Seiging, the besieged Kashmir

An old man envisions Burial of his Dead self in Kashmir,

Appalled how this thought precipitates his imagination,

Is it merely a serendipity or causation?

Imageries of horror & terror are never bereft of causations,

They are complexly situated, ideational, relational & ideological,

This is Land of syncretism; Kashmir, less admired & more envied,

Here Children of conflict are traumatized,

Curfewed Nights are stark reality,

Rights are repressed, freedom curtailed, censorship privileged

Here ideas & gesticulations are subjected to preventive detention,

Anyone in Kashmir devoid of this repressive experience is either a beast or god;

Here Travesty of Justice is but a Normalization

Spaces of deliberations and voices of dissent are muzzled,

Here if Legitimacy of state lies in its popular sovereignty,

Then why 8 million Kashmiri’s are excommunicated, house arrested & under siege by a million soldiers,

Reductionists call Kashmiri’s akin to Homo Sacer;

Here thoughts amount to Thought Crimes rendering Freewill into fiefdom,

Bio politics operates as Panopticon, girdled by capillaries of power and suppression of self,

Here  Structural Violence is a new metaphor of Banality of Evil, hovering in the parched death valley

Spatial Brutalism in Kashmir is embedded in violent geographies of subjectivity,

Perpetual Masculinisation of War and Feminization of Violence is mundane,

Playground of children are fenced with barbed wires;

The tangibility of soul is slowly fading; aspirations are suppressed by new rhetoric,

A condescending Leviathan has scuttled all laws of morality and collective consciousness,

Even Media traction of the situation feigns Optical illusion for masses;

This is symbolic of the systemic dehumanization of the Kashmir by fascist dispensations;

Here history has been forgotten, twisted to justify blatant acts and Melian Dialogue becoming new charter of the Post Truth Era,

Silencing by clampdown here, is a sub-text without text,

Amid  this militarised region, a soldier stands like the Vulture Stalking the Little Girl of Sudan;

The siege continues unabatedly, the veils of trauma extends beyond geographies of imagination,

This enforced silence must not be interpreted as normalcy & more importantly peace,

This is the parched land where no Responsibility to Protect is invoked

Or is it that Structural forces will penetrate the region where Security trilemma is ripe for intense rivalry?

Amid this entire conundrum, Kashmir is heading towards a new phase of renewed death and destruction, imminent and inevitable;

Life in Kashmir has become a graveyard,

every one waiting for their turn, like the Old man, unambiguously waiting for death to elope him.

Zahoor Ahmad Dar is a Kashmiri researcher based in New Delhi. He has completed Masters in International Relations at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. E-mail: zahoorjnu@gmail.com        

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