In Kashmir, history repeats itself - first as pellets, and then as 'talks'
In the Valley, where nothing, in fact, is quite the ordinary, we witnessed something extraordinary last summer. It is not new to see Kashmiri women on the streets venting their anger, but the particular images of teenage Kashmiri girls in school uniforms hurling stones at security forces went viral.
Behind the white scarves and the hijabs were eyes that read of anger, of disgust. While talking to a reporter, a burqa-clad girl picked up a stone in anger and hurled it against the wall to vent out her frustration.
"Madam! Please tell me? Can government bring back the dead and restore vision to the eyes that they attacked with pellets in the recent unrest. If no, then how does it try to placate us into believing that they are with us and that we should protest no more? We will protest, no matter what,” she said angrily.
Much has been made out of the appointment of a former Intelligence Bureau director, Dineshwar Sharma, as the Indian state’s “special representative” in Kashmir to hold “talks”. But the question is, do we even have the language to speak to these young school kids? Or, are we even listening for a start?
While announcing the latest round of “talks”, the home minister boasted: “Our announcement shows how serious we are about initiating dialogue.” He continued that “the Centre has shown conviction and consistency on the Kashmir issue and carrying forward this policy, we have decided to begin a sustained dialogue policy for Jammu and Kashmir.”
He said that this initiative is consistent with PM Modi’s Red Fort address on independence day, where he had stated that the problem of the state could be solved “neither by bullet, nor by abuses but by embracing the people”. The home minister, in fact, also said “whatever we do, we will do with saaf neeyat aur neeti (good intentions and clear policy).”
But can there ever be an embrace while the rifle butt juts into the ribs? Can there really be a “talk” under the gunpoint? And as far as “saaf neeyat” is concerned, here is an aggressor that on the one hand is talking of “talks” and on the other hand is simultaneously pursuing its mission to abrogate whatever limited autonomy remains of the Valley as per the Constitution.
In December 2015, a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court by a RSS-linked NGO, We the Citizen, seeking to repeal of Article 35A on the ground of constitutionality. This, of course, has been in the wish list of RSS since decades, and found its place in the BJP’s election manifesto in 2014. In their goal of creating an “Akhand Bharat”, they believe “Jo Kashmir hamara hai, woh saara ka saara hai”. A robust majority with a 56-inch chest thumping figurehead has further emboldened them today, and has added to the jingoism. Even the alliance with the PDP and the resultant “understanding” hasn’t stopped the BJP from openly demanding the scrapping of Article 370, leaving its junior partner in the Valley red-faced on multiple occasions.
Knowing the impossibility of achieving the same in the J&K state legislature, the Sangh is persistently attempting the same now through the judiciary. To speak of “talks” in such a context, what do we call it? Running with the hares and hunting with the hounds?
More than thousand youths have been blinded by pellets since last year’s protests in the Valley in one of the most brutal phase of repression on civilian protestors. One among them was 14-year-old Insha Mushtaq. "I just peeped through the window and the policemen, who were outside, targeted me. I fell down and I don't know what happened to me after that. Everything went dark," she said. Her face was pockmarked with more than hundred pellet wounds; some hit her eyes, some pierced close to her brain. Her nasal, frontal, and maxillary bones were also broken, her vision lost for life.
The summer of violence gives way to the winter of 'talks'
"I am open to talking to everybody. Anybody who believes in peace and wants to come and give me some ideas how to go about, I am willing to listen."
“We are here to talk to every shade of opinion and we are here to listen to the people."
Can we tell the difference between the above two statements? There is hardly any. Right? Well, the first is the statement of Dineshwar Sharma appointed by the BJP as the “talker” in October 2017, and the second is that of one the “talkers” appointed by the Congress in October 2010 after the summer of rage in the Valley and the subsequent crackdown that left more than 100 civilians dead.
But as was expected, the fundamentals of the "talking points" remained restricted by political expedience. Even the limited suggestions that the committee had on offer concerning reducing the Army’s visibility in the Valley, addressing human rights violations and reviewing AFSPA - were all left to gather dust.
