Jeevey Jeevey Pakistan: The Nation

By Shamshad Ahmad

For the past 60 days or so, since the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed (Indian) soldiers, in the most densely militarised zones in the world.-Arundhati Roy, 'Azadi'- Outlook India)Kashmir is in crisis and aflame again. This time nobody can blame any foreign hand in it. It is indigenous and an inevitable eruption of volcanic suffocation simmering underneath among the Kashmiri people for several decades. Since after 1947, Kashmir has been at the core of South Asia's issues of peace and security, and is today a sombre reminder to the world that despite universalisation of fundamental values and freedoms, the people of Kashmir remain deprived of them.In a remarkable piece on the current uprising in Kashmir, Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize winner and world's renowned humanist has challenged the world's and India's conscience on this issue drawing their attention to a huge price being paid in terms of military, material, moral and human costs in keeping the Indian occupation of Kashmir against the wishes of its people.

She narrates how an ill-conceived move over the transfer of a small piece of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board "suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of petrol. She acknowledges that "rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of the valley."In reaction, the Kashmiris mounted massive protests bringing the valley to a complete shutdown. In no time, despite curfew and crackdown, the political revolt spread from the cities to villages and developed into a mass movement which not only resurrected memories of the Kashmiri uprising in the 90s but also gave a new dimension to their struggle for freedom. Numerous Kashmiri people were killed by the Indian armed forces in street clashes.

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