Opinion | Mulakat and the Return of an Old Habit

“Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighbourly community” (John Dewey)

Baramulla’s Dak Bungalow did not host an event on 19 July. It hosted a question Kashmir has been avoiding for more than 30 years whether we still want to talk to one another at all. There is a question every violence scarred society eventually has to answer, and it is rarely the question its politics is built to ask. It is not who governs, or by what margin, or on what mandate. It is smaller and harder than that: do we still want to speak to one another? A society can hold elections with impeccable procedure and still fail this test. It can produce governments, budgets, five-year plans, and still be a society whose members have quietly stopped addressing one another as fellow claimants on the same difficult inheritance. Elections measure consent to be governed. They do not measure whether a society still trusts itself to talk. That second measurement is harder to take, and far more consequential, because a people that has stopped talking to itself has, in every way that matters, stopped being a people.

The American philosopher John Dewey understood this a century ago, in a country undergoing its own convulsions of division. Democracy, he insisted, was not a mechanism to be operated at intervals but a mode of associated living — a discipline of daily reasoning-together that either exists as habit or does not exist at all. An election is a photograph of what a society decided on a single day. Dialogue is the film reel of what it decides, continuously, about itself. Baramulla, on 19 July, offered a frame of that film reel worth pausing on.

What the room refused to do

What convened at Baramulla’s Dak Bungalow, and radiated from there into a pan-Kashmir outreach across ten districts under the name Mulakat, refused the two easiest exits available to any interfaith gathering. It refused false unity – the temptation to paper over differences with a group photograph and a joint statement, as though more than 30 years of separation could be dissolved by an afternoon’s good manners. And it refused despair — the equally tempting conclusion that difference has hardened past any possibility of conversation, that the distance between communities is now simply how things are. Between those two exits lies a much narrower and much more honest path: sitting with difference long enough to discover what survives it. Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs and Christians took that path together on 19 July, and what they found waiting for them on the other side was not agreement so much as recognition — that human dignity is not the property of any one faith, and that defending it is a shared assignment rather than a competitive one.

This is worth sitting with, because it cuts against the grain of how Kashmir has been taught, for more than 30 years, to think about itself. Proxy violence did not merely kill people; it killed grammar — the ordinary, unremarkable vocabulary of neighbourliness that once required no explanation and no defence. It replaced that grammar with a simpler and more brutal one, in which every community was assigned a fixed role — victim or suspect, native or exile and conversation across those roles came to seem not merely difficult but, in some quarters, disloyal. What happened in Baramulla was small against the scale of that damage. But it was also a direct refusal of the grammar the violence imposed, conducted by the very people it was imposed upon.

A foundation that does not ask to be thanked

It matters, in this context, what kind of institution convened the room, and what kind of institution it declined to be. Save Youth Save Future Foundation, which brought Mulakat into being, does not operate on a premise of ownership. It does not regard the dialogue as its possession, its programme, or its legacy to be claimed. Its role, as it understands its own role, is to set the stage and then step back from it — to open a space wide enough for people to walk into on their own initiative, and to trust that they will, because the desire to talk was never actually absent. It was only unaddressed. That is a more demanding form of humility than it sounds: an organisation that convenes a gathering and then insists the gathering belongs to no one but the people inside it has given up the easier reward of being credited, in exchange for the harder and more honest achievement of being unnecessary once the conversation has taken hold.

The premise underneath that humility is a belief about people rather than about institutions: that Kashmiris do not need to be persuaded to talk to one another so much as permitted to. That desire was there all along, dormant rather than extinguished, waiting in a room that felt safe enough to enter. And the desire, where it is most acute, is not abstract. It is the wish to talk to the Pandit who was once a neighbour — who shared a wall, a well, a wedding, a harvest; who stood at one’s shoulder in the ordinary happiness of festivals and in the ordinary sorrow of bereavements, long before proxy violence arrived from across a border to break that cohesion into fragments it has taken more than 30 years to even begin reassembling. To want to speak to that neighbour again is not nostalgia. It is the most natural of human wishes — the wish to finish a conversation that was interrupted by force rather than by choice. Save Youth Save Future’s contribution is not to manufacture that wish. It is to stop standing in its way.

Why the stakes are higher here than the word “dialogue” suggests

It would be a kind of intellectual laziness to make this argument in the abstract, as though dialogue were a universal good requiring no local justification. In Jammu and Kashmir it requires a very specific one. More than 30 years of armed conflict, sustained in no small part by cross-border proxy terrorism engineered precisely to keep communities suspicious of one another, have left behind more than grief. They have left behind a generation for whom addiction has become a private, chemical answer to a public silence — narco-networks exploiting exactly the isolation that dialogue is built to dissolve. They have left behind the ordinary economic exhaustion of any violence ridden society: unemployment, migration, the slow fraying of livelihoods that once made neighbourliness affordable. Each of these afflictions is, at root, a disorder of connection. Each depends on convincing someone that no one is listening, that the room does not exist, that the neighbour across the faith line has become permanently unreachable.

