“What is worth a human life?”
This question has been recoiling from one wall of my mind to the other ever since I was a kid. The fact that money is everything never settled with me. The question never left me why are humans all around are always running after money like a shark chasing its prey?
Better analogies are needed, I know; a six-year-old me couldn’t come up with any!
Even though I come from a lower middle-class family from a valley in North India, my parents have always put everything they ever had into the education of their children. So just like any other lower middle-class children, we were made to study hard so that we could earn enough money when we grow up. Whenever I asked my lovely mother the very same question, “why are people mad about this thing called money?”; she would look at me with utmost disdain and say, “then, what is it that you want in your life?” and I would simply answer, “I want to help people.”
To this, she would tell me that it is my parents who I should be worried about first and then about people in general. But, this answer of hers never made me part ways with the only innocent desire of childhood.
Today, I stand as a 25-year-old man, pursuing a Masters in Law, and the question still haunts me deep, “What is worth a human life?”
Yes, those of you who have noticed that I come from Kashmir are absolutely right. I come from the world’s most heavily militarized zone, I belong to paradise lost, I hail from the valley of terrorists – you can have your pick!
If most of you are non-Kashmiri Indians, then you might already hate me (why am I saying this? You can help me answer this question!) and if most of you are common Kashmiris then you might end up hating me by the end of this article.
On February 14, in the deadliest of attacks on the Indian Armed forces in Kashmir, 40 CRPF personnel lost their lives. That’s what the news says and I deeply condemn it but I also have a perspective to put forward.
If you want to stop reading this here, I can’t help you. After all, you don’t ask for help from a helpless person or do you?
Well, for me, the incident was a 20-year-old kid loaded with 360 kgs of RDX who rammed into a convoy killing 40 humans including himself. A number of questions again booked my mind.
You may also call me someone who has always been on the lookout for the answers to these questions but has remained unlucky. So, here I have wee hope in my heart that they will find some credible answers.
Firstly, when will we stop focusing more on nationalities and secondary identities of the people who are dying? When will we stop condemning human deaths in the name of religion or region or whatsoever is left of these categories?
What I mean here is that Kashmir has been used as a slaughterhouse for humans since 1947. Sometimes they are humans in uniform, sometimes they are humans with a gun but no uniform and a lot of times they are just common unarmed people. Nevertheless, in all cases, they are humans. But nobody seems shattered with the real problem here – the loss of human lives. They are busy with either branding these deaths as soldiers martyred or terrorists neutralized.
Secondly, what motivates a 20-year-old young man, who had everything to achieve and see in this world, to lace himself with the explosives and blow up a cavalcade of humans? This 20-year-old, before he picked up arms, as reports say, was a resident of a place which is just 10 kms from Pulwama. He was about to put his feet into adulthood and could have a peek at the countless possibilities that life has to offer but even before he could even think of living his life, he chose a path of killing himself and 40 soldiers along with him. What can possibly drive a ‘human’ to do something like this?
Thirdly, who benefitted from this incident? It is better to put this way – who has been benefitting from this business of terrorism since 1947 (not 1989)?
If you don’t know then I must tell you that the United States of America and Russia are the first and the second largest producers of arms in the world, respectively. And why wouldn’t they want a flourishing market to sell these arms and keep the money flowing? If the arms produced by these countries were to be distributed among their own citizens, each citizen would easily receive more than one weapon.
Whenever a favourable situation for resolving the issues pertaining to the sub-continent knocks on the door, the USA and Russia very conveniently lurk around the corner and make it such that the opportunity is laid into the ground without anything concrete coming out of it.
Finally, can any of the Kashmiris who have not condemned this attack or people who ‘want revenge’ in the form of a war assure me that the problems of the sub-continent will vanish as a result?
But, if there is one thing that I have been able to understand in the past 25 years of life, it is that nothing in this whole wide world is worth a human life. Though I have used ‘human’ throughout this article to address the real problem, I still wonder if the problem would have existed if human nature would have been taken into consideration right at the beginning.
While all of us ponder upon these questions, which should ideally be the only questions being asked, let me remind each one of you that there have been countless human rights violations in the region – 100,000 have died and 20,000 women have been raped in their own homes since 1989.
We asked the question “why?” when so many of us were showered with pellets but have never had the feeling of ‘vengeance’ on any of these occasions because as far as my understanding goes, the actual problem has always been misunderstood. And now, so are the outcomes.
If you still ask me what the solution to this problem is, I would like you to go through this article again and highlight the number of times the term ‘humans’ has been used. Yes, as vague as the concept of humanity may sound to you in an imperfect world where every war starts with the lie of restoring peace, I believe that a soldier is the last person to want war.
Wars can never be the solutions or even close to it. Wars take uncountable lives. Tell me if you can, if there is anything worth a human life? I will wait for your answers.
-Farzan Dar, a child of the conflict