[Reader-list] Kesavan on Kashmir

[S. Jabbar]

 From the Telegraph, Calcutta

THE TROUBLE WITH EDEN
- Kashmir offers a choice between two compromised ideals
Mukul Kesavan

I¹ve never been to Kashmir. I nearly went in 1987 to Srinagar; there¹s a
guesthouse there that used to be owned by Grindlays Bank, where I was meant
to stay, but then the troubles began and I stayed home. The closest I came
to living in Kashmir was living in Kashmiri Gate, a neighbourhood in north
Delhi where the walled city ended and the Civil Lines began. There¹s a
cinema hall there called the Ritz, where, in the early Sixties, I saw
visions of Kashmir in films like Kashmir Ki Kali. Those were the years when
Bombay cinema specialized in houseboat and hill-station idylls and in these
films Kashmir often stood in for Eden.

Delhi was a Jan Sangh city then; Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a promising local
politician. Growing up in Kashmiri Gate, I wasn¹t especially political but I
knew that Jan Sanghis blamed Nehru for Kashmir¹s disputed status. If he
hadn¹t agreed to a plebiscite, or if he had allowed Indians from outside
Kashmir to settle there, or if he hadn¹t made the fatal mistake of Article
370, which gave Jammu and Kashmir a special status within the Union, if he
hadn¹t indulged Sheikh AbdullahŠ if he hadn¹t done all of this, we wouldn¹t
be wrestling with secessionism and sedition in Kashmir.

For most of us who, like me, have no first-hand experience of Kashmir, the
troubles in the Valley are, for the most part, a series of off-stage noises.
Our governors, or more precisely, our proconsuls, sometimes become famous
for making bad things worse, wars and skirmishes emblazon names like Kargil
on our collective consciousness, newsworthy violence like the purging of
Kashmiri Pandits from the valley or the brutalization of Kashmiri Muslims by
the security forces surfaces in the newspapers and news channels, and then
there are long periods of absent-mindedness when Kashmir disappears and
these are the times when it¹s deemed to be calm or inching towards normalcy.
Wise men, in these interludes, talk on television about commerce being the
key to peace. Tourism¹s up, they say hopefully. Then the valley erupts and
half-forgotten names like Hurriyat and Malik and Geelani and Farooq flicker
in our heads.

This latest eruption, though, has provoked a set of unusual reactions. The
enormous popular mobilization in the Valley after General Sinha, our last
governor, stirred the pot by allotting a large plot of land to the Amarnath
Shrine Board, and after the security forces, predictably enough, killed
Kashmiri Muslims in the demonstrations that followed, has prompted
mainstream journalists like Vir Sanghvi and Swaminathan Aiyar to write
opinion pieces arguing that India should seriously consider letting Kashmir
go. Arundhati Roy, who was present at the enormous rally, made the same
point more forcefully, arguing that the pro-Pakistan slogans or the
distinctly Islamic idiom of the azadi vanguard, ought not to distract us
from the fact that India has no right to hold the Valley¹s Muslims against
their will. The routes by which these writers came to their conclusions are
different, but the conclusion is the same: that the time has come to think
the unthinkable: an azad Kashmir, or even the prospect of Kashmir becoming
part of Pakistan.

Are they right? Should Indian liberals and democrats endorse
self-determination for Kashmir? Or is it possible to hold another position:
can a liberal oppose azadi in Kashmir in good faith? One way of exploring
this is to make dhobi lists of the pros and cons of Kashmiri
self-determination.

The case for self-determination is contained in the term itself. If we
accept that the two hundred thousand Kashmiris who came out to protest
against Indian rule, to shout for liberty, to invoke the ideal of an Islamic
state, to press the case for union with Pakistan, are representative of
Kashmir¹s Muslim population, then pressing India¹s claim to Kashmir with
guns and bayonets is a violent negation of their collective will. It¹s hard
for a liberal or a democrat to defend that position. No matter how violently
you disagree with their ideas, or how convinced you are of Pakistani
mischief and instigation, given the violence the Indian state has inflicted
on Kashmiris, it¹s hard to argue that India is entitled to the benefit of
the doubt. Kashmiri alienation is now of such long standing and the Indian
state¹s interventions in Kashmir have been characterized by such
unscrupulousness and such ruthless violence that touting India¹s virtues as
a secular, democratic state, which Kashmiris should be glad to be part of,
feels like a sick joke.

But there is a case against self-determination which needs to be made, if
only to clarify the consequence of endorsing self-determination.
Self-determination isn¹t in itself virtuous. The Tamils in Sri Lanka, led by
Velupillai Prabhakaran have been fighting a civil war for decades to achieve
a separate state, Tamil Eelam. Tamils have suffered violence at the hands of
Sinhala chauvinists and discrimination from the Sri Lankan state, which, in
the Sixties, defined itself as a hegemonically Buddhist, Sinhalese entity. I
know of very few people outside of Prabhakaran¹s followers who want such a
state to come into being. This is partly because Prabhakaran is an
old-fashioned totalitarian leader and partly because a tiny, Tamil-majority
statelet on a small island doesn¹t feel like a rousing cause.

Sri Lanka aside, we¹ve witnessed the hideously violent unravelling of
Yugoslavia in the name of self-determination. We¹ve seen the idea of
self-determination taken to its absurd extreme in the elevation of Kosovo
and Ossetia, tiny enclaves, barely a million strong, into nations on the
ground of ethnic or religious difference. So perhaps, as liberals, we¹re
entitled to ask of movements of self-determination, what sort of state they
aspire to. If self-determination in Kashmir is meant to create a
majoritarian state on the basis of ethnicity or faith (and Arundhati Roy, in
her essay, is clear that the tableau of azadi that she witnessed was
substantially shaped by Islamic ideas and bound by a sense of Muslim
identity), an Indian liberal might still prefer azadi because he thinks
chronic, quasi-colonial state violence is worse, but at least he would
acknowledge that his was a counsel of despair rather an endorsement of a
freedom struggle.

That same liberal might argue that the expulsion of the Pandits and the
violence against them shouldn¹t be accepted as an alibi for holding on to
Kashmir, but he would be forced to acknowledge that Kashmiri nationalism in
this Muslim variant seeks to draw a border around an ethnically cleansed
people.

Alternately, he might oppose self-determination because he thinks the Indian
republic is a flawed but valuable experiment in democratic pluralism, that
the Indian national movement and the nation-state it created, tried, in an
unprecedented way, to build a national identity on the idea of diversity,
not homogeneity. It¹s worth mentioning here that the Indian state has never
attempted to change the demographic realities in the Valley in the way in
which Israel and China have in Palestine and Tibet. The loss of Kashmir, the
only Muslim-majority state in the Union, would be a) a massive setback to
this pluralist project, and b) a gift to Hindu chauvinists who would cite
Kashmiri secession as yet another proof of the impossibility of integrating
Muslims into a non-Muslim state.

To sum up then, the Indian liberal has two options. He can support azadi in
Kashmir because it is the lesser evil, knowing that azadi will almost
certainly mean either a sectarian Muslim statelet or more territory for a
larger sectarian state, Pakistan. Or he can endorse the Indian occupation
because, in the larger scheme of things, Kashmiri Muslim suffering is
collateral damage, the price that must be paid for the greater good of a
pluralist India. Put like that, there¹s no shimmering cause to lift our
liberal¹s spirits, just a choice between two squalid, compromised ideals.