Hearts or wallets?

[VetDoctor]

Hearts or wallets?
Asma Hamid

The visit of Kashmiri leaders from across the Line of Control (LoC) to Pakistan helped to raise awareness and remind us that the thorn that is the Kashmir issue is still as sharp and painful as ever. Professor Abdul Ghani Bhat emphasised that Kashmir is not to be relegated to a dispute about territory, but to be kept alive as an issue about “the aspirations of a people.”
Bhat’s powerful statement emanates from his first-hand account of the innumerable tragedies he has witnessed in his own lifetime. His speech during the visit was all the more heart-wrenching for the tales it does not tell. Kashmir is not all about mountains and rivers and lakes, according to Bhat, it is about anger and alienation and the “collective memories of discontent.” It is a collage of scared glances, chance remarks and helpless shrugs, of screams, despair and racing heartbeats.
The vivid landscape of the deep destruction of a generation that continues to weather the storm and another growing up to grasp the baton, albeit in weakened hands, emerges from his description of “the turmoil within.”
The canvas he paints is anything but abstract; it is a meticulously crafted image of an entire nation choked and paralysed at inception. Bhat appeals to us to help it to breathe.
Bhat and his associates, including Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the vocal Lone, epitomise the struggle that has defined their generation. Quintessentially Kashmiri, each of them have suffered a personal loss apart from the daily suffering, constant humiliation, news of human rights abuses and new levels of atrocities.
Their pain is mirrored in the people they meet here, but in a distracted way. They gain sympathy but it is brief, and they feel overshadowed by the shiny new economic prospects that beckon the attention of a new generation this side of the border.
Contemporary corporate wisdom, Bhat calls it. They are treated like distant cousins – welcome, but not for long. They watch as we glance at the clock, imagining a guilt-free future. In this age of a global political culture, why can’t someone find a quick solution?
Surely, an App could be developed, a few video conferences, a seminar or two at a Middle Eastern resort and we could shelve this file, and broker the deal. This is the language of a new culture where politics is power is money is trade is power... There is no room for patience, no time for pain. Sombre political reality, Bhat calls it.
Bhat’s stance is of a Kashmiri Brahmin – warrior-like and unaccustomed to accepting defeat in any form. But as I listen, I wonder if his armour, made of powerful memories linked and chained together by the unbreakable bonds of allegiance to his land, has suffered a fatal slash. He knows the future lies in the hands of the Kashmiri youth. The Indian state, with all its economic power and machinery, spends on addressing grievances and providing connectivity, infrastructure, education and health to these very youth.
Does Bhat wonder if, with the passage of time, the alleviation of grievances may lead to a compromise on aspirations? Is this the uncertainty in our collective political conscience he refers to? Will the forces of economics prevail over those of sentiments?
Except that, with renewed vigour and dismissing any doubts, Bhat remains sold on the dream that he terms to be “linked to the survival of South Asia”: Kashmir is home to millions of youth capable of a spring that can outstrip and outshine the Arab one, we are told.
We need to buy into that dream wholly, with our hearts, and not only with our wallets.