For more than three decades, Kashmir’s education system was not merely disrupted but was placed in the wrong hands by the wrong people, and these were none other than the Hurriyat in Kashmir. This is the truth, and anyone who reads this article must rebut it if I have stated anything wrongly, either mail me; I am ready to answer. The youth were systematically wounded, indoctrinated, and penetrated against India. The main target was education, initially in schools, then in homes, forcing them onto the streets with stones. Through means of hartals, street protests, stone-pelting calendars, and “shutdown culture,” this became so routine that for many children, the idea of a normal school year turned into a distant fantasy. In those years, schools were not spaces of learning but symbols of fear: classrooms closed for months, examination centres converted into security camps, playgrounds deserted, and young minds conditioned to associate books with curfews.
This destruction was not accidental; it was managed and engineered. But the most painful truth is that those who called the hartals, issued the protest calendars, and radicalised neighbourhoods did not sacrifice their own children to this chaos. The slogan of “self-determination” was sold to the sons and daughters of poor Kashmiris, while the sons and daughters of separatists quietly built their futures in foreign countries.
The poor child of Kashmir lost their career in the early 1990s and again in the late 2010s. A Kashmiri child could lose an entire academic year not because of illness or disaster, but because of a “call” from a separatist leader sitting safely inside a guarded residence or speaking from abroad. Annual school days fell drastically. Board examinations were postponed repeatedly. Competitive exam cycles were missed. College admissions were delayed or cancelled. Children spent months indoors, not preparing for Olympiads or engineering entrance exams, but memorising protest routes and slogans. The administration had no alternative but to provide security and safety to the violent youth.
This was not merely the loss of schooling; it was the loss of childhood itself. Instead of debates, science fairs and sports meets, our youth inherited street clashes, funerals, slogans, and fear. The soft and gentle minds of Kashmiri children were not nurtured; they were penetrated and indoctrinated.
Let us be honest and practical. Kashmir was effectively turned into a two-track society: their children versus our children. While ordinary families watched their children lose years of education to shutdowns and street violence, the children of separatist leadership quietly built stable careers far away from the turmoil they helped sustain.
For decades, a group of separatist leaders presided over protest calendars, hartals, and cycles of shutdowns that paralysed education in Kashmir, yet within their own homes a very different future was quietly secured: their children became doctors, professors, engineers, journalists, and professionals, finding places in universities, government institutions, and foreign classrooms in Turkey, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, and beyond, often aided by political connections and recommendations, while their spouses and families remained insulated from the daily realities of curfews, school closures, tear gas, and disrupted semesters; even when some of these leaders themselves faced imprisonment, their sons and daughters continued their studies abroad, building stable careers far away from the conflict they were encouraged to glorify at home, so the real question is this: when neighbourhood schools were burning, when classrooms were replaced by barbed wire and slogans, where were the children of those who called the shots, because they were not dodging pellets, not losing academic years, not burying dreams on the streets of Kashmir, but sitting safely in universities overseas, constructing futures while the sons and daughters of ordinary Kashmiris paid the political price with their lives and their lost education.
The end of hartal was the end of violence. “Hartal” was not resistance, it was a factory, a factory that crushed childhood, a factory that buried careers, a factory that robbed youthfulness, much like how Hitler crushed generations through indoctrination. These leaders turned Kashmir into a production line of lost futures while exporting their own children to safety. They manufactured anger, not graduates. They produced slogans, not skills. They preached guns and stones to poor Kashmiris while running a visa-and-degree factory for their own families.
The loss of life is not as great as the loss of a career, because career loss is a mental loss, and mental loss is the loss of life; this loss is irreversible. Every year of shutdown meant a child missing competitive exams, a girl losing motivation to pursue science, a boy being forced into street politics instead of scholarships, a teacher leaving the profession, and a school turning into ruins. This loss cannot be compensated by any speech. It is the loss of education, the loss of childhood, the loss of careers, and the loss of youthfulness.
It is a new Kashmir now, after decades of work toward peace, development, and prosperity. Today, schools are open, roads are functional, and classrooms are filled, and this is what angers the old elite. Peace in schools is not digestible for those whose sons and daughters are sitting in London cafés, tweeting hate from safe distances. But let me say this clearly: all those who called hartals were enemies of my child; they were enemies of every poor Kashmiri child who faced daily Kashmir while their own children lived abroad.
This message is for you, Hartal Chacha: if you could make your daughter a doctor, why was my son told to abandon his school; if your home was shielded from shutdowns, why were our classrooms turned into graveyards of ambition; you raised your children with books while ours were handed slogans, opening doors for your family but locking the gates of education for an entire generation—so come back to Kashmir, bring your children with you, let them attend the same broken schools, walk the same damaged roads, and face the same winters of uncertainty, because we will no longer fight you with stones or guns but with logic, reason, and intellect, and we will accept no more provocation, no more indoctrination, no more sacrifices demanded only from the poor, and no more compromise on the future of our children.
Yes, I salute the rebuilders. I salute the parents who refused to surrender their children to hatred. I salute the youth who chose classrooms over violence, pen over gun. I salute the administrators who rebuilt Kashmir after three decades of devastation and are shaping it into a growing crown state of India. Hurriyat is not irrelevant because it was silenced; it is irrelevant because Kashmir’s children have finally found their classrooms again.

Email:------------------------vadaiekashmir@gmail.com