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Focus on Youth and Students

Resource Centre for Youth in Kashmir Valley 

Mission: To create a safe space for debate and discussion, to free themselves of the mental siege of a violence ridden polity, to regain the confidence to transcend their situation.

Objectives
1. To help young people develop a perspective on their own situation by encouraging them to write, record and reproduce their and others' experience of life in the Valley during the period of militancy. To also help generate an interest among them in the plight of others, similarly situated, around the world.
2. To encourage young people to discover and to learn various means of self-expression through the above processes.
3. To organise exchange programmes for students from J&K and other parts of India.

Strategy: The centre is visualised as a space for learning, self-expression and for self-governance. SAFHR would like to keep its interference to a minimum. We see SAFHR's role as that of facilitators and catalysts who would try to provide the desired inputs to the extent that they cannot be organised by the students and young people themselves. To begin with, till the centre acquires a momentum of its own, we would offer to the young people, a broad programme schedule, for the achievement of which they would be expected to work to the maximum extent possible.

Activities
1. To build a small library of books and journals, audio and visual material that would provide a sample of the trends and changes in thought and worldview.
2. To organise programmes, workshops, seminars etc. on various topics such as law, philosophy, economics, political theory, human rights, leadership training, art, music, literature, theatre etc. For this purpose resource persons from all over India would be invited to visit and organise/ hold programmes/ workshops etc.

In August 2002 a four-room apartment in Gobji Bagh, Srinagar was taken on two years lease for the Kashmir Resource Centre. A local media organisation of Srinagar donated two computers to the Resource Centre. Other members also contributed furniture and fixtures. SAFHR is paying the rent for the apartment, cost of telephone and e-mail connections and salaries of the Coordinator and the Caretaker. The Resource Centre has a reading room, a computer room, a guestroom, a bathroom and a kitchen.

Mr. Sahwar Gowhar, a young lawyer who has been working as human rights defender in the valley for the past 10 years and is a founder member of JKFCSO, is the Coordinator of the Resource Centre. Mr. Mohamad Ashrof is the caretaker. The Centre's work is supervised by a group of young Kashmiri volunteers. There is an Advisory Committee consisting of well known teachers, editors, lawyers and poets of Kashmir like Dr. Hamida Bano, Mrs. Nusrat Andrawi, Dr. Noor Mohammad Baba, Mr. Zafar Meraj, Mr. Ved Bhasin, Mr. G. N. Gowhar and Mrs. Naseem Safai

The Resource Centre has since been functioning as a library, reading room, communication centre with Internet facility and as a fortnightly discussion forum. It is designed as a free space where all ideas and points of view are discussed and debated without rancour or anger. It has been agreed that Resource Centre would not function as a place from where political initiatives would be undertaken. There was a broad consensus in envisaging the centre as a space that could facilitate personal discovery and growth among students and young people, besides providing exposure to ideas from the larger world.