Why the Karnal Incident Failed to Divide
I. Ahmed Wani
The facts of what happened near Divine Dhaba on NH-44 in Karnal on the night of October 17 are, by now, fairly clear. A J&K bus (JK01BE8013) was parked outside the dhaba. A car wanted to leave the parking area. The bus driver did not move. Two local youths travelling in the car got into the bus and scuffled with the driver. Passengers rushed to his aid. Outnumbered, the youths backed off, but on their way out they hurled a brick and stones at the bus, breaking its window glass and windscreen. Police arrived. Everyone, including the dhaba owner Yogendra Kundu, went to the police station. A compromise was reached and no case was registered. Police also allege that in the confusion a passenger, Sayed Aiyar, assaulted a police personnel.
That should have been the end of an ugly but ordinary night on a national highway. It was not. Within hours, the incident was on social media, and within a day it had become something else entirely. The bus was no longer a bus. It was a “Kashmiri bus.” The youths were no longer two hotheads in a parking lot. They were a mob. A dispute over a few feet of road space had become proof, for anyone who wanted it, that Kashmiris are not safe anywhere in India.
The preliminary inquiry and the CCTV footage say otherwise. Haryana Police have described it, prima facie, as a road-rage incident. The quarrel started over parking. There is nothing so far to suggest that the youths knew or cared where the bus had come from before the scuffle began. Road rage on NH-44 is not news. Buses, trucks and cars from every state fight over parking at every dhaba between Delhi and Amritsar, every night of the year.
None of this makes what happened acceptable. Passengers travelling hundreds of kilometres from home were frightened. A vehicle was damaged. A compromise was reached at the thana in a way that let the attackers walk out without so much as an FIR, which is exactly the kind of casual policing that lets small incidents grow into big ones. That the police have now apprehended the two youths again, after the matter gathered attention, is welcome. It is also an admission that the first response was wrong. An FIR should have been registered on the night itself. The law does not need public pressure to do its job.
There is a harder truth to face here too. Incidents like this land differently on a minority. When a bus with a Jammu and Kashmir registration is stoned in Haryana, Kashmiri students in Punjab, Kashmiri traders in Delhi and Kashmiri labourers across north India all feel it. They have reasons for that feeling. They have been through worse, after Pulwama and after Pahalgam, when the anger of a nation was turned on people who had nothing to do with either attack. Vulnerability is not paranoia. It is memory.
But a feeling of vulnerability, however justified, is not the same as a fact about the country. I spoke to Sadat, a Kashmiri scholar pursuing his PhD in Human Resource Management at Chandigarh University, a few hours’ drive from Karnal. He called the incident condemnable, and then said something that deserves to be heard as loudly as the video of the broken windscreen. “I have been at this university for four years,” he told me. “I have never experienced anything like this. I am respected here. As a minority student, I have more privileges than the rest, not fewer.”
Back in Srinagar, Rashmi, a B.Tech student at NIT who came to the Valley from outside the state, offered the mirror image. “We have enjoyed peace here in the Valley,” she said. “It is some of our own people in the rest of the country who are trying to bring flames into that peace. It is condemnable and unfortunate.” A non-Kashmiri student in Srinagar speaking of peace, and a Kashmiri student in Punjab speaking of respect, say more about the state of this country than two youths with a brick.
The same highway carries lakhs of Kashmiri passengers, drivers and traders every month without incident. The same Haryana that produced these two youths produces the dhaba owners who feed Kashmiri truckers, the farmers who buy Kashmiri apples, the families who holiday in Pahalgam and Gulmarg. The passengers on that bus were not rescued by the police. They were saved by their own numbers, and the attackers were then taken to the police station along with everybody else, by local people who clearly did not want trouble in their town. That is not what an intolerant country looks like.
The real danger in such incidents is not the brick. It is what happens afterwards, on the phones. There is a well-practised machinery that waits for exactly this kind of footage, and it exists on both sides. One set of handles wants every Kashmiri to believe that India hates him, because a Kashmiri who believes that is easier to isolate and easier to recruit. Another set wants every Indian to believe that every Kashmiri is a threat, because fear is good politics. Both sets had the Karnal clip within hours. Both would have liked nothing better than for a parking dispute to become a communal flashpoint.
It did not happen. Ordinary people, in Karnal and in Kashmir, did not take the bait. Kashmiri passengers did not escalate beyond defending themselves. Local Haryanvis did not rally behind the two youths. Nobody burnt an effigy. Nobody called a bandh. And across the educated section of our society, the response has been the same as Sadat’s and Rashmi’s: condemn the act, refuse the narrative. People are no longer drawn to violence in the name of caste or religion the way they once were. That refusal is the clearest sign yet that the dark days are behind us, or very nearly so.
That is where it must stay. Those who entered the bus and attacked the driver must be prosecuted. Those who threw stones at a vehicle full of passengers must face the sections that apply to endangering life, not just to damaging property. If a passenger did assault a policeman, that too must be examined on evidence, not on which side the social media mob prefers. Nobody should be shielded because of where they come from, and nobody should be hounded because of where they come from either.
Jammu and Kashmir has paid, for thirty years, for the habit of turning every grievance into a cause. The lesson of Karnal is the opposite one. A crime is a crime. It has a thana, an FIR and a court. It does not need a flag. The people on that bus wanted to get home safely. The people of this country, overwhelmingly, want them to. Let the law deal with the handful who did not.
