|
|
|
|
|
| June 26, 2000 | ||
|
|
KASHMIR By Harinder Baweja in Srinagar
Notice the choice of words. It is not just that the vocabulary of 12-year-old Naeema Jaan is striking or that it is littered with words like guns, firing, crackdown, death and graves. It is the ease, the matter-of-fact manner in which these words are delivered that is stunning. Naeema studies at a medium-level school in Litter village in Pulwama, an hour's drive from Srinagar. But she could have been from anywhere. From a remote village in Kupwara, four hours from Srinagar, or from Sopore, the apple town, 50 km from the state capital. For there is no town or village in Kashmir that hasn't been touched by violence. No child whose young mind has not been scarred. Naeema is not the only midnight child. Nor is she the only child who has dropped out of childhood. This is the story of an entire generation lost to the deafening sounds of blasts and bullets, a generation growing up amidst periodic hartals called by the militants and raids and search operations conducted by the security forces. Stepping out of the house is like entering the battle zone. There are bunkers outside their homes and close to their schools. The playground often lies next to a graveyard. And life comes to a halt after sunset, except within the four walls of the house. As the night creeps in, the only words they hear -- either from family members or on TV -- are of violence and more violence: 10 militants killed in an encounter; 36 Sikhs massacred in Chitisinghpora; an attack on an army camp; six killed and 15 injured in a grenade attack. One million children -- 25 per cent of the Valley's total population -- are growing up hearing more such news every day. Today, there was yet another attack on the civil secretariat where the chief minister, his cabinet and bureaucrats sit. Yesterday, a 13-year-old was shot because she wore jeans, defying the dress code imposed by militants. The day before yesterday, a shell landed in a border village in Kupwara and sliced a little girl's leg off and killed her brother while they were playing with dolls in the verandah of their house. This generation has seen Kashmir only as a war zone. Children all over the world are living through conflicts -- in Sierra Leone, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Iraq or earlier in Vietnam -- and growing up confused. But unlike those battlegrounds, where agencies like UNICEF and who are able to assess the damage and provide relief to the children, in Kashmir there are hardly any NGOs in this field. The Government has a relief committee but so far its role has been restricted to doling out Rs 1 lakh each to affected families. "There is a tremendous sociological and psychological impact on children but the Government has been found wanting," admits state Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. Monetary aid is not what the children need. What they require is help to deal with problems like recurring nightmares, difficulty in concentrating, depression and a sense of hopelessness about the future. Most of all, they need help to understand that what they think is normal is actually something abnormal. Shaukat Ahmad was just a few months old in 1989 when the gun first made its presence felt in Kashmir. Today, at 12, he gives you his own interpretation of words like mujahid and fauj (army). Mujahideen or militants, he says, are the boys who are trained in Pakistan to fire the gun. The army, he says, is there to contain the fight for azadi and deter militants from achieving their goal. How do they do that? Shaukat knows it all. He has seen it. They come to the homes of the militants and threaten their parents and damage their property. Even after surrendered militants return home, the fauj comes and makes them lie down on the snow without their clothes on. These are not stories. Shaukat has seen this happen. If this sounds bizzare, listen to what Dr Mushtaq Margoob, one of the Valley's leading psychiatrists, has to say in a study paper: prior to 1989, he used to get about 70 patients a day. Today, the figure hovers at 400. Margoob's analysis of patients seeking psychiatric help at general hospitals, private psychiatric clinics and at the only government-run psychiatry hospital revealed that while in 1980 only 14 per cent suffered from depressive disorders, this figure shot up to 32 per cent in 1989 and has now risen to almost 80 per cent. Says Margoob: "The number of patients in the 20-25 age group is double that of any other group. It's the age when children are shifting from the stage of dependence to independence. They are conscious of their problems and can articulate them." There's another alarming trend. Earlier his patients use to tell Margoob that they would have committed suicide if not for the fact that their faith did not allow it. But a study conducted by Margoob between April and September 1997 revealed that of the 23 suicide attempts reported in the general hospital's psychiatric clinic, most of the cases belonged to the younger age group. "The children of Kashmir can never be like their counterparts anywhere in the country,'' says Professor A.G. Madhosh, dean of the faculty of education, Kashmir University. A detailed study conducted by him in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare highlights simple, everyday needs which have been affected by a decade of turmoil. Education is one such. Between 1989 and 1996, while the enrolment figures remained static, the dropout rate soared. Children could not attend school for several reasons. Indefinite strikes saw the number of working days in a year drop from the normal 210 to 60. Parents refused to send their children to school for fear of blasts and crossfiring. Militants also went on a school-burning spree, razing to the ground 828 of the 5,379 schools in the Valley. Apart from this, several