By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi: More people should be talking about Kashmir in public forums, says US-based journalist-writer Basharat Peer, who believes the situation there is grim and has been neglected.
“Our focus should be to talk in public forums and hope that somebody someday will listen. But justice does not come easily in South Asia,” Peer said.
He was addressing a panel discussion at the launch of an anthology, “Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifida in Kashmir”, here this week.
According to Peer, any talk about the situation in Kashmir should take into consideration the Kashmiri people.
And the dialogue has to involve the governments of India and Pakistan. “It is a grim situation that has been neglected,” he said.
In his essay, “Kashmir Unrest: A Letter to an Unknown India” in the anthology, Peer explores the emotional trauma and bitter memories the unrest in Kashmir has left behind in the psyches of young writers and professionals like him – who have lived and worked abroad.
“Even when we go about our business of getting degrees in universities and working jobs in far-off lands, we remember…
“Like my friend, who confessed one night in a New York room to a recurrent dream: a boy he had known was running in a lane outside his home in a northern corner of Kashmir, but the soldier chasing him had fired and not missed.
“The boy had been running in my friend’s dream for 18 years now,” Peer says in the book.
Lives have changed amid violence in the valley. On Aug 13, 2008, a 21-year-old house painter from a village near Sopore saw unarmed people being shot near the Line of Control, Peer recalls.
“The house painter’s memory (of the shooting) brought him to Srinagar on Jan 7, 2010 carrying a gun – shooting and eventually being killed after a 27-hour encounter with the troops that you might remember. And now, there is much more that is becoming hard to forget.”
For more than 60 years, “the stunning Kashmir Valley has been flashpoint for tensions and war between rivals India and Pakistan”, says Ravi Nessman, in his essay, “The Wounds of Kashmir’s never Ending War”, one of the highlights of the anthology.
“The rate of suicide, once unthinkable, in the Islamic society has gone up 26 fold – from 0.5 percent per 100,000 (before insurgency in 1980s) to 13 percent per 100,000 now,” says Arshad Hussain, a Kashmiri psychiatrist quoted by Nessman. Drug abuse is epidemic.
Nearly 19 percent Kashmiris suffer from depression and nearly 16 percent have post-traumatic stress disorders, Nessman says quoting the medical fraternity in the Kashmir valley.
The anthology, edited by Sanjay Kak and published by Penguin-India, has essays by nearly 50 journalists, writers, analysts and Kashmir watchers.