The Kashmir Monitor
By Er. Mehraj Khurshid Malik
Another Encounter over, Another Young Soul Dies! Another Family Cries, Another Mother Lost Her Shine, Another Sister Lost Her Closest Friend, Another Father Loses His Strength, Another Neighbourhood Mourns, Another Relative Shocked, Entire Kashmir Wretched, Another Black Day In Our Calendar Martyrs Are So Many That Entire Calendar Is Black, Don’t Know If Any Day Left For Celebration, Another Soul Dies. Another Soul Dies….
We as Kashmiris are very much empathetic towards the idea of referendum, separate state, and simply Azaadi; especially after all the sufferings we have faced throughout the recent decades. We including our elderly have seen the good and the worst phases of our lives in the past as well as in present times. This has made every-one of us deeply heart-broken and now everyone wants to fight for justice by any means!
We Muslims believe in Shahadah, where Jihad is to “achieve” a set of objectives for Deen; and while doing that, if some of us lose our lives, God had promised Jannah. However, another truth is that when you see it not achieving any goals at all and do not have proper planned strategy to proceed, then Islam tells us to call for a truce.
Just going out there and getting eliminated without any plan for victory won’t work and is not what Islam warrants priority for. We need youth to live and win, not just achieve martyrdom (with great respect for it).
Another important role of any wise Muslim is to give preference to create an opportunity of peace at whichever front possible in order to avoid any unnecessary loss of life which is yet another duty of any Muslim.
Purely on the strategic grounds, you need to call for truce. If any youngster seeks my opinion, I’ll do everything to stop him from taking this step. To understand why, I’ll quote an example from a friend:
If a father sees his son getting killed by a monster, he’ll do everything to stop his other son from fighting such a disproportionately powerful enemy. However, if he fails and his 2nd son is dead too, he will be sad but will always speak proudly of his 2nd son’s bravery and conscience. That’s exactly the case. We honour those who’ve got martyred. And we respect the emotions and the suffering of our people. We’re not cowards, but Islam is not all about unplanned war for the sake of martyrdom, it’s about Hikmah too.
A civilization stands on shoulders of its young generation but unfortunately every-day we are either losing one or handicapping one or both which is even more worrying! The continuation of such unguided, unplanned, non-strategized movement has caused huge losses & now can become cause for destabilization of the whole Muslim society of Kashmir, and these varied sufferings will gradually become breeding ground for chain different crimes, part of which has already started and now threatens the very existence of our society (namely: Drugs, spying (voluntary or forced), more frequent CASOs, razed houses, much more corruption, absence of male worker in family, poverty, deeper income inequality, prostitution, self-inflicted demography change due to frequent deaths of youngsters, societal-divisions between police families-Govt. job families-martyred families and then related big-chain of crimes whose description will take several new articles). Death of even a single male child becomes a collective disaster for at least 4 different families of a society and has its repercussions for many decades of future; and we already have lost too many!
Those of you who have laid down lives deserve respect since it’s your conscientiousness that made you leave all comforts of life. I’m not one of those who ask people not to glorify you. To say so makes you dunderheads who just go out to become heroes seeking glorification-which is not the case.
The need of the hour is to protect our dying young generation; every one or other day, encounter breaks out, and our Kashmir ends up losing its young lives with nothing even close to victory nor any kind of strategic goals.
Today, militants need to come home. This is not because West calls it terrorism. This is neither because we are afraid nor because we are less in number. Also, neither because it’s banned in UN Charter nor because of any other reason, If we even attempt to give them wrong reasons, it’ll be hypocrisy for which we will be answerable to Allah. This is only because Islam recommends this!
Islam teaches us to take every decision with Hikmah, particularly considering thinking about the present and the future; our continuous deaths must not change our demography which already is at the edge of the cliff! And must not complicate the problems to a level that will end up creating a dark future. Apart from fighting Jihad, Islam is also about teaching our young generation to be alive and face the beautiful hardships of Poverty and do Jihad of living their life piously & righteously, avoiding bribery/”sufarish” despite difficulties of neediness, joblessness, days of hunger (a remembrance of struggles of Prophet, his family and pious Sahaba (PBU all)) as well as doing the duty of spreading Deen, which is another most important duty on our shoulders given by our Beloved Prophet Muhammed (PBUH).
Secondly, if we analyse closely we will find that even countries like Russia, China, Pakistan, US, Britain etc. have only misused/exploited the current situation of Valley for their own geo-political conspiracies, debt-traps and prosperity of their weapon industry and in which “we” do not even play a negligible role, apart from being forced to be misused on their hands.
We have become mere involuntary customers of weapons industry at the hands of super-powers and indirectly boost their economy by which they in-turn create new wars in different countries by which innocents loose lives day by day! Those who live, get poorer day by day, get humiliated every day in the name of terrorists and at the end do not even get to express of our victimhood. After all this, we merely condemn their policies for which we were the initial customers and then helplessly watch the elite people and elite economies rule over us directly and indirectly!
In Kashmir, we are at the point that any step we take today directly determines the path to be adopted by our coming generations tomorrow. We are losing at an exponential rate in this regional battle and now we must not get carried away by the pain/agony and neither allow anyone to misuse our emotions. We also have the exact same sentiments and emotions but it’s time to reanalyse our steps and find a middle path which would help us save the dignity & lives of our innocent brother and sisters. We need to look at a bigger picture: We have a bigger responsibility of acting wise enough to also prepare ourselves educationally, religiously, economically and become a source of protecting the lives of all the innocents not only in Kashmir but across different parts of the world as well.
Let us all come together with righteous intentions and collectively rethink a course for the years to come. Come home. Let’s collectively plan what course of action would be better for us in these times.
You’re the purest and the bravest of us. We can’t afford to lose you. Let’s together start a new way forward to overthrow misrule, tyranny and change the system from corruption to protection.
(The author is a computer engineer having worked at the world’s biggest corporate Microsoft and is now actively involved in social work activities across Kashmir in the field of education, personality development programmes and various other co-curricular activities. He can be reached on facebook @ErMehrajMalik or at email: [email protected])
