[Reader-list] "I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Mignight"

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

Even as the Indian state seems to be on the threshold of losing its  
grip both on hearts and minds in Kashmir and on its own wisdom, we  
have our own bunch of proud patriots making a heroic effort to  
convert this list (and many other media spaces) into their own,  
special, battleground.

Perhaps they might be consoling themselves with the hope that the  
Reader List may yet be won, even if Kashmir is lost. Somehow, I am  
not so sure that this is going to be the case.

Unfortunately for them, to win in arguments, both the state in  
Kashmir, and he Indian nationalist hard liners in the media and on  
this list, need some ideas, some attempt at reason, some amount of  
vision. I am afraid, that so far, neither the state, nor its hyper- 
loyal editorialists and cyber-footsoldiers, have been able to display  
any. Instead, we have had bullets in Kashmir, and as I write this,  
news of midnight raids, arrests and the putting in place of the  
machinery of a major crackdown tomorrow, on those planning to  
assemble to protest peacefully on Lal Chowk in Srinagar, and  
restrictions on the freedom of expression. It is possible that a lot  
will happen tomorrow and in the next few days that will not filter  
through on television and the newspapers. It is possible that  
internet connections will be momentarily 'down' and that phone  
contact with the valley may be suspended. If it is not, then it is  
imperative that those who are in the valley, especially journalists  
of major international newspapers witness and report what might  
happen. If the worst does not come to pass, then, everyone will be  
relieved, and I really hope that is the case. We must remember, that  
in 1989-90, major massacres took place in Srinagar and in the rest of  
India, nobody really knew what was going on before it was too late.  
It is not as easy today for the Indian state to replicate the news  
blackout that accompanied the crackdown that took place in 1989, but  
certainly, the signs are that there might just be an attempt to do  
precisely that.

The PTI report quoted in a story just uploaded on the Indian Express  
website an hour before midnight, yesterday, 24th August, makes for  
chilling reading, especially if we read between the lines. It  
deserves being quoted in its entirety.
_________________________________________________________

One killed in fresh firing, Curfew in valley imposed again
Press Trust Of India
Posted online: Indian Express, Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 2203 hrs  
Print Email
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/352744.html

Srinagar, August 24:: In fresh violence, one person was killed and 40  
injured when security forces opened fire and lobbed tear gas shells  
after curfew clamped in the entire Kashmir valley today was defied by  
protestors at several places.

Appealing for calm, authorities braced for the rally called by  
separatists at Srinagar's Lal Chowk tomorrow and curfew imposed in  
all the 10 districts of the Kashmir Valley for the second time in a  
week as a precautionary measure.

Several separatist leaders were put under house arrest ahead of the  
rally to protest against what they called the "failure" of the Centre  
to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Authorities also feared there may be some threat to the lives of the  
separatist leaders.

Police said a man identified as Ghulam Qadir Hajjam was killed when a  
stray bullet hit him when protestors attempted to defy curfew. His  
son also sustained injuries.

The incident took place in the Dalgate area this evening when the  
protesters tried to storm the battalion headquarters of paramilitary  
forces, police said.

Security forces had to resort to firing after repeated cane charging  
and bursting of tear gas shells failed to disperse the mob protesting  
against the clamping of curfew.

A CRPF spokesman Prabhakar Tripathy said the security forces had to  
open fire as the father-son duo tried to attack their camp, killing  
one person and wounding another.

Citing "absolutely imperative" reasons, the Jammu and Kashmir  
government meanwhile restricted local TV channels from broadcasting  
news and current affairs programmes with immediate effect on the eve  
of separatists' rally.
________________________________________________________________________ 
____

Read this again, carefully, and recognize the import of what it says.  
The signals, are transparent, and is recognizable even in the fact  
that this is a PTI Report, not a report authored by an Indian Express  
correspondent in Kashmir. But just to be clear, let's read the signs.

