Events in Jammu and Kashmir are perceived by the rest of the country as if through the wrong end of the telescope. The existing distance between the country and the state always ends up magnified, and crucial developments playing out in the region appear emptied out of their significance.

If Nithari, a village in Noida, has today become a byword for evil and institutional culpability, why should the anonymous villages of south Kashmir not hold a similar resonance? Here too, after all, have unfolded stories of the killing of innocent and the searing agony and helplessness of parents who have lost their children. And if the police have failed to prevent a Nithari, they were in places like Ganderbal playing mid-wife to the horror. But while Nithari has made us cringe and cry out loud for institutional reform, Ganderbal leaves us relatively untouched. Does this mean that in Kashmir the arbitrary snuffing out of lives without let or hindrance has over one and a half decades of militancy somehow become normalised? The inevitable ‘collateral damage’ of insurgency that leaves us untouched? Has the ‘common sense’ that these are, after all, matters best left to those in charge of protecting the country’s security robbed us of our sense of justice?

This all-too-deliberate public apathy has in fact helped to create the climate of impunity that allows private executions and staged encounters to flourish, and they in turn have alienated people further and stoked the fires of militancy. The J&K government has just admitted in the assembly that some 1017 people have gone missing since 1989. Other estimates are ten times this figure.

... contd.