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Gurmehar’s push for peace has not gone unnoticed. She has quite a following in Pakistan and she hopes to visit the neighbouring country sometime. This may be criticised like many positive steps but like all idealists, she couldn’t care about the naysayers. People are now blaming her for asking for a right to freedom of expression. This is not directly related to her but she knows this kind of freedom is very important not just for her but for the students and adults too. If friendship and peace and thought to be negative, where are we heading towards? It is high time we join hands with her to understand what true heroism and maturity is all about and raise a toast to her and people like her, reasons Jamuna, saluting the 20-year-old girl for her exemplary courage, in the special feature on International Women’s Day (IWD), exclusively in Different Truths.
In our society, we often focus on parental lineage and mostly, the paternal side, as we have always been a patriarchal society. I personally don’t think we should focus on one lineage alone but focus on what are values are who shapes them. As most of us know, parenting is always a joint effort with the mother playing a significant role.
Let us take the example of Gurmehar Kaur. I had heard about her a long while ago when she was encouraged and when she began on a mission towards peace.
Her father, Capt Mandeep was with 4 Rashtriya Rifles when militants stormed his camp in Kupwara, in August 1999. He was killed in the gun battle that followed when he was just 30. Hence, Gurmehar has spent almost all her years missing her father. She was two and her sister, Bani, was five-month- old when their father was killed.
In May 2016, she was the subject of a silent video by Ram Subramaniam, an ad filmmaker whose Facebook page – Voice of Ram – aims to “create a positive change”.
In the video, Gurmehar recounts how as a six-year- old she tried to stab a burqa-clad woman because she believed Muslims killed her father. Gurmehar is who she is today hugely because of the parenting and the right values she has received from her mother. She explained to her that it was war that killed her father, not people and certainly not a particular community. “I fight for peace between India and Pakistan,” she has often said and considers herself a soldier of a different kind.
Though her life has been quite tough, she has learnt that hatred does not take us forward in any way. “Try and affect people in a positive way, that’s the only way to bring about a change,” she said in a Facebook chat, on January 30, 2016.
This day is of course significant as it is the day we lost the greatest peacenik of all, Mahatma Gandhi. I am certain had he been here, he would have surely been proud of this young girl and her mother too.
Gurmehar’s push for peace has not gone unnoticed. She has quite a following in Pakistan and she hopes to visit the neighbouring country sometime. This may be criticised like many positive steps but like all idealists, she couldn’t care about the naysayers.
People are now blaming her for asking for a right to freedom of expression. This is not directly related to her but she knows this kind of freedom is very important not just for her but for the students and adults too. If friendship and peace and thought to be negative, where are we heading towards?
It is high time we join hands with her to understand what true heroism and maturity is all about and raise a toast to her and people like her.
We also need to recognise her mother’s role in shaping her as a complete human being and learn to be mothers like her who encourage their children to love not hate and learn that true heroism is all about maintaining peace no matter what the circumstances may be.
©Jamuna Rangachari
Photos from the internet.
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