[Reader-list] The Azadi We Need

[inder salim]

Dear Kshmendra,

How to think geography of a would be nation, when we have lost Earth,
collectively. ( almost )

Poignantly, I thought of verse while writing uni(vers)al but as you
see, one alphabet is short. I am looking for it, and might discover it
in an(other) language, an(other) word, an(other) performance,
an(other) thought. May be we have lost it permanently so there is no
chance to restore the uni(vers)al, but I have no other option but to
try. The verse, I believe is most vital part of anything that
qualifies for universal.  Here, I am acutely thinking about culture (
more as oral than written  )  as ancient way of living. Even what we
tentatively believe as ancient may not qualify what I am thinking
about 'ancient'. I am obviously vague, but not out of place.

So, universal words like beauty, compassion and truth are embedded in
verse, in  the form of it. The moment we isolate the meaning from
thought, here verse , all we get is dogma.  So religion is a dogma,
you may agree or not. So a Nation State too, once it is based on
religion, race, colour, caste gender automatically lapses into some
other sort of dogmatic practice. It banishes the 'verse' of it,  and
simply replaces it with something worse.  Remember, even Plato is
known for his difficulties with poets. But, Socrates , questioning was
not far from some poetics in continuity of thought. He could unnerve a
politician as well as a poet, but a poet could have never sentenced
him to death, so they could have lived all along, even though debating
this or that, endlessly. That is what I like.  I am certainly not
talking about poetry, but something else, and since I already exposed
my inability to write that in absence of an alphabet, metaphorically
even, necessary for the  completion of thought. But alas!

We chased meaning ruthlessly, even in poetry, and compelled the verse
to hide itself in aesthetic designs only.  Be it some arabesque, a
design in stone, a thoughtful image, a sculpture, a piece of music or
an act. All we have is Nation States who have  aesthetic designs
called State Collections, State poets who sing songs in praise of
Nationhood, directly and in disguise, and music which is based on
hierarchy and state like discipline. There must be a sincere form of
'verse' in music, in image, in thought and in love still around. I am
optimistic. Don't we know that  Armed forces too have a design,  an
aesthetic sense. They too are religious and  know how to sing and
write a poem. About corporate- culture, the less said the better- they
are the most privileged of Nation State.

You will feel that I am delaying the topic :Kashmir, but I am talking
about it as well.  I am not interested in naked politics, be it
Kashmir or else where.  The life, as in the present is wrapped in
black humour,  and multiples of losses registered in our  singular and
layered memory patterns. There is a no-mans land in the life of each
one of us, and that is why there is a word 'angst' which perhaps
translates as existential loneliness.  But these things quickly lapse
into literature, or poetics. So  we want hard politics, and for that
we can go to any extent.

Time and again, I tried to inset the word ' environmental' in the on
going political uncertainty in Kashmir. As we know that geography is
part of any discourse on  anything environmental but not whole,
because environmental is also about way of living. It is again vague,
but not out of place.

That is why, the constitution of any would be nation can not be
without the acute consideration of environment, and urgent subjects
like Feminism. A new way of living can emerge, a new sociology can
emerge, for example in Kashmir if it is given a chance to become a
free economic zone between the countries that encircle it- China,
India and Pakistan, then it might throw a fresh example.  Let them
have their own currency, so what. But I am not in support of a
Kashmiri Army with guns on  its boarders. That is indeed  utopian,
yes, but that is how  we can talk about something New in international
politics.   Satus Quos are dead.

Yes, in the present form, the Indian constitution is not a bad one to
be copied for a new would be nation, as India has done is already
under the apt leadership of Baba Ambedkar. The Queen of England too
could have argued that if you are lifting from British laws to run a
new country what is the harm if we continue to rule. All they  needed
was a proper implementation of the law.  But no, we needed a free
country, even when they could have provided a better administration, a
better railway network and better health system.    About
constitution-  do we merge all those Nations  whose constitutions are
similar in content and thought.  True we can't specify what that new
free constitution would look like, but that is not the excuse to
occupy endlessly.

