IN KASHMIR, ONLY SUFFERERS NEED TO TALK FIRST

                                              

     ( At Srinagar Airport, a Hindu lady police officer is being blessed by a Muslim lady leaving for performance of Hajj .Recent Photo in Social Media ) 

CONVERSATION THROUGH COMMON VOCABULARY

 

The historical resilience of Kashmir's pluralistic ethos was sustained not by political institutions, but by an indigenous spiritual counterculture. While shortsighted political actors repeatedly instrumentalised religious and regional identities to consolidate power, fracturing communities along lines of faith, ethnicity, and ideology, the social fabric endured through the quiet yet transformative work of saints, faqirs, and spiritual adepts. Their teachings dissolved rigid boundaries between the 'self' and the 'other', cultivating an ethic of coexistence that transcended sectarian affiliation.

Shrines functioned as non-sectarian civic spaces where disputes were settled, alms distributed, and devotional music resonated across communal divides. Itinerant faqirs, bound by vows of renunciation, moved effortlessly between Hindu and Muslim households, embodying a lived detachment from political loyalties and worldly power. This syncretic infrastructure gave rise to what scholars have described as a "shared sacred geography": shrines, proverbs, Shrukhs, and Vakhs collectively inherited, revered, and sustained across communities.

The insurgency and terrorism of the 1990s, however, inflicted a civilisational wound. Death and destruction, the indiscriminate killing of innocents, the selective targeting of minorities, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and the weaponisation of religious narratives precipitated an epistemic rupture of unprecedented magnitude. The centuries-old warp and weft of Kashmir's social fabric were violently torn apart, displacing not only people but also the everyday practices of coexistence that had long rendered political divisionism socially inconsequential. What was ruptured was not merely demography, but memory; not merely neighbourhoods, but an entire moral universe of shared meanings, practices, and belonging.

Peace cannot survive in the absence of dialogue, conversation, and a common vocabulary through which estranged communities may once again encounter one another, not as adversaries defined by inherited grievances, but as co-heirs to a civilisational legacy that neither violence nor politics can afford to extinguish. To begin with, away from political actors, opportunists, non-sufferers and those who benefitted from this human tragedy; let only sufferers on both sides speak to each other first.

(Avtar Mota)

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