Tracing the changing phases of violence in Kashmir, this article explores how there is violence even in the silence and how it continues to resonate in Kashmiri lives. It aims to read outside the "received frames" and ask the right questions about perceptions, impressions and understandings of a violent act in the state. Even though Kashmir has always lived with violence, the two bomb blasts in Srinagar in July 1988 changed everything. Violence from thereon became an assertion, its forms changing but continuing to hold sway.
History repeats itself, it is said. In Kashmir however, history is recalled often and each time with a little distortion here and a misinterpretation there, a few omissions and some gaps. It is worse than a replay; for it leaves Kashmir not merely as a territorial dispute or a struggle for “freedom”, but as a dilemma, a conundrum.
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