[Reader-list] land and freedom : by Arundhati Roy

[inder salim]

LAND AND FREEDOM BY ARUNDHATI ROY IN  THE GUARDIAN.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/22/kashmir.india



For the past 60 days or so, since about the end of June, the people of
Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have
shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of
half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarised
zone in the world.

After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian
government's worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the
militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent
mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is
nourished by people's memory of years of repression in which tens of
thousands have been killed, thousands have been "disappeared",
hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated. That kind of
rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and
sent back to where it came from.

A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of 100
acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages
the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas)
suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of
petrol. Until 1989 the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about
20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of
about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamist militant uprising
in the valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindu nationalism
(Hindutva) in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to
increase exponentially. By 2008 more than 500,000 pilgrims visited the
Amarnath cave, in large groups, their passage often sponsored by
Indian business houses. To many people in the valley this dramatic
increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by
an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state. Rightly or wrongly,
the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It
triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate
plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of
the valley.

Days of massive protest forced the valley to shut down completely.
Within hours the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young
stone pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired
straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the
government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early 90s.
Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal (strikes) and police firing,
while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing
every kind of communal excess, the 500,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed
their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they
had been shown by local people.

Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the
response, the government revoked the land transfer. But by then the
land-transfer had become what Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the most senior
and also the most overtly Islamist separatist leader, called a
"non-issue".

Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There, too,
the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise
issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian state. (For some
odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led
to the blockading of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the only functional
road-link between Kashmir and India. Truckloads of perishable fresh
fruit and valley produce began to rot.

The blockade demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir
that they lived on sufferance, and that if they didn't behave
themselves they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of
essential commodities and medical supplies.

To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn't anybody
noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like
water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi,
freedom? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing
political suicide.

Not surprisingly, the voice that the government of India has tried so
hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Raised in
a playground of army camps, checkpoints, and bunkers, with screams
from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation has
suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the
dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for
themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an
epiphany. Not even the fear of death seems to hold them back. And once
that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second largest army
in the world?

There have been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory
that have been so sustained and widespread. The mainstream political
parties of Kashmir - National Conference and People's Democratic party
- appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi's TV studios, but can't
muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed
militants who, through the worst years of repression were seen as the
only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at
all, seem content to take a back seat and let people do the fighting
for a change.

The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not
leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal
spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on
Kashmir's streets. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people
swarm around places that hold terrible memories for them. They
demolish bunkers, break through cordons of concertina wire and stare
straight down the barrels of soldiers' machine guns, saying what very
few in India want to hear. Hum Kya Chahtey? Azadi! (We want freedom.)
And, it has to be said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity:
Jeevey jeevey Pakistan. (Long live Pakistan.)

That sound reverberates through the valley like the drumbeat of steady
rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder during an electric storm.

On August 15, India's independence day, Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of
Srinagar, was taken over by thousands of people who hoisted the
Pakistani flag and wished each other "happy belated independence day"
(Pakistan celebrates independence on August 14) and "happy slavery
day". Humour obviously, has survived India's many torture centres and
Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.

On August 16 more than 300,000 people marched to Pampore, to the
village of the Hurriyat leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down
in cold blood five days earlier.

On the night of August 17 the police sealed the city. Streets were
barricaded, thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads
leading into Srinagar were blocked. On the morning of August 18,
people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the
valley. In trucks, tempos, jeeps, buses and on foot. Once again,
barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were
faced with a choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre.
They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.

The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air.
Everyone had a banner; houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers,
doctors. One said: "We are all prisoners, set us free." Another said:
"Democracy without freedom is demon-crazy." Demon-crazy. That was a
good one. Perhaps he was referring to the insanity that permits the
world's largest democracy to administer the world's largest military
occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.

