City is indifferent as terror strikes Jammu again

MUMBAI: Some 27 people were slaughtered in the most recent spate of violence in Jammu, but Mumbai continues its business of business without missing a beat.
No dharnas at Flora Fountain, no e-mail petitions, no public meetings decrying the sustained targeting of a particular group.
Among the many exiled people who have been driven out of the state by the violence, anger has led to deep frustration and bitterness."There are some statements after each incident. But they do not stop the killings,which have become endless," said Shiv Kumar Sharma, renowned santoor player who hails from Jammu.
Even when there is government and media attention on Jammu and Kashmir, it most often focuses on political issues of autonomy, trifurcation, elections and independence. "The pain of the common man is eclipsed by charged, manipulative politics," remarked Nida Fazli, a noted Urdu poet from Gwalior.
And this apathy to human tragedy offers one of the bigger contradictions of the Indian national consciousness: Jammu and Kashmir has become central to distinguishing India''s secular nationhood from Pakistan''s religion-prescribed, two-nation theory. However, despite the state''s centrality to India''s identity, it has become possible, and indeed the norm, to gloss over the pain of its exiled and alienated people.
The indifference of the vast majority of the country has allowed the violence to spread, according to some analysts. In the past two years, the focus of terrorist attacks have moved from the Kashmir valley into the Jammu region.
Bomb blasts in temples, selective gunning down of H indu and Sikh members of village defence committees, and attacks on families in isolated villages preceded the more indiscriminate Kaluchak and Quasim Nagar massacres.
"We are losing Jammu, in exactly the same way we lost the valley a decade ago," warned Ashok Pandit, a film maker from the valley who is also the official spokesperson of Punun Kashmir, a movement that hopes to resettle the exiles in their homeland.
According to him, the targeted slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs in Jammu is stimulating their gradual exodus, and the regularity of the killings seem to be inuring the rest of the country into accepting them as normal happenings that demand little reaction.
But some assert that people around the country are not oblivious to the Jammu and Kashmir human tragedy. According to Rafiq Zakaria, Islamic scholar and author of several books, the "madness of the jehadis" who operate in the name of Islam is reflecting on Muslims around the country. "Eventually it is the Indian Muslim who suffers the most.
The jehadis in Jammu and Kashmir have made Muslims pariahs and as a result, communal relations between Hindus and Muslims have never been so low in the history of India," he said with some distress. Mr Zakaria attributes the corrosion of trust between the two communities in Gujarat partly to Kashmir.
Panun Kashmir is quick to add that the tragedy of their people cannot be used as an excuse to attack Muslims.
The group was one of the first to condemn the violence against Muslims in Gujarat, a process that they see not too different from their own victimisation.
"The Gujarati Hindus cannot use Kashmir as an excuse for their barbarism.What were they doing when the Kashmiri pundits were being driven out of their homeland? What was any Indian doing? Where were the media, human rights groups and apostles of secularism to discuss the conditions in refugee camps of the Kashmiris?" film maker Mahesh Bhatt asked.
A vocal member of Punun Kashmir, Mr. Bhatt added, "It is repeatedly said that India''s secular fabric was irredeemably tattered when the Babri Masjid was broken down. But an equally if not far more heinous blow to secularism came before—when the pundits were killed and driven out of Kashmir."
Many of the Kashmiri pundit community cynically say that they lost their 5000-year-old homeland because they are not a vote bank and because they did not take to guns, but instead produced painters, poets and musicians.
"It is also easier for the nation to be in denial than to own up to its powerlessness in the face of terrorism, and its inability to stand firm," said Mr Pandit, referring to a mindset that V.S. Naipaul referred to as "Indians telescoping their history" and ignoring all that is unpleasant.
"Or the common people of Mumbai are indifferent," mused Mr Sharma, "because human life does not matter in this country any more, be it in Gujarat, Kashmir or the North East."