A few years have passed but I will never forget that morning. A neighbour, a boy in his early 20s, had stepped out of his home to buy a newspaper. I had gone along with him. I still recall how the calm of the morning was suddenly shattered as the Central Reserve Police Force jawans arrived on the spot and stones started flying in their direction. My neighbour had neither a stone to hurl at the jawans nor any intention of doing so. Little did he know when he stepped out that he would himself become the news that morning. He just collapsed into a heap when the CRPF jawans opened fire. I know it was just another casualty, an everyday happening in the valley, but I still recoil when I think about it, which I do day after day even if I try not to. I am not the only one who lives in such a state of constant terror. Everybody I know, all my friends, shares this state of mind and would like nothing more than to escape this situation. We are simply unable to think beyond gunfire and blasts. “Yahan rahenge to fuzool mein maare jaayenge (Unless we escape, we will just end up dying a futile death),” we keep telling each other.

But I know not all of us can escape. How can the daily wage earner escape when he does not have even enough to eat? The politicians who call a bandh every other day are not concerned about him. The chief minister who keeps provoking violent protests whenever innocent people are gunned down doesn’t care about him. The entire administration is to blame for this state of affairs. All politicians are to blame. Whoever comes to power does not want to tell the truth to New Delhi. This probably affects their chances of making money. So even as we suffer some people do want this state of affairs to continue. The Congress government had good intentions and it did want to get some development work done. But it was dependent on Mufti’s party and just look how things have worsened ever since the PDP showed its true separatist colours. Now we have a chief minister who actually went on a picnic with his family to Pahalgam during the ongoing crisis. Then there is the opposition which only fuels the raging fire. Opposing the government is all right but not if you provoke people into commiting suicide by clashing with the security forces. The forces also need to exercise restraint and try to distinguish between ordinary people and the terrorists.

All of us, all youngsters just want to escape this ceaseless cycle of misery. We want to study so that we are able to go to a more secure place and lead a life free of  violence and strife. But withall this violence, we can’t even study properly. Schools and colleges remain shut half the time and even when they open nobody knows how long they will stay open. The shadow of the gun always looms large over our daily lives. So most of us cannot escape even if we want to. We just feel trapped with all escape routes blocked.

This first appeared in the July 16-31 issue of the Governance Now magazine (Vol. 01, Issue 12).

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