[Reader-list] Needs and styles of Panditocracy

[Tarun Bhartiya]

Needs and styles of Panditocracy

For all those amused/fascinated/disgusted or plainly mystified by the
responses Jashn-e-Azadi's (non) screening journey has gathered, here is the
accumulated commentary of more than two years. As editor of the film, I
comment in order to take a bit (hopefully quite a bit) of blame about the
lopsided stance of the film vis-à-vis the Pandits and the Indian Nation, and
as the Shillong based moderator and blogmistri of www.jashneazadifilm.com to
also share in some of the opprobrium about freedom of expression.

Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.

Speak –
But keep your yes and no unsplit
And give your say this meaning:
give it shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midday and midday and midnight.

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive –
where death is ! Alive !
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.    (Paul Celan)

Even if I assume that the outraged constellation of media savvy
undergraduate bluster, pop Sufism embarrassed at the Islamic roots of
Sufism, elegantly written defenses of intolerance, and the conspiratorial
comedies of the blog world, do not represent the range of politics and
opinions which the Kashmiri Pandit (KP) world has to offer (how can it?), at
least these maneuverings allow us a privileged peep into the workings of
Panditocracy, an opinion making machine which grinds into motion (or is it
always working?) to defend the ramparts of divinely ordained Bharatvarsha.

This defence plan, of which patriotic snitching is the latest weapon used,
has consisted of protesting shock troopers, willful misreading of the film,
conspiratorial search for a 'puppet master', repeated unsubstantiated
allegations in the hope that by their very repetition would make them true,
vile and threatening comments on the blog (comments which we have quite
early on and openly said we would moderate), and non-reviews of the film
stalking any discussion forum, website, blog which mentions Jashn-e-Azadi …
As if an event management company has been working to a script.

In this tiring necessity, talking to Sanjay recently, we laughed and said
that only thing left for the Panditocrats was to accuse us of making threats
– and there it was: a post on the Reader's list hypothesizing about the
matter. (Maybe they should accuse us now of scripting their responses too. )


But this script which Panditocracy churns out, every once in a while (sadly
Jashn-e-Azadi is not its first target) has a history. A history which needs
to be spoken about, dissected and innards examined, to understand its
working and its intentions.

A leaf, treeless
For Bertolt Brecht,

What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime

because it includes
so much made explicit ?
(Paul Celan)

I was curious, December 2004, Sanjay came to Shillong for a film festival
and over some nice Swish coffee, outlined his ongoing Kashmir project and
asked me to be a part of it. My small town curiosity about the big issue was
also about the professional desire to be part of a process not limited by 28
minutes of scripted gentility. I saw his Narmada Film at the festival, a
depressing letter to the tradition of the non-violent progressive nation and
felt that finally I have seen a documentary which is not about solutions,
outrage, horror show, but an engagement, thinking through, a conversation
which began when the film ended. (Even if my work on Jashn-e-Azadi does to
some people just a bit of what 'Words on Water' did to me, I can go back to
watching Shillong rain).

But what of Kashmir did I know? I knew the shorthand – JKLF, LeT, JeM, Hizb,
IeD, Pakistan, Flawed elections, progressive visions of National Conference
perverted by its inheritors, Islamic Fundamentalism, and the Tragedy of
Pandits. I acknowledge that this short hand knowledge was filtered-tempered
by my khadi diaper upbringing. This filter has meant that as much as I try,
only by parricide will I be a part of the right wing nationalist consensus
about India. But if I wasn't a part of the 'right' brigade, I was still
somewhere in the secular progressive mode of envisioning India – a vision
that for all its criticality remains inscribed within the accidental
cartography of India. Kashmir to Kanyakumari, a people's republic. Defend
not just the nation, but the people bound by the nation.

Although all this secular progressive inheritance was already getting
slightly rusty in the winds of North East (that other endemic battleground
of the Indian nation), where I grew up and now lived. Also, blame it on the
post 9/11 shape of the world, where struggles and their rhetoric, and their
bombs were (and are) grabbing the Manichean dialectic of my tradition into
the uncharted political mess.

If you ignore the (vanaspati) Pandit Nehru, my political encounters with
Kashmir began with the Pandits. As an undergraduate in the Delhi University,
in the early nineties of Raths and Reservations, as part of campaigns
against majoritarian Hindu visions, these two issues which were sure to come
up to embarrass us into silence – Shah Bano and our willful neglect of the
victims of Islamic terror – namely the Kashmiri Pandits who had been driven
out of the Kashmir Valley. (Why were we only working with the victims of
riots in Seelampur, while there were Kashmiri Pandits refugees right here in
Delhi?)

