As much as I’d like to see her return to fiction for at least one more round, I usually look forward to about anything she publishes, which always seems to work as a sharp, double-bladd instrument, cutting through entrenched mainstream analysis while also giving the well-meaning “left” a few well deserved slices.  Again using her homeland of India as a backdrop for showing the larger picture, this round looks at something contrary to most sensibilities, including my own, the “dark side of democracy.”

Why do people in places in mass revolt against something we know so many others are fighting to obtain?

The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on the peoples’ behalf, informed us that “Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace.” What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Meanwhile Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir’s sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.

To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace alone they yearned for, but freedom too. Over the last two months the carefully confected picture of an innocent people trapped between “two guns,” both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.