Kashmir Rings Familiar Notes In Northeast

It doesn't help when others' reading of a conflict is forced on the locals. The quieter voices for peace must be heard as much as the hawkish ones for revenge

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

The massacre of innocents at Pahalgam in Kashmir shocked the nation and the world. It was one of those moments when civilisation and its values seemed completely eclipsed by a dark, atavistic madness in humans, which great literature such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Golding's Lord of the Flies provided terrifying glimpses of.

It was indeed an Apocalypse Now moment. What, however, is equally frightening and surprising is that it took just five radical murderers to overturn a nation's composure so completely and expose what now seems no less than a primordial faultline running deep in the heart of India, along a religious line. In Kashmir, this faultline seems even deeper—for here, the trouble is more than about religion, but also sub-nationalistic aspirations among a section of Kashmiris for secession from India.

The surge of retributive anger along with a swell of patriotic fervour in India following the carnage can only be the oxymoronic phrasal adjective "terrible beauty" that poet W.B. Yeats used to describe the mix of fear and admiration he felt while silently watching ordinary people transform to become possessed by an awesome energy almost overnight in the wake of a similar surge of Irish nationalism around the Easter of 1916.

This visible current mass psychology in India as a response to a single terror attack has another story to tell. No spark can cause an inferno if there was to be nothing to catch fire in the first place. Hence, the normalcy that had supposedly been restored in this beleaguered state now seems a veneer just enough to camouflage a deeply entrenched scar in the minds of ordinary Indians, needing only a spark to bring back old distrust, resurrecting the spectre of the old emotional wall which can cause the further isolation of Kashmir.