Empty classrooms and voiceless Kashmiris

It matters little to me as to what separatists are saying and how the government is responding to the ongoing situation that has inflicted wounds the Valley has rarely seen before. I am more concerned about the children who have not gone to school for the past 100 days. Their infamous elevation as street protesters with stones is unbearable.
These violent disturbances have opened so many issues other than a contest between the dangerously tilted narratives of no schools unless the mission 2016 is accomplished and let them tire themselves out. Both sides are blinding the future of Kashmiri children. If the slogans that attract them to stones and streets become a norm, nothing will help them out. These little minds don’t realise that they are playing into the hands of vested interests calling this unrest as ‘intifada’ and those fuelling it from across the border.
A pertinent question is being asked: where is the atmosphere for opening of schools when the stones are flying thick and fast and teargas shells and pellets killing and blinding the young souls like Junaid and Insha who had not seen many summers in their lives?
Three narratives are interwoven – one, that of separatists that the polluted climate of “repression” doesn’t present conditions for children to go to schools. In short, this view is that children should not study anything Indian, though it is well known that their children and grandchildren are studying in Indian cities, completing the same syllabi.
Second, once schools open, the stakes of children, parents and teachers in peace would gain an extraordinary momentum and the whole cycle of shutdown and protest calendars would collapse like a house of cards. The experience of 2010 is before them. And, separatists, particularly Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who is generally believed to be the hero of this unrest, working under pressure of hawks, are unwilling to take a risk to their reputation of having done something that “led to the end of the struggle.” No one is clear where the “struggle” is headed.
The third element presents a pathetic story of the state government’s capitulation to the streets. Education Minister Naeem Akhter wrote an open letter to Geelani, urging him to allow the government to open schools, only to be reprimanded.
Viewed against this tortured landscape, where democratic institutions are under threat and politics matters more than children’s careers, the government has failed to summon the courage to open the schools. Its direct and indirect understanding with the separatists on the issue has hit a wall.
The opposition parties have sided with the separatists in condemning the holding of examinations as per schedule. They are sounding more like separatists than the separatists on this issue because they also know that once peace returns, the longevity of the PDP-BJP government will become a given.
This has suppressed further the desire of parents to see their children in classrooms facing computers and not battling with security forces on streets. But who is listening to them. The majority of Kashmiris has been choked as they cannot challenge the “freedom in sight” narrative even while knowing that it is consuming lives and careers of their children. They have become voiceless. Everyone else is taking advantage of their helplessness as only this majority knows who is suppressing whom.
May I say that Kashmir is not only being killed physically but intellectually too? Stones belong to the Stone Age, not the space age. Others are going to Moon and Mars and the young protesters here have been promised the moon with stones in their hands. It is a shameless situation for the leadership of the Valley who is burning the careers of children to stir the cauldron of their myopic politics.

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