[Reader-list] The Freedom of Others: A Sentimental Education: Three Blocks

[Vivek Narayanan]

Below, an excerpt from Ananya Vajpeyi's review of Sanjay Kak's 
Jashn-e-Azadi in Outlook Magazine
( 
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20071004&fname=ananya&sid=1 ):

"What allows someone like me – born, raised and educated in India, 
secular, committed to the longevity and flourishing of the Indian nation 
in every sense – to get, as it were, the meaning, the reality, and the 
validity, of Kashmir’s agonized search for azadi? Why do I not want my 
army to take or keep Kashmir by force, or my fellow-citizens to enjoy 
their annual vacations as unthinking, insensitive tourists, winter or 
summer? Why do abandoned Pandit homesteads affect me as much as charred 
Muslim houses, and why do I think that neither will be rebuilt and 
re-inhabited, nor will they be full of life as they once were, unless 
first and foremost, the military bunkers are taken down?"

[full text of review below]

Azadi: Theirs and Ours

Ananya Vajpeyi

Sanjay Kak’s new documentary “Jashn-e-Azadi” (“How we celebrate 
freedom”) is aimed primarily at an Indian audience. This two-part film, 
138 min long, explores what Kak calls the “sentiment”, namely “azadi” 
(literally “freedom”) driving the conflict in the India-controlled part 
of Kashmir for the past 18 years. This sentiment is inchoate: it does 
not have a unified movement, a symbol, a flag, a map, a slogan, a leader 
or any one party associated with it. Sometimes it means full territorial 
independence, and sometimes it means other things. Yet it is real, with 
a reality that neither outright repression nor fitful persuasion from 
India has managed to dissipate for almost two decades. Howsoever unclear 
its political shape, Kashmiris know the emotional charge of azadi, its 
ability to keep alive in every Kashmiri heart a sense of struggle, of 
dissent, of hope. It is for Indians who do not know about this 
sentiment, or do not know how to react to it, that Kak has made his 
difficult, powerful film. And it is with Indian audiences that Kak has 
already had, and is likely to continue having, the most heated debate.

Between 1989 and 2007, nearly 100,000 people – soldiers and civilians, 
armed militants and unarmed citizens, Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris – lost 
their lives to the violence in Kashmir. 700,000 Indian military and 
paramilitary troops are stationed there, the largest such armed presence 
in what is supposedly peace time, anywhere in the world. Both residents 
of and visitors to Kashmir in recent years already know what Kak’s film 
brings home to the viewer: how thoroughly militarized the Valley is, 
criss-crossed by barbed wire, littered with bunkers and sand-bags, 
dotted with men in uniform carrying guns, its roads bearing an unending 
stream of armoured vehicles up and down a landscape that used to be 
called, echoing the words of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, Paradise on 
earth. Other places so mangled by a security apparatus as to make it 
impossible for life to proceed normally immediately come to mind: 
occupied Palestine, occupied Iraq.

Locals, especially young men, must produce identification at all the 
check-posts that punctuate the land, or during sudden and frequent 
operations described by the dreaded words “crackdown” and “cordon and 
search”. Kak’s camera shows us that even the most ordinary attempt to 
cross the city of Srinagar, or travel from one village to another is 
fraught with these security checks, as though the entire Valley were a 
gigantic airport terminal and every man were a threat to every other. As 
soldiers insultingly frisk folks for walking about in their own places, 
the expressions in their eyes – anger, fear, resignation, frustration, 
irritation, or just plain embarrassment – say it all. In one scene men 
are lined up, and some of them get their clothes pulled and their faces 
slapped while they are being searched. Somewhere beneath all these daily 
humiliations burns the unnamed sentiment: azadi.

One reason that there is no Indian tolerance for this word in the 
context of Kashmir is that the desire for “freedom” immediately implies 
that its opposite is the case: Kashmir is not free. By the logic of the 
Indian state, India is free and Kashmir is a part of India, ergo, 
Kashmir too, must be free. But Kak’s images provide visual attestation 
for something diametrically opposed to this logic: the reality of 
occupation. Kashmir is occupied by Indian troops, somewhat like 
Palestine is by Israeli troops, and Iraq is by American and coalition 
troops. But wait, objects the Indian viewer. Palestinians are Muslims 
and Israelis are Jews; Iraqis are Iraqis and Americans are Americans – 
how are their dynamics comparable to the situation in Kashmir? Indians 
and Kashmiris are all Indian; Muslims and non-Muslims in Kashmir (or 
anywhere in India) are all Indian. Neither the criterion of nationality 
nor the criterion of religion is applicable to explain what it is that 
puts Indian troops and Kashmiri citizens on either side of a line of 
hostility. How can we speak of an “occupation” when there are no 
enemies, no foreigners and no outsiders in the picture at all? And if 
occupation makes no sense, then how can azadi make any sense?

