military and Police represent the coercive arm of the state, and is under the jurisdiction of Parliament and Judiciary. The idea of democracy is therefore legally represented by the constitutional impetus of keeping institutions alive.

Each of the forty men who were killed in the bomb blast at Pulwama  on 14^th February 2019 had obligations to family, which they had set aside, to return to duty. What were their thoughts as they set out on a new assignment? Was it a job like any other, to drive out into the cold and lose their lives in a fraction of a moment? The tragedy was something that the Nation experienced sorrowfully, so soon after Republic Day. One of the soldiers  killed came from Lakkidi village in Wayanad, Kerala. It is an obscure village, where there is a temple to Sita, for it is believed that it was here that Luv and Kush were born, and that she was absorbed into the Earth. These legends are what the Indian subcontinent is always composed of, where extra terrestrial time, and local time converge. The soldier had hoped to retire from the CRPF in two years, and focus on his children.

His brother told journalists that they were sorry to lose him, but proud that he had died for his country.

In these deaths, the Nation comes together, because the sacrifice soldiers make for their country are expressions of how they represent their love for the country as being the sole goal, in their possible martyrdom.

Kashmiris have presented themselves as scapegoats in the confrontation between the Military and their dream of a promised homeland. The pellet injuries that Kashmiri children have been blinded with become the most terrible evidence of how the Nation state sees forms of warfare as legitimate in contexts of civil war. How can human rights activists deal with the infiltration of terrorists among the Kashmiri civilians? India has a political sensibility which while not trying to get back Pakistan occupied Kashmir, will not give up Jammu, Ladakh  and Kashmir. There is no possibility of the further severance of the subcontinent.

Kashmiri school children doing  Central School examinations know that the idea of the homeland is tied inextricably with the Nation. Pakistan becomes an ally of Saudi Arabia,  and of China, when it requires aid. Kashmiris are to be found in every nook and corner of India, either as merchants or as refugees. The problem of borders cannot be solved by expressing enmity with neighbouring countries, whether it is China or Pakistan. The first step towards healing is for the presentation of occupational rights to Defence personnel, along with the line of duty which premises that citizens cannot be treated as if they are enemies. The unholy alliance that terrorists have with anybody who provides them with guns and money is something that cannot be condoned.