Editorial | Tide Over Troubling Times

While the drug related crimes, thievery and other such offences have become a routine now, the Valley otherwise unbeknownst has witnessed multiple heart-wrenching and heinous crimes over a short span of time – just exposing the rot creeping within the society we are dwelling in. It very recently happened that a young girl was killed in the most inhumane and barbaric way in central-Kashmir’s Budgam district, wherein the accused with utter disdain to every human principle had chopped the girl into pieces and scattered it far and wide. The incident caught the whole valley by awe and shock and mass protests and demonstrations poured in from different parts of the valley to show their abhorrence to the brutal act. Just few weeks into the incident, a more violent and shocking incident was reported from frontier north Kashmir’s Kupwara district wherein a throat-slit corpse of an innocent girl was found lying in a pool of blood at Khurhama Kupwara. How more shocking could it be that the merely seven-year-old girl was murdered by his father – as revealed by preliminary investigations of Police. Barely hours later the day the corpse of the young girl was found, another news that sent chills down the spine of everyone was the murder of a mother by her son in Sopore in Baramulla district. The sequence of incidents indicate that things aren’t alright in any part of the Valley, be it Centre, North or South and the society is witnessing offences of higher degree and magnitude that are too thick and fast. The law enforcement agencies are on their toes to work out the cases to bring fore the culprits, but how long will we as a society leave it to them. Are we morally and ethically bound to behave as a society largely known to the world as ‘Pir Vaer’ a word synonymous to ‘Insaniyat’. Kashmir is a Muslim-majority territory and is as such expected to keep up with the values and principles the religion demands us to, however as things play out with each passing day, it seems we are heading towards annihilation for the reasons we better know. There is still hope that if we collectively take the moral responsibility to set the things in tandem, there is every chance that we can at least prolong the things, if not curb them totally. We need to take heed from the very essence of our being, take heed from basic principles of humankind and more so take heed from what our religion teaches us to sail through these troubling times.