Tolerance, what's that?

Omar Abdullah
We want to find a solution to the "dispute," "issue," "disagreement" of Kashmir and we want to do so via a dialogue. It is almost largely accepted among the 'mainstream' and 'separatists' that a violent
resolution of the problem is simply not possible. The sentiment is admirable but the reality is so very different.
Over the last few weeks since I started blogging I have been disappointed by a large number of respondents' inability to accept an alternate point of view. It's almost as if the ground rule is "it's my way of the highway." There seems to be no scope for discussion on alternate formulations and propositions. How on earth are we going to agree on a settlement to the problem if we can't even agree to disagree in a civilised manner? We don't like what some one says and we want to "slap" the other person. We don't like what the other  person says so we threaten to simply ignore his (or her) point of view. You disagree with me and suddenly my 10 year old son becomes fair game for your abuse and threats.
May be I'm wrong but I don't remember things being like this. My elders tell me of a time when we could agree to disagree and be gentlemen about it. We could argue our point on the merit of our argument and not descend to personal digs and insults, or worse still threats of violence. We could argue and argue passionately and yet still sit down over a cup of tea and enquire about the well being of each others family and friends.
What is this change the result of? I don't really know. A naturally impatient younger generation unhappy with a future that holds limited promise? A community angry at what they have seen happening around them for the last two decades? A land torn between conflicting ideas and ideologies? I honestly don't know which of these, if any, is applicable but I'm sure you have an opinion and I'd like to hear. I could, of course, be completely wrong and this is nothing new. The one thing I do know is that if we are not willing to respect an alternate point of view we'll soon find that very few people will be willing to respect our point of view. There are two sides to every argument and none of us has an exclusive license to an opinion. We are not discussing religion which more often than not is carved in stone, we are discussing politics and politics gives us the space to agree or disagree. I just wish we could do disagree without taking it as a personal affront.
On a different note I spent ages deciding whether to blog or not. The last few days have been very difficult for me. The personal abuse I can manage very well. I have been to Sanawar and there isn't an insult or abuse that hasn't been flung at me, in jest or seriously, in the 8 years I was there so reading them in an email is like water off a ducks back but what really bothered me was the ease with which sections of the media were able to take my words out of context and use them to satisfy their own editorial twist. Suddenly 'Times Now' claimed that I had accepted a genocide where I had done nothing of the sort. Though how less then two hundred and fifty deaths (of Kashmiri Pandits) in a total of more than sixty thousand qualifies as a genocide is a matter of a completely different discussion. The ease with which they took a few stray sentences and built a completely twisted story surprised me. Similar the rush to claim what I had said about my uncle as some sort of admission of separatist politics or sentiment on my part would have been laughable if it wasn't such a serious accusation. Knowing fully well that I had been clear in accepting what had happened in 1990 as an overwhelming expression of popular sentiment I just cautioned that the other side of the coin needed to be seen as well no matter how insignificant a percentage of the overall number of people who participated in what happened in the early 1990s a reporter from one newspaper found it so easy to frame a headline that made it look as if I had said that everything that happened in 1990 was enforced. Things like this caused me a lot of personal anguish apart for the obvious political difficulty. It's made me so much more cautious about what I write and how I write about what I think because I have realised that it is so easy to just take a sentence or two, attribute it to my blog and then build as much fiction as a person wants to around that. The damage will be done long before I can offer a word in explanation.