The claim was that the three-member team of interlocutors would “suggest a way forward that truly represents the aspirations of the people of (J&K), specially (the) youth”. They failed to understand the people’s aspirations, or rather they were simply meant to fail as these “talks” have counted for nothing more than a tactic to buy time, or as an eyewash to abate international pressure over its repressive tactics in the Valley.
The Valley is used to this routine by now and the farce of it. It is no different this time, albeit with far more jingoism and saffron blood lust.
The new “special representative” is someone who has been an aide to former IB head Ajit Doval and who has been the head of UP’s intelligence when Rajnath Singh was its CM.
As AG Noorani puts it, he is no more than a policeman given the job of a postman. Dineshwar Sharma has been repeatedly claiming his intent to speak to all “stakeholders”. But as Hilal Mir points out, major figures in the first and second-rung separatist leadership - the “stakeholders” - in fact remain arrested under the NIA. And Dineshwar Sharma has ruled out any possibility of the release of any of the political prisoners. Thousands of youths, stone-pelters, from among the ones arrested since last year’s protests still languish behind bars. And there has been no cessation of “search and cordon” operations, harassment and killing of civilians and stomping of boots in the Valley.
So, while praises are being showered on the benevolence of holding these “talks”, there can never be any dialogue at the point of the bayonet. But this, however, brings us to the second important question that concerns us in the mainland.
Can there be any talk with Kashmir, without allowing us to talk about Kashmir?
The Himalayan human cost of the Kashmir crisis has already taken the lives of close to 100,000 Kashmiris in the past three decades. Modest official figure puts it close to 47,000. About 700,000 security forces are deployed by India in Kashmir. With an astounding military to civilian ratio of 70:1000, it is the world’s most militarised zone as well as the largest region under the jackboots of security forces.
Today, after decades of conflict, curfewed nights and deathly “peace”, Kashmir still simmers with the living memory of thousands of disappeared, the haunts of hundreds of unidentified mass graves, rapes, tortures, blindings and fake encounters. But none of this have ever bothered the mainland or stoked its “collective conscience”.
Buried under the jingoist and chauvinist belligerence of the Indian mainstream media, one of the biggest struggles for those in the Valley against power has been that of their memory against our forgetting. And for those conscientious few democratic minds of the mainland that dares to speak of the sufferings and aspirations of the Valley, they are bullied (trolled/sedition-ed) into silence.
“The most untouchable topic,” in India as per Perry Anderson, “is the question of the unity of the nation.” “No dissent is allowed here and the scholastic critique”, he says “almost by its own choice stops at the gate of India’s national unity.”
Even after seven decades, a free discussion around Kashmir still remains a virtual no-go zone, even for most of the democratic-left-liberal intelligentsia. It has been so under any regime, any shade in power. More so under the saffron regime today.
The dominant narrative has been that of a jingoist muscular pride wherein Kashmir is conceptualised as a crown on an essentially Hindu imagery of mother India. It is claimed as an inalienable part of India that the “treacherous Pakistan” is out to steal from it.
Then there has been another narrative of Kashmiris having enjoyed and by now having accepted the fruits of Indian democracy, the elections and so on to address their grievances, albeit a handful of foreign-sponsored rotten apples. There has always been only a few to speak of the insufferable pain that looms over the valley. But even most of the left/liberal democrats would limit themselves only to the discourse of “excesses”- human right abuses and violations - that has alienated the people in the Valley. Very few would dare to speak of the freedom that we as a nation solemnly pledged about seventy years back to the people of Kashmir - the freedom of “choice”. The very word, in this context, has acquired a dangerous meaning.
In the year 325 Emperor Constantine I convened the first ecumenical council of Christendom. As Eduardo Galeano puts it, after much deliberation this council ruled that the word “heresy”, from the Greek “hairesis”, which means “choice”, from then on would mean “error”. So if any one of us dares to speak of that freedom of “choice” that we ourselves vouched for, we are immediately branded as “heretics”, as “anti-nationals”, as the ones committing “sedition”. But, while myths have been manufactured in plenty, by the demagogues over the past seven decades, it still does not change history.
