17 September, 2008Countercurrents. org
Today morning a battery of Forest officers and police descended on the village of Nandapeda near Ahwa in the Dangs, Gujarat. They pulled out the doors and the windows, pulled out the wooden ballis which support the roof; they pulled out wood from the roof of the huts of the villagers. The forest department decided late night that it was illegal wood and they must recover it.
The ATS meanwhile rounded up a few people.
Nandapeda is the only village with majority Muslim population in the Dangs district, considered the poorest district in the whole of India.
The government has been pressurizing the Muslims to convert to the Hindu religion or face eviction from their land.
Some of the residents of this village moved the Gujarat High Court against the government's pressure of converting and changing their religion.
The families have been living in the village for over 100 years.
On June 13th 2008 a senior officer had called a meeting in Ahwa and asked them to change their religion or vacate the land.
After this meeting police and forest officers had been harassing them. Police have been searching old cases registered against any person of the community and asking them to furnish bail papers. The police targeted 33 people against whom some petty crime or a scuffle with the neighbors was registered.
Claiming that repeated representation before authorities for regularization of their land has been in vain, petitioners requested the court to restrain the government from pressurizing them to convert from their religion. Justice Jayant Panchal had in July sought explanation in this regard from the secretary in-charge, district collector and the village sarpanch.
After hearing all parties, Justice Anant Dave admitted the case on September 11, 2008 and ordered to maintain status quo on the disputed land.
On the next day the police captured approximately 80 villagers for transporting cattle into Maharashtra and also apprehended some villagers who were going on motorcycles using the reason of cow slaughter, though there were no cattle in the tempo.
The villagers gathered. There was a clash between the villagers and the police. People were beaten on both the sides. One policeman was also beaten up. Police then opened fire and a number of villagers got bullet injuries. They were taken to Ahwa civil hospitals. The relatives were not allowed to meet them. Police apprehended eight villagers for beating a policeman and though a local lawyer went for their bail, it was not given.
Next day the police came and in the name of combing operation attacked and ransacked the village. Villagers were beaten up brutally including women and children. All men fled to the jungles. The police not only took away all the goods but before going they poured kerosene into the eatable good so that they could not eat anything too.
VHP proposed a rally on 15th.
After a lot of pressure the VHP rally was stopped but they declared a Bandh on 16th.
The VHP gave a deadline to the collector it is heard to get the village vacated.
Today morning as already mentioned the forest department swooped in.
The villagers need urgent help and intervention. I have been personally informing various state politicians and centre about the developments.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
STOP CRUSHING KASHMIR : RESPECT THEIR DEMOCRATIC ASPIRATIONS ! REAL DEMOCRACY INCLUDES FREEDOM FOR KASHMIRIS !
Nearly three month long agitation and counter agitation in Jammu and Kashmir has brought home extremely serious situation in J&K. In two days on August 11 and 12 Indian security forces shot dead thirty two people in Kashmir valley. Unrelenting indefinite curfew ahs been imposed in the whole of the valley since the 24th of this month and at least eight people have been killed by the security forces during this period. Already reeling under economic blockade the imposition of curfew made it worse with even hospitals not being allowed to function fully and attacks on ambulances and injured people. Food is in short supply, water and electricity disrupted and no one was being allowed to move about even with curfew passes. There were restrictions placed on media. Sixteen media persons have been brutally thrashed by security forces. The Kashmir Valley has seen massive outpouring of people in essentially peaceful demonstrations against the blockade and for their democratic rights, aspirations and freedom. Despite the peaceful nature of the protests these unarmed civilians met with state repression of a high order. But braving police firings, curfew and brutalities, Kashmiris came out in huge numbers. The people of the state groan under black laws like AFSPA and Disturbed Areas Act, Public Security Act while unarmed people are fired upon even as they gather to only attend the funeral of their leader killed in firing by armed forces. In contrast the agitation in Jammu, spearheaded by Hindu communal forces, chiefly led by Hindutva brigade of RSS-BJP and Congress, were conducting what was essentially an anti-Kashmir agitation. There was competition between these two leading parties of Indian ruling classes in harnessing majority Hindu chauvinism. Their top leaders in Jammu participated in blockade while the Congress led UPA went into a denial mode on the fact of blockade despite extensive proof of the same. Not only did the State side with the agitators, they failed to lift the economic blockade and protect victims of mob violence for more than a month. Reports suggest that drivers and passengers of Kashmiri origin had been dragged out and beaten on the highway, guarded ostensibly by the Indian army. The present exacerbation came about after the Kashmiris protested against the transfer of land in Kashmir against the law of the state. It is instructive that the valley based Anti Land Transfer Committee leaders went and reassured yatris of their being honoured guests, organized langars for the yatris and they were provided free boarding in hotels and house boats. It is also worth remembering that during this entire agitation, the yatra carried on and yatris did not encounter threats of the kind faced by Kashmiris in Jammu, Kathua and Udhampur, the Hindu majority districts. The recent announcement of agreement with SASS for handing over control of the land in Kashmir without discussion with Kashmiris clearly shows that the Central Govt. cares little for either the law of the state and rights and aspirations of the people of Kashmir. The economic blockade