I. Ahmed Wani
Watch the words, not the tears. In the politics of Jammu and Kashmir, vocabulary has always been the most honest witness, because the words change the moment the man holding the gun changes.
When the Indian Army conducts an operation in the Valley, it is “zulum”: oppression, tyranny, a human rights emergency fit for United Nations resolutions, OIC statements, and candlelight vigils in Western capitals. When an entire generation of Kashmiri boys was pushed into the jihadi industry through the late 1980s and 1990s, trained across the Line of Control, armed by Rawalpindi and sent back to die, it was sanctified as holy war, and every funeral became a recruitment rally. But now, when the people of Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, Bagh and the Poonch division rise against the Pakistani state that actually rules them, and are answered with Rangers, Frontier Constabulary, tear gas and live fire, the entire dictionary softens overnight. Now it is a “deadlock.” Now it is negotiable. Now the only prescription is dialogue and confidence-building.
Nobody embodies this shape-shifting lexicon better than Mushaal Hussein Mullick, wife of jailed Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Yasin Malik. She has offered herself as mediator between Pakistan’s establishment and the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), even as Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) burns through weeks of unrest with a death toll that has crossed thirty by several counts.
The word was “jihad” when the victims were ours
To grasp the audacity of this linguistic conversion, recall what her husband’s career actually was, and which words dressed it up.
Yasin Malik sat at the centre of the armed insurgency that set the Valley alight from 1988 onward. He faces trial as an accused in the January 1990 Srinagar attack in which four unarmed Indian Air Force personnel were gunned down, and in the December 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union Home Minister, the abduction that forced the release of hardened militants and taught a generation that the gun paid. The JKLF he led spearheaded the most brutal phase of militancy, the phase whose targeted killings drove the Kashmiri Pandits out of their homeland. In May 2022, a special NIA court convicted him under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on terror-funding charges to which he pleaded guilty, and sentenced him to life imprisonment on a money trail documented across the border.
Through all of it, the sponsoring vocabulary never wavered. The boys ferried across the LoC into training camps were not victims of an industrial-scale exploitation racket; they were “mujahideen.” The men who financed and armed them were not handlers; they were patrons of a freedom struggle. Every coffin in the Valley was converted into political currency, every mother’s grief into a slogan. The jihadi industry consumed Kashmir’s young as raw material, and its marketing wing, in which Mushaal Mullick starred as spokesperson before Pakistan’s caretaker government elevated her as a special assistant on human rights, called the assembly line holy.
The word is “dialogue” when the shooter is theirs
Now place that record beside the present.
The JAAC’s agitation in PoJK has nothing to do with India. Its charter is a catalogue of the humiliations of daily life in the territory Pakistan calls “Azad”: punishing tariffs on electricity generated from PoJK’s own rivers, hospitals that exist on paper, broken roads, drinking water that never arrives, assembly seats and privileges reserved for a favoured elite, and an administration that answers to Islamabad rather than its own people. When residents marched, women, children and the elderly among them, the state replied in the grammar every occupier knows: containers blocking highways, communication blackouts, baton charges and bullets. Protesters were killed in and around Rawalakot. Some JAAC leaders now openly call the territory “forcibly occupied,” their words, aimed squarely at Pakistan.
And what does the azadi lobby’s loudest voice say to this? Not “zulum.” Not state terrorism. Not a demand for international investigation. Mushaal Mullick appeals gently to Field Marshal Asim Munir to intervene, criticises civilian politicians for insensitivity, stresses the value of human life, reassures everyone that PoJK’s Kashmiris hold nothing against the “Riyasat-e-Pakistan,” and proposes a human chain plus a seat for herself at the table.
Weigh the asymmetry. For Srinagar: hashtags, dossiers and demands that the world intervene. For Rawalakot’s dead: a discreet request that the army chief settle matters quietly before the embarrassment spreads. When Indian forces impose a cordon, it is a siege of humanity; when Pakistani forces fire into crowds of their own “azad” citizens, it becomes an unfortunate impasse requiring flexibility from both sides. The blood runs the same colour on either side of the Line of Control. Its market price does not. That price depends entirely on whose propaganda can spend it.
The priorities behind the pivot
Why the sudden tenderness? Because the mind-set of these political actors has always followed priorities, never principles. The priority was never the Kashmiri; it was the utility of the Kashmiri. When Valley youth could be spent as ammunition against India, their deaths were an investment and the war was holy. When PoJK’s youth rise against the Pakistani oppressor, they turn into a liability that threatens the shop itself, so their rebellion must be talked down, mediated, managed, and above all kept out of the occupation vocabulary, lest the world start applying to Muzaffarabad the standards Islamabad demands for Srinagar.
Read Mushaal Mullick’s mediation offer, then, not as compassion but as damage control by a franchise watching its brand collapse. Even so, it deserves a strange kind of welcome, because it is an admission extracted under duress. The family that spent three decades telling the world Kashmiris needed rescuing from India now pleads, in effect, for Kashmiris to be rescued from Pakistan.
The eye-opener for the Valley
Here lies the lesson for those in the Valley who still romance destabilisation: the over-ground workers, the drawing-room sympathisers, the recyclers of Rawalpindi’s talking points. Look across the LoC and see the azadi on offer. A territory whose protests are met with bullets. A people whose rivers light Punjab while their own villages sit in darkness. Citizens forced to march for water and flour. The state that ran the jihad factory could not, in eight decades, run a hospital network in the Kashmir it holds. Whatever grievances exist with Delhi, and legitimate ones do, on statehood and political voice, they are contested within a system moving toward elections, tourism and investment, not toward the tear-gassed sit-ins of Muzaffarabad.
The dictionary stands exposed at last. Zulum, jihad, negotiation: three words, one cynical grammar. Rawalakot has translated it for everyone. Those in the Valley still conspiring for chaos should read the translation carefully. The people they claim to speak for have seen the other side of the mountain, and the other side is on fire.
