Silence in the ranks

Ordinary people are for most parts silly. They don’t understand much. Economics. Electricity Distribution. Exchange rates. Hedge funds. State budget. Or Security. Only governments make sense of these things. The mobile phone, for most parts, a communication brick in your average Kashmiri pocket can pose a great risk.
It can jeopardize the plans of Indian army in Kashmir. When you have no clear understanding of how important a country’s internal security is, you can’t possibly argue such stuff. Hence mobiles shall be banned, henceforth.

Close to four million people may not be able to communicate now. That is but a small detail. When historians finally sit down to write the gold-colored history of Kashmir -- after the last rebel is killed in some encounter -- they shall mention [in sun-color ink] that four million Kashmiris stopped talking amongst themselves in the winter of 2009 because 800 rebels continued to hide behind the obelisks of the old mountains. How many nations can claim to go through pangs of such renunciation?

People will soon be struck dumb as the phones in their hands will no longer cheep [I can imagine the utter helplessness]. Lovers may not be able to whisper into darkness, holding the cell-phone at midnight, like the mitt of their beloved. Friends may be unable to plan the evening together. Parents shall never know the whereabouts of the college-going kid. And when that ubiquitous guest turns up suddenly while the hubby is still out, how does the lady of the house inform him: Maz Pava haz Unzo [Get some mutton]. Life was so much less complicated earlier.

Mobile phone. The 207th human bone. In Kashmir the extra bone shall be removed shortly. The policy mandarins in New Delhi are very wise men, apart from being grim. And they know one lesson by heart: Go forth and ban anything if you can’t fix it. Now if you are a democracy you can’t get away with imperial diktats, such as this, without reasoning it. Security reason. That trite, simple, user-friendly alibi. Period. Twenty thousand ordinary people, who lived off mobile business in Kashmir, shall go jobless. But people are mostly silly.

When no mobile towers existed, rebels, as early as the beginning of 90’s, were known to make use of new-age, highly advanced satphones.

Sameer