Uninvited Kashmir: A Story Of Blueprints And Bystanders

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
KO file photo

By Dr. Syed Eesar Mehdi

Kashmir has always been more than a geopolitical flashpoint. It's a living landscape of culture and resilience. This serene space of sages and skillmen is forever longing for peace. And yet, peace remains as distant as the Himalayan ridges that cradle the valley.

Time and again, efforts to resolve the strife have collapsed. Not because peace is impossible, but because its architects have built it from the top down - far from the soil where its roots must take hold.

The recent terror attack in Pahalgam, in which several innocent people lost their lives, is a tragic punctuation mark in a much longer and painful narrative. Every such act of violence reinforces the urgency of rethinking what peace really means in Kashmir - and more importantly, who gets to define it.

From the Delhi Agreement of 1952 to the Shimla Accord of 1972, and through successive rounds of dialogue and confidence-building measures, the defining feature of the Kashmir peace process has been its top-down nature. Designed in capitals and conference rooms, these initiatives have prioritized strategic interests over human dignity.

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In these processes, Kashmiris have not been participants. They have been spectators, sometimes even suspects.

The absence of Kashmiri voices in negotiations over their own future is not just a political oversight; it is a philosophical and ethical failure. As political theorist John Rawls argued, justice must be rooted in fairness, and fairness cannot exist when those most affected by a decision are excluded from the making of it.

Even Immanuel Kant, in his essay Perpetual Peace, insisted that true peace cannot be imposed upon people, but must arise from their collective will. Kashmir has never been given that chance. Instead, it has been locked in what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls a distribution of the sensible, where visibility and voice are privileges, not rights. The Kashmiri voice - fractured, diverse, yet full of depth - has too often been overlooked, or oversimplified into slogans.

Kashmir's tragedy is not just the violence it endures, but the fact that peace has always been imagined without its people at the center. As the philosopher Cornel West wrote, justice is what love looks like in public.

If that is true, then Kashmir has been denied both justice and love - offered instead a procession of administrative gestures and security-led development models that rarely address its core political alienation.

Every peace process that has failed in Kashmir shares a common flaw: it has treated peace as a managerial challenge rather than a moral imperative. It has focused on containment rather than inclusion. The Pahalgam attack, for instance, was swiftly condemned, as it should have been. Yet, the response was predictably limited to heightened security rhetoric and tactical reassessments.

What remained unasked was the deeper question: Why do these eruptions of violence persist despite decades of ceasefires, elections, and economic packages?

The answer lies not in intelligence failures or border infiltrations alone. It lies in the absence of trust, and trust cannot be manufactured through policy. It must be earned through participation, through listening, through shared decision-making.

Philosopher Michel Foucault warned that modern power operates not just through overt coercion but through the subtle, everyday control mechanisms. In Kashmir, checks and balances - however necessary they may be in moments of crisis - have created a psychological architecture where fear often replaces freedom. In such an atmosphere, the establishment becomes an observer, not a partner.

And yet, amid the barriers and broken promises, hope continues to whisper - sometimes through poetry, sometimes through polemics, sometimes in the quiet dignity of everyday life.

The Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose verses resonate with loss and longing, once asked, what remains when the word goes back to its shell?

The answer, in Kashmir, is silence born of exhaustion. But Kashmir has never been voiceless.

From the mystical verses of Lal Ded and Sheikh

Alam (Nund Rishi) to the contemporary works of Naseem Shafaie and Zareef Ahmad Zareef, Kashmir's literary tradition has always articulated a nuanced and native yearning for peace - not the peace of submission, but the peace of recognition.

As Tagore once wrote, Freedom is the soul of a nation - not merely the act of breaking chains, but the art of choosing one's own rhythm. Kashmir is yet to find that rhythm.

The Pahalgam tragedy, like countless others before it, must not be another moment we mourn and forget. It must become the starting point for a deeper reckoning: that peace processes designed without people are bound to fail.

Kashmiris are a people to be engaged. Peace cannot be air-dropped. It must be built with hands that know the soil.

A new model of peace in Kashmir must be bottom-up, participatory, and locally owned. It must begin by listening - not just to elected leaders, but to civil society, student activists, Sufi clerics, women's cooperatives, and trauma healers. These are the true custodians of peace, and they exist even now, quietly holding the social fabric together.

A transitional justice framework - rooted in truth-telling, acknowledgment, and healing - could offer a way forward. Dialogues should not be confined to formal conference halls but held in schools, markets, shrines, and town halls. Peace must be practiced, not just promised.

The political philosopher Jürgen Habermas speaks of communicative action - dialogue that is grounded in mutual respect. That is what Kashmir needs: not statements delivered from podiums, but conversations held around fires, without fear, without cameras, without scripts.

Peace in Kashmir has to shift its moral center - from borders to people, from land to lives, from cartography to community.

Meanwhile, the river Lidder, flowing through the valley even now, does not know about negotiations, nor does it stop for headlines. But if it could speak, it might say this: the valley is tired - tired of being a prize, tired of being a wound. It wants to be a place again - of songs, of stories, of simple joys.

• Writer is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Peace Studies (ICPS), New Delhi. Views expressed in this article are author's own and don't necessarily reflect KO's editorial policy.

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