This week-by-week validity is making us invalid
AJAZ UL HAQUE
Every new protest calendar looks like a `recharge pack’ fed to us before the old one expires. Every seven days our validity as occupation-resisting people is renewed. And here we are – into the fourth month of this back-to-back scheme of calendars. Once again we are experiencing a `calendar-isation’ of our existence as a nation.
We are riding a racehorse – a wild racehorse. We don’t control it, it controls us. Our hands don’t hold the reins and our feet are not in the packsaddle. We don’t know where the horse will take us? We have `optimists’ amongst us who think that it will fly us straight into the heavens of freedom. They sell a cocktail of hope and dope. They sell a dream that shutting down for months will bear us a fruit for years to come. And then we have a class of cynics who see no light at the end of the tunnel. Who see this horse-ride as a one way journey to hell. I belong to this class of cowards who will prefer to crawl by foot than to ride the flying horse. It needs no saint to foresee the disaster as we are already reaping the bitter of the seed we have sown ourselves. The balloon stands deflated. It takes courage to accept, denial deludes.
Does that mean we give up resisting? No way. But we are not resisting, we are decaying, we are withering, we are dying. And faster we die, faster will die our resistance. Resist we will, resist we must, but if that resistance means turning men against men, denying people their livelihood, pushing society into an irrevocable chaos where anyone can attack anyone else, then our doom is sealed. Our enemy has nothing to do now as with friends like us who needs enemies.
Our gravest crime as leaders and as opinion makers has been the same. We share a hypocrisy of selective condemnation. We support anything that happens on the roads. Be that harming our own selves, be that falling victims to each other. We are quick to condemn violence done on the people, but we wait when the same violence is done by the people to the people. If we are excited that the present movement is led by a group of teens who don’t accept anyone as their leader and who are leaders unto themselves, then we are finished as a nation. If we give them a free run, then this is the time to celebrate freedom.
As we witness the burning of vehicles in the city, we are horrified. Are we waiting for the time when this vehicle burning will be followed by people burning? We don’t know who is doing it, but has that racehorse reached its first mark? And if this is the first, imagine the last?
