This, ladies and gentlemen, is Kashmir!

During the past week, I have been involved in an interesting online debate with supporters of National Conference on their official website. I was least surprised to find most of these 'ardent' supporters of Sheikh Abdullah, living in a make belief world where their ideologies are more important to them than human lives but at the same time the opposing ideology is conveniently termed as extremism, secession and fanaticism. They have this universal trait of giving India the benefit of doubt for all its human rights violations and its illegal occupation of Kashmir. No amount of custodial killings, genocides or executions will change their basic stance. There will be an election-time shift in the usual soft rhetoric and all of a sudden National Conference will talk about 'India and Kashmir' as if Farooq Abdullah has never been on record to say that "Kashmir is an integral part of India". Overnight, the family, the party and the henchmen change their garbs and put on different masks while they run up and down the hinterlands fanning emotions and asking for votes on the same old pledge and promise of 'Autonomy'. Every single day, Kashmiris are humiliated and killed like cattle on their own soil while these pioneers of an autonomous Kashmir roam around in the cushion of security with recurring vacations in the lap of luxury. They very conveniently blame Pakistan for starting the current insurgency which, according to them, was the primary reason for us being killed, raped and burnt by the Indian Army. Stupid Kashmiris - couldn't shut up and accept a rigged election! The elections of 1987 that were rigged in favor or Farooq Abdullah are completely invisible to National Conference as if that year never came and the calendar skipped from 1986 to 1988. As if we were too uppity and hard headed to compromise with our fate and accept the Sheikh's son as our next traitor-in-chief. Their proclamation that Autonomy for Kashmir is the best option is based on a million and one variables and assumptions which they are too willing to be optimistic about. Whether the Army will be thrown out of Kashmir, whether India will resist temptations to rig elections in favor of its puppets and whether the hindutva-bloc in India will let such an arrangement survive are treated as questions from Mars. However, the same people are quick to jump in the bandwagon together and somehow drag Pakistan into the equation in the form of a wild-card which is supposed to make their dumbest arguments makes sense. The whole package about Pakistan's democratic fragmentation and failure, about its regionalism and its instability, somehow are more significant than the fact that Kashmiris cannot and will not attest to any association with a country and nation which has killed its teenagers, raped its daughters and molested the basic fabric of its society. Compromises are fine. Accepted. Thats diplomacy and like it or not, survival is more important than ideologies at times. But, there is a filter - a limit. Asking Kashmiris to compromise and sign of their existence for the pride of Indian nationalism and secularism is akin to asking the Jews to forget the concentration camps, the Kosovars to forget the Serbian atrocities and the Bosnians to forget their genocides. Although it might me easy for the Abdullahs or the Muftis to 'forget' about these wounds, these raptures in our soul.....Kashmiris cant and never will forget the faces of India that have been shown to us. The Abdullahs and Muftis have seen different faces of India. To them India is the epitome of secularism and tolerance. They are not concerned about Modi being re-elected twice after killing thousands of Mulsims. They are also not concerned about the political dissent and unrest in the East or the Khalistan Movement. Those, to these people, are just normal disturbances 'fueled' by the ISI. Maybe they are too biased and too comfortable within their Indian homes and in their Indian government bullet proof cars or in their first class plane cabins to see the reality in such deep perspectives. But are they so blind that they cannot see how our teenagers and children are being humiliated, thrashed and harrassed while their own children are growing up experiencing the great Indian story of a multicultural secular existence? Are they too blind that they cannot read the verdict of Kashmiris in the eyes of this child? Are they?