It would have mitigated the pain of readers if the headlines read, ““A Gujjar infant died” instead of “an infant died” after a mother, who was refused a bed in Lal Ded hospital, gives birth on a pavement.”” Hadn’t it? Don’t we have different degrees of grief? Don’t we feel less pain for the ‘other’?
So what, if the hospital has got its name from a 16th-century mystic poetess and priestess: Lal Ded? Though her spirit would be feeling detached from the society she was once part of, but why do we even care? It is a gujjir shur, it doesn’t belong here. Does it?
Due to her everlasting affection and compassion, even the name Lal Ded is used as a compliment, that too for a mother only, in our language. Phrases like “Sa chi Svodui Lal Ded” or she (mother) is like Lal Ded in her compassion. Did you say, mother? The one that was thrown away doesn’t count; after all, she is a Gujjar mother. Isn’t she?
It is not the first incident though. The war against the weakest section of the society, infants, has intensified in the recent past. We have seen babies abandoned on the roads, in dustbins and in public lavatories, lately. And if they are Gujjar infants, then this society has inexplicable onslaught in store for them. Since their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have been subject to social prejudice, so will be they. Why do they even reproduce? ‘Their umbilical cords should be let loose if they are even accidentally born.’ They shouldn’t be allowed in this world? Should they be?
After a while, when the reports of the incident surfaced on the social media, people started to discuss the matter in detail. Discussions are all that we are good at. Aren’t we?
“Not all of us are prejudiced,” is a cry of a liberal-postmodernist-apologist who, while pelting stones at SOG men, finds no derogatory sentence except, “Ho gujjir Hehro,” with emphasis added on the word Gujjir. Another person, a coffee-shop-theorist, tries to problematize the issue, “There is always another side of a story.” I shouldn’t feel nauseating after listening to such shit. They are talking about Gujjars, we are not allowed to feel anything for them, are you?
Why should I feel sorry for someone about whom I have been taught, since the very birth of my consciousness, “If you come across a snake and a Gujjar in a jungle, then leave the snake and kill the Gujjar.” In other words, Gujjars are not only lesser humans but bigger enemies than snakes as well.” (Snakes are considered biggest enemies in Muslim mythology. For instance, if you see a snake in a dream, it is interpreted as your enemies are conspiring against you, or they are already after you.)
We had walnut business in Matti-gawran, which is a gujjir alaq in Anantnag District. Whenever I wanted to go there, someone would always shout: “be careful, ‘Gujjur Yaar go Kayid Naar’ or Gujjars are not trustworthy.” Such proverbs are innumerable if you turn the pages of any dictionary on Kashmiri proverbs. We have so many derogatory proverbs and phrases on Gujjars that it has made us hate them to the extent that they have become the archetype of the ‘other’ in Kashmir. But we have to use them, haven’t you? The world will be less pleasurable without those? Wouldn’t it be?
Ahh! The probe has been ordered, politicians have unanimously, from Indian Loyalists to Resistance Leaders, condemned the negligence from doctor’s part. Commendably, the Chief Medical Officer of the Lal Ded hospital has submitted the initial report of the probe to the authorities. The report has found the doctor, who is also a PG second-year student, guilty of negligence and has been suspended. So sorry that a Doctor has been suspended over a petty issue of delivery of a Gujjar woman on a roadside on one chillai kalan night. A blot in her career, so sorry. And yes, we all should feel sorry for her, for she doesn’t belong to any gujjir, Pahari, Bakerwal or Sikh family, does she?
What now? Media reports will vanish by and by. How many cases like these have ended like this? Don’t we know how governments manage such situations? Collective memory is short-lived, but for the family, that baby will live and die every single day until all of the family dies. They all should die instantly, shouldn’t they?
Their memory won’t deceive them. With the death of their baby, the humiliation has taken new birth in all of them. But they deserve to be humiliated because they dress and speak differently than us, don’t they? And yes, whatever is not urban is backward, isn’t it? So, when we say Gujjar Alaq, we mean a place whose people are not even close to being called humans. That is what we mean, don’t we?
For all of us it would be negligence, but for the family, it is cold-blooded murder. Why so hue and cry over a gujjir Bache’s murder?
But that family pays as much tax as the doctor who denied them space. I don’t have to walk you through the science of direct and indirect taxes. In fact, it is because of this taxation system that the doctor is getting paid during her Post Graduation in a government-run institution. Everyone falling under the Indian fiscal framework pays almost 48% taxes from his permanent income through direct or indirect measures. But they are gujjir, they don’t know about their rights. Mind you, don’t even dare to let them know; they are born to be ignorant about their being humane, aren’t they?
However, who will save the society from failing less-privileged peoples, Gujjars, Paharis, Bakerwals, Sikhs etc., from the racist behaviour of its privileged majority? Who will cure it of Shahar-gaam, groos-bazruk like prejudices? Who, after even Lal Ded has thrown away the infant from her lap to die on the roadside? If not we, tell me who then?