had severely affected the life in the valley over a month and a half. Thus the right to life of people in the valley was imperiled by it. The message being conveyed was that Indian State is unmindful of even the physical well-being of the people of Kashmir. The procession towards Muzzafarabad on August 11 was a consequence of this blockade imposed on the valley by the Jammu agitators. And paradoxically is in line with the Government of India’s own promise of opening the LOC for trade. While Central Govt. said it was not opposed to the opening, its armed forced killed 6 persons including a top leader of Hurriyat Conference. All this makes it incumbent on us to take a fresh look at developments in Jammu and Kashmir in order to understand why masses of unarmed people have come out on the streets to demand ‘azadi’ from India. We need to know whether right of self-determination is the peaceful and democratic way out? Or is there any other solution? We need to ponder over whether J&K is considered “an integral part of India” or actually it is considered a conquered Muslim majority territory won by India in war with Pakistan in 1947-48? We need to question the reason behind the Indian state’s maintaining a 700,000 strong security force for fighting just 1200 militants. Why did the issue of land become so explosive? Why did the Congress-PDP Government “divert” land to the Shrine Board, which bars permanent transfers to non-state subjects? We need to familiarize ourselves with the report and recommendations of the Nitish Sengupta Committee (1996) on Amaranath yatra. Why did they recommend that the yatra be regulated, numbers of yatris restricted to 100,000 and the time period of the yatra to be thirty days? Was not the constitution of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, which not only transfers management to outsiders but stipulates that Indian State’s representative, the Governor, can become the Chairman of the Board only if he is a Hindu, a communal project? Is it not a fact that ex-Governor S K Sinha has a history of fomenting communal discord in his earlier posting? We, Jan Hastakshep, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and Rajendra Prasad Academy are organizing a meeting on September 9, 2008 (Tuesday) from 4 P.M. at Rajendra Bhawan, Deendayal Upadhyay Marg, New Delhi to discuss all these aspects. We feel there is an urgent need for democrats, intellectuals and activists in the Capital to speak out for the just democratic rights and aspirations of the people of Kashmir.
Meeting on KASHMIR, PEOPLE’S RIGHTS and the INDIAN STATE Date: Tuesday, 9 September Time: 4 pm Venue: Rajendra Bhavan, Deendayal Upadhyay Marg (near ITO)
Meeting on KASHMIR, PEOPLE’S RIGHTS and the INDIAN STATE Date: Tuesday, 9 September Time: 4 pm Venue: Rajendra Bhavan, Deendayal Upadhyay Marg (near ITO)
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Arundhati Roy
The Guardian, Friday August 22 2008
For the past 60 days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarised zone in the world.
After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government's worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is nourished by people's memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been "disappeared", hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and sent back to where it came from.
A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of 100 acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas) suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of petrol. Until 1989 the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about 20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamist militant uprising in the valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By 2008 more than 500,000 pilgrims visited the Amarnath cave, in large groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses. To many people in the valley this dramatic increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state. Rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of the valley.
Days of massive protest forced the valley to shut down completely. Within hours the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young stone pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early 90s. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal (strikes) and police firing, while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind of communal excess, the 500,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they had been shown by local people.
Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer. But by then the land-transfer had become what Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the most senior and also the most overtly Islamist separatist leader, called a "non-issue".
Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There, too, the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian state. (For some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the only functional road-link between Kashmir and India. Truckloads of perishable fresh fruit and valley produce began to rot.
The blockade demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir that they lived on sufferance, and that if they didn't behave themselves they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of essential commodities and medical supplies.
To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn't anybody noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi, freedom? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the government of India has tried so hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Raised in a playground of army camps, checkpoints, and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation has suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an epiphany. Not even the fear of death seems to hold them back. And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second largest army in the world?
There have been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory that have been so sustained and widespread. The mainstream political parties of Kashmir - National Conference and People's Democratic party - appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi's TV studios, but can't muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed militants who, through the worst years of repression were seen as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at all, seem content to take a back seat and let people do the fighting for a change.
