Unidentified

Inexplicable things keep happening in our stomping ground. When everything looks calm and peaceful, mysterious men appear from nowhere and slaughter a few blokes, before disappearing into the dark of night. Only the dead know who their executioners are and corpses seldom speak. Nary a word. Friends and family weep quietly on sad evenings, while neighborhood dogs bark in a fierce readiness, outside. Anonymous assassins roam the streets.

The blame game had already begun. Two poor girls have been killed in cold blood in Sopore. Kashmir’s apple plot is cherry red again. So many times the dwellers of this tiny township have been at the receiving end of a lot of shit. Bludgeoned and beaten, over and over again, they are now faced with a faceless foe, which knocks at the door at sundown and even as you stand up to answer it, a barrel stares you in the face. Then there are merciless gun-shots.

The cops quickly declare the killer outfit. Another matter two years after the Shopian double murder they are still at pains to explain how grown ups went down under in ankle deep water and died. Talking about the latest killings, the CM, wet behind the ears, tweets about his state of sorrowfulness in a spate of incessant tweets in which he also discusses how charged he feels about test driving a new Range Rover. The separatist bandwagon condemns but stops just short of passing the judgment of conviction. Too little, the Twitterati boo.

The tragedy of it all is that too many people appear to be caught up in the contretemps here. The state brutally represses people and mocks at their defiance. It indulges in psyops, defames the leadership and attempts to confuse. The Azadi association on its part is pusillanimous when it comes to blowing whistle on its own treasonists. Insincerity of virtue is perhaps a side effect of the conflict.

As for the online passengers: Small boats sometimes carry dubious cargo.

© Sameer