[Reader-list] Kesavan on Kashmir

[Rahul Asthana]

I am tempted to toss a poser on the list.What kind of ethical framework is,or should be, more in congruence with the liberal line of thinking -teleological or deontological? 
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/phil/blfaq_phileth_sys.htm
P.S. I am fully well aware of the open ended nature of the question,but I think,trying to derive some kind of formalism from Kesavan's advice to liberals may churn up some interesting ideas.


--- On Thu, 8/28/08, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Kesavan on Kashmir
> To: "Sarai" <reader-list at sarai.net>, "S. Jabbar" <sonia.jabbar at gmail.com>
> Date: Thursday, August 28, 2008, 7:18 PM
> Most certainly (in my opinion) a fairly and sensibly laid
> out set of arguments on this issue. 
>  
> Kshmendra
> 
> --- On Thu, 8/28/08, S. Jabbar
> <sonia.jabbar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> From: S. Jabbar <sonia.jabbar at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Kesavan on Kashmir
> To: "Sarai" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Date: Thursday, August 28, 2008, 7:00 PM
> 
>  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 Abdullah 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
> knowof 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.
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