By Ashfaq Ahmed Zehgeer

A video crossed two hundred thirty thousand views last week, and by the time anyone thought to check whether its claims held up, the damage was done. 

The clip made sweeping, corrosive insinuations about young women from Jammu and Kashmir who study medicine abroad. 

Doctors and former students who watched it describe something specific: alleged individual incidents stretched into a verdict on an entire category of women. 

That distinction, between one act and a whole population, is the only thing worth arguing about here, and it has been lost.

I have spent more than three decades counselling students and their families through MBBS admissions abroad. I have travelled with them to Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Russia and China. I have watched them wrestle with unfamiliar food, foreign languages, brutal academic schedules and homesickness thousands of miles from home. I have watched parents sell property and drain savings to make a daughter’s medical degree possible. Silence, given what I have seen, is not an option.

Start with the basic logic that has gone missing. 

If a student anywhere commits an immoral or illegal act, that student answers for it, and credible evidence belongs in front of the appropriate authorities. 

What one person allegedly did cannot become a character reference for thousands of others. 

A woman studying abroad does not surrender her values by crossing a border, and the country she studies in does not determine who she is. Good people and bad........

© Kashmir Observer