[Reader-list] A post-national space opens.

[rashneek kher]

Shudda,

The only thing is that a Hindu Nepal did not drive out 5 lac muslims to
become a Hindu State while your Islamic Republic of Kashmir would to be
awash with the ethnic and religious cleansing of minority Pandits.
Equally interesting is the fact that you are writing these posts when you
yourself have been guilty of spreading misinformation campaign on Kashmir
either by saying that Pandits could have been killed by Ikhwans in 1989 or
that Sankarvarman destroyed Buddhist Viharas.So it is time for you to go
back to school before you can reclaim the Kashmir expert position and post
your solutions to a problem which either you dont understand or seem to
misunderstand,misrepresent and misnterpret thus.
Although one would support any resolution which would avoid further
bloodshed but to grow Chinars on Batte Mazar,well let us wait and see.

Rashneek

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:34 AM, Shuddhabrata Sengupta <shuddha at sarai.net>wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> It has been a pleasure to witness the maturation of the debate on
> Kashmir, India and Azaadi on this list. Compared to where we were,
> even some months ago, the propensity towards name calling and abuse
> has gone down compared to the actual willingness to engage with the
> issues at hand,despite serious differences and disagreements. I would
> personally like to thank Sanjay Kak, Jeebesh Bagchi, Junaid Mohammed,
> Rahul Asthana, Kshmendra Kaul, Inder Salim, Partha Dasgupta, Tapas
> Ray, Radhikarajen, Radhakrishnan,  Wali Arifi and Sonia Jabbar for
> all their contributions, I have gained a lot by listening and
> reading. I think we also need to thank, Arundhati Roy, Mukul Kesavan,
> A.G.Noorani and Umair Ahmed Muhajir, whose texts (forwarded on to
> this list by list members) have contributed to the depth and
> intensity of the exchanges. In all of this, one can see the Reader-
> List emerging, not just as a space for grandstanding, and the
> performance of rehearsed rhetorical routines, but as an actual space
> for thought and questioning. If this contributes in even a small way
> towards helping people think through the apparent intractability of
> the political relationships between all the peoples of Kashmir, India
> and Pakistan, then it will have redeemed its promise as a space for
> creative and imaginative discursivity in great measure.
>
> Apologies in advance for what will be a long posting.
>
> Having said all this, I would like to come back to the question that
> lies at the heart of the debate between the two positions representd
> by Roy and Muhajir.
>
> For let's look at what Roy is saying:
>
> 1. Roy's core argument can be summarized as follows : An end to the
> occupation of Kashmir by India is a price well worth paying if it is
> the means by which the dismantling of the violence that accompanies
> this occupation can be brought about. As she says towards the
> conclusion of her text "At the heart of it all is a moral question.
> Does any government have the right to take away people's liberty with
> military force?"
>
> Roy points out that too many people have died, or have been
> imprisoned, tortured or been made to disappear for us to pretend any
> longer that the continued and enforced attatchment of Kashmir to the
> project of the Indian nation state has any ethical basis.
>
> 2. Interestingly, Roy does not at any point suggest that she actually
> endorses any of the 'Islamist' or 'Secular' visions of a possible
> future Kashmir. And anyone who reads that endorsement into her text
> confuses her faithful reportage of what people may be saying on the
> streets of Kashmir with what she herself may feel.
>
> 3. Her doubts and reservations about the directions that the struggle
> for Azaadi is taking, which are listed at least 9 separate times in
> her essay (encompassing doubts about the treatement of all kinds of
> minorities, doubts about the consequences of not accounting for the
> exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, doubts about the nature of a so called
> Islamic state and so on) seem to suggest that she is amply sceptical
> of a great deal of the content of what is on offer by way of Azaadi
> in Kashmir. What she does not doubt is that people passionately
> believe that this Azaadi, (which they are either unable or unwilling
> to elaborate on) is desirable. She takes a stand which should be
> understandable to anyone with the slightest commitment to the virtues
> of democracy - if a majority of the people want something, you can
> argue with (and against ) what they want, but not with the fact that
> their is a reality to their desire. It is clear that the majority of
> people in the Kashmir valley do not want to remain committed to the
> Indian nation state. To insist that they stay committed is to ignore
> and destroy the reality of their desires.
