THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

MUBASHIR BUKHARI 

Imagine these scenes: a few teenage girls dressed in the usual school uniform setting out for school in the morning. Barely outside their homes, in the open, the girls’ strip down to their underwear, slip into more fashionable clothes, and set out to have fun. A young mother pissed off with her husband’s philandering decides to slit the throats of their two young boys as a way of getting back at her husband. A stray dog finds an infant abandoned on the street, lifts the baby in its mouth, and roams around the city centre with the baby clutched

between the dog’s sharp teeth. A man was spotted seducing a young girl in the woods before a stranger reprimands him for the sexual indiscretion. A boy was found murdered with one of his arms cut off from the body. 

The graphic anecdotes have not been culled from a juicy, cheap potboiler, but the above scenes, so sordid in nature that you might feel disgust welling up in you, are enacted right before our eyes, if only we had time to pay attention to what is going on around us in our society. Our social fabric, let’s admit it, has gaping holes wide enough to show us the dark underside of the life we have constructed for ourselves. How else does one explain these degenerate incidents, which are falling into a clear pattern, becoming the rule rather than the exception. 

For example, the poor infant’s lifeless body dangling from the mouth of a stray dog in Srinagar a few months back reveals how promiscuity was widening in our society, turning upside down our social mores. Although there is no research or survey done to come to an exact figure on such cases of out of wedlock pregnancies in Kashmir, a gynecologist at Lal Ded Hospital Srinagar says they come across only 5-10 per cent of the overall cases, since the majority of such births or the termination of births are midwifed by local pharmacists and fly-by-night private medical clinics.

 A video recently went viral on social media showing three teenage Kashmiri girls taking off their school uniform in the open and donning trendy clothes while a friend of theirs filmed the entire sequence on her smartphone before uploading it on YouTube. In another video, a couple is entwined in each other’s arms while some fellow discreetly records the sexual intimacy on his phone.

A student of engineering in Peerbagh is brutally murdered with his throat and chest peeled off and one of his arms torn away from his torso. The police said it was an unusual love affair beginning with an innocuous conversation on cellphone between two strangers and ended in a violent crime.

Has the set of values our society lived by for ages fallen by the wayside in our pursuit of material gains? How much role does political repression play in contributing towards the waywardness in the society? Can religion play a role in beating back the growing tide of vulgarity and degeneracy?

Basarat Hassan is a PhD scholar in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He feels the armed conflict going on in Kashmir for the last nearly three decades has exploded the structure of our society. “There is a lot of geographical boundary and resistance here, and in the midst of this water-tight situation technology provides the space that people crave for. It would not be wrong to say that, in Kashmir, technology is an alternate free world to people who are otherwise bound.”

Hassan explains how youth in Kashmir are finding themselves in the middle of a chaotic situation where the ideals they look forward to, the aptitude they develop and the ideas they call as leisure are all contrary to the moral values they are expected to keep.

“Pornography, the so called sexual liberty is deeply consumed and practiced in the quarters of our society. We are simply being exposed to materialism through a reverie of liberalism, freedom and equality,” said Hassan.

Hassan believes that parental care and attention becomes all the more important given the conditions our youngsters find themselves in. “The role of parents is all the more critical given the early age exposure to extremes of everything negative. I am not saying that parents are the only party responsible for the mess but they are an important party to it, and they have the power to turn it around as well,” said Hassan.

Dr Mansoor Ahmad, a psychiatrist at Srinagar’s Mental Hospital, says that each day he comes across cases of youth who are exposed to substance abuse and addiction and most of them complain that  they don’t get enough attention and care from their parents.

“When you have a kid who is going through some problem and there is no one to listen to him, parents are too busy with their jobs or anything else, he or she is vulnerable to a world of ills. This is why a small issue gradually evolves into a major crime or a health hazard.”

According to Dr Ahmad, unchecked and needless exposure to technology especially the Internet and mobile telephony is making things worse in such a situation.

“Technology is not bad but how you use it determines its affects and unfortunately in Kashmir, we mostly use it negatively. For example uncontrolled exposure to crime, and other gory incidents on different media like internet and satellite television has had its overall impact on the mental health of the society, people are emotionally numb these days, you will have pictures and videos showing torn bodies, nude girls and religious texts all circulating at one place on social media, a human mind is influenced and sometimes confused by these diverse subjects,” said Ahmad.

He feels, seeing all this, people wrongly assume that it would not affect them for they do not see any physical or tangible connection between them and the mess.  But this notion, over a period of time, has proven detrimental and has placed us at a point where we are witnessing episodes involving unimaginable violence, immorality and crime.

Some feel we need to be able to distinguish between what is inherently good and bad for society and just cannot pick and choose from what is out there on offer. Dr Javid Ahmad, a certified Aalim (Islamic scholar) and a medical doctor practicing at Government Medical College Srinagar says that Kashmiri society is at a very critical point.

“You cannot be a victim’s friend and his murderer’s attorney as well, a line has to be drawn but in Kashmir there is no one drawing it, in fact we all believe that we can take everything along and still have no repercussions, we make sure that our child goes to a convent school, study literature that contains sex, drugs and immorality, be exposed to the darker side of technology and then also study the Qur’an and Islam and follow it, it is impossible, too hard for an adolescent to manage,” he said.