What six years have changed, and what they cannot change alone

It is worth being precise about what has actually shifted, because precision here is a form of respect for the people who lived through the alternative. Over the past six years, law and order across Jammu and Kashmir has visibly improved. A sense of security has returned to the common Kashmiri in a way that would have seemed implausible a decade ago; the fear that once organised daily life, which street, which hour, which gathering was safe has receded. That shift found its clearest expression in 2024, which delivered the first genuinely fear-free election the Valley has seen in a generation, with no terror incident reported across the process. This is not a small achievement, and it should not be narrated as though it were incidental to everything else in this piece. It is the ground that made a gathering like Mulakat conceivable at all.

But it is precisely because that ground has been secured that the next task falls to someone other than the state. The government has done, and continues to do, its part — the part only the government can do: securing the peace, restoring the institutions, making the roads and the districts safe enough to convene a room like Baramulla’s in the first place. Opening the dialogue itself, however, is not a task the government can perform on a society’s behalf. That belongs to the people, and to the social institutions that exist between the citizen and the state — the mosque committee, the shrine trust, the youth collective, the informal council of elders. Only a common Kashmiri, choosing to speak to another common Kashmiri, can repair a social cohesion that was broken socially, one relationship at a time, and that can therefore only be rebuilt the same way.

This is where the deeper argument of Mulakat lives. Simply being Kashmiri, simply living as a Kashmiri in the fullest sense of that inheritance, is itself the answer to more than 30 years of imported, proxy-driven narrative. Because being Kashmiri has never meant belonging to one faith to the exclusion of others; it has meant being indigenous to a shared valley and a shared coexistence, in which difference was never historically a cause for conflict but an occasion for celebration — Eid observed alongside Shivratri, Kashmiri Pandit cousins and Kashmiri Muslim cousins keeping one another’s festivals as naturally as their own, a single cultural fabric woven from more than one thread. The proxy narrative that arrived from across the border required Kashmiris to forget this, to relearn their own home as a place of fixed and hostile categories. Simply refusing that forgetting — simply continuing to live as a Kashmiri has always lived, in coexistence rather than suspicion is itself a quiet but total rejection of everything that narrative was built to achieve.

This outreach, and the series of gatherings it is generating across the other districts, is best understood in exactly that light: not as the introduction of something new, but as the reopening of a dialogue whose aspiration was never absent from any of the faiths it now brings into the same room. Every community walking into Mulakat already carried, somewhere within its own tradition, the wish this outreach is simply giving permission to express.

A habit, or nothing at all

Dewey did not ask societies to invent a discipline of talking to one another. He asked them to notice the one they already had, and to stop letting it lapse into occasion rather than habit. That distinction matters more in Kashmir than perhaps anywhere else, because Kashmir is not being asked to learn dialogue as an import. It is being asked to remember it as an inheritance. Wal, kath baat karith— come, let’s sit and talk is not a phrase Mulakat introduced to Kashmiri life. It is a phrase Kashmiri life has always carried, in its blood and in its idiom, long before it needed a foundation, a venue, or a name to make it happen. That it now does need these things is not a comment on Kashmiris. It is a comment on what more than 30 years of imposed silence can do to even the oldest of habits: not kill it, but strand it, so that a people must be given a room before they can do again what they once did without one.

This is why Mulakat deserves neither more nor less than an honest accounting. It is not the return of coexistence — coexistence was never actually gone, only unaddressed, waiting the way an old friendship waits through a long silence, ready to resume from wherever it was interrupted. And it is not, either, a finished achievement that Kashmir can now file away with satisfaction. It is a beginning that has done exactly what a beginning should: it has shown that the want was real, that the room did not stay empty once opened, that a Pandit and a Muslim and a Sikh and a Christian could sit at Baramulla’s Dak Bungalow and find the old grammar was not as far gone as three decades of engineered suspicion wanted them to believe. That is worth real credit.

The honest question, in Dewey’s own terms, is when “wal kath baat karo” stops requiring Mulakat to say it, and starts being said again on its own — in a mosque courtyard, a shrine compound, a shared harvest, a wedding invitation crossing a faith line without a second thought, the way it once did before violence made such crossings feel like statements rather than simply life. Dewey’s democracy as a way of living was never a demand for grand reconciliation. It was a demand for the unremarkable to become unremarkable again for neighbourliness to stop needing an outreach programme to justify itself, and to go back to needing nothing more than a neighbour.

That is the fair measure of what still lies ahead, and it is not a small distance. A single gathering, however sincere, does not undo 30 years of narrative built specifically to make communities forget they ever knew how to do this. Nor should Kashmir pretend otherwise, or treat Baramulla as more than what it was: proof of appetite, not proof of restoration. But the direction is not in doubt, because the impulse being rekindled is not a new one being installed against the grain of Kashmiri life — it is an old one being permitted to resume its own grain. Save Youth Save Future’s honesty lies in understanding this correctly: it has not given Kashmir a reason to talk. It has removed an obstacle to a reason Kashmir already had. What happens from here whether “wal kath baat karo” becomes, once again, simply how Kashmiris live rather than something Kashmiris convene to relearn- is not the Foundation’s to decide. It belongs, as Dewey would have insisted it must, to the ordinary rooms, the ordinary neighbours, and the ordinary days still ahead.

Irshad Ahmad Bhat is a Research Scholar in Politics and Governance and serves as Coordinator and In-charge of the Research Wing at Save Youth Save Future. He can be reached at Bhatirshad81@gmail.com.