1. Blood has been spilt, when people attempted to defy curfey, it may  
be spilt again, tomorrow at Lal Chowk, or in the coming days, all  
over the valley.

2. There has been a crackdown. The leadership of the forces resisting  
the occupation have been arrested. With them absent, there may be no  
one to effectively restrain an angry and scared crowd, should there  
be use of force against that crowd. This may lead to an escalation of  
violence, which is precisely what the state wants just now in  
Kashmir. It is fed up of a non-violent crowd, and wants to provoke at  
least a section of the crowd to turn violent. This is much easier to  
do if the leadership is locked away, and if a situation is created  
where passions may run high.

3. Some people of prominence in the 'separatist' leadership may be  
assasinated - (this is the import of the statement - "Authorities  
also feared there may be some threat to the lives of the separatist  
leaders" - these will then be used to sow dissension. An attempt was  
made to do this by the NSA chied Narayanan recently when he declared  
that Abdul Aziz did not die from a police of CRPF bullet. This  
backfired on him because he could not demonstrate how he knew this,  
especially as the 'bullet' in question was not found during the  
autopsy of the body. But there is no reason why this tactic, which  
has been so successful in the past with regard to the assasinations  
of the present Mirwaiz's father and Abdul Ghani Lone, may not be  
tried again.)

4. There will be a news blockade. This can be clearly read into the  
import of the statement - "Citing "absolutely imperative" reasons,  
the Jammu and Kashmir government meanwhile restricted local TV  
channels from broadcasting news and current affairs programmes with  
immediate effect on the eve of separatists' rally."

Simultaneously with this 'crisis management' mode kicking into gear  
in the valley, there has also been the unleashing of the threat,  
through the loud and clear signals sent by hard-line commentators of  
the bringing to bear of 'sedition' charges against anyone displaying  
the slightest hint of sympathy for the idea that the time for 'Azadi'  
in Kashmir has come. This threat has always been held out to people  
in Kashmir. Now, it is being held out against all those who are, or  
may think of standing by the people of Kashmir in this time of  
darkness. So, the threat of violence inside Kashmir goes hand in hand  
with the veiled, but clear threat of 'being locked up with the keys  
thrown away' (as Coutside Kashmir.

The ratcheting up of abuse, of name-calling, of loud and pathetic  
displays of rhetorical excess against all those, especially, but not  
only on the writer Arundhati Roy, on the ground of 'sedition' in this  
list needs to be seen in this context. This list is being used to  
deliver this threat to its members. And I urge everyone on this list  
who thinks that the conceptual violence of this threat needs to be  
countered to wake up and respond to this fact.

In the middle of all this. Not a single argument has emerged, either  
from the state, or from its minions in the media, or on this list, as  
to why Kashmir should continue to be held, by force if necessary.  
Please do not mistake the import of what I am saying. I mean 'Why'  
not 'How'. We have heard a lot of 'How' Kashmir must be held. We have  
not heard a 'Why'. Because there is no "why' anymore.

To answer the 'Why' question, the proponents of the Indian states'  
now visibly hardening stance on Kashmir would have to take recourse  
ultimately to the ethical and moral bases for justifying what is a  
visibly brutal occupation of a now voluntarily un-armed resistance.  
The United Jehad Council (the umbrella separatist militant's  
organization) has called on all militants to not use or even display  
weapons, to take no recourse to violence. This call may be inspired  
by cynicism as much as it may be a tacit admission of the recognition  
of the moral strength of non-violent resistance. Whatever the case  
may be, if bullets fly tomorrow, they will not fly from guns in  
militants' hands. The people have disarmed. The state is arming  
itself. We must all pray that this situation does not degenerate into  
a bloodbath on Lal Chowk tomorrow. Let us hope that whosoever thinks  
they are in charge in the Government of India does not get carried  
away into thinking that India, like China or Burma, can 'take' the  
fallout of a certain number of casualties in its stride. That all you  
need after a massacre is festivity. And even if we don't have the  
Olympics lined up like China did after cracking down hard on Tibet  
and all internal dissidence, we can always manufacture some beguiling  
image of 'economic resilience' or 'cultural diversity' to distract a  
possibly indignant world's attention from the real possibility of  
dead bodies piling up on the streets of Srinagar. This robust 'firm  
hand theory' might be wanting to have us believe that If China can do  
a Tienanemen Square and get away with it, surely, the other resurgent  
Asian power can afford a little 'lali' (a tinge of bloodied August  
redness) on the dirt of Lal Chowk.

