Kashmir: Let down by leaders, united in neglect

It was the summer of 2010. Another summer just like this.

Little boys armed with nothing more than stones, defying the might of the Indian state, being shot at, mothers weeping, fathers wringing their hands in despair, politicians shedding false tears.

I had returned to my homeland the first time after 1976, not as a child retreating from Delhi's loo-swept heat to the cool confines of her grandparents' Srinagar home, but as a journalist being forced to live in a hotel just a block away from that home, now stripped of its apple trees and shorn of its grass, sold to a nameplate I did not recognise.

"You are always welcome back, beti," said Syed Ali Shah Geelani, even as he held court in the walled courtyard of his Haiderpora home, to a beautiful boy of ten.

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The boy's shirt was stripped from his pale body, and 12 wounds from pellets shot at him by the CRPF shown to him. Geelani kissed him on both cheeks, congratulating him for his courage in waging a war against India.

That boy, if he is still alive, may well become another Burhan Wani, a bright boy who thought his only recourse was violence. His body too may be carried out in a moving procession, borne along by enraged crowds.

But Geelani's world will be unaffected, his death just another statistic in a bloody war that doesn't always use guns. It will be the same for Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a man whom one-time chief Kashmir spook AS Dulat said cannot decide between being pope of Kashmir and its elected leader.

His sprawling garden, which he often looks out on from his verandah, will remain as still and calm as his demeanour as he speaks of how close India came to resolving Kashmir during back channel talks with Pervez Musharraf.

It will be the same again for Omar Abdullah, chief minister in 2010, seated in the reception area of his official residence, who spoke emotionally about being haunted by the thought of the little children who were killed on his watch that summer.

And yes, it will be the same for Mehbooba Mufti, then chief opposition leader and occupant of a home that was once the premier detention centre during the height of the insurgency, Papa 2. With the characteristic fidgeting with her head scarf, she had railed against the deaf and blind Omar government.

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Power is a great leveller.

I haven't met them this summer, but something tells me they will say almost the exact same things, seated in the exact same spots (except for a few switches necessitated by the changes wrought by elections).

How this is all regrettable, how it could have been avoided, and how we need peace in Kashmir, and yes, that old cliché, which now even the most devoted Kashmiri Pandits don't believe, that there can be no Kashmiriyat without the Pandits.

But let's get some things clear. Things have changed.

Kashmiri Pandits, abandoned by the one party many of them thought would take care of their interests, have little or no faith that they will ever return to the land they called their own.

Stateless in their own country, they have done the best they can with their education and their hard work, two things they share in common with the "others" in their state, who may have kept their land but have seen their freedoms constricted.

They know now that they are nothing more than a convenient political tool to polarise sentiment and to reopen old wounds with talk of settlement. There's truly a country without a post office, a phantom land with Agha Shahid Ali's "doomed addresses, each house buried or empty".

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The Kashmiri Muslims - and it pains me to make the distinction on the basis of religion because that is not how it was even in my lifetime - have become as disaffected by their own leadership, even the so-called pure and unalloyed stand of Geelani who has never sought a compromise with the "imperialist" Indian state.

Geelani may kiss the stone-throwing boys of 2016 as much as he wishes, but they will not do as they are told. They are ignited by an anger that sees little or no hope in a tired old man, a young religious leader who cannot make up his mind, and two dynastic scions who are clearly less, much less, than their fathers.

The Indian government too is not the same. It is not the same as the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee who wanted talks within the dayraa of ''insaniyat'', or the immediate succeeding years of the Manmohan Singh government. It is a government that believes in force being the only answer during times of war and drift being the only option in times of peace.

And the world? Frankly the world, despite Pakistan's delighted needling, has bigger problems at its doorstep.

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Mad men mowing down holidaying crowds. Dictators stripping their soldiers to their briefs. Bomb attacks at busy airports. Mass shootings at nightclubs.

In this one thing perhaps the Hindus and Muslims, who lived for long in absolute amity when Kashmiriyat was not just a cliché, may finally be united.

Nobody cares for their them.

Not their leaders.

Not the world.

Not the government.