The organisation to which I belonged had many senior democratic rights and
civil liberties activists, who had kept watch over happenings in Kashmir,
but they too were silenced into embarrassment. Remember in the late eighties
- there were many trips which many progressives (Gandhians, JPites, Radical
humanists, even Maoist sympathisers) made to Kashmir to look at the early
days of the Indian states' encounters with the movement there. They had all
come back with stories of repression, and the sentiment of people chanting
'Azadi'. Many of the unresolved questions of Kashmir had started making
appearance in the mass media. The Indian project was again up for
questioning. But then the first wave of migration of Pandits from the valley
happened, and my tradition was stunned into an embarrassed silence. Lest our
campaigns to question howling Hindutva be suspected of one sidedness, we
were forced to omit any mention of Kashmir. We started making obligatory
noises about the plight of the Pandits. Trips to refugee camps were made and
a balancing act ensued - we made the mandatory connection between
Majoritarian Islamic politics with Majoritarian Hindu politics.

But these trips were curiously ambiguous, a trudge through the debris of
hope that only exiles could build out of. But there was more, there was a
more insistent air of exultant grief – now you see the truth as we want you
to see. For me, the odious memories of Muslim persecution which I had to
listen to became too much. But I being the well meaning liberal I was
training to be, filed them as a tragedy whose opinions I did not like, but
so what, still a tragedy, and I shut up. And thus a decade of Kashmir was
lost to me; it became my bad conscience to which I would return in purer
times. Pandit migration became the gate from where to enter Kashmir, with
well-chosen Panditocrats as gatekeepers. The diversity of Kashmir's'
politics, its history, and its voices turned one colour – green. Propaganda
on PTV.

In these three years of working on Jashn-e-Azadi, recovering those years of
disappearances, encounters, curfews, crackdown, reptilian Indian secret
apparatuses, internecine battles – my head screams. Where were those
stories? Why didn't I seek them? A valley of savages with beards, the
popular upsurge. All had vanished into anonymous violent headlines. A
consensus appeared in which we all partook, from The Hindu to the Organiser,
Kashmiris as irrational mullahs with bombs, their Sat phones trained towards
their Emirs. How could we even imagine politics in such an irrational
revanchist atmosphere? If what they can do with their well-integrated
minority was any indication, then god-forbid, what theocratic dread we were
going to have! In our fears for the 'innocent' Kashmiris, we chose to be
liberal interventionists, with Indian Security apparatus doing the dirty but
necessary work on behalf of civilization and democracy. A whole people and
their history was switched off. What remained were victims, being paraded in
their pain. If you asked a question, it stared you with grief-wet eyes,
striking you with guilt. And you moved on from politics to tragedy,
questioning to heartfelt sadness, concrete to debilitating abstractions.

Between the idea and the word
there is more than we can understand.
There are ideas for which no words can be found

The thought lost in the eyes of a unicorn
appears again in a dog's laugh.
(Vladimir Holan)

Obviously it would be a tad bit too obvious to point out that the other film
"And the world remained silent" wholesale borrows its title from Eli
Weisel's classic telling of the Holocaust experience. And it may also be too
obvious to reach out for some historic correspondences in this well thought
out semantic borrowing, because it is to the pantheon of holocaust and
genocide to which the Panditocrats want their experiences to belong. But in
the contested terrain of the meaning and histories of the Holocaust, lie
some cautionary lessons for us. In a simple counter posing of the silence of
the world and the genocidal destruction of European Jewry, the Zionist
telling of its history plays on the guilt of the silent world to
unquestioningly accept the special place for the Jews as victims, and thus
accords them a special treatment and protection.

Because there remains a fascist fringe (or Ahmedinijad) with their
anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying fantasies, to question any element of this
equation then opens you out as an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier. The
Zionist machine ensures that uncomfortable questions about the behaviour of
Israel, for instance, are kept out of bounds in popular consciousness.
Anti-Semitism becomes Anti-Israel.