The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on Kashmir's streets. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm around places that hold terrible memories for them. They demolish bunkers, break through cordons of concertina wire and stare straight down the barrels of soldiers' machine guns, saying what very few in India want to hear. Hum Kya Chahtey? Azadi! (We want freedom.) And, it has to be said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity: Jeevey jeevey Pakistan. (Long live Pakistan.)
That sound reverberates through the valley like the drumbeat of steady rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder during an electric storm.
On August 15, India's independence day, Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of Srinagar, was taken over by thousands of people who hoisted the Pakistani flag and wished each other "happy belated independence day" (Pakistan celebrates independence on August 14) and "happy slavery day". Humour obviously, has survived India's many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.
On August 16 more than 300,000 people marched to Pampore, to the village of the Hurriyat leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in cold blood five days earlier.
On the night of August 17 the police sealed the city. Streets were barricaded, thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads leading into Srinagar were blocked. On the morning of August 18, people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the valley. In trucks, tempos, jeeps, buses and on foot. Once again, barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were faced with a choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre. They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.
The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air. Everyone had a banner; houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers, doctors. One said: "We are all prisoners, set us free." Another said: "Democracy without freedom is demon-crazy." Demon-crazy. That was a good one. Perhaps he was referring to the insanity that permits the world's largest democracy to administer the world's largest military occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.
There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs were painted over. Rawalpindi they said. Or simply Pakistan. It would be a mistake to assume that the public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates into a desire to accede to Pakistan. Some of it has to do with gratitude for the support - cynical or otherwise - for what Kashmiris see as their freedom struggle, and the Indian state sees as a terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and doing what galls India most of all. (It's easy to scoff at the idea of a "freedom struggle" that wishes to distance itself from a country that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that has, for the most part been ruled by military dictators. A country whose army has committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are important questions, but right now perhaps it's more useful to wonder what this so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it so?)
Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry Pakistan se rishta kya? La illaha illallah. (What is our bond with Pakistan? There is no god but Allah.) Azadi ka matlab kya? La illaha illallah. (What does freedom mean? There is no god but Allah.)
For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hard - if not impossible - to understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said "What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?" Her reply silenced me.
Surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or ignore the deeply Islamic fervour of the uprising taking place around me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jihad. For Kashmiris it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and will some day, I hope, have to account for, among other things, the brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire Hindu community from the Kashmir valley.
As the crowd continued to swell I listened carefully to the slogans, because rhetoric often holds the key to all kinds of understanding. There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do (Oh oppressors, Oh wicked ones, Get out of our Kashmir.) The slogan that cut through me like a knife and clean broke my heart was this one: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself - Pakistan.)
Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who are not nanga or bhooka are and have been complicit in complex and historical ways with the elaborate cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal. And third, because it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much themselves mock others who suffer, in different ways, but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the Qur'an. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to turn to the Qur'an for guidance. He said Islam would guide the struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam, and that that goal should never be subverted. He said just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan. He said minority communities would have full rights and their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was applauded.
I imagined myself standing in the heart of a Hindu nationalist rally being addressed by the Bharatiya Janata party's (BJP) LK Advani. Replace the word Islam with the word Hindutva, replace the word Pakistan with Hindustan, replace the green flags with saffron ones and we would have the BJP's nightmare vision of an ideal India.
Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious states handing down a complete social and moral code, "a complete way of life"? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism, from having enormous emotional stakes in the society in which we live. What our neighbours do, how they choose to handle their affairs does not affect our argument, it only strengthens it.
Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamist project (which is as contested, in equally complex ways, all over the world by Muslims, as Hindutva is contested by Hindus). Perhaps now that the threat of violence has receded and there is some space in which to debate views and air ideas, it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans and vague generalisations. Those who wish to turn to the Qur'an for guidance will no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur'an does not make place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for 61 years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the "complete social and moral code"? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers many models for Kashmir's thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?
At a crucial time like this, few things are more important than dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and honestly.
Already the spectre of partition has reared its head. Hindutva networks are alive with rumours about Hindus in the valley being attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to flee. Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.
However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for freedom justified the colonial project.
Of course there are many ways for the Indian state to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the people's energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish this non-violent uprising and re-invite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half a million to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.
The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnutritioned population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?
The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimise Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir.
India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much as - if not more than - Kashmir needs azadi from India.
The Guardian, Friday August 22 2008
For the past 60 days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarised zone in the world.
After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government's worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is nourished by people's memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been "disappeared", hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and sent back to where it came from.
