[Reader-list] A million identities now - DNA

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

*A million identities now*
 Sidharth Bhatia, DNA
Thursday, August 14, 2008  22:20 IST


*While India has grown as a nation-state, forms of tribalism continue to
flourish*

For the past few weeks, we have seen the gradual escalation of violence in
Jammu and Kashmir, where a kind of peace had begun to prevail. In the last
three or four years, 'normalcy' of sorts had come to the state and
especially the Valley, which meant that violence had come down and economic
activity had started to increase.

Correspondingly, secessionist elements, who did badly in the last elections,
had gone quiet, finding little support from locals.

Now, as tempers have risen, cries of 'azadi' are once again being heard in
Kashmir.
The Hurriyat has come out of its low profile and with the deaths, in police
firing, of some of the marchers, has assumed some importance too.

Meanwhile in Jammu, which has resented the importance given to the Valley, a
new kind of protest has emerged. It is fast taking the hues of a
Hindu-Muslim conflict though it did not begin in that way. An innocuous
looking circular, under which the state sought to appropriate land for the
temporary use of Hindu pilgrims going to the Amarnath shrine, has brought
out latent hostilities that are now in the open.

Each political party is playing it their way — the Congress, after having
tried to please one side and then capitulating when the other protested,
seems completely caught out, unable to move to stop this explosion of anger.
The PDP, till recently part of the government, has immediately distanced
itself from it, and the other Kashmiri party, the National Conference, wants
to make sure that the PDP does not walk off with all the credit. The
Bharatiya Janata Party, looking for a cause, any cause that will give it a
platform to stand on, has jumped into the fray in Jammu.

Somewhere at the heart of it all is the special status that Kashmir enjoys.
This status makes Kashmir a part of India and yet not of it — elections are
held here like anywhere else but an Indian cannot buy land in the state. For
Kashmiris, the expanse that stretches below is 'India', an alien and even
hostile land that they are not sure they want to be part of. Violence has
pushed away the Hindu Kashmiris who were more inclined to join India, but
all Kashmiris are agreed that they have a special brand of 'Kashmiriyat'
that any influx of outsiders would destroy.

This has for long angered many, especially the BJP, which promised to
rescind Article 370, that confers special status when it came to power; as
is well known, it didn't. But Indians are within their rights to ask — why
should Kashmiris enjoy this status and why can't non-Kashmiris buy land
there? This discriminatory provision is not limited to Kashmir — a
non-Himachali cannot buy land in Himachal Pradesh either. They too do not
want 'outsiders'. Given half a chance, Goans would pass such a provision too
— they too hate the idea of their languid land being gobbled up by Punjabi
fat cats and Mumbai businessmen. And while Raj Thackeray has not yet dreamt
up a demand to debar non-Maharashtrians from buying land in Mumbai, he too
is up in arms against the dreaded outsider.

In their own way, the Himachalis, Goans and Maharashtrians are echoing the
idea of 'Kashmiriyat', a kind of cultural exceptionalism that makes them
unique and different from others. It is no secret that many Goans think of
India as the usurper of their state; Portuguese rule, they say was far
better.

Such feelings are not new, but what has changed over the years is the means
of expressing them. Barely a decade after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru had
to succumb to the demand of states based on linguistic commonality; the
republican in him could not come to terms with the idea of community
identities. The Indian federal state, built on the notion of unity in
diversity, where the unity counted for much more, faced many a challenge in
all these years to its bedrock values. Kashmir under Sheikh Abdullah, the
agitations in the North East (always called insurgencies), Punjab through
the 1980s — all were confronted and dealt with, either by co-option or by
force. Everyone was an Indian first — cultural uniqueness would be allowed
and celebrated, but not at the cost of separation.

But 60-odd years after Independence, the challenges of identity politics
have only grown. They are not always violent, but let that not fool us. The
tribalist idea lives on, even though the nation-state has advanced in many
ways. A tribe always values the collective over the individual, which goes
against the republican idea. We need a strong centre to suppress such
heresy; as we all can see, that is one thing that is missing in this
equation.

Email: sidharth01 at dnaindia.net