In April, the world press was suddenly filled with unusually deeply-felt tributes to one of their own. Equally unusually, the cause of this spontaneous fraternal grief was not a western journalist. It was Shah Marai, an Afghan photographer who had picked up the camera in the 1990s, the Taliban dawn. Over the years, he bore lonely witness to his country’s long descent into a dystopian cycle of ceaseless, and senseless, violence. He could have left Afghanistan anytime, but chose to stay on, to frame and interpret a colossal, ongoing holocaust.
Before his death, counting the colleagues he lost to the war, attending their funerals, assuaging their families, all that was part of his professional routine. The morbid was mundane for him, in a way the rest of the world simply could not comprehend—till one day the dogs of war got him too.
Kashmir’s journalistic fraternity too goes through this mind-numbing routine—having to report death, often of a colleague, in a deadpan fashion. In Kashmir too, death is an intimate and hovering presence that stalks each one of those who chase its details for their daily story. Even in this unending nightmare, the shooting of Rising Kashmir editor and veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari shocked everyone, across all political lines. Universally liked as well as respected—as much for his transparent desire for peace as his dignified moderation—the feral dogs of war chose this gentle soul for their nightly supper this time.
An Eid lies tainted by this sacrifice. A ceasefire that looked promising, with talk of an extension and perhaps even dialogue at the end of it, has delivered a monstrous baby. A young Armyman back home for Eid too lay motionless, among a chorus of mourners. Who wanted the peace killed? Depends on who you ask. There’s another war out on Twitter. There are those who baited Bukhari for being a “quasi-Islamist”. There are those who bait those critics. And those who blame Indian agencies. In the midst of all that lies a corpse, signifying the difficulty of being human in Kashmir.