But the world of Holocaust History is not only the world of Zionist grievers
and Fascist conspiratorialists. There have been – and are – other voices,
the most prominent of them being Raul Hilberg (who died recently), a figure
of hate for both the Zionist and Holocaust deniers. In his seminal and
monumental work 'Destruction of European Jewry' about both the number and
composition of the dead in Nazi Concentration camps, and the ideology that
led to the world of concentration camps, he shows that numbers in themselves
tell you nothing, unless and until you unpack them in their historical
concreteness. Otherwise they just remain a shocking image, an ideology whose
function may very well be to stop any historical enquiry. In his work he
shows that if it was Holocaust for the Jews, it was also for the Gypsies,
the Homosexuals, the Communists. In his view, Zionist attempts to
appropriate special victim hood was not just mistaken, but also ideological,
which by making the tragedy a-historical, allowed them to shield their
politics from any enquiry.

It is not only the title of the film "And the world remained silent" they
have borrowed, but their attacks on our film also closely borrows the
language and politics of Zionism. If you are a Jew who questions Zionism,
s/he is a Self Hating Jew. So if you are Sanjay Kak, a Kashmiri Pandit, who
refuses to toe the community consensus, he is suffering from Self-Hatred. If
you question the Panditocratic consensus – you are anti-national,
anti-people. (The Anti-Hindu charge is reserved for their favoured company,
the Swapan Dasguptas and Sandhya Jains, not Sarai Reader's List.)

As an example, in all the twisted public posturing as a non-sectarian,
liberal, mystic, Mr Nietzsche (Twice) Born, with Ghalib as his wali, Rumi as
his 'quotable quotes' and Kashmiri Muslims as his friends, when it comes to
private arenas of beliefs truly held, what comes out, unsurprisingly, is not
Anti-Islamic Fundamentalist belief, but Anti-Muslim bile. He borrows his
terminology from the Hindu Right. (Please trawl through this list for a
private mail revealed by mistake, and his comments approvingly quoted at the
Maharaja Agrasen College screening of ATWRS in the blog of the film). His
Nietzschian nihilism is not all that Nietzschian in it's all embracing
nihilism of 'all that is sacred', but instead a sad adolescent copy of the
Nazi caricatured Nietzsche, who foretold the 'Superman' being reborn.

Even in their willful misreading of the film, which they wish to memorialize
through their web stalking (even on their blackberries), this historic
script is being materialized. By accusing the film of minimising the numbers
of dead, and not according special status to the Pandit dead, or minimizing
their tragedy, they hope that Jashn-e-Azadi would be pushed into a life on
the fringes of jehadi propaganda, whose CDs could then be regularly seized
by Indian Police to show their active involvement in the fight against
terrorism. To return to Raul Hilberg, and his monumental work (which even
Zionist Historians refer to), in popular telling he was tarred with the same
number-brush, accused of robbing the dead of their special status. If you
accuse someone of trifling with Human tragedy, what you are trying to do is
to warn off that 'open minded' soul to close his or her mind.

To reach for my editing pride – let me go over some numbers that concern KPs
in the film. They appear just before the intermission (if somebody really
wants to know, I can recall for you the reasons for this placement), and I
quote the script :

[[BEGIN QUOTATION FROM THE FILM]]
A village of absence: Haal village

Txt Caption 3A:
In the volatile 1990 uprising, Kashmir's Pandit minority became vulnerable
to a sharp religious polarization.
Almost 200 Hindus were brutally killed by extremists.

Subtitles:
Is Piarey Hatash at home?
Could I speak with him?
Bade Papa there's a phone for you?

Greetings!
I'd spoken with you, about your poem …
"Brothers our address -
"So brothers our address is lost
Where do we look for our own, that place is lost
What we gazed upon with love all our years
That shelter is locked, our home is lost …

Txt Caption 3B:
The Government let it be known it was unable to guarantee their safety, and
encouraged them to leave.Over the next year, nearly 160,000 Pandits fled the
valley.


txt: Haal
 South Kashmir

 Summer 2004

[[END FILM QUOTE]]

200 is the number of dead in the year 1990-91, the year of their first
exodus, and this is important, it does not say a total of 200 Pandits dead
till 2007. (In fact the graphic in the film actually omits to mention the
number of Muslim dead for that period: that is an omission that someone from
the valley should point out!). But unlike what the number twisting ARKP
would have people believe (without seeing the film), we simply wanted to
point out the reality behind the perception in the minds of the minority
about the struggle for Azadi in the valley. When we later return to the KPs
exile in the film, we pose a question for the movement in the valley, which
should be an uncomfortable question for our imagined "puppet masters"

