The Search is a story taken from a collection of stories (Half a Rupee: Stories) by Gulzar, and offered here as an independent read. It is from part four, which is about ordinary people, not only poor adults but middle class and children as well, living in times not quite as civilised as we would like to think we do. Part four deals with trying times, what with terrorism and attacks on women and bombings of lands to root out terrorists that affect normal people because bombs do not discriminate who they affect, and so on.
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The Search is about the anger and anguish of the various characters and the writer about the treatment meted out to various people due mainly to their being of a faith blamed for terrorist acts and all related to that faith being thereby suspect of further such acts at any given time or place, and the title refers to frequent searches they have to go through of their baggage and home and person, whether in travel or living at home.
This story in particular is about Kashmir, and the writer limits it to only Muslims of Kashmir and their woes due to this suspicion and searches and disappearances of sons and other young males of the valley. One is uncertain if the person accredited at the end, Humra Kuraishi, is the author or only the protagonist who told her story to Gulzar, but whoever the author is has committed a double sleight of hand fraud hoping to fool others and certain of gathering sympathy of Muslims in general.
The sleight of hand and double fraud here is to equate Kashmir with Muslims, which is as far from true in India as it gets - it is on par with equating, say, US with exclusively rich, and forgetting that there are rich elsewhere and plenty of poor in US too.
So the writer and the protagonist forget about the non Muslims of the state massacred and threatened and forced to leave and be refugees in their own nation away from their homes in Kashmir, while at the same time preferring not to mention other Muslims of India when discussing problems of Muslims in Kashmir, and not giving a thought to the fact that if there had been no terrorism there would be no problems there either - it is not due to faith but due to the fact of there being no guarantee of when, not if but when, someone might turn out to be a terrorist or a suicide bomber.
That the demand for separation due to faith conveniently forgets the question of what about those of other faith that belonged there and were thrown out, even apart from the question of other Muslims of India who have chosen to stay rather than migrate at partition, is another fraud - one might suspect it is salami tactic, and could be not far from truth at that.
As for the main anguish here, a thorough search of person and baggage while travelling to or from Kashmir, the writer again does the same double fraud with sleight of hand - such unpleasantness has to be born by most people and certainly those of Asian origin when travelling almost anywhere by flight, at almost every airport, and it is due to the attack by terrorists using planes as weapons little over a decade ago.
At that one cannot help but reflect that if only India had instituted such thorough searches of passengers even before that, having had her planes blown up in mid eighties, perhaps the hijacking of India's plane to Kandahar and freeing of a terrorist to save two hundred lives of the passengers of that plane might not have happened at all - or if US had helped India rather than watching on tarmac as the terrorist was handed over and vanished, US might not have been attacked using planes subsequently, for it was he who masterminded the attack on US as is well known (and some right wing US persons again perform a sleight of hand double fraud by blaming India for the attack on US for freeing the terrorist, never mind the few hundred passengers of AI who happened to be of not right colour or race after all!).
So the writer here conveniently forgets it all and goes out with the story begging for sympathy, and one wonders, would the problems of the world or even Muslims be over if Kashmir were given up by India? No - that is where the fraud is, for it is salami tactics. If Jerusalem is given it would be the rest of Israel then on target, and if Kashmir were given it would be rest of India, death to all other faiths.
So any sympathy for anyone suffering in this story has to be even more limited with provisos than other stories of the collection so far - if they suffer in this one, don't forget others do, and that is even before speaking of hundreds, thousands dead due to terrorism perpetrated in India by those helped by the nation across border to Northwest, and artificial border created by British colonial rulers minutes before leaving so India would never be free of such problems. Will this stop if everyone were forced to convert at gunpoint, not likely - one has only to read accounts of permanent purge that was very well explained by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
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Gulzar to some extent and Sahir Ludhianavi to a far more committed extent were leftists - Sahir was about to be arrested for h in his chosen or default home in the other part of India as it was before independence, and had to escape to India as it is post independence, and yet he said it was lucky for Mumbai to have him, rather than admitting he was lucky he could get away and not be arrested to spend life in jail, rather than the respect and fame and prestige and satisfactory work he had during his life in India. Gulzar in that tradition sympathises with a suicide bomber who plans to blow up a prime minister, and writes a story and publishes it, apart from a film or more he made on the topic.
Wonder if they had courage enough to battle for Malala and her ilk. Easy to target a democracy, especially one that does not penalise you for being in minority politically.
Monday, March 31, 2014.
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