All we have heard, in the meanwhile, is the tiresome repetition of  
the following -

1. The unity and integrity of India is paramount. Not an inch of  
territory can be negotiated. Those who want to be 'Azad' should be  
pushed, into Pakistan, leaving Kashmir, essentially an empty Kashmir,  
so that the occupation can continue.
2. Too much money has been spent on Kashmir, so we can't let go of it.
3. The people of Kashmir are misled by dangerous, fire-breathing,  
Islamist radicals. Or, the people of Kashmir are dangerous, fire  
breathing, Islamist radicals
4. The Kashmiri pandit population has had a really bad time.
5. If Kashmir goes, everyone else will want a piece of Azadi.
6. Kashmir must remain in India, because its continued existence  
within the Indian union as the only muslim majority province is proof  
of India's secularism. if Kashmir goes, what will happen to Indian  
Muslims?

In everything that I have read and heard till now, these are the six  
core arguments. Earlier, there used to be a seventh one. Which went  
like this. "The people of Kashmir love India, it is only a handful of  
the ISI inspired terrorist subversives who are the root of all the  
trouble in Kashmir. Once they are dealt with, the people of Kashmir  
will return to the bosom of the motherland. They will be seen, plying  
their shikaras, casting their non-votes in non-elections, weaving  
their carpets, painting their laquer, carrying pilgrims on their  
backs and selling their apples and being extras in the Hindi movie  
set which Kashmir must remain so that Indians can enjoy their little  
bit of  home grown Switzerland. In other words, the people of Kashmir  
really, truly, deeply love having the Indian armed forces occupy  
their land and torture them."

Unfortunately, this seventh argument, which was the really top- 
drawer, shined and polished argument, is no longer available for use.  
It has been consigned to the dustbin of history by the visible  
evidence that we have all seen of the hundreds of thousands of people  
on the streets of Kashmir peacefully stating that their only desire  
is liberation from the occupation.

So, the only arguments available are the 6 outlined above.  
Unfortunately, none of these six arguments take into account what the  
people of Kashmir may or may not want. They all hinge on what people  
outside Kashmir may or may not find desirable for Kashmir and the  
people of Kashmir. To me, that is just as reprehensible as the  
justification of the occupation of Iraq by an invading army on the  
grounds that actually this is happening because Haliburton wants it  
this way, or that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops in  
1968 was justified because the politbureau of the Communist Party of  
the Soviet Union (which represented neither the people of  
Czechoslovakia, nor the Communist Party of the Czech Republic) wanted  
it this way.

The only argument that rested, or relied on the will of the people is  
the one that has quietly had to exit in the last few days, the one  
about how much the people of Kashmir loved their continuing occupation.

Since, none of the arguments rely on, or even feel the need to take  
cognizance of the will of the majority of the people of the Kashmir  
valley, we have to come to the conclusion that following these  
arguments through to their logical conclusion must require the Indian  
state to either empty the valley of its inhabitants, or to beat them  
into submission to an extent that they are left with no will. To do  
that will be to follow Betolt Brecht's irony laden advice to the  
ruling powers in the former GDR's (during a swift repression of a  
workers uprising in East Berlin in 1953( of the need to "dissolve the  
people and elect another in their place" .

