Contemporary Kashmir Politics: Some Insights: Based on Reshi Dev’s Political Diary

If politics is the game of scoundrels, democracy is the game of numbers that are only counted but not weighed.  It is more ludicrous when left to untutored masses that can be either reckless or irresponsible in their national consciousness.  That, by the large, is truth about the depressing story of contemporary Kashmir politics.  We do find politicians here and there who pen down their political diaries.  But in the first place these diaries are rarely published.  And if published, the authors glibly hide the truth from the reader.  Secondly, if some facts trickle down, these are craftily presented to suite their party line.  Rarely do we find an honest and dedicated political activist who, rising as he does from grassroots level, taking active part in the politics of his days, moving in utter disappointment from post to post in search of light that could banish darkness and ignorance, and then putting down his variegated but sordid experience in black and white.  Such a reading is always unusual and rather bizarre because the unsuspecting public is happy with understatements and half-truths paraded as gospel truth.  The uniqueness of this work lies in its author recounting many small not too momentous events happening on strictly local political plane of contemporary Kashmir.  But taking them as indicator of the move of J&K political heavy weights on the chessboard of Kashmir politics, one finds in these cues quite substantial fund to draw inferences from.  It opens our eyes and imagination, not wild but specific, to speculate what shape things are likely to take in that tormented region.  When principles are abandoned and cherished slogans reversed, when facts are subverted and fiction is boosted, then virtually people are set eyeball to eyeball with impending failure of the state.  And the government they deserve comes true.