An unbroken history of broken promises
On June 26, 1952, Nehru said in Parliament:
“I say with all respect to our Constitution that it just does not matter what your Constitution says, if the people of Kashmir do not want it, it will not go there. ...Let us suppose that there was a proper plebiscite there - and the people of Kashmir said, ‘We do not want to be with India’, well we are committed to it, we would accept it. It might pain us, but we would not send an Army against them; we might accept that, however much hurt we might feel.”
On August 7, 1952, he again said in Parliament about Maharaja Hari Singh’s accession to India:
“So, while the accession was complete in law and in fact, the other fact, which has nothing to do with law, also remains, namely our pledge to the people of Kashmir, if you like, to the people of the world, that this matter can be re-affirmed or cancelled or cut out by the people of Kashmir, if they so wish. We do not want to win people against their will and with the help of armed forces, and if the people of Jammu and Kashmir state so wish it, to part company from us, they can go their way and we shall go our way. We want no forced marriages, no forced unions like this. I hope this great Republic of India is a free, voluntary, friendly and affectionate union of the States of India ... ultimately – I say with all deference to the Parliament – the decision will be made in the hearts and minds of the men and women of Kashmir, neither in this Parliament, nor in the United Nations, nor by anybody else.”
Any recollection or reminder of these passionate speeches are today frowned upon on a scale of being impractical to outright blasphemous. But there was a time when even mainstream politicians could opine more freely on the subject.
Take for instance Jayprakash Narayan’s letter to Nehru in 1956 wherein he writes: “I doubt the wisdom of trying to ‘keep’ people by force where they do not wish to stay. This cannot but have serious long-term political consequences, though immediately it may suit policy and please public opinion. From the point of view of the desirability of establishing a peaceful social order, it cannot but prove disastrous. I do earnestly wish that this question be considered more from a human; rather than a nationalist point of view.”
After all these decades, these words sound prophetic, doesn’t it? And we ought to ask ourselves can there really be any genuine talks with Kashmir without allowing ourselves to speak freely about Kashmir, its chequered history, our promises and their aspirations?
Now, what does the violence in Kashmir mean for India as a society?
Or rather, why should we be so bothered?
Nehru once said, “We have gambled at the international stage on Kashmir, and we cannot afford to lose. At the moment we are there at the point of a bayonet. Till things improve, democracy and morality can wait.”
Seven decades have passed, democracy and morality still waits outside the doors of AFSPA. From the infamous Gawkadal massacre in 1990 to the mass rapes in Kunan Poshpora in 1991 to the mass-blindings in 2016, every time the Valley bleeds a bit of democracy dies in our polity, and with every forced disappearance disappears a part of our conscience.
So, if we feel that the laboratory of torture and brutality in the Valley leaves us unscathed as a society, then we are probably mistaken.
If as a society we don’t just sanction, but also openly relish and egg on such violence at a mass scale on an entire population then it reflects upon our collective psyche.
If as a society for years we are in the grip of such jingoist bloodlust for an "other-ised" and villainised community (read Kashmiris) aided and abetted by those in power, by movies and by some news-anchors on our TV screens, it over time turns us all into sociopaths, devoid of humanity, of conscience. That amount of hatred and bloodlust rots us all from within as a society. And that should bother us if we still believe in democracy as an idea to strive for in this country.
As we over the decades, from one generation to the next pass on such amount of accumulating venom and mass-sanction for violence, we ultimately end up normalising the same.
It all adds up to whet our appetite for more. And as we feed that monster within, it just doesn’t remain contained towards any one “other”. As and when we "otherise" more of us - be it the Muslims, or the Dalits, or the Adivasis, or say the Bihari migrant labour in Maharashtra, we make ourselves capable of unleashing the same degree of socially sanctioned violence on them too. That is not the sign of a healthy or democratic society.