Kak explained to an audience at a recent screening of his film in Boston 
(23/09) that he could only begin to approach the subject of his film, 
azadi, after he had made it past three barriers to understanding that 
stand in the way of an Indian mind trying to grasp what is going on in 
Kashmir. The first of these is secularism. Since India is a secular 
country, most Indians do not even begin to see how unrest in any part of 
the country could be explained using religion – that too what is, in the 
larger picture, a minority religion – as a valid ground for the 
political self-definition and self-determination of a community. The 
Valley of Kashmir is 95% Muslim. Does this mean that Kashmiris get to 
have their own nation? For most Indians, the answer is simply: No. 
Kashmiri Muslims are no more entitled to a separate nation than were the 
Sikhs who supported the idea of Khalistan in the 1980s. Such claims 
replay, for Indians, the worst memories of Partition in 1947, and bring 
back the ghost of Jinnah’s two-nation theory to haunt India’s secular 
polity and to threaten it from within.

The second barrier to understanding, related to the struggle over 
secularism, is the flight of the Pandits, Kashmir’s erstwhile 4% Hindu 
minority community, following violent incidents in 1990. 160,000 Pandits 
fled the Valley in that year’s exodus, leaving behind homes, lands and 
jobs they have yet to recover. Today the Pandits live, if not in Indian 
and foreign cities, then in refugee settlements that have become 
semi-permanent, most notably in Jammu and Delhi. For Indians, even if 
they do little or nothing to rehabilitate Pandits into the Indian 
mainstream, the persecution of the Pandits at the hands of their 
fellow-Kashmiris, following the fault-lines of religious difference and 
the minority-majority divide, is a deeply alienating feature of 
Kashmir’s conflict. Kashmir’s Muslim leadership has consistently 
expressed regret for what happened to the Pandits in the first phase of 
the struggle for azadi, but it has not, on the other hand, made any 
serious effort to bring back the exiled Hindus either. In failing to 
ensure the safety of the Pandits, Kashmir has lost a vital connection 
with the Indian state – and, potentially, a source of legitimacy for its 
claim to an exceptional status as a sovereign entity.

The third major obstruction to India taking a sympathetic view of 
Kashmir is the problem of trans-national jihad. Throughout the 1990s, 
Kashmir’s indigenous movements for azadi have received varying degrees 
of support, in the form of funds, arms, fighting men, and ideological 
solidarity, not only from the government of Pakistan, but also from 
Islamist forces all across Central Asia and the Middle East. The reality 
of Pakistani support, and the presence of foreign fighters, from an 
Indian perspective, damages the claim for azadi beyond repair.

Kashmiri exceptionalism in fact has an old history. Yet even if we do 
not want to go as far back as pre-modern and colonial times, then at the 
very least right from 1947, Kashmir has never really broken away 
completely like the parts of British India that became Pakistan, nor has 
it assimilated properly, like the other elements that formed the Indian 
republic. The status of Kashmir has always been uncertain, in free 
India. But with the involvement of pan-Asian or global Islamist players, 
starting with Pakistan but by no means limited to it, the past gives way 
to the present. India no longer deals with Kashmir as though it were 
still the place that was ruled by a Hindu king until 1947 and never 
fully came on board the Indian nation in the subsequent 50 years. It now 
looks upon Kashmir as the Indian end of the burning swath of Islamist 
insurgency that engulfs most of the region. In quelling azadi the Indian 
state sees itself as engaged in putting out the much larger fires of 
jihad that have breached the walls of the nation and entered into its 
most inflammable – because Muslim-majority – section.