>
> 4. Her criticism of India holding on to Kashmir may have one very
> simple point at its centre - the deeply unethical and brutal
> consequences of enforcing a form of governance on to an unwilling
> people, but her criticism of the unthought out nature of the
> intellectual response to this brutality by Kashmiris has at least 9
> nuanced positions. These 9 positions need not be seen as signs of her
> hostility to the people of Kashmir, rather, they could be read as the
> criticism that stems from a committed, unpatronising solidarity. She
>
> 5. Personally, i found her most trenchant critique contained in the
> fragment that says  (while considering what she found painful in the
> layered import of the slogan - "Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se
> pyaara Pakistan (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself
> —Pakistan). Roy says - "it was painful to listen to people who have
> suffered so much themselves mock others who suffer in different ways,
> but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw
> the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators."
>
> Seeing 'the seeds of how easily 'victims can become perpetrators' is
> seeing what nationalism, and the dream of national liberation
> actually means. And the one thing that Roy cannot be faulted for, at
> least in this article, is an inability to see and countenance the
> possibility of 'victims becoming perpetrators'. All nationalism,
> anchors its moral legitimacy in the idea that 'yesterdays victims,
> cannot do to others what has been done unto them'. Roy does not share
> in this delusion, and her essay while it is being read in India as a
> critique of the Indian state (which it no doubt is) would also no
> doubt be read in Kashmir as a critique of the painful limitations and
> narrow bandwidth of imagination of Kashmiri nationalism (and indeed
> of all nationalisms, of all ideologies that speak for and on behalf
> of 'nations in waiting')
>
> Now let us turn to the core of Muhajir is saying. I go along with
> much of what Muhajir says, and I find his arguments against
> 'nationalism' per se. compelling. Things turn a bit different
> however, the moment when he begins to qualify 'nationalisms' and
> weigh different kinds of nationalism as 'lesser' and 'greater' evils.
>
> After much ado, Muhajir's basic premise is  as follows  - the
> continuation of the occupation is a price well worth paying for the
> sake of the sake of the lesser of two evil's in so far as types of
> nation state are concerned. Muhajir believes that an independent
> Kashmiri Nation-State would inherently tend towards affirming an
> exclusionary principle, and that the Indian model of the nation
> state, for all its flaws, still retains the value of being an
> 'inclusive, pluralistic' (albeit imperfectly inclusive and
> pluralistic)  model for a nation-state building.
>
> "they (nation states) 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."
>
> Let us ask, precisely how the Indian nation state has proved to be
> 'capable' of accomodating human difference? Without going into a
> great deal of detail, I would like to focus on the simple fact that
> the continued operation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, in
> Kashmir, and parts of the North East takes away the constitutional
> guarantee that the state provides to its citizens that they will not
> be deprived of life and liberty without due process of law. The AFSPA
> empowers Armed Forces Personnel to kill, detain and destroy the
> property of the people who happen to be under its jurisdiction with
> impunity.
>
> This means, that at least insofar as the basic guarantee of life is
> concerned, the areas where the AFSPA operates are not instances where
> the state demonstrates an 'equal capability to accommodate human
> difference'. For a Kashmiri, (and for someone in the North East) who
> has had to deal with death and disappearance as sanctioned under the
> AFSPA, the difference between being a Kashmiri, A Naga, a Manipuri
> and some other kind of 'Indian' can mean the difference between life
> and death.
>
> That this situation has continued to be sustained by the Indian state
> for 18 years in Kashmir, and 50 years in the North East, means that
> the Indian state does view the people who happen to live in these two
> vast swathes of territory in a somewhat different light. This is no
> longer something that can be viewed as an 'aberration' or as state
> excess. It is the way in which the Indian state functions 'normally'
> in Kashmir and in the North East. It 'accommodates' the difference of
> their people by maintaining the highest 'military to civilian' ratio
> in Kashmir and by the daily humiliations that it visits on a people
> it treats as its 'subjects' as a matter of stable policy because they
> happen to inhabit tracts of territory that are 'strategically'
> important for reasons of state.
>
> I have no doubt at all about the fact that the resistance to the
> Indian state that crystallizes in these areas, (whether in the form
> of the NSCSN (IM) or (K) or the PLA or the different factions of the
> miltiant resistance and their overground supporters in Kashmir) often
> occupy a space that is as auhoritarian as that occupied by the Indian
> state. But the people who inhabit these areas cannot be expected to
> rely on one form of authoritarianism to protect them from the
> depredations of another.
>
> In fact there is a rough equivalence in the two apparently
> diametrically opposite positions that say either 'no discussion and
> debate about what exactly 'independence' means until the Indian state
> vacates the territory' and 'no withdrawal of armed forces and special
> laws until the end of the insurgency'. Both of these positions need
> to be rejected. Roy does not fall into the trap of endorsing one in
> order to battle the other, in fact her explicit demand to her
> Kashmiri audience is to actually wrestle with the necessity of
> articulating the contours of the future that they desire for
> themselves. She says -
>
> "it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a
> vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is
> time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans and vague
> generalisations. Those who wish to turn to the Quran for guidance
> will no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish
> to do that, or for whom the Quran does not make place? Do the Hindus
> of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-
> determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits
> living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to
> return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they
> have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India
> has done to Kashmiris for 61 years? What will happen to homosexuals
> and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and
> writers who do not agree with the "complete social and moral code"?
> Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of
> death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers many models
> for Kashmir's thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study.
> What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South
> Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?"
>
> The discussion on this list has extended the logic of this demand. We
> have had people, especially Jeebesh, talk of the possibility of 'post
> national' paths as concrete possibilities, Sonia Jabbar has spoken of
> 'confederal South Asia', Rahul Asthana has spoken of a 'Hong Kong'
> like arrangement. All of these are as valid options as
> 'independence', and need to be considered in turn.
>
> Muhajir's text, actually does not offer us this range of
> possibilities. In the end, it asks Kashmiris to reconcile themselves
> to the brutality of the Indian occupation simply on the basis of the
> fact that it comes garbed in a normatively 'inclusive' form of
> nationalism. Actually, when a boot kicks your face in, it is a bit
> odd to console oneself with the fact that the boot happens to be a
> happily 'secular' one. I don't quite see how doing so could possibly
> relieve the agony of having your face kicked in. Even so, I welcome
> the fact that it has acted as a catalyst in terms of leading us
> towards the possibility of hinking this through outside the familiar
> and exhausted tropes of nation states.
>
> So, what might a future Kashmir be. Let me throw my own two bits into
> the ring, following on the lines sketched out by Jeebesh. In doing
> this, I take the term 'Azaadi' seriously, and interpret it to mean
> the liberation, not only from external, but also 'internal'
> domination, and it is this that colours my perspective on possible
> futures for Kashmir.
>
> 1. Demilitarization of Jammu and Kashmir. The 700,000 Indian soldiers
> in Indian Occupied Kashmir to withdraw, (south of Jammu) the 50,000+
> Pakistani soldiers in Pakistani Occupied Kashmir to withdraw (west of
> POK and Northern Areas). All militias (insurgent or counter
> insurgent) and paramilitaries to decommission weapons and demobilize
> under international observation (as happened in Northern Ireland) .
> The process of withdrawal, decommissioing and demobilizing to take
> place under the auspices of an international body within a UN mandate
> (as happened in East Timor and Bosnia). A UN peacekeeping force to be
> stationed in Kashmir, paid for by the Governments of India, Pakistan
> and China (as reparations)  This could have peacekeepers from Bosnia,
> East Timor, Iraqi Kurdistan, Norway and Lebanon.
>
> 2. A cooling period of five to seven years, during which Jammu and
> Kashmir (including present day 'Azad' Kashmir, Northern Areas in
> Pakistan and Ladakh in India as well as the Aksai Chin and Karakorum
> regions ceded or annexed by China) is governed as a UN mandated
> territory, with full local autonomy, with the presence of the UN
> Peacekeeping Force at limited levels. Normal, unrestricted political
> activity, complete freedom of speech and association and local
> governance to determine quesitons of local importance. Free movement
> of people, and free trade, across the LOC. People of J&K to be issued
> special travel documents for 'stateless people'. People of India,
> Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet and Central Asian republics can travel
> without visas to J&K. All others to receive visas on arrival,
> Adminstered by the UN administration. Eventually, people in J&K to be
> given the freedom to opt for cascading forms of dual citizenship. J&K
> to have a twenty year tax holiday, fiscal burden of administration to
> be on the UN. People not domiciled in J&K not to have the right to
> own property in land in the region.
>
> 3. All displaced people (including those displaced in 1947, 1965,
> 1971, 1989 and after) of all denominations (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist
> and others) to be allowed right of honourable return, with
> reparations in the event of loss or destruction of property.
> Indigenous Nomadic peoples to have freedom of movement across the
> entire territory of J&K.
>
> 4. A constituent assembly to be set up during the five year cooling
> period on the basis of universal adult franchise, to discuss the
> future constitutional arrangements for J&K. Plebiscite to be held,
> under UN auspices, with the presence of international observers,
> after five years to determine the exact nature of constitutional
> arrangements. The constituent assembly is to be guided to develop
> models of statehood without the necessity of a standing army,
> (Japan's post war constitution can be a basis for a state which gives
> up the right to conduct war and maintain a standing army) so that a
> future free territory of Kashmir does not represent a threat to any
> of its neighbours. India. Pakistan and China, to give guarantees to
> protect the independence and sovereignty of Kashmir, to undertake not
> to invade or station their armed forces in J&K. J&K to be declared a
> 'zone of peace' with special heritage protection for all religious
> and culturally important sites and environmentally fragile zones.