schools were occupied by security forces. Non-formal educational centres which catered to the poor closed down completely because classes were held after 5 p.m., a time when even adults feared to step out. Madhosh points out that there are other serious consequences. Mass copying, for instance, has become a norm and Kashmiri children have acquired criminal tendencies, something unthinkable earlier, he says. Margoob notices a lot of aggression in his school-going patients. Like 16-year-old Taufeeq Hussain, a Class X student who alternates between being very angry and very depressed. He lives in a small house in downtown Srinagar's Alamgiri Bazaar and strays through its bylanes as if trying to find a way out of the maze. "I start crying and can't stop when I think of life around me. What future do I have here?'' he asks pointing to bunkers and shops with shutters half down. He finds solace in "ghazals and khamoshi (silence)" and is always on a short fuse. The other day he broke the window panes at his home with his fists because his sister refused to iron his shirt. This bout of deviant behaviour took him first to the hospital where he was given 11 stitches and then to a heart specialist because he also complained of a pain in the chest. Taufeeq was cleared by heart specialists and sent to Margoob's clinic. His problem was more psychological than clinical. But there has been a disturbing rise in the number of patients with cardiac problems in recent years. Data gleaned from Srinagar's Soura Medical Hospital indicate an alarming rise in the number of patients with heart problems. Between February 1989 and May 1993, 35 cases were recorded at the hospital. In the next two years, from May 1993 to August 1995, the hospital had 62 cases with heart ailments. Of greater concern is, as Bashir Dabla, who teaches sociology at the University of Kashmir, points out, that at least one in every 10 of these children will become a deformed adult. This is because many parents have not been able to get their children inoculated due to the turmoil in the Valley that restricted movement and forced doctors to stay away from hospitals. There's more. "In-depth interviews with a cross-section of children led us to believe that this agitation and aggression is actually the venting of a suppressed fear of death, socio-economic deprivation and the prolonged fear of competition in life," says Madhosh. An estimated 60,000 people have been killed in the senseless violence in the Valley since 1989. Each incident chips away a bit of innocence. Each contributes to change, psychological and sociological. A group of children, all under 10, play in the ruins of what was once the homes of Kashmiri Pandits. But they are unaware of who the occupants of the house were. Once it was impossible to think of a Kashmir without Pandits. Today, it is difficult to find one there. In the congested streets of Habba Kadal, once a prominent Pandit-dominated locality in Srinagar, children are adding years. But as Sajjad Ahmed, a BSc first year student says while working out with weights, "I need this to keep some sanity. This is all I've seen since my childhood and I feel totally directionless." It could be Sajjad Ahmed, or Shaukat or Naeema Jaan. Theirs is a community that has lost interest in studies and is confused about its future. Sometimes, this confusion leads to further violence. Afaq Ahmed, 18, failed to clear his Class X exams twice. He turned to religion and spent hours at the mosque. He would return home late in the evening, switch off the lights and read the Quran by candlelight. Unknown to his parents, Afaq had come in contact with militants at the mosque. He finally left home on March 25. Three weeks later, the paramilitary forces converged on his house to grill his family. Afaq had offered to be a "live bomb". On April 19, he drove a car laden with explosives to the army headquarter in Srinagar and detonated himself along with it. His friends now talk about Afaq with a sense of pride. Says Farooq Abdullah: "Kashmir's social fabric needs urgent repair." Indeed, while in the early 1990s children grew up eulogising militants as their heroes, they are now left without any. The Kashmiri militant has been replaced by foreign mercenaries. What should be encouraging for the state and the parents are Dabla's findings that the children want peace. They want a society without orphans and widows, a life free from stress and conflict. That may seem like a childlike dream. For the bunkers remain, as do the militants' guns. And new graves continue to be dug. Dreams continue to be shattered and innocence continues to be robbed. Listen to the girl again, "I feel scared and I cling on to my mother. They came with Kalashnikovs ... I want to go to Master Ghulam Mir's grave ..."
|
|
|||||
| Top |
 © Living Media India Ltd |
First,
listen to the girl talk. "They came through the trees holding
Kalashnikovs and approached our master who was taking a class in the open.
They asked him for directions to a nearby village and then demanded some
tea. But even as they were talking to him, one of them aimed his gun and
shot our teacher dead. He slumped in his chair, blood oozing out and
staining his shirt. I started crying and looked around to see all the
other 200 children screaming and tearing their clothes. The mujahideen
walked away casually, threatening us against giving their description to
the Indian Army. I had seen mujahideen before ... they come to our village
often ... but I had never seen them killing anybody. My mother was at a
market where a blast had taken place. There had been a crackdown, and the
army took my father and brothers out of the house. I was scared then and I
am scared now. I can't sleep at night ... I start shivering and cling to
my mother. I can't forget my master, Ghulam Hassan Mir. I want to go to
his grave but my mother won't let me."