Secularism, the Pandits and jihad are all very real impediments to India 
actually being able to see what is equally real, namely, the Kashmiri 
longing for azadi. Kak explained to his viewers that to be able to 
portray azadi from the inside, he had to get through and past these 
barriers, to the place where Kashmiris inhabit their peculiar and tragic 
combination of resistance and vulnerability, their dream of a separate 
identity and their confrontation with an overwhelmingly powerful 
adversary. Their misery is palpable but they have yet to find a politics 
adequate to transform dissatisfaction into independence. Kashmiris do 
not agree on a singular meaning of the word “azadi”. Meanwhile, in the 
face of brute oppression, they do not fully fight back, but they do not 
submit either.

Kak subtly captures their strangeness as a people: they recount how they 
lost sons and husbands to a random, ubiquitous and unforgiving violence, 
and, in the midst of gruesome narrations, offer the questioner tea. They 
walk among the dead, through lots covered with marked and unmarked 
graves, speaking of the departed in a weird idiom that mixes the 
language of martyrdom with the everydayness of life that must continue. 
Their poets, whether Muslim or Pandit, compose verses that in Kashmiri, 
Urdu or English carry the same unmistakable note of pain, even as they 
mirror a landscape of mountain lakes, blooming flowers and 
delicately-hued skies. (A few years ago Amar Kanwar’s documentary “Night 
of Prophecy” also brought to Indian audiences the same poignancy of 
poetry written by Kashmiris that confronts torture, disappearance and 
death in a place of unearthly natural beauty). Their traditional 
entertainers, village bards and clowns, called “Pather Bhand”, remember 
their patron, the medieval pir (Sufi saint) Zain ul Abidin, or Zain 
Shah, and tell tales of war and destitution with a mischievous 
light-heartedness that makes you cry instead of making you laugh. Women 
cover their heads but look at the camera with unnerving directness, 
insouciant, beleaguered but never submissive. These are a wry people, 
part defeated, part unconquerable.

Their breathtakingly beautiful land stands at the crossroads of East 
Asian, Central Asian and South Asian cultures. For centuries, different 
races, religions and ethnicities have trampled through Kashmir, subduing 
its people on their way. But the Kashmiri language bears little 
relationship to any other languages of Persia, India, Afghanistan, Tibet 
or China, its nearest neighbours. Kashmir has always kept its head down 
as the winds of history have blown over and across the mountains, turned 
inward in an isolation that feeds the desire for azadi but does not 
provide the political wherewithal, the canniness, to carve out a 
separate nation in a world where might makes right.

Here the Indian Army arrives, 1 Indian soldier to every 10 Kashmiris. 
Here the Indian tourists arrive, as Kak shows us, sledding in snowy 
Gulmarg, dressing up in “native” costume to have photographs taken in 
the Mughal Gardens of Srinagar, calling blood-spattered Kashmir a 
veritable Paradise. Here the sadhus in saffron robes arrive, on their 
way to the holy shrine at Amarnath, on their annual pilgrimage, 
invoking, in the same breath, the Hindu god Shiva and the Indian flag, 
the “tiranga” (“tri-colour”). You cannot take away what is ours, say 
these people. Ah, but you cannot keep what was never yours, either. 
India for Indians; Kashmir for Kashmiris: this is the fugitive logic 
that the filmmaker is seeking to make explicit.

Kak has set himself a nearly impossible task. He must take Indians with 
him, on his difficult journey, past their prejudices, past their 
suspicions, past their very real fears, into the nightmarish world of 
Kashmiri citizens, torn apart between the militants and the military, 
stuck with the after-effects of bombings, mine-blasts, crackdowns, 
arrests, encounter killings and disappearances that have gone on for 
nearly two decades without pause. I became interested in Kashmir at the 
same time, for the same reason, that Kak began his investigations: the 
trial of S.A.R. Geelani, accused and later acquitted in the December 13, 
2001 Parliament Attack case. In 2005 I wrote a couple of articles about 
Geelani, a Kashmiri professor of Arabic and Persian Literature at Delhi 
University, for this and other Indian publications. These earned me 
denouncements as anti-national, self-hating, anti-Hindu, pro-Pakistani, 
crypto-Muslim, etc. One letter to the editor even called me a terrorist!

Kak has already had a taste of this reaction since the release of 
“Jashn-e-Azadi” in March, and must expect more of it to be coming his 
way in the next few months, as his film is shown widely in India and 
abroad. In fact, he is sure to get more flak that I ever got, given he 
is a Kashmiri Pandit. Aggressively Hindu nationalist, right-wing Pandit 
groups find Kak’s empathy for Kashmiri Muslim positions infuriating, a 
“betrayal” that enrages them much more than that of a merely 
(apparently) Hindu – non-Pandit – sympathizer like myself.