The Kashmir Monitor also spoke to Mufti Ishaq Nazki, an Islamic jurist from Dar-ul-Uloom Raheemiya, a premier religious school in the Bandipora district. Nazki gives an Islamic explanation to the problem:

“There is utter moral destruction and the reason is baydeeni (straying from Islam). We have forgotten death, forgotten Islam. There is no fear of Allah since our earning is Haraam (prohibited) and we feed our kids from the same Haraam earning, when this happens at large people hardly have a problem in committing or witnessing a shameful act, both at personal and social level.”

To counter the waywardness, Mufti Nazki said we have to take responsibility and focus on moral education among kids and adults as well.

“As kids, we used to be first taught Islamiyat and Ikhlaqiyat (good mannerism) but today our education revolves around materialism and money; it is everyone’s problem and the responsibility also lies with everyone, parents, teachers, ulemas, media, politicians and youngsters; they all have to wake up or else we will end up like those countries which are bearing the ill-effects of the limitless liberalism and freedom they once used to advocate,” said Nazki.

If one talks about parents earning a Haraam livelihood, white collar crimes and corruption is the first thing that comes to mind.

A 2014 research paper titled “White-collar Crimes in Kashmir” by two scholars of the Psychology department of the University of Kashmir and the University of Jammu defines white collar crime as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation. The purpose of the concept of white-collar crime is to call attention to a vast area of criminal behavior which is generally overlooked as criminal behavior, which is seldom brought within the score of the theories of criminal behaviour.

It says: “One side J&K Government is trying to use advanced technologies in different departments to make work easier and comfortable for its employees another side some officials are involved in white-collar crimes which destructs the future of younger generations.”

The paper specifically refers to the infamous BOPEE scandal which involved corruption at the highest level.

It concludes that in Jammu and Kashmir white-collar crimes are increasing tremendously and because of these crimes the state is one of the top-most corrupt states of India. White-collar crimes and related abuses are not adversaries that can be targeted, met, attacked, and defeated once and for all. Other experts also believe that the emergence of social issues and avoiding their remedy with time increases the overall criminal behaviour among the population.

A 2013 research paper ‘Normlessness and Seeds of Criminality in Kashmir: A Social Analysis’ by one research scholar Aijaz Mir of the Department of Sociology, the University of Kashmir explains the rot better. Here is an excerpt from it:

“Kashmir just a century back was nearly a crime free, and a morally strong place to live in. Crimes were neither committed in an organized way nor were reported by people at large. The dominant majority of people in that situation lived a peaceful non violent life in which they hardly witnessed or heard about any major crime. In actuality, their (sic) existed a non violent social ethos in the extreme form and any kind of violent, immoral or criminal act was considered undesirable and condemnable.

But today’s Kashmir is a different Kashmir with both traditional and modern crimes comprising of murders, rapes, dacoity, arson, eve-teasing, dowry deaths, economic crimes like corruption, drug trafficking, smuggling, cyber crimes, crime against women and children, etc.”

“From the field study of Srinagar city we found that almost 86% people agree that crime rate has increased in Srinagar city. Most people believe that rise of conflict situation is the primary cause of increased crime rate in Srinagar city. A maximum of 38.28% people follow this opinion. The other main reasons are excessive freedom to youth (22.91%), socioeconomic insatiability (10.30%), immorality (10.30%) and poverty (4.18%),” states the research paper.

It adds that the most prevalent crimes in Srinagar city are crimes related to women, crimes related to alcohol and drugs, property crimes, motorized traffic crimes, cheating, and most recent the cyber crimes.

The paper also refers to Robert Merton’s theory of ‘anomie’, one of the important theories in understanding Crime and Criminology.

Robert Merton’s theory of anomie first appeared in 1938 in an article titled “Social structure and anomie”. According to Merton, anti-social behavior (crime) is produced by the values of the society itself in encouraging high material aspirations as a sign of individual successes without adequately providing approved means for all to reach these goals. Merton states:

“It is only when a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common symbols of successes for the population at large while its social structure rigorously restricts or completely eliminates access to approved modes of acquiring these symbols for a considerable part of same population, that anti-social behavior ensues on a considerable scale.”

Thus this theory is based on the assumption that persons who are denied the means to reach their goals get frustrated and resort to deviant behavior. It is low socio-economic groups which are discriminated against; they have a greater incidence of deviant behavior.

One of the essential premises of this approach is that organization and disorganization in society are not mutually exclusive, but rather that many of the cultural values that have desirable consequences often contain with them or produce undesirable consequences.

Sociologically the emergence of crime in Kashmir can be explained in terms of factors which include the environment of inequality, competition and conflict created through the process of modernization, urbanization, industrialization, material development and so on.

In this particular social dynamics, sociological-pathological factors of social disorder, disorganization, improper socialization, nuclear family, School control could not be avoided and were considered as co-relates of this grand transformation. The features of deviance and delinquency could not be avoided. 

The added factors to the emergence of criminal trends are media exposure and IT revolution. This situation has led to the emergence of crime as a social trend and has attracted the younger elements in society.