It was a terrible accident by the looks of it. The CRPF vehicle was upside down. There were injured crying for help. Amidst all this pandemonium a gaggle of people from the surrounding villages arrived and took the injured CRPF personnel to hospitals. A video clip posted on the social networking sites also showed local passengers in a Tata sumo vehicle being asked by people to de-board so that CRPF personnel could be shifted to hospital as soon as possible. The people were in emergency mode and were trying their level best to ensure that none of the CRPF personnel loses his life in the critical golden hour. This once again shows that humanity is not dead in Kashmir and locals have always maintained the spirit of brotherhood and amity.
If we rewind our memory by a few years, the same Kokernag was the stage for massive civilian killings, unprovoked firings, mass blinding in the agitations of 2010 and 2016. Imagine the embittered locals actually coming to the rescue of the force that was ruthless in their dealing with public uprising. Over the course of many centuries Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs and Dogras tried to dehumanize a Kashmiri by subjecting him to ruthless oppression. But a Kashmiri always retained his humanity in all circumstances. Imagine the scene elsewhere in India. In the majority of the metropolitan cities of India people do not even come to the rescue of the injured leave alone ferrying them to the hospital.
In Indian metropolitan cities and elsewhere, at the maximum a person can dial emergency ambulance number and that is about it. But Kashmir has been outstanding in its empathy towards even foreigners. We value human life. We understand how important human life is. And a Kashmiri wants peace but not through the barrel of a gun.
The accident at Kokernag shows Kashmiri is a peaceful human when you empathize with him. Even with a force that resorted to unbridled force during the agitations of 2010 and 2016 we can empathize. We cannot bear the sight to see an injured man writhing in pain, be it a fellow Kashmiri, a foreigner or a military man. That is the spirit of a Kashmiri and Kashmir.