Since the episode of scrimmage, a confrontation that lead to an eerie bloodbath in the Galwan valley took place, there has been a buoyancy of faith allied to the forecaste of war and a reliant end to an overlong struggle. A community that has been striving from the past 3 decades against its paralyzed economy, mutilated education system and vandalized mental health stability is coupling its gross solution to a war. Is a fatuous craving for war going to be an absolute solution to end of the agony for Kashmiri’s?
If we review the chapter’s of war that took place past a century, the memoir’s are full of events that had offended the civilization and showed the monstrous and a grisly face of human nature. The immense and primeval of which was seen between 1939 to 1945. A union of multiple conflicts, a contest of inventory formulation of different methods of genocide. World War II was the best example of what a martial competition can put a civilization into. Aftermath, it was estimated that World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities. Tens of millions of people died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), premeditated death from starvation, massacres, and disease. Apart from Hiroshima and Nagasaki there had been a broadband of incidents, incidents that are affixed like a shadow full of monstrosity. From Shoah the genocide of European Jews inside the Nazi Concentration Camps to Unit 731 a Japanese biological research unit that was developed in China to carry lethal human experiments, from Comfort Women the women and girls that were forced into being sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army to the brutal mass rapes that were committed against German women during and after the battle of Berlin. All those wartime violences has had showed a disgraceful subsidiary of human psychology. Among the survival stories from the chapter of Comfort Women a hurtful story of a Chong Ok-Sun born in 1920, narrated as
“One day in June, at the age of 13, I had to prepare lunch for my parents who were working in the field and so I went to the village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldier surprised me there and took me away, so that my parents never knew what had happened to their daughter. I was taken to the police station in a truck, where I was raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head of the police station hit me in my left eye because I was crying. That day I lost my eyesight in the left eye”. Chong Ok-Sun, who told her story in the UN report, exposes just how horrifically the women were treated. “After 10 days or so, I was taken to the Japanese army garrison barracks in Heysan City. There were around 400 other Korean young girls with me and we had to serve over 5,000 Japanese soldiers as sex slaves every day – up to 40 men per day. Each time I protested, they hit me or stuffed rags in my mouth. One held a matchstick to my private parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were oozing with blood”. The extremism of human brutality has not ended here, there were a lot of untold stories from multiple conflicts that traumatized the world upto the end of the 20th century. Whether it be the Operation Ranch Hand in which the US Military Forces sprayed more than 20 million gallons of various herbicides over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos or the chemical weapon crossfire between Iranian and Iraqi forces that left thousands of civilians dead. The results were always upheaving.
Now if we shift our concern from international conflicts to a conflict that has gripped the valley of Kashmir from the last 3 decades, a torment that has looted away adequacy of the youth, the lavishness of the state and most probably the socio-mental stability of the people. The precipitation of blood from the dark clouds of conflict has created a never ending sorrow. In last 30 years it has been estimated that more than 100,000 people have been killed with a large scale of displacements including negative impact on women and other vulnerable groups and noticeable increase in the psychiatric problems of the victims. In addition to this there has been a stern loss to an important source of livelihood for localities such as tourism, horticulture and handicrafts. Adjoining the cost of damage to education system and plight of intellectual instability to the youth, the loss is irrecoverable. On humanitarian grounds there are lot of tales that demonstrates the cruel act of human rights abuses in the past. Apart from the well-known atrocities committed during a broad scale massacre at Gawakadal, Zakoora, Tengpora Handwara and Sopore. There are hair-raising stories about the torture implicated inside the cells of interrogation centres and the mass rape incidents that were committed during crackdowns, cordon and search operations in which men were held for identification in parks or schoolyards while security forces used to search their homes. From the eventual records of PAPA 2 a notorious interrogation centre, the various persuasions for torture were electric shocks, iron rods coated with chili paste infused into the rectum, rollers from heavy logs rolled on legs to excruciate pressure and much more.
Assimilating the entire story from international conflicts to the regional disputes, the war has always welcomed the thunder full of agony, regrets and wreckage. So associating a faith of betterment with prognosis of war is a total failure. As a community what we should be most concerned about are the ways of fortifying the moral and perception of our youth, cultivating the ways to foster the deprived economy and to attain an elite education system for intellectual growth and stability. To grasp a revolt, a community should be robust, robust enough to utilize its self resources for any confrontation. When the resources are zipped under the obscurity of lack of education, growing drug abuse and negligence to self grooming, it will consume a lot of aspiration to mold the perception to a single yearning cause.