Alternate means of resistance:

Kashmir the international dispute and the world’s highest military zone is going through the turmoil for past 62 years but the conscience of the oppressors is not showing any change. Many futile efforts were taken or forced to be taken by US to resolve the long standing dispute. The aspirations of the major stake holders in the dispute, the people of Kashmir were never taken into consideration. The people of the Kashmir bearing the brutal force of the state forces, who with all their power suppressed the demand of freedom of Kashmir, We can never deny that the Kashmir became the victim of the political turmoil between the two nations, India and Pakistan, both trying to grab this piece of land for their own interests. None of them is concerned towards the development of the state or the betterment of the people, who are living a miserable life in both sides of Kashmir. It should not be in the hands of Pakistan or India to decide what the people of Kashmir want; I think it should be left only to the people of Kashmir to decide. Custodial killings, human rights violations, target killings, rapes, murders, disappearances are now the common tools of state forces in Kashmir. The question is why all this is going on and how can we tackle this? We always blame each other for the mistakes while our own souls have got spoiled by repudiating the realty. We are good but not best, we are happy but not joyful, we live a miserable life and everyone knows that but no one will come out for its betterment. We are contributing in the struggle of freedom by being in home and accepting the Hartal call. The other means of protests which we never tried are there but we are not looking towards them. We don’t want to engage ourselves in this struggle we only want a share of it and nothing else. Did we ever accept that we ourselves are not saints either; we are the one who are volunteering this oppression by all means. We gave them the platform and watched like the mute spectators like herds of animals. In past we were fighting Sher-Bakra fights now we replaced that with Hurriyat (G)-Hurriyat (M), is this how much sincere we are towards our struggle of freedom. They are using divide and rule policy but we are not able to open our eyes to see that. We degraded our society ourselves, we accepted everything which they gave us and at that time we never remembered the blood of martyrs. People of Kashmir on one hand promote Indian policies and on other hand they talk about freedom of Kashmir, by this biased nature we will never get success in our struggle. We are losing our own people to India and we are helpless to do anything. As many writers want to know the means of resistance other than Hartal, there are many ways to resist but those will affect our life directly and we never want to implement them. We should use internet as a mean of communication between us and the world around us, because most of the people outside Kashmir don’t know what is really going on here. We can do pen down strikes in offices but we are not because we fear for our jobs. Recently it was seen how the employees went on the election duty in herds and received the amount of 10,000 rupees each. I think they all sold the blood of martyrs and received a good amount for that. Is this how we are demanding freedom? The other big way of showing our protest is to boycott every government function. We never boycotted any function; we see how people sit in front row of University or SKICC auditorium and sip kehwa while listening the speeches of Indian politicians. These people can protest and boycott such kinds of functions, but they will never do it because they fear for their livelihood. When these people are following Indian politicians like spoons then why can’t we stop Hartals for the safety of livelihood of poor people and find other ways of protest. By using other means of resistance and less Hartals Kashmir will not be integral part of India. The other way of protest is to refuse the Indian awards for anything. How can people of Kashmir receive honoraries and awards while their homeland is burning and their own people are being killed by the award host country? Even an Indian author refused to accept the Indian award in protest against the brutalities and the human rights violations in Kashmir. The reason is we are not sincere to our own nation Kashmir; we don’t want to be independent, we only want to live our own luxurious lives, we don’t want to contribute to our nation. The other thing on which we should focus is the thousands of mostly young people who left Kashmir and are doing their jobs in other Indian states. It is very unfortunate for Kashmir to see these people not even raising a single voice against the occupational forces. They didn’t do anything when their sisters and mothers are raped and murdered, when their brothers are killed in cold blood. They should have protest against this; they should have an organisation there which can protest at these times. At least they can wear black bands while in office or at any place where they visit. But we are witnessing that they become deaf and dumb while they went outside Kashmir. They think by downloading video clips of brutality of kashmir in their mobile phones can bring us freedom; it’s not like that my friends we have to do something. These people even don’t aware the Indian people which are around them about the situation of Kashmir, they don’t because they fear that they may be arrested. This is not any development for Kashmir that these boys or girls are working there, earning good salaries; this is biggest loss for us. This is the part of big policy to break the educated backbone of Kashmir. ‘Without educated society, a nation is not more than a zoo.’ These are the ways of protest and the things on which we should concentrate instead of accusing each other or calling for Hartal. We have to be independent of Indian economy and try to get the economical and freedom of other things first, than we can talk of freedom of Kashmir. It’s easy to write about freedom struggle but it is very difficult to be part of that struggle. We have to make our souls part of struggle not the appearance of our body, be sincere by our heart so that we can eradicate this oppression from our nation Kashmir.