Jammu:“Until the Lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” This is a very famous African proverb and resonates much with the situation of the Dogra Body politic. It’s a historical fact that since independence the control of political power in the state of Jammu and Kashmir has always relayed in Kashmiri hands and it has also been kept as such, very cleverly by ensuring that it never left the hands of the Kashmiri masters through congenial institutional engineering.
Dogras, who have been struggling from all these decades to assert themselves and claim their fair share of the sky, are today confronted with a plethora of questions seeking to downright negate their very characteristics as a decent lot. Thanks to misinformed reportage on the infamous and fateful Kathua mishap, a façade has been put up by a section of the Kashmiri and national media, dubbing all of us as ‘Pro-rapist’, ‘Communal’, ‘Anti-Muslim’ and what not. Nothing could be far from the truth.
It all exploded when two ministers from the ruling dispensation went to Kathua to pacify a migration triggered by Crime branch’s excesses on the local youth in the name of investigation. National and Kashmiri Media, without any factual basis, went overboard and pronounced them as ‘Hindu Nationalists’, ‘Anti-Muslim’, ’Bigots’ and what not! Kashmiri newspapers were full of reports featuring operative phrases like, “A Muslim girl raped in a ‘temple’”, which were nothing but an explicit smear campaign against the entire Dogra Community. This isn't for the first time that such a narrative has been doctored by the Kashmiri Media to slander Jammu, it can simply be seen as a continuum to the same trend of assassinating the Dogra character and robbing the regional polity of its moral claims, and establish the Kashmiri word as the only sane shade of opinion in the whole state. Thus, assuming moral intellectual and political hegemony.
The ministers have since resigned on moral grounds. But the media has been far from acknowledging its mistakes, let alone rendering an apology to the innocent people they have so badly maligned.
Presumption of innocence is a human right; the right of an accused to be deemed innocent until proven guilty or as it’s known in popular parlance, “Innocent until proven guilty.” Isn’t one quite apt to ask here on what grounds did the media pronounce those accused as guilty even before the case went sub judice? Just not this, but they even went to the absurd lengths of calling all those people demanding a CBI enquiry ‘Pro-rapist’, ‘Communal, ‘Bigots’ and all those terrible adjectives that there can be. Since when is asking for a better enquiry tantamount to supporting the crime or criminals? It just defies all logic.
Not only did their actions were outright unethical by all means but their surprising silence on the bourgeoning protests throughout the Jammu region reeks of nothing but their moral and intellectual hypocrisy. Today around 25 thousand people in all blazing sun marched 35 long kilometres to impress upon their same old genuine demand of a CBI enquiry inter alia. But it was all, to no surprise, once again conveniently left unheeded, for it may have exposed their hypocrisy. The people of Jammu, nonetheless are braving all odds and malice and are firm in their resolve to go to all lengths fathomable for the cause of Justice.
It’s not that we have to make the deaf hear but put to shame all those have been maligning us and reclaim our characteristic decency and empathy as a people which has been quite deliberately misrepresented as everything we just don’t stand for but are quite opposed to.