There was a green flag on every lamp post, every roof, every bus stop
and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All
India Radio building. Road signs were painted over. Rawalpindi they
said. Or simply Pakistan. It would be a mistake to assume that the
public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates
into a desire to accede to Pakistan. Some of it has to do with
gratitude for the support - cynical or otherwise - for what Kashmiris
see as their freedom struggle, and the Indian state sees as a
terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and
doing what galls India most of all. (It's easy to scoff at the idea of
a "freedom struggle" that wishes to distance itself from a country
that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that
has, for the most part been ruled by military dictators. A country
whose army has committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country
that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are
important questions, but right now perhaps it's more useful to wonder
what this so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it
so?)

Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry Pakistan se
rishta kya? La illaha illallah. (What is our bond with Pakistan? There
is no god but Allah.) Azadi ka matlab kya? La illaha illallah. (What
does freedom mean? There is no god but Allah.)

For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of
freedom is hard - if not impossible - to understand. I asked a young
woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her,
as a woman. She shrugged and said "What kind of freedom do we have
now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?" Her reply silenced
me.

Surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or
ignore the deeply Islamic fervour of the uprising taking place around
me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jihad.
For Kashmiris it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and
complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties
and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any
means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and
will some day, I hope, have to account for, among other things, the
brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the
uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire Hindu
community from the Kashmir valley.

As the crowd continued to swell I listened carefully to the slogans,
because rhetoric often holds the key to all kinds of understanding.
There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: Ay jabiron ay
zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do (Oh oppressors, Oh wicked ones, Get
out of our Kashmir.) The slogan that cut through me like a knife and
clean broke my heart was this one: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se
pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life
itself - Pakistan.)

Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work
it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that
the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth
about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who
are not nanga or bhooka are and have been complicit in complex and
historical ways with the elaborate cultural and economic systems that
make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal. And third, because
it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much
themselves mock others who suffer, in different ways, but no less
intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of
how easily victims can become perpetrators.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the
Qur'an. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of
occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to
turn to the Qur'an for guidance. He said Islam would guide the
struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would
govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created
as the home of Islam, and that that goal should never be subverted. He
said just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to
Pakistan. He said minority communities would have full rights and
their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was
applauded.

I imagined myself standing in the heart of a Hindu nationalist rally
being addressed by the Bharatiya Janata party's (BJP) LK Advani.
Replace the word Islam with the word Hindutva, replace the word
Pakistan with Hindustan, replace the green flags with saffron ones and
we would have the BJP's nightmare vision of an ideal India.

Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious
states handing down a complete social and moral code, "a complete way
of life"? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our
rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism,
from having enormous emotional stakes in the society in which we live.
What our neighbours do, how they choose to handle their affairs does
not affect our argument, it only strengthens it.

Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is
for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamist
project (which is as contested, in equally complex ways, all over the
world by Muslims, as Hindutva is contested by Hindus). Perhaps now
that the threat of violence has receded and there is some space in
which to debate views and air ideas, it is time for those who are part
of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are
fighting for. Perhaps it is time to offer people something more than
martyrs, slogans and vague generalisations. Those who wish to turn to
the Qur'an for guidance will no doubt find guidance there. But what of
those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur'an does not make
place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right
to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri
Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the
right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses
they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what
India has done to Kashmiris for 61 years? What will happen to
homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and
lafangas and writers who do not agree with the "complete social and
moral code"? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will
the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers
many models for Kashmir's thinkers and intellectuals and politicians
to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria?
Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?

At a crucial time like this, few things are more important than
dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have
consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for
intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and
honestly.

Already the spectre of partition has reared its head. Hindutva
networks are alive with rumours about Hindus in the valley being
attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu
reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and
that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to
flee. Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of
more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned
have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.

However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the
continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than
the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for
freedom justified the colonial project.

Of course there are many ways for the Indian state to continue to hold
on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the
people's energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It
could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It
could extinguish this non-violent uprising and re-invite armed
militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half a million
to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted
assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests
should do the trick for a few more years.

The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the
military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to
be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished,
malnutritioned population in India. What kind of government can
possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons,
more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?

The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It
allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimise Muslims in India by
holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in
Kashmir.

India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much as - if not more than -
Kashmir needs azadi from India.

· Arundhati Roy, 2008. A longer version of this article will be
available tomorrow at outlookindia.com.

--