Stones kill, bullets don't

Let's all mourn the death of common sense

By: Ajaz ul Haque

The first asset bigotry snatches from a human mind is common sense. The idea can aptly be illustrated on hearing some BJP members speak in television discussions regarding Kashmir. A comment that will make even a nut die laughing came from ostensibly a well meaning man Chandan Mitra. Justifying the use of force against civilians Chandan calls stones `lethal' which to his mind can only be responded with bullets. Explaining an inanity like this can only amount to a space waste. That is what happens when politics and ideology overpower anyone leaving little space for sense to operate. Sure, we don't justify any mob violence that results in burning of public property and destruction of government buildings, but the whole point is about the disproportionate use of force. No sane person can smell `lethality' from stones the way he has done. To him stones kill, bullets don't. Otherwise numbers must have solved this `riddle' for him. It's about 100 civilians dead on one side, how many on the other. If `non-lethal' bullets could finish off a hundred, `lethal' stones that rain on them must have snuffed a thousand out. Do we need a court to entertain a case like this which just a single stroke of common sense can summarily dismiss as a piece of bad humor.


One more ridiculous remark was shot from Arun Jaitley. He counts the number of wounded policemen in Kashmir during the ongoing crisis as many as 1300. To him a mob of protestors leaves forces with no option but to fire indiscriminately. First his statistics are known to him alone. It can only baffle a common Kashmiri who knows the number of dead and the number of wounded from the side of civilians, but can't quite believe that as many policemen could be targeted with stones. May be Jaitley knows the list of the wounded.

Ravi Shankar Prasad is no different. His mere act of speaking about Kashmir makes all fury, no sense. He is searching for the reason as to what happened that brought the whole situation reach this pass. If people voted, if government was functioning, if everything was going on smoothly, who triggered the crisis. The old man is using all his vocal energy in mystifying the whole issue which is as evident as, someone rightly puts, `elephant in the room'. He can't accept the reason anything other than the perennial invisible hand of Pakistan which not even Pakistan can see, but Prasad can. He keeps trotting out the same question as to how did the situation get from bad to worse as if the question merits an investigation. A man in the street knows about Machchil fake encounter whereby innocents had been gunned down to fetch promotions for those who issued the orders to shoot them dead. The startling disclosure of nameless graves in Rafiabad shocked the entire valley followed by the killing of Tufail Mattoo. This obvious detail sounds too weak a reason to have fanned the present crisis, and Prasad tries hard to assemble the lose ends of his own theories of counter-insurgency.

The problem does not lie with the individuals, but a pattern of thinking that makes them treat Kashmir as an enemy territory and Kashmiris as enemy people. Their argument of not tying the hands of the army for that will `demoralise' Indian forces in Kashmir is rooted in the same parochial thinking. Otherwise they know it well that for a few hundreds militants, garrisoning the whole population and jamming the whole land with seven lack armed troops is a unilateral form of aggression. Treating unarmed people the same way as armed militants makes no democracy. Their notions of nationalism and Hindutva breed blindness to an extent that they can't appreciate the difference between a bullet and a stone.
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