If reports from the Kashmir valley are to
be relied on various sections of people,
traders, transporters, hoteliers, students and a section of employees, feel fed up with almost frequent calls for shutdown. They feel upset over the way separatists call for protest rallies which usually are preceded by imposition of curfew restrictions. These protest rallies, curfew restrictions and keeping separatists under house arrest or detaining some of them invariably triggers scenes of violence in which the protesters clash with the security forces. This results in unfortunate events leading to arrest of a number of youth, particularly students. This way students are forced to suffer heavy losses as far as their academic activities are concerned. Despite these odds, some sections of people opt for registering protests on the call of separatists. Whatever may be the level of interest in registering protests against killing of a youth or a militant, a large section of people in the valley feel burdened with the style of living which banks on uncertainty and scare.Hence a word has gone to the separatists to change the mode of protests. People want that story of repeated shutdowns to end.
It is in this context that the Chairman All Party Hurriyat Conference, Molvi Umar Farooq, who heads a conglomerate of moderates among the separatists has decided to seek suggestions from his political colleagues, from people, from the youth, from transporters, traders and other sections of people so that a new anti-national programme was launched. In its first exercise of its kind, the Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq had called for a joint meeting of separatist organisations, religious scholars, students, lawyers, journalists and other stakeholders to discuss what it calls "the alternate forms of protest." The idea, Mirwaiz says, is to seek suggestions from people at large over the "new strategy to stage protests". However, authorities on Wednesday placed him under house arrest ahead of a joint meeting he had called at Rajouri Kadal. Other anti-India activists were also detained.
Despite growing pressure from various section of people for changing the mode of protests the separatists have no plan to drop the plan on voicing their anger and resentment against the government.But these separatists are for altering the mode of protests so that the new programme did not create a lot of problems for the people in Kashmir. The new programme, if at all it is framed, may not create added difficulties for traders, transporters, and students, besides those connected with tourism. In fact launching protest rallies and calls for repeated shutdowns help the separatists to register their presence and relevance. These modes of protests allow them to measures the level of peoples' support which alone has been able to sustain them and help them to survive politically. But these separatists, especially those in the camp of moderates, have got the feedback which indicates that they may lose peoples' support if traders, transporters, lawyers, students continue to suffer losses because during shutdowns neither the traders nor the transporters are able to earn anything.
All this shows that Hurriyat activists are fast becoming irrelevant in the valley. To avoid people's anger, they are now trying to devise new ways of protest. It is widely felt that they won't succeed and would lose their nuisance value in the near future. |