And if nothing else, that should bother us.
We ought to ask ourselves what truly is the meaning of democracy? Is the holding of elections every five years enough for the claims of being the world’s largest democracy? Or more than that, should it mean the inculcation of democratic values and principles? If it is the latter, then can it go hand in hand with such brutalisation of an entire populace?
Let’s for a moment entertain the discourse around wastage of taxpayers’ money which was quite in vogue two years back around the clampdown in JNU. As citizens of this country it should, in fact, bother us that the taxpayers’ money is also sponsoring (if not sanctioning) the use of those pellet guns that at the pull of a trigger fires clusters of iron balls, hundreds of them in high velocity that claim visions in the Valley.
These guns that are usually used to hunt animals have been let loose in the Valley. The head of a team of eye specialists who went to Srinagar from AIIMS said that the nature of the injuries was so severe that it was almost as if Kashmiri doctors were dealing with a "war-like situation". Another doctor told the BBC on conditions of anonymity that the "government forces are deliberately aiming at chests and heads…They seem to be aiming to kill."
As a society we ought to ask ourselves, are we blinding them, or are we blinded?
Can we let them speak for themselves?
There can be no resolution, unless we keep the people of Kashmir and their aspirations at the centre stage.
There are those in the saffron Right in power today for whom these aspirations never meant anything. In the rhetoric of "kheer denge" and "cheer denge", for them it's a dehumanised piece of land devoid of choice.
Even as the recent “talks” were being floated, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was clear in his demand for constitutional amendments to ensure "complete assimilation of Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of Bharat".
On the other hand, there are those who have always propagated that it is just a matter of addressing the petty needs/grievances of the valley – a few crumbs and sops, they said was all that was required to keep the unthinking lot happy. As Indira Gandhi would put it, “I feel all political talk will count for nothing if the economic can be dealt with. Because after all the people are concerned with only (one) thing – they want to sell their goods and to have food and salt... But most important of all – and I feel the only thing that can save Kashmir for India and the Kashmiris – will be an influx of visitors this summer, preferably from Bombay and Ahmedabad, since they are ones (who) buy most.”
What she, her father and even many today don’t realise that one cannot buy off aspirations for freedom, it's a hard-sell. A teacher in Kashmir summarised succinctly: “Don’t blur the lines between our grievances and our aspirations. Aspiration is azadi. Grievances are like Centre does not hand over power projects in Kashmir to the state government.”
It is certainly not in the interest of the ruling classes on both sides of the borders, whether in India or in Pakistan, to resolve the crisis. It serves their war-mongering self-interests in keeping the issue alive so as to arm themselves to their teeth with their multi-millions worth of arms deals.
Alongside, the Kashmir question allows for a convenient distraction for our rulers whenever they are faced with difficult questions around their failures to address people’s issues in the mainland.
It serves as a magic button that whips up instant jingoism whenever they need to bring all shades of opposition in line or rally the impoverished masses in their favour. Thereby, it is upon us, upon the democratic sections to ask the difficult questions.
Is it possible to go beyond the discourse of “foreign hands”? How is it that the Bangladeshi youth fighting against the tyranny of Pakistan in 1971 were celebrated by us all, and rightfully so, as “freedom fighters” (or mukti-joddhas in Bengali), whereas we so easily brand any voice in Kashmir? How is it that we resented the former being called “Indian agents” by Pakistan, but we so easily follow the same path when it comes to the latter?
Instead of the LoC or the AFSPA, or the “strategic” landmass, is it not possible for both India and Pakistan to give primacy to the “choice” of the people of Kashmir? What would be the marker of a truly matured democracy?
To force one’s sovereignty on another at gunpoint? Or to demilitarise, then consult the affected people and acknowledge their universally recognised democratic right to self-determination?
So, at the end, it won’t be far-fetched to claim that the possibility of a truly democratic society in India is somehow intrinsically linked to how we talk to and about Kashmir.