Now, it is debatable as to whether a state can continue to call  
itself democratic with any honesty (it could of course call itself  
democratic in the manner of the former 'peoples democracies') if it  
has to rely on such drastic measures in order to ensure that the will  
of the people in one of its parts actually not prevail. If the state  
is such that it gears itself to make war upon the people, is it at  
all unrealistic to assume that some people, in return will seek to  
defend themselves by means (which may be non violent, which may just  
include peaceful assembly, writing, speaking, thinking, having  
conversations) that nevertheless can be read by those who are  
partisan to the state as acts amounting to 'causing disaffection  
towards legally constituted authority and making war upon the state'

What should such people,(who are so accused of 'causing disaffection  
and making war upon the state') and those who stand by them do.? What  
should I do?. What should, for the sake of argument, Arundhati Roy,  
who has been so vilified, whom people on this list have so delighted  
in calling a 'whore' do?

(I have to add here that though neither I, nor Arundhati would think  
that there is anything dishonourable about whoring, I do realize that  
when the person who has called her a whore does so, they have not  
meant it as a compliment, they have instead nakedly revealed their  
utterly misogynist contempt for the simple fact of the difference of  
her opinion from theirs regarding the character of the Indian state)  
I wonder how and why, words like 'whore' come so easily to the lips  
of those, who on this list spare no effort at educating us with pious  
homilies about the virtues of religion and nationalism. Does this  
intensity of religious feeling and love for the nation breed a  
prediliction towards personal abuse of a particularly base kind? Is  
this piety another cloak for a  raging, enraged, violent misanthropy  
and misogyny? Is it merely inevitable that our proudest patriots are  
also our basest, most sexist thugs?

But let us not be distracted by these matters. The question before us  
remains.

What should the people of Kashimir, what should I (and others like me  
on this list and elsewhere), who choose to stand by them, do? Should  
we and they (the people of Kashmir) 'make love', not 'war' on that  
state that reveals with its every word and deed that it is making war  
upon them/us? Is that what those who are so quick to jump to the  
'sedition' gun want?

Asking for that to happen is a bit like asking a woman who is going  
to be raped to love her rapist. To save her 'honour' by marrying the  
rapist. And if she is 'married' to that rapist, to not insist, ask or  
even dream of a divorce so that the 'unity and integrity' of the  
marriage can continue.

She can criticize it, she can complain occasionally, (as Kshmendra so  
graciously suggests)  but does she not know that when rapists assault  
women, or their wives, they do so out of deep affection? And what  
they demand in return is the gentle reciprocity of in-house  
criticism, not the ungrateful churlishness of a demand for  
separation, of Azaadi. Those who do so, (and I am deeply saddened  
that by his sentiments, Kshmendra Kaul, whose sentiments I respect,  
despite our differences, seems to be in their company) are determined  
on impressing upon us that rapists do what they do to their victims  
only to prove how much they really care.

For me, the difference between that demand for the display of  
'critical reciprocity' to a rapists love and the demand for a divorce  
is the difference between 'criticism' and 'sedition'. I want this  
cruel, suffocating, strangle of an embrace to end, and if  that  
desire is sedition, then I would much rather be seditious than be  
violated. Being 'seditious' in this sense is really not about  
embracing a daring idea, it is just about self-preservation, and the  
effort to retain for oneself, a semblence of dignity and self- 
respect. That is all there is to it.

The argument against 'sedition' can be held to have some strength in  
a situation where a numbing continuity of violence is not a necessary  
condition of the persistence of the 'union' . When the reality of a  
state's presence in the life of a people can only come to mean  
violence, then not to be seditious is to agree to be violated, on a  
daily basis, probably forever.

My question to those who are asking for the prosecution of those  
being labelled 'seditious' is as follows, do you really want to be  
complicit in this routine, banal, prolongation of daily violation?  
And if you do, what do you really intend to do, in order to carry out  
your threat against those who choose not to be complicit? Do you  
really want to lock them up and throw away the keys, in keeping with  
the proclamations of those you applaud today?