 India  too begun with a new country in 1947, but see what we got.
Cheap American model of a capitalist state, which is neither fish nor
fowl, so we can question this too.  Tomorrow  Kashmir can become a
worst case than what India is at the moment, we can question that too,
what is the fear.

But at the moment, is India justified to hold on in Kashmir with not a
single soul ready to sing Vandhey Mataram,   Yes, Muslim character of
Muslims in Kashmir cant be simply wished away, but that does not mean
all the muslims  of the world need to live under a single roof.

 this blood spilling on the roads in Kashmir may come to end sooner
than possible, one only wishes. We are all concerned.  We may blame
ISI or even America even for that. And if  India has truly some
national compulsion to hold on Kashmir, then at least they can
declare, yes  we need slaves as long as we are not confident of
ourselves.

with love
is






On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Inder Salim
>
> Sanjay Kak's (SK's) comment that you have quoted is a ridiculous one coming
> as it does from someone who through various forms of expression has
> "identified" himself closely with the Kashmir "Azadi".
>
> If the likes of SK, who are ever so ready to speak for and on behalf of the
> Kashmir "Azadi" have no idea "what the movement aims at" then the least that
> they are guilty of is intellectual dishonesty. In fact they bear moral,
> ethical and criminal responsibilty for furthering the circles of violence
> that engulf and permeate through Kashmir and ever so often spiral out with
> tragic consequences.
>
> That holds true for you too Inder Salim since you parrot SK's comment.
>
> In "The Azadi We Need", Umair Muhajir addresses precisely this kind of
> glibness while chiding Arundhati Roy for the pretense that could be used an
> an excuse for ignorance about such matters. The excuse being that it
> was "merely a question of the Kashmiri separatists not having spelled out
> their agenda in greater detail as yet."
>
> There are some questions I have asked in my post. Answer those questions
> Inder Salim. I will not every single time indulge your arrogance in asking
> questions when you are not bothered to answer those asked. If you do not
> have the answers to the questions, then seek their answers.
>
> Your confused comments (or slick attempts at trying to confuse) do not
> interest me.
> For your benefit I am reproducing the questions. The answers to them will
> also serve well to bring some clarity to your confusions:
>
> 1. When "Azadi" is spoken about in connection with Kashmir, what is the
> geography of that "Kashmir"?
>
> 2. The 'contours of the movement' and 'elements of Azadi'  in Indian
> Controlled Kashmir are fairly well know even if not well understood. If the
> "geography" of the Kashmir "Azadi" covers the 'erstwhile Princely State of
> Jammu and Kashmir as it stood Pre-1947-Partition' then what are the
> 'contours of the movement' and the 'elements of Azadi' in Pakistan
> Controlled Kashmir? What are the synergies between the two? When and How
> will the two merge?
>
> 3. If the Kashmir "Azadi" does not cover Pakistan Controlled Kashmir, Why
> not?
>
> 4. Will the Kashmir "Azadi" lead to a "New Country"?
>
> 5. How will this New Nation State be better than the Indian Nation State as
> far as Indian Controlled Kashmir is concerned? What will make it better?
>
> 6. What will the Constitution (briefly) of this New Country be?
>
> 7. On what specific points will the Constitution of this New Country be
> different from the Constitution of India? In what specific aspects will the
> Constitution of this New Country be better than the Constitution of India?
>
>
> Kshmendra
>
>
> --- On Sun, 9/14/08, inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] The Azadi We Need
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Date: Sunday, September 14, 2008, 9:30 PM
>
> dear kshmendra
>
> your you are likely to get a long  passionate reflection on your
> passionalte reflection on UAM's article which has already been
> passionnately reflected by Sanjay Kak, Vivek...
>
> I quote Sanjay,
>
> Because in the absence of democracy, in the absence of free and fearless
> politics, and in the presence of a quite monstrous apparatus of occupation,
> none of us can as yet lay claim to saying that we know what the movement
> aims at.
>
> Now if you see hypocrrisy  in what is being talked about on kashmir,
> then you suggest, what are alternative ways of talking kashmir. One is
> to maintain Status Quo, the other the questioning. And we are all
> passionately questioning, and of course we all are outsiders to