[[BEGIN QUOTATION FROM THE FILM]]

55 A village of absence: Haal village
• A moon rises over the hill; a boat
• Phone rings and he begins a recitation

Subtitles:
I don't know what happened to the line
Yes, I couldn't figure out either
Can you again, from beginning to end -

So brothers our address is lost
Where do we look for our own, that place is lost
What we gazed upon with love all our years
That shelter is locked, our home is lost
Who for that darkness do we blame?
Stifled, alas, that reason is lost
Fluttering around the lamp, burnt ourselves
Darkness fell, the moth is lost
When will return that heart-warmth?
The intimacy of winter nights is lost

You see on winter nights
we would meet in our villages,
in the old days,
we'd share our joys and sorrows
We'd weave blankets,
tell old tales, of ancient dervishes
So that's why –

When will return that heart-warmth?
The intimacy of winter nights is lost
All we'd garnered was one faith
Lidless our pots, the treasure is lost
At the last, when we leave with nothing
God knows, what places were lost
The one who knew tomorrow's secrets
That dervish, that mad seer is lost

Txt: Pyare 'Hatash', Jammu

When I recited these ghazals
in Srinagar, at Tagore Hall,
people started to cry …

We're just the two of us here
my children are outside, in Delhi.
I don't move out
Because outside is a fog,
of politics, of violence,
of lies, and lust –
I just stay at home,
I'm broken by this world – as poets often are …
I want to see you …

V/O 15
The broken voice of a poet, evoking the absence of a lost minority …
That's a question that hangs over the struggle for freedom in Kashmir,
collateral damage to the old questions of freedom, nation, and religion.

[[END FILM QUOTE]]


(By the way, in that year of 1990-91, around 700 Kashmiri Muslims also died
in Kashmir.)

So what do the Panditocrats want? They want to silence the critical voices
from raising any question that they have not vetted. They want to be sole
actors, directors, and scriptwriters of this twenty yearlong story. Twenty
years of "And the world should remain silent" and only listen to us: ask no
questions, express no doubt. If even well feted liberals like Ramchandra
Guha say that  "the two critical events that… defined the epoch of
competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the
exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (India after Gandhi)" then you know that
Panditocracy is not a fringe phenomenon. They have succeeded in suspending
all disbelief.

For instance one commonsensical question, how come 200,000 or 500,000 (fill
in any big number), are forced out of a place, and the Indian state, which
Panditocrats defend with such zeal, does nothing or remains silent. And
there is no skepticism directed towards this divine protector of life and
liberty. Even if the cause of this 'forced' migration was that every
Kashmiri Muslim (doubtful, but what the hell let me be ARKP for a moment)
was baying for KP blood, wasn't it the responsibility of Indian state
apparatus – which can station 700,000 soldiers, camp around every village of
the valley, crackdown at a drop of an utensil – to do something. Okay, even
if it had inadequate forces in 1990-91 and wanted for sometime to allow
people to move to safe places, why didn't it encourage them to move back
when it had adequate security? Or will the return only happen when all the
Muslims have been repatriated to Pakistan (or where ever they are to be
thrown out or made to vanish), and then the Pandits can enjoy their purified
ancestral land (read Panun Kashmir). This is a legitimate question to ask
(Jashn-e-Azadi doesn't do that, but someone will), as legitimate as asking
of the movement in valley as to why was their minority made to feel unsafe?

But ask unvetted questions, and see Panditocrats piling onto you. For you
see KP's in exile makes more sense for the Indian state, than them being in
the valley. Poignancy of Exile and Migration is more potent than the
historical messiness of politics. Poignancy, if I may point out to the
Panditocrats, is not just the migration of Pandits, but a Pandit politics
based on the triumphant return to the cleansed land of the Twice born. And
that, friends, has the possibility of making the exile a permanent
condition.

But these are troubling thoughts… let me get back to the troubles at hand,
of refusing to see Kashmir only from the eyes of Panditocrats. I am proud of
theses troubles, for no longer will the only conversation about Kashmir be
about 'jehad' and its 'innocent' victims. Jashn-e-Azadi has attempted, in
its own inadequate filmic way, to ask questions, join conversations, bear
witness. No wonder the Panditocracy is outraged. An outrage that is stopping
me from going back and enjoying my special Shillong rain.