But like Israeli refuseniks, there is reason to believe that now India 
too has its own nay-sayers, who cannot condone the presence of the 
Indian armed forces in Kashmir or the continued refusal of the Indian 
state to engage with Kashmiris on the question of azadi. Kak himself 
makes the comparison to Palestine by calling the azadi movement of the 
early 90s “Kashmir’s Intifada”. What allows someone like me – born, 
raised and educated in India, secular, committed to the longevity and 
flourishing of the Indian nation in every sense – to get, as it were, 
the meaning, the reality, and the validity, of Kashmir’s agonized search 
for azadi? Why do I not want my army to take or keep Kashmir by force, 
or my fellow-citizens to enjoy their annual vacations as unthinking, 
insensitive tourists, winter or summer? Why do abandoned Pandit 
homesteads affect me as much as charred Muslim houses, and why do I 
think that neither will be rebuilt and re-inhabited, nor will they be 
full of life as they once were, unless first and foremost, the military 
bunkers are taken down?

The answer comes from my own history, the history of India. If ever 
there was a people who ought to know what azadi is, and to value it, it 
is Indians. 60 years ago India attained its own azadi, long sought, hard 
fought, and bought at the price of a terrible, irreparable Partition. My 
parents were born in pre-Independence India, and to them and those of 
their generation, it is possible to recall a time before azadi. Kak’s 
film incorporates video footage from the early 1990s, taken from sources 
he either cannot or will not reveal. In those images of Kashmiris 
protesting en masse on the streets of Srinagar, funeral processions of 
popular leaders, women lamenting the dead as martyrs in the path of 
azadi, terrorist training camps, the statements of torture victims about 
to breathe their last and BSF operations ending in the surrender of 
militants, the seething passions of nationalism come right at you from 
the screen, leaping from their context in Kashmir and connecting back to 
the mass movements of India’s long struggle against British colonialism, 
from 1857 to 1947.

No Indian viewer, in those moments of collective and euphoric protest 
against oppression, could fail to be moved, or to be reminded of how it 
was that we came to have something close to every Indian heart: our 
political freedom, our status as an independent nation, in charge of our 
own destiny. The irony is that azadi is not something we do not and 
cannot ever understand, but that it is something we know all about, 
intimately, from our own history. What frightens us is not the alien 
nature of the sentiment in every Kashmiri breast: what frightens is its 
familiarity, its echo of our own desire for nationhood that found its 
voice, albeit after great bloodshed, six decades ago.

The British and French invented modern democracy at home, but colonized 
the rest of the world. The Jews suffered the Holocaust, but Israel 
brutalizes Palestine. India blazed the way for the decolonization of 
dozens of Asian and African countries, and established itself as the 
world’s largest democracy, yet it turns away from Kashmir and its quest 
for freedom, and worse, goes all out to crush the will of the Kashmiri 
people. Indians with a conscience – and perhaps Kak’s film will help 
sensitize and educate many more, especially the young – ought not stand 
for this desecration of the very ground upon which our nationality 
rests. After all, we learnt two words together – “azadi” and “swaraj”, 
freedom and self-rule – and on these foundations was our nation built.

We are a people who barely two generations ago not only fought for our 
own freedom – our leaders, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and so many others, 
taught the whole of the colonized world how to speak the language of 
self-respect and sovereignty. We of all people should strive for a time 
when it will become possible for a Kashmiri to offer a visitor a cup of 
tea without rancour or irony, as a simple uncomplicated expression of 
the hospitality that comes naturally to those who belong to this 
culture. We should join the Kashmiris in their search for a city 
animated by commerce and conversation, not haunted by the ghosts of the 
dead and the fled. We should support them, whether they be Muslims or 
Hindus, in turning their grief, so visible in Kak’s courageous work of 
witnessing, into a genuine “jashn”, a celebration, of a freedom that has 
been too long in the coming.

Anything less would make us lesser Indians.


-- 
www.sarai.net

Vivek Narayanan
The Sarai Programme 
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29,Rajpur Road, 
Civil Lines
Delhi 110 054.