Ghazala Wahab

I hadn’t noticed it until I reached the end of the account by a CRPF constable in Indian Express (16 February 2019). I had a lump in my throat. Long after I had gotten over that emotional moment, his words continued to haunt me — “No one can carry so much explosive in a car without some local support.”

Local support, over ground workers (OGWs), misguided youth, Separatists, vested interests. Call it by any name. The meaning will remain the same. A large part of Kashmiri population, and here I am not referring to the entire state of Jammu & Kashmir (only the Valley), is not merely disaffected or disenchanted with us, it is hostile to the Indian State. While the sense-numbing attack on the CRPF convoy was the extremely brutal manifestation of that hostility, the Kashmiri people have not exactly been coy about expressing it as far as memory goes.

Yet, we continue to broad-brush this memory of ours, incident after incident. When the mainstream Kashmiri politicians refer to this memory as ‘popular sentiment’, we run them down as opportunists. We don’t think that perhaps for once they are representing the sentiment of the people and not their own selfish interests. We fool o