SRINAGAR: Former IAS officer Shah Faesal today said that there has been a war playing in our lives for the last 30 years.
Shah Faesal said,”panic” that gripped the strife-torn region as India-Pakistan tensions reached boiling point after the attack in Pulwama.
“The last fortnight has been a horrific time for all of us,” Faesal, who resigned from the civil service in January, said at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi.
“I was in my home, and all of us were really waiting for these jets to crash over us and all these bombs to crash in through our roofs.”
“We haven’t slept,” Shah Faesal said.
“All Kashmir had gone for panic-buying and we were preparing for, maybe, a war of a couple of months,” recalled Shah Faesal, describing the past fortnight. “People were thinking: what if there is a nuclear attack?”
“Our children were totally agitated and we didn’t know how to arrange for their baby food.
“When there are hostilities between India and Pakistan”, Shah Faesal said, “it’s fundamentally the people of Jammu and Kashmir who become the worst sufferers of that war. So we would not want that war to happen.”
“There has been a war playing in our lives for the last 30 years,” Shah Faesal said. “And every morning, when my kid goes to school, my wife tells me that we don’t know [whether he will] come back. This war plays every evening in my house when my mom looks at the portrait of my dead father, who lost his life in this conflict.” (PTK)