>
> 5. I am not averse to an EU style South Asian Union, especially if it
> provides for freedom of movement between the different parts of South
> Asia, and makes borders and border controls in the region irrelevant.
> In some ways, I think that this will be inevitable. But the terms for
> participation in this union need to be democratic and equitable. It
> hardly matters to me as to whether the people of J&K participate
> within this arrangement as 'Indians', 'Pakistanis' or as
> 'Independent' or as 'members of a 'post national entity'. The crucial
> thing is, if they do not want to participate in this arrangement as
> 'Indians', nothing should compel them to do so.
>
> I see all of the above as practical and realizable goals. The most
> important obstacle is the presence of large bodies of official and
> informal armed men, once those are removed, anything is possible.
> There are many territories in the world, ranging from the Aaland
> Islands, to Andorra, to Northern Ireland, to Hong Kong, to South
> Tyrol whose constitutional contours contain elements that may be
> useful for thinking 'out of the box' solutions to the Kashmir
> dispute. In fact the so called step by step formula put forward by
> Musharraf during the Agra Summit had a lot that could have been
> thought through
>
> Siddharth Varadarjan, writing in 'Newsline' has provided a useful
> summary of some of these possibilities, see -
> http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsNov2004/cover3nov2004.htm
>
> Whatever be the possibilities, they will probably need a
> comprehensive measure of demilitarization to become workable.
> Demilitarization, in its simplest and most effective sense means the
> 'abolition of the standing army'.
>
> It needs to be remembered, that for about fifty odd years, the
> 'abolition of the standing army' was the standard demand of every
> respectable socialist, social democratic, anarchist and working class
> party in the world from the mid nineteenth century onwards. The
> abolition of standing armies was a mainstream, respectable slogan, it
> had nothing dreamy or utopian about it. The first world war put an
> end to this vigorous tradition of practical pacifism in the
> International Working Class Movement. Perhaps the future of Kashmir
> can bring this utterly human demand back on the agenda for the rest
> of the world in a real sense. If Kashmiri people, and their
> leaderships seize this opportunity to demand an abolition of standing
> armies on their territory they will have made a fundamental
> contribution to world history. I sincerely hope that they respond
> positively to the challenge that this opportunity represents.
>
> ---------------------------------
> Finally, a word about the confessional character of a state, or its
> secular, or non secular basis. As a person with no interest
> whatsoever in perpetuating the nation state as a form of human
> organization, I refuse to make the case for 'secular' states as being
> necessarily better or worse than 'non secular' ones. I think that
> states need to be judged, not on their formal accotrements, but on
> their actual conduct.
>
> Technically, the United Kingdom is not a secular state. The United
> Kingdom has a an official state church, and the head of state is also
> the head of the Church of England. Yet, it treats its minorities
> better than say, Turkey, or France, both of which are secular state.
> Saudi Arabia is a nightmare of a non secular state, and China is a
> nightmare of a secular state, insofar as issues pertaining to the
> freedom of conscience is concerned. IN our own neighbourhood, the
> Indian state has lived quite happily with the fact that until
> recently, Nepal was an autocratic, theocratic monarchy within the
> hands of a single corrupt dynasty. This dynasty also bankrolled Hindu
> fundamentalist outfits in India, and at one time offered refuge (as a
> fleeing tyrant) to Indira Gandhi after she had been defeated in 1977.
> I have never heard anyone say that Nepal's theocratic, corrupt,
> autocratic monarchy was a problem for anyone other than the people of
> Nepal (and they have quite competently got rid of that problem). I do
> not hear people say that where a revived Lama State in Tibet to
> exist, it would be a problem for India. Why then would the
> possibility of an Islamic, or even an Islamist state in Kashmir (if
> at all that came to pass, which may or may not be likely) be a
> necessary problem for India, If anything, it should be a problem (if
> it were to be a problem) that the people of Kashmir would have to
> deal with, in their own fashion, in their own time.
>
> Those of us who believe that the state should not interfere in the
> private lives of people, and in matters of faith, conscience and
> doubt, would find ways of supporting that struggle, if it were to
> take place, in a possible future Kashmir. If it were not to take
> place, I would advise that we reconcile ourselves to the presence of
> an Islamic Kashmir in our neighbourhood, exactly as we have
> reconciled ourselves to a Hindu State in Nepal all these decades. I
> cannot see how one can be worse than the other.
>
> regards,
>
> Shuddha
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-- 
Rashneek Kher
Wandhama Massacre-The Forgotten Human Tragedy
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com