> Kashmir conflict. We all are living in India and that is normal. But
> that does not mean we should not question. To be secptic is not such a
> bad idea after all. Jean paul Sartre questioned the occupation of
> Algeria by France, and  lot of other Nationalists intyellcetuals
> criticized him for taking a stand against the country of which he was
> proud citizen, But history proved him right.
>
> The Nation State has failed on many accounts. So why no question that
> even. Why not to provide more and more autonomy to all the States in
> Indian union. 10 Janpath is not where God need to be.
>
> about  question of a  free Kashmir and the need to know its would be
> Geography  is a valid one.  But we dont know, no one has an answer,
>
>
> but absence of an answer does not mean that there is no question.
>
> regards and love
> is
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 8:46 PM, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>> I look forward to reflections that will be posted about "The Azadi We
> Need" by Umair Ahmed Muhajir (UAM). Thank you Jeebesh for posting the
> article.
>>
>> On this List there are many people in whom one can see a confluence of
> what are two basically contradictory positions. They are dismissive of the
> "Nation State" and "Nationalism" and at the same time are
> supportive of the Kashmir "Azadi". There is an inherent hypocrisy in
> this because all that they are doing is seeking to reject Indian Nationalism
> and
> favouring Kashmir Nationalism even as they elsewhere constantly proclaim
> that
> they are 'against' Nationalism and 'against' the concept of
> Nation States.
>>
>> In his very competently written piece, UAM dismisses the "Azadi"
> call in Kashmir since he sees it as an attempt to carve out another "Nation
> State" out of the existing Indian "Nation State".
>>
>> UAM's repugnance is for a Nation State of any hue. His dismissal of
> Kashmir "Azadi" (and of Arundhati Roy's "rallying cry"
> in its support) is based on questioning what, in the the name of
> "Azadi," is being sought to be "let loose on the world" and
> questioning "the logic that they and would-be nationalists of all stripes
> have attempted to replicate for decades".
>>
>> In UAM's view, all of this Kashmir "Azadi" movement(s), if
> successful, would only lead to yet another "Nation State" and so he
> finds no merit in it. The "Azadi" that UAM is looking for is described
> by him as  "the freedom we need is azadi from the mindset that thinks of
> peoples and communities only in terms of nation-states".
>>
>> On a personal note - in UAM's favoured recognition of
> "Azadi" I too subscribe to the expansiveness of attitude that one
> should not think of "peoples and communities" ONLY in terms of Nation
> States. I say that to and for myself, as one who subscribes to and fervently
> argues in support of Nation States since I see them as (currently at least)
> the
> only credible practically functional system for organized societies. Without
> any
> qualification, I completely share UAM's desire for "an azadi that
> demands that the Indian state honour its promise, to itself and to us."
>>
>> UAM does not contest Arundhati Roy's "critique -- of the Indian
> state's indifference, its callousness, its inhumanity, its cruelty"
> since UAM recognizes that India as a Nation State "does what nation-states
> do: in the final analysis, sacrifice humanity in the service of a larger
> political project."
>>
>> At the same time UAM says with confidence that  "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."
>>
>> Giving examples of "Minority rights? Justice for different
> communities, and between genders?" UAM does not see any difference in the
> aims of the (Azadi) 'movement' and those of the "existing Indian
> state".
>>
>> UAM rather sarcastically tells Arundhati Roy that she did "well not
> to linger" over her "thought experiment"  where she wondered
> "what the independence demanded by the state's Muslim majority might
> mean for the state's religious or other minorities". UAM suggests that
> """"identities of those disadvantaged will shift, as new
> disfavoured minorities, new "outsiders", new "insiders", and
> new identity policemen""""""
>>
>> UAM finds disingenuous any sidelining of such concerns with any excuse
> that it was "merely a question of the Kashmiri separatists not having
> spelled out their agenda in greater detail as yet". UAM asks "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?"
>>
>> Even as UAM sees little hope for Kashmir "Azadi" not resulting
> in "refugees" and "victims", he argues against the Kashmir