Once you have locked up all the 'seditionists' (and their tribe seems  
to be increasing) what will you do? A CNN-IBN poll on live TV, showed  
that 51 % of the viewers of a programme that discussed the pros and  
cons for 'Azadi' for Kashmir, and featured rabid, ranting  
politicians, wanted 'Azadi' for Kashmir. A TImes of India poll  
indicated that 41 % of Indians in major metros indicated that they  
wanted 'Azadi' for Kashmir. I am not one given to taking opinion  
polls seriously, but clearly something is changing in the bigger  
picture. More and more 'Indians' seem to be giving the 'Azadi for  
Kashmir'-option a serious consideration. If this wave of Indians who  
want 'Azadi for Kashmir from India' and "Azadi for India from  
Kashmir' swells to a tide, what will the 'anti-seditionists' do?

Will they hunt 'seditious' sentiment wherever it is and lock its  
proponents and throw away the key? Will they make them 'disappear'  
just as people have been known to 'disappear' in Kashmir. Will they  
ensure that the channels through which 'seditious' sentiment is being  
expressed, mainstream newspapers, television channels, blogs,  
discussion lists, tea shops, class rooms, be tightly controlled and  
viciously monitored? Will they meticulously weed out every favourable  
reference to 'plebiscites in Kashmir' made by India's first prime  
minister? Will they drop Jayprakash Narayan's name from hospitals and  
institutes because he had once said things just as seditious, and  
about Kashmir? Will they turn their beloved Secular, Democratic,  
Republic into a 'People's Democracy' on the formerly Rumanian model?  
Or will they ensure that their beloved state comes to resemble, more  
and more, with every passing day, their envied doppelganger, the  
People's Republic of China, which has a very efficient, tried and  
tested mechanism for dealing with 'seditionists', which can be  
imported and Indianized, just as effectively as the idea of a  
'special economic zone' has been? Will they expand the 'occupation of  
Kashmir' to the extent that it ceases to be an 'occupation of  
Kashmir' and becomes instead an 'occupation of India by its own armed  
forces. In ordinary circumstances, such situations are known as coup- 
de-tat's, and they happen with a depressing regularity in our  
neighbourhood. Is it time finally, then, for the anti-seditionists in  
India, to ensure that India enters the SAARC spirit by having at  
last, a respectable military, or quasi-military coup of it's own  
(After all, the people in Pakistan and Bangladesh have had so much  
fun all these years, and all we had were those two measly years of an  
internal emergency in the now forgotten seventies !)

How lovely that india would be. Standing tall with Ahmednijad ruled  
Iran, with the Ibn Saud's nizam-e-more-stuffed Saudi Arabia, with the  
(some) People's Republic of China, with Czar Putin's Russia, with  
Cuba (where the doctrine of Socialism in one country has been refined  
to Socialism within one brotherhood) with the Gerontocracy of North  
Korea (where the doctrine of Socialism in one country has been  
refined to Socialism within one dynasty), with the United States  
under Mad King George, with Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the Burmese Junta's  
Myanmar and oh, even that pesky neighbour, the inconsistently  
military barracks of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In each of  
these states, there are people locked away for sedition, with the  
keys thrown away. It is rumored that some of these people, especially  
in advanced tyrannies like Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea are  
writers and troublesome intellectuals. Perhaps, having realised and  
actualised this sedition-free utopia, the Indian government could  
then initiate a new grouping of states, to be known as the 'Sedition  
Suppressers Group' or SSG, to match the Nuclear Suppliers Groups  
(NSG). And the benefit of membership of the first grouping (SSG)  
could be used to console the hurt pride of a Republic that may or may  
not  be spurned by the non-proliferationary fundamentalism of some  
pesky non-entity members (with no impressive track record in sedition  
suppression) of the  other group (NSG) in the coming days.

