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http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080904&fname=umair&sid=1


The Azadi We Need

The azadi demanded by the Kashmiri movement, and used by Roy as a  
rallying cry, is not the answer. The freedom we need is azadi from the  
mindset that thinks of peoples and communities only in terms of nation- 
states; and equally, an azadi that demands that the Indian state  
honour its promise, to itself and to us.





Umair Ahmed Muhajir







Towards the end of her impassioned piece calling for azadi for  
Kashmir, Arundhati Roy pauses to reflect on what might follow azadi in  
Kashmir, wondering what an independent Kashmir might mean, including  
what the independence demanded by the state's Muslim majority might  
mean for the state's religious or other minorities. She does well not  
to linger, because the thought experiment illustrates precisely what  
is most problematic about "national movements", namely that they are  
unable to think the political except through the prism of nation-states.
National movements, that is to say, see themselves as nation-states-in- 
waiting, and do not see any political horizon beyond that of the  
nation-state. So was it with the Indian national movement, and its  
inability to think the difference that might have been capacious  
enough to house the country's Muslim-majority regions; so it  
definitely was with the Muslim League and its two-nation theory, even  
more wedded to the siren song of European-style nationalism  
transplanted to a colonial setting; and so it is with the "copycat"  
nationalisms that have followed, be it Kashmir, or Punjab, or  
Nagaland. The failure to imagine a nation-state different from the  
traditional European model, the shoe-horning of Indian communitarian  
identities, into models conceived with the likes of Germany and  
England in mind, paved the way for the catastrophes of partition. The  
"belated" nationalisms of the post-partition sub-continent demonstrate  
the truth of Marx's depressing observation, namely that we learn from  
history that we do not learn from history.
The point is worth making given Roy's trenchant critiques of the  
Indian state (in the context of Kashmir, but not only of Kashmir; her  
essay on the Indian state and dams, The Greater Common Good, is  
astonishingly powerful). That is, much of Roy's critique -- of the  
Indian state's indifference, its callousness, its inhumanity, its  
cruelty -- is (or certainly ought to be) animated not by her target's  
Indianness, but by the fact that it is a nation-state, and as such,  
does what nation-states do: in the final analysis, sacrifice humanity  
in the service of a larger political project. The distinction is an  
important one, because nothing in the Kashmiri independence movement  
suggests that it will throw up anything different; indeed given that  
the movement aims at a traditional nation-state just like all the  
others, I submit that it cannot yield a different result. Minority  
rights? Justice for different communities, and between genders? The  
outcomes will be better than they are now, we are told by the  
movement, not because the aims are different from those of the  
existing Indian state, but because the movement will simply do a  
better job.

I am skeptical, and not because of the identity (religious or  
otherwise) of those who comprise the Kashmiri independence movement; I  
am skeptical because the aim of that movement is congenitally  
incapable of producing a result that is "better" in some cosmic sense  
-- at most the identities of those disadvantaged will shift, as new  
disfavoured minorities, new "outsiders", new "insiders", and new  
identity policemen are created. Roy is too sophisticated not to see  
this, but doesn't bother to delve into it, pretending that this is  
merely a question of the Kashmiri separatists not having spelled out  
their agenda in greater detail as yet.


It is not: over half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote (in The  
Origins of Totalitarianism) of the masses of refugees and victims that  
seemed to accompany the birth of every new nation-state, and nothing  
has changed, not in the age of South Ossetia, Kosovo, Rwanda, ad  
nauseum.


Certainly, those of us from the sub-continent should be especially  
wary of political projects that promise us clean solutions to  
intractable political problems: we live with the legacies of the  
bloodbaths of the 1940s, not to mention innumerable later, "lesser"  
massacres. By all accounts, the leaders of the new nation-states of  
India and Pakistan were caught by surprise by the scale of the  
violence in 1947; they had evidently internalized the logic of  
colonialism, pursuant to which communitarian difference presents a  
political "problem" that may be solved by means of creative  
cartography and judicious population transfers. Conceptual neatness is  
one of the hallmarks of the colonial mindset (thinking of Cyril  
Radcliffe, who could doubt it?).
Unfortunately, reality is anything but, and the sub-continent's  
leaders -- and, even more importantly, its people -- should have  
learned long ago that partitions are not the solution to people's  
inability to live together; rather, the mindset that vests its faith  
in drawing easily-policed borders is a mindset that demands enemies.  
It is a mindset that, in the final analysis, demands that facts on the  
ground correspond to the political project of the nation-state (and  
not the other way around). A nation-state for Muslims thus becomes a  
state virtually free of non-Muslims; a sub-national state where Hindu  
pride is honoured above all else becomes a state where non-Hindus must  
know their place.

Why would one ever hope for anything different from a nation-state for  
Kashmiris, as far as those who don't fit the bill are concerned?  
Certainly the region is not short of candidates for stigmatisation  
(some of this is because India is fantastically diverse; some of it is  
because nation-states are rather gifted at manufacturing "problematic"  
identities): Buddhists; Shiites; Gujjars; perhaps even Sunni Muslims  
who will be deemed insufficiently supportive of the independence  
movement (the last is hardly far-fetched, as even a casual glance at  
the history of Algeria or the Khalistan movement, or Kashmir itself  
during the 1990s, makes clear). Indeed, several hundred thousand  
Kashmiri Pandits have already been driven off, and it is hard not to  
see in them a harbinger of more to come.

