[Reader-list] Mukul Kesavan's response

[S. Jabbar]

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From: Mukul Kesavan <mukulkesavan at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:05:10 +0530
To: <sonia.jabbar at gmail.com>
Subject: Shuddhabrata

Dear Sonia,

Thanks for sending me Shuddhabrata's intervention. I was interested in what
he had to say and I've tried to respond to his comments. Do you think you
could post it? I'm not sure how the site works. I'm cutting and pasting it
into the body of this message.

I hope you're writing madly.

All best,

Mukul

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I read Shuddhabrata Sengupta's comment on my Kashmir piece with interest,
particularly his strictures on earthbound thinking. As an admirer of the
potential of utopian thinking I expected he would indicate a way in which
the possibilities of co-existence in Kashmir could be re-imagined and I was
disappointed when he didn't. Perhaps he'll sketch something out in time; in
the absence of spelt-out alternatives, the world as it is will continue to
shape the conversation. Chiding 'pragmatists' and 'realists' for their
State-bound imaginations without supplying a lead or two about how he might
set about the issue is a bit blithe.

 "Weak, consequentialist arguments": Shuddhabrata has two objections to such
arguments in the piece. I suspect we could collapse them into one: i.e.
don't argue from possible outcomes because you don't know what they'll be.
Self-determination and secession have led to good outcomes as well as bad
ones: to second-guess the result is presumptuous and, less charitably,
colonial.

It's worth pointing out that it's hard to think about the future without
guessing at outcomes. The way this is often done is by analogy (what has
happened before or elsewhere). The reason I don't vote for the BJP is
because history and experience has taught me to mistrust majoritarian
parties that believe nations are owned by a dominant People. So when
Kashmiri Muslim leaders begin to frame their arguments in mainly Muslim or
Islamic terms I begin to see an unpleasant sectarian state as the likely
outcome of azadi. If the a dominant Muslim/Islamic idiom is set in the
context of the violence that purged the Valley of Pandits, this outcome
begins to seem more likely. I might be mistaken (and even if I'm right, this
may still not be sufficient reason to oppose azadi), but you can scarcely
rule guesswork/speculation/deduction (call it what you like) out of court.

Shuddhabrata speculates in just this way when he guesses that I prefer the
coercive secular state solution to azadi. I don't explicitly endorse one or
the other in my piece, but he looks for clues to my inclination in the piece
and decides he has found them. He might be wrong but it's a legitimate route
to a conclusion. In just this way, I listen to speeches and slogans, I read
about the ways in which Kashmiri Muslims imagine azadi and think about the
the uses they'd put it to. I can, of course, do this opportunistically, and
imagine the worst to suit my prejudices, but we must allow that it can also
be done in good faith, because the criterion of certainty that Shuddhabrata
suggests is an impossible one. Am I certain that Prabhakaran if he achieves
Tamil Eelam, will rule like a Stalinist despot? No I'm not; not certain. But
I'm not about to write him a cheque on the off-chance.

"Lame liberalism": yes, that last option is colonial in its reasoning.
That's why it's squalid and compromised. Is it an argument that liberals can
make: yes--liberals have made arguments of this sort since liberalism came
into being. Just as self-determination has been used to dress up a multitude
of unpleasant ideologies.

"Kesavan invokes the Chechens, but not to mention that Stalin's decision to
'wipe Chechnya off the Map' and to deport all Chechens (and parts of other
ethnicities) to forms of forced internal exile, (in the name of the
integrity of the Soviet Union under his dictatorship) led to many hundreds
of thousands of deaths....": I'm not sure what to make of this. I don't
mention the Chechens or Chechnya at all. Shuddhabrata has me not just
'invoking' the Chechens but invoking them selectively, a misreading so
extravagant that it's baroque. Perhaps his response to questions about
'azadi' is, in the idiom of the Eighties, over-determined.

But Chechnya is worth discussing in this context. Would a Russian liberal
who wanted to hang on to Chechnya make the same arguments as our liberal
Indian apologist? No. He wouldn't be able to, for the reasons that
Shuddhabrata outlines. His country in its earlier avatar as a totalitarian
despotism and its present incarnation as a Russian Orthodox state is rather
different from the Indian republic. It attempted genocide, deportation,
internal exile. The Republic of India has much blood on its hands in
Kashmir, but it's worth saying that it hasn't done those things. If there
are Kashmiris who live a form of internal exile, it's the pandits. Just as
self-determination isn't necessarily virtuous, neither is the territorial
integrity of a large state always a worthwhile cause. So a liberal
attempting a quasi-colonial apologia for Russia's claim to Chechnya would
find arguments harder to come by than his Indian counterpart.

This difference might make no difference to Kashmiris, a pluralist bullet
being as lethal as any other, but it might make a difference to the desi
liberal trying avoid a told-you-Muslims-are-incapable-of-co-existence
upshot. Weakly consequentialist? I don't know. If I was a Kashmiri Muslim
I'd say (as a Kashmiri Muslim correspondent said to me), "Is India a myth
that it can be undone by the secession of a small state? Why should you hold
us hostage to your anxieties?" And the liberal might say, "You're right. But
given Partition I can't take our pluralism for granted. An Indian State that
signed on to secession by Muslim majority Kashmir runs the risk of Weimar,
the risk of losing legitimacy." Or he might cross his fingers about the
weakly consequentialist consequences, and be shamed into supporting Kashmiri
self-determinism.

This compromised choice might mean nothing to the clear-thinking person who
isn't a liberal and doesn't set much store by the 'Westphalian state'. For
those who think they are (liberal) and haven't yet transcended the State
that contains them, the dilemma is a real one.


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