All these options are available to our proud patriots. And I would  
really urge all those who have been crying themselves hoarse to  
consider them in detail. Pawan Durani made a perceptive statement  
when he commented on the youtube link (forwarded by  
kashaffairs at yahoo.co.uk in the post titled 'democracy' at work in  
Kashmir which contained the video of the gruesome violence meted out  
to an unarmed young man by CRPF personnel in Srinagar on August 17.  
He said, "Not that a (sic) justify this treatment,but this happens in  
other states." Durani's response is telling. The occupation of  
Kashmir produces conditions of brutality that are no longer confined  
to Kashmir. True, the habit of state terror is contagious, once  
unleashed at one end, it itches to be unleashed elsewhere. It  
unleashes itself, everywhere. Farmers are shot in cold blood in a  
suburb of Delhi, a hundred or so die in Nandigram. Its not just India  
that occupies Kashmir, it is the habits learnt in Kashmir that return  
to haunt, and to occupy india. In the end, occupation corrodes the  
nominal occupier as much as it corrodes the nominal occupied. That is  
why, once again, India needs Azadi from Kashmir, as much as Kashmir  
needs Azadi from India. Such an Azadi will not autmatically end the  
spectacle of policemen pulverizing unarmed resisters in India. But it  
will give to every act of resistence to that indignity a fresh lease  
of life.


As I finish writing this, I have apprehensions of what the morning  
will bring. And the next many mornings. And I cannot but help end by  
ending this  long post with a poem by Agha Shahid Ali that I have  
always thought of as prescient. Were he alive today, and how  
marvellously alive he would be if he were alive, all he might have  
done is to simply re-write this poem, word for word.


I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight
Agha Shahid Ali (from "The country without a post office.")


1

One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains
to will the distant mountains to glass.
The city from where no news can come
is now so visible in its curfewed night
that the worst is precise:

 From Zero Bridge
a shadow chased by searchlights is running
away to find its body. On the edge
of the Cantonment, where Gupkar Road ends,
it shrinks almost into nothing,

is nothing by Interrogation gates
so it can slip, unseen, into the cells:
Drippings from a suspended burning tire
are falling on the back of a prisoner,
the naked boy screaming, "I know nothing."

2

The shadow slips out, beckons Console Me,
and somehow there, across five hundred miles,
I'm sheened in moonlight, in emptied Srinagar,
but without any assurance for him.

On Residency Road, by Mir Pan House,
unheard we speak: "I know those words by heart
(you once said them by chance): In autumn
when the wind blows sheer ice, the chinar leaves
fall in clusters--

one by one, otherwise."
"Rizwan, it's you, Rizwan, it's you," I cry out
as he steps closer, the sleeves of his phiren torn.
"Each night put Kashmir in your dreams," he says,
then touches me, his hands crusted with snow,
whispers, "I have been cold a long, long time."

3

"Don't tell my father I have died," he says,
and I follow him through blood on the road
and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners
left behind, as they ran from the funeral,
victims of the firing. From windows we hear
grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall
on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames,
it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,
the homes set ablze by midnight soldiers.
Kashmir is burning:

By that dazzling light
we see men removing statues from temples.
We beg them, "Who will protect us if you leave?"
They don't answer, they just disappear
on the road to the plains, clutching the gods.

4

I won't tell your father you have died, Rizwan,
but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth
on the tomb of which saint, or the body
of which unburied boy in the mountains,
bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies
on Himalayan snow?

I've tied a knot
with green thread at Shah Hamdan, to be
untied only when the atrocities
are stunned by your jeweled return, but no news
escapes the curfew, nothing of your shadow,
and I'm back, five hundred miles, taking off
my ice, the mountains granite again as I see
men coming from those Abodes of Snow
with gods asleep like children in their arms.

A poem from "The country without a post office." by Agha Shahid Ali


END
_______




Shuddhabrata Sengupta