> "Azadi" by saying "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. ……..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."
>>
>> UAM does not place any trust in the "outcomes" from the Kashmir
> "Azadi" being any better than the situations in the "existing
> Indian state" just on the the basis of "being told by the
> movement" that the "movement will simply do a better job."
> Sounding skeptical about the "secular" drumbeats of the "likes of
> Yasin Malik" he sees them, even if accepted, as being no different from the
> "Nehruvian show on a smaller stage" and sees no reason for believing
> that they would "yield a better result"
>>
>> UAM reckons that a "Kashmir for Kashmiris" is in fact further
> away from Nehru's India  and more like the idea of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
> He fears that "The promise of the Kashmiri movement combines both of these
> nightmares." (The killings, displacements and creation of disadvantaged
> groups).
>>
>> I just could not put my finger on it. UAM makes an intriguing statement
> that both the Kashmir and Pakistan movements are "explicitly predicated on
> a favoured community that is less than everyone who lives within the state's
> borders." This has many possible interpretations but UAM makes it clear
> that "Muslim majority" is not what he is talking about.
>>
>> UAM sees "second class citizenship" implicit in the Kashmir
> "Azadi" and sees that as hypocritical when compared to (taken from his
> Blog and is not included in the Outlook article) "nation-states where
> "second-class" citizenship is explicit, where it is part of the very
> logic of the state."
>>
>> UAM brings about a fascinating distinction between Nation States where
> some are better than the others although he considers them all accountable
> in
> the "moral responsibility for the horrors it perpetrates" and
> "all of them problematic, all of them complicit in cruelty"
>>
>> UAM finds more complicit and more problematic the group of Nation States
> like  "Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, and, based on the logic of
> the movements, the would-be nation-states of Kashmir or Khalistan"  since
> they are "premised on explicit notions of religion, language,
> ethnicity"
>>
>> Against them he finds better the group of Nation States like "the
> contemporary United States, Brazil, South Africa, and, yes, India". As UAM
> puts it  "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)."
>>
>> I have reproduced much of what was written by UAM. My purpose was to lay
> down a structure (hopefully without misrepresenting what UAM said/meant)
> that
> would lead to the asking of some questions which I think are important in
> connection with the "Kashmir Azadi" and for which I invite serious and
> sober comments/answers:
>>
>> 1. When "Azadi" is spoken about in connection with Kashmir, what
> is the geography of that "Kashmir"?
>>
>> 2. The 'contours of the movement' and 'elements of Azadi'
> in Indian Controlled Kashmir are fairly well know even if not well
> understood.
> If the "geography" of the Kashmir "Azadi" covers the
> 'erstwhile Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir as it stood
> Pre-1947-Partition' then what are the 'contours of the movement' and
> the 'elements of Azadi' in Pakistan Controlled Kashmir? What are the
> synergies between the two? When and How will the two merge?
>>
>> 3. If the Kashmir "Azadi" does not cover Pakistan Controlled
> Kashmir, Why not?
>>
>> 4. Will the Kashmir "Azadi" lead to a "New Country"?
>>
>> 5. How will this New Nation State be better than the Indian Nation State
> as far as Indian Controlled Kashmir is concerned? What will make it better?
>>
>> 6. What will the Constitution (briefly) of this New Country be?
>>
>> 7. On what specific points will the Constitution of this New Country be
> different from the Constitution of India? In what specific aspects will the
> Constitution of this New Country be better than the Constitution of India?
>>
>>
>> Kshmendra Kaul
>>
>>
>> --- On Thu, 9/11/08, Jeebesh <jeebesh at sarai.net> wrote:
>>
>> From: Jeebesh <jeebesh at sarai.net>
>> Subject: [Reader-list] The Full text...
>> To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
>> Date: Thursday, September 11, 2008, 7:50 PM
>>
>>
> 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, butdoesn'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 aboutthe 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.
>>
>> _________________________________________
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>>
>> _________________________________________
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