The above might seem like an odd place from which to maintain a  
defense of India vis-à-vis Kashmir. It is, on the contrary, a natural  
vantage point: the idea of an independent Kashmir for Kashmiris must  
be resisted precisely because, as the experience of the once-colonised  
has amply illustrated, nation-states are appallingly inhuman. Equally,  
however, they are not all inhuman in precisely the same way; nor are  
they all equally inhuman, by which I simply mean that they are not all  
equally incapable of accommodating human difference, whether  
communitarian or otherwise. The Germany of 2008 is manifestly not the  
Germany of 1938; but nor does the Germany of 2008 accommodate ethnic  
minorities as comfortably as the United States does.
None of this relieves any state of moral responsibility for the  
horrors it perpetrates; but in order to agitate against horrors, one  
must first understand what they are.




And within the range of nation-states on offer -- all of them  
problematic, all of them complicit in cruelty -- it is apparent to me  
that those premised on explicit notions of religion, language,  
ethnicity, blood in some sense, are more problematic, more complicit,  
than those with far more modest litmus tests.  The contemporary United  
States, Brazil, South Africa, and, yes, India, are among the latter  
group of nation-states; Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, and,  
based on the logic of the movements, the would-be nation-states of  
Kashmir or Khalistan, are not. Theoretically, one does not need to be  
other than "wholly Bengali", "wholly Tamil", or "wholly Muslim" in  
order to be utterly Indian; one cannot say the same of Pakistan and  
its Hindus citizens, and the religious colour of the Kashmiri movement  
means it is almost inconceivable that this won't be true of an  
independent Kashmir as well (even leaving aside the obvious ethnic  
dimension).


Indeed, even if one were to take the likes of Yasin Malik at their  
word, they promise no more than Jawaharlal Nehru did, that is to say a  
secular state where all who live in Kashmir, of whatever ethnicity or  
religious persuasion, will be equal in the eyes of the state; why and  
how could such a project -- essentially the same Nehruvian show on a  
smaller stage -- yield a better result? On the contrary, all the signs  
are that an independent Kashmir would be more like Pakistan than  
India: not because both are Muslim majority (that is irrelevant to the  
point I am making), but because both movements are explicitly  
predicated on a favoured community that is less than everyone who  
lives within the state's borders.

Why does any of this matter? Because nation-states where "second- 
class" citizenship is implicit -- think the United States prior to de- 
segregation; I assume Roy would include India; but really one could  
argue some are always more equal than others in all nation-states --  
can be called out on their failures. Such nation-states are guilty of  
hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is not the worst sin; indeed hypocrisy, by  
opening up a gap between theory and practice, between promise and  
reality, makes it possible to hold a mirror up to the state, to try  
and compel it to honour its own promise to itself; and enables us to  
argue that the nation-state is only imperfectly itself until it takes  
a good long look in that mirror.
In short, the point is that while the Jim Crow South is unforgiveable,  
the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream"  
moment are possible in a USA where actual practice made a mockery of  
the nation-state's constitutional guarantees of equal protection under  
the laws; they would not be possible in the face of apartheid South  
Africa, which could not be reformed, simply destroyed. It is far more  
difficult, perhaps insurmountably so, to call the nation-state to task  
where it has promised and can promise nothing different than what it  
offers (one can rebel and try and dismantle the state, but one can't  
make it see the problem): beyond a point, a "Pakistan for Pakistanis",  
that is to say for Pakistanis of all religious persuasions, would make  
no sense, and would undermine the national idea (substitute  
"ethnicities" for "religious communities" and the idea of Pakistan  
becomes more flexible; it should come as no surprise that the movement  
for ethnic justice, greater federalism, and rights for smaller  
provinces, has far more legs in Pakistan than any movement for the  
rights of religious minorities; ethnicity illustrates the potential  
flexibility, but also the limits, of the idea of Pakistan; and even  
with respect to ethnicity, the difference of even a Bengali Muslim  
identity that was deemed "too Hindu" could not be accommodated within  
the state).


A "Kashmir for Kashmiris" is far closer to the idea of Pakistan than  
to the Nehru's India, and perhaps closest of all to Bangladesh,  
seeking to compress both 1947 and 1971 in one secessionist moment. Roy  
would do well to remember the "Biharis" stranded in refugee camps in  
Bangladesh since 1971, Muslim but not Bangladeshi enough; and she  
herself mentions the 1971 genocide of Bengalis by the Pakistani army,  
who were not Muslim enough. The promise of the Kashmiri movement  
combines both of these nightmares.

None of this is about the decency or lack thereof of Mirwaiz Farooq,  
or Yasin Malik, or anyone else. The question isn't whether these are  
or are not upstanding politicians who genuinely believe that Kashmir  
belongs to all Kashmiris, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Sikh, or not;  
the more important question concerns the logic of what they let loose  
in the world (more accurately, the logic that they and would-be  
nationalists of all stripes have attempted to replicate for decades).  
The azadi demanded by the Kashmiri movement, and used by Roy as a  
rallying cry, is not the answer to that question; the freedom we need  
is azadi from the mindset that thinks of peoples and communities only  
in terms of nation-states; and equally, an azadi that demands that the  
Indian state honour its promise, to itself and to us.
The nation-state as political Alpha and Omega was problematic in its  
European birthplaces to begin with; to continue to cling to it as the  
last best hope of ethnic or religious minorities in milieus like  
India's (or Africa's, or the Balkans'; pick your poison), in the wake  
of the man-made disasters that have befallen us over the last century,  
is nothing short of bankrupt.





Umair Ahmed Muhajir is based in New York City. When not blogging at  
qalandari.blogspot.com or contributing to naachgaana.com, he makes a  
living as a lawyer.