[Reader-list] Needs and styles of Panditocracy

[rashneek kher]

Sorry Tarun,you are missing rains in Shillong.I have incidentally not been
missing 17 years (all seasons) away from my home,not just rains.
Incidentally 17 years before of this very day,my house was looted and
torched.It wasnt a big mansion.A small house by the river and a courtyard
where I played with my childhood mates Yasin and Shafiq.
Shafiq was shot 3 months later,branded a Mukhbir(informer).I am sure he
wasnt one.Like me he supported an indepedent,secular,plural and modern
Kashmir.
2 years before when I want to his mazar,small white flowers had grown on
it,they resembled the print of his shirt that I had last seen him in.

Sorry,you are missing your rains..go home..i wish I had one...

Regards

Rashneek


On 9/2/07, Tarun Bhartiya <tarunbhartiya at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.comto
> 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.
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-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com