SRINAGAR: People Democratic Party (PDP) Saturday said that Jammu and Kashmir is like a zoo where people are displayed to outsiders like caged animals on tours curated by GOI.
In a Speak Up edition of PDP’s monthly party newspaper June edition, the party said, With censorship on everything but our thoughts Kashmiris have been thrust into an Orwellian nightmare. Local newspapers have been reduced to advertisement catalogues and our fearless journalists have been silenced. It’s becoming more apparent that in the grand scheme of things we are not a state or a UT but a colony, an occupation that will never be anything more than a milch cow.
In the foreground, people see GOI boasting about record-breaking tourism while in the background record breaking raids by NIA and other agencies continue to terrorise law-abiding locals. The period just before the G20 meeting saw an uptick in these raids. However, despite the completion of the event, these raids have not abated. GOI’s decision to hold the meeting in J&K raised a lot of questions.
As the presiding country, India has the prerogative to hold the meeting where it sees fit. More importantly, it was a great way for GOI to get international validation of their decision to scrap 370. Having sold Indians on the false notion of ‘Naya Kashmir’ it only made sense to peddle the same to the rest of the world. The bump in tourism numbers served as a much-desired side effect. And thus began a series of North Korea-esque renovations throughout Srinagar so that Kashmir could charm the world, PDP said.
Bunkers were painted, national flags installed, barbed wires removed and anything that could be deemed an eyesore was hidden away. Like a Bollywood movie, where the destitute family decorates their home in hopes of snagging an upper-class suitor, the sham was over as soon as our international guests left, they said.
PDP further said, “We have just enough ‘normalcy’ to host dozens of countries in our capital city but it’s still nowhere near enough the ‘normalcy’ needed to exercise our democratic rights. Until they are sure of an absolute majority for BJP, it only makes sense for GOI to put off the legislative election indefinitely”.
The despotic measures of GOI hide behind a faceless administration as our fundamental rights as citizens of this country are violated on a daily basis. There is no accountability because there is no one to take accountability. J&K is like a zoo where people are displayed to outsiders like caged animals on tours curated by GOI to showcase ‘how Kashmiris live in normalcy.’ Even cumbersome traffic jams are attributed to ‘growing normalcy’ instead of an administrative failure to regulate traffic, the party said.
The last few years have seen an explosion in the stray dog population of Srinagar with no effort on part of the local administration to solve the problem. As a consequence of this, residents have endured frequent dog bites and the occasional case of rabies from said dog bites. Instead of launching a government mandated community birth control program for strays, the administration ignored the issue until the G20 meet.
That’s when stray dogs were promptly captured from their original locations in Srinagar and released elsewhere so the visiting dignitaries wouldn’t think of us as an uncivilised nation. And if that bothers you, the way they were captured wasn’t humane either. The streets of Poloview were picked clean not only of dogs but also of locals. Even the face-lift received by Srinagar was botched as our traditional architectural elements were replaced by their cheap and tacky counterparts.
Before you think that we buried the lead, another Kashmiri minority has been killed. Deepu, a circus worker in Anantnag who was the sole earner for an impoverished family was shot by militants.
The ‘Naya Kashmir’ that the world sees, brimming with the smiling faces of tourists is a product of strategic editing where people only see what the government wants them to see. Much like the Peace village of North Korea, ‘Naya Kashmir’ only exists in BJP’s narrative which is carried forward by the mainstream media pandering to BJP’s every whim. Every tourist arrival is shouted from rooftops but when an innocent life like Deepu is lost it is not deemed newsworthy enough.
India by virtue of its population is a sizeable market, one that cannot be ignored in terms of trade-relations. Just like the rest of the world, our guests from G20 saw though the veneer we put up rather tactfully but no one wants to lose a potential market of one billion people. Just so we’re clear, no matter how many G20s Kashmir gets the ‘pleasure to host’ GOI already knows they’re fooling no one. You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time – We can’t help but agree with Abraham Lincoln on this one.
