When Time Becomes a Political Alibi

In Kashmir, the Endless Wait for Statehood Is Recast as a Philosophical Mystery

A local mosque in Srinagar. Photo credit: Ashiq Naik

There continues to be unlettered heartburn about the definition of “appropriate time” with respect to returning statehood to Jammu & Kashmir.

As if this is a simple matter.

Consider this: a Russian walking down Bond Street in London accosted a British gentleman to ask, “Sir, what is time?”

At which, the bewildered British gentleman (most likely a professor) drew a sigh, and replied, “My dear, you have asked a most imponderable question; what indeed is time?”

Needless to clarify that the Russian man had intended to know just the time of the day, but, owing to mother tongue interference in his spoken English, left out the vital little article “the” before “time.”

Think then of the great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking who set out to know the reality of time; yet, even at the end, his monumental book, A Brief History of Time, was barely better equipped to answer the question than when he set out.

One may ask, did the colossus Albert Einstein fare any better in decoding the meaning of time?

Also read: “Under an Invisible Lock”: In Post-Pahalgam Kashmir, Locals Live and Survive Silently

Opinion remains divided on his earth-shaking propositions too.

Come to the valley of spiritual valleys, Kashmir, and the conundrum of time has through eons found even more profoundly unsettling explorations than Hawking and Einstein may together have attained, but again with no easy resolutions, only invocations to continuing meditations on the timeless subject.

Such being the dilemma, are we to expect a mere prime minister, or a home minister, or a designated lieutenant governor to return an answer as to what may be an “appropriate time” to bestow statehood on the Union Territory, where neither Hawking, nor Einstein, nor the rishis or the sufis have quite fathomed the deep mystery of time.

And if time itself remains so impenetrably opaque, how, pray, is one to know anything about when time may be appropriate or not?

One is then persuaded to conclude that the unravelling of the mystery may come, if it does, only from a non-biological happening.

Do recall how, in recent years, even an honourable justice of the top court revealed how the resolution to an intractable contention, stretching over centuries, came to his volition through a moment of divine intervention.

It would be most appropriate, therefore, for elected representatives in that superlatively mystical of territories to hark back to the rich philosophical cogitations that have, through millennia, marked the excellence of Kashmiri culture; there they would find a catechism to grant the powers that be, at this infinitesimal moment in time, the justice of their difficulty, rather than attribute more understandable motives to their Hamlet-esque misery in making any rash determination as to when the “appropriate time” may be for giving back to Kashmiris what was so unwisely taken from them at an inappropriate time.

A well-known Kashmiri professor once remarked with prudence that it is often easier to open a file than to close it.

It is also the case that, in human history, answers to profound conundrums have often come from the mouths of babes whose perceptions of human motivations are undisfigured by the chicaneries of well-timed politics.

Such indeed many think may be the situation with respect to Jammu & Kashmir as well, but this surely is neither the age nor the time for an innocent disclosure of truth; is it?