A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of 100 acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas) suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of petrol. Until 1989 the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about 20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamist militant uprising in the valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By 2008 more than 500,000 pilgrims visited the Amarnath cave, in large groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses. To many people in the valley this dramatic increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state. Rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of the valley.
Days of massive protest forced the valley to shut down completely. Within hours the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young stone pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early 90s. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal (strikes) and police firing, while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind of communal excess, the 500,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they had been shown by local people.
Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer. But by then the land-transfer had become what Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the most senior and also the most overtly Islamist separatist leader, called a "non-issue".
Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There, too, the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian state. (For some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the only functional road-link between Kashmir and India. Truckloads of perishable fresh fruit and valley produce began to rot.
The blockade demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir that they lived on sufferance, and that if they didn't behave themselves they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of essential commodities and medical supplies.
To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn't anybody noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi, freedom? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the government of India has tried so hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Raised in a playground of army camps, checkpoints, and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation has suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an epiphany. Not even the fear of death seems to hold them back. And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second largest army in the world?
There have been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory that have been so sustained and widespread. The mainstream political parties of Kashmir - National Conference and People's Democratic party - appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi's TV studios, but can't muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed militants who, through the worst years of repression were seen as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at all, seem content to take a back seat and let people do the fighting for a change.
The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on Kashmir's streets. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm around places that hold terrible memories for them. They demolish bunkers, break through cordons of concertina wire and stare straight down the barrels of soldiers' machine guns, saying what very few in India want to hear. Hum Kya Chahtey? Azadi! (We want freedom.) And, it has to be said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity: Jeevey jeevey Pakistan. (Long live Pakistan.)
That sound reverberates through the valley like the drumbeat of steady rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder during an electric storm.
On August 15, India's independence day, Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of Srinagar, was taken over by thousands of people who hoisted the Pakistani flag and wished each other "happy belated independence day" (Pakistan celebrates independence on August 14) and "happy slavery day". Humour obviously, has survived India's many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.
On August 16 more than 300,000 people marched to Pampore, to the village of the Hurriyat leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in cold blood five days earlier.
On the night of August 17 the police sealed the city. Streets were barricaded, thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads leading into Srinagar were blocked. On the morning of August 18, people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the valley. In trucks, tempos, jeeps, buses and on foot. Once again, barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were faced with a choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre. They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.
The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air. Everyone had a banner; houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers, doctors. One said: "We are all prisoners, set us free." Another said: "Democracy without freedom is demon-crazy." Demon-crazy. That was a good one. Perhaps he was referring to the insanity that permits the world's largest democracy to administer the world's largest military occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.
There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs were painted over. Rawalpindi they said. Or simply Pakistan. It would be a mistake to assume that the public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates into a desire to accede to Pakistan. Some of it has to do with gratitude for the support - cynical or otherwise - for what Kashmiris see as their freedom struggle, and the Indian state sees as a terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and doing what galls India most of all. (It's easy to scoff at the idea of a "freedom struggle" that wishes to distance itself from a country that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that has, for the most part been ruled by military dictators. A country whose army has committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are important questions, but right now perhaps it's more useful to wonder what this so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it so?)
Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry Pakistan se rishta kya? La illaha illallah. (What is our bond with Pakistan? There is no god but Allah.) Azadi ka matlab kya? La illaha illallah. (What does freedom mean? There is no god but Allah.)
For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hard - if not impossible - to understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said "What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?" Her reply silenced me.
Surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or ignore the deeply Islamic fervour of the uprising taking place around me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jihad. For Kashmiris it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and will some day, I hope, have to account for, among other things, the brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire Hindu community from the Kashmir valley.
As the crowd continued to swell I listened carefully to the slogans, because rhetoric often holds the key to all kinds of understanding. There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do (Oh oppressors, Oh wicked ones, Get out of our Kashmir.) The slogan that cut through me like a knife and clean broke my heart was this one: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself - Pakistan.)
Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who are not nanga or bhooka are and have been complicit in complex and historical ways with the elaborate cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal. And third, because it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much themselves mock others who suffer, in different ways, but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the Qur'an. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to turn to the Qur'an for guidance. He said Islam would guide the struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam, and that that goal should never be subverted. He said just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan. He said minority communities would have full rights and their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was applauded.
I imagined myself standing in the heart of a Hindu nationalist rally being addressed by the Bharatiya Janata party's (BJP) LK Advani. Replace the word Islam with the word Hindutva, replace the word Pakistan with Hindustan, replace the green flags with saffron ones and we would have the BJP's nightmare vision of an ideal India.
Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious states handing down a complete social and moral code, "a complete way of life"? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism, from having enormous emotional stakes in the society in which we live. What our neighbours do, how they choose to handle their affairs does not affect our argument, it only strengthens it.
Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamist project (which is as contested, in equally complex ways, all over the world by Muslims, as Hindutva is contested by Hindus). Perhaps now that the threat of violence has receded and there is some space in which to debate views and air ideas, it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans and vague generalisations. Those who wish to turn to the Qur'an for guidance will no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur'an does not make place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for 61 years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the "complete social and moral code"? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers many models for Kashmir's thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?
At a crucial time like this, few things are more important than dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and honestly.
Already the spectre of partition has reared its head. Hindutva networks are alive with rumours about Hindus in the valley being attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to flee. Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.
However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for freedom justified the colonial project.
Of course there are many ways for the Indian state to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the people's energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish this non-violent uprising and re-invite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half a million to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.
The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnutritioned population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?
The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimise Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir.
India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much as - if not more than - Kashmir needs azadi from India.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Kashmir!
During the past week, I have been involved in an interesting online debate with supporters of National Conference on their official website. I was least surprised to find most of these 'ardent' supporters of Sheikh Abdullah, living in a make belief world where their ideologies are more important to them than human lives but at the same time the opposing ideology is conveniently termed as extremism, secession and fanaticism. They have this universal trait of giving India the benefit of doubt for all its human rights violations and its illegal occupation of Kashmir. No amount of custodial killings, genocides or executions will change their basic stance. There will be an election-time shift in the usual soft rhetoric and all of a sudden National Conference will talk about 'India and Kashmir' as if Farooq Abdullah has never been on record to say that "Kashmir is an integral part of India". Overnight, the family, the party and the henchmen change their garbs and put on different masks while they run up and down the hinterlands fanning emotions and asking for votes on the same old pledge and promise of 'Autonomy'. Every single day, Kashmiris are humiliated and killed like cattle on their own soil while these pioneers of an autonomous Kashmir roam around in the cushion of security with recurring vacations in the lap of luxury. They very conveniently blame Pakistan for starting the current insurgency which, according to them, was the primary reason for us being killed, raped and burnt by the Indian Army. Stupid Kashmiris - couldn't shut up and accept a rigged election! The elections of 1987 that were rigged in favor or Farooq Abdullah are completely invisible to National Conference as if that year never came and the calendar skipped from 1986 to 1988. As if we were too uppity and hard headed to compromise with our fate and accept the Sheikh's son as our next traitor-in-chief. Their proclamation that Autonomy for Kashmir is the best option is based on a million and one variables and assumptions which they are too willing to be optimistic about. Whether the Army will be thrown out of Kashmir, whether India will resist temptations to rig elections in favor of its puppets and whether the hindutva-bloc in India will let such an arrangement survive are treated as questions from Mars. However, the same people are quick to jump in the bandwagon together and somehow drag Pakistan into the equation in the form of a wild-card which is supposed to make their dumbest arguments makes sense. The whole package about Pakistan's democratic fragmentation and failure, about its regionalism and its instability, somehow are more significant than the fact that Kashmiris cannot and will not attest to any association with a country and nation which has killed its teenagers, raped its daughters and molested the basic fabric of its society. Compromises are fine. Accepted. Thats diplomacy and like it or not, survival is more important than ideologies at times. But, there is a filter - a limit. Asking Kashmiris to compromise and sign of their existence for the pride of Indian nationalism and secularism is akin to asking the Jews to forget the concentration camps, the Kosovars to forget the Serbian atrocities and the Bosnians to forget their genocides. Although it might me easy for the Abdullahs or the Muftis to 'forget' about these wounds, these raptures in our soul.....Kashmiris cant and never will forget the faces of India that have been shown to us. The Abdullahs and Muftis have seen different faces of India. To them India is the epitome of secularism and tolerance. They are not concerned about Modi being re-elected twice after killing thousands of Mulsims. They are also not concerned about the political dissent and unrest in the East or the Khalistan Movement. Those, to these people, are just normal disturbances 'fueled' by the ISI. Maybe they are too biased and too comfortable within their Indian homes and in their Indian government bullet proof cars or in their first class plane cabins to see the reality in such deep perspectives. But are they so blind that they cannot see how our teenagers and children are being humiliated, thrashed and harrassed while their own children are growing up experiencing the great Indian story of a multicultural secular existence? Are they too blind that they cannot read the verdict of Kashmiris in the eyes of this child? Are they?
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