In Thursday’s Greater Kashmir, Haseeb Drabu did something rare in our public life. He took a silly quarrel seriously, and in doing so showed us how silly it is. The quarrel began with the claim that a whole village once shared a single pyjama. It has since produced effigies, memes, one apology from one NC legislator, regret from another, and a Chief Minister’s refusal to apologise at all. Drabu’s point is that civilisation and poverty are not opposites. Egypt built its high culture on forced labour, and Bengal had a refined court while people starved. Antiquity, as he puts it, “is not a savings account.”I agree with his history. I want to take his argument one step further, because the pyjama quarrel is not really about the past. It is about what we cannot bring ourselves to say about the present.

What the old men knewI grew up in Lolab, where poverty was lived, not read about. The generation before mine did not need Walter Lawrence to tell them what the Dogra years were like. They carried it in their bodies: the walk to the city in borrowed clothes, the pulhoad, a straw sandal woven for feet that had no leather, and the harvest counted out to the last handful before the cultivator saw his share. When the old men said akh yezar poore mohallas, one pyjama for the whole mohalla, nobody was being mocked. It was the humour of survivors, the kind that makes hardship bearable by making it laughable.So Tanvir Sadiq was not inventing anything. Omar Abdullah is right that the poverty is well documented. The Big Landed Estates Abolition Act of 1950, which gave land to the tiller, was a real revolution. It changed rural Kashmir more deeply than most land reforms anywhere in the subcontinent. No honest history of Kashmir can leave it out.

And yet the remark hurt. It is worth asking why.Why it hurtDrabu calls it a “semiotic hijack”: a sign of poverty rewritten as a sign of shame. That is true, but it doesn’t explain who was ready to be hijacked, or why.A people who feel secure in the........

© Greater Kashmir