[Reader-list] Azadi and other suspects

[V Ramaswamy]

AZADI AND OTHER SUSPECTS
- An anthem for genuine freedomThe Thin EdgeRUCHIR JOSHI

The Telegraph, Calcutta
Sunday , September 21 , 2008


The Czech writer, Milan Kundera, talks about a small moment in the history
of his country as the communists took it over in 1948. He describes the
famous leftist poet, Paul Eluard, visiting from Paris and linking arms with
local young people to dance in a circle, celebrating the 'freedom' of the
new-born socialist republic. The poet dances and recites his revolutionary
poetry as he circles, refusing to condemn the executions, the day before, of
a socialist activist and a surrealist artist who were both deemed
counter-revolutionary. Kundera sees this dancing circle as a floating wreath
and he knows the cause of freedom in Czechoslovakia is lost. Paul Eluard
would go back to Paris and his Left circles, and laud the 'revolution' he
had just witnessed, deliberately ignoring the fact that the Soviets had
rolled their brutal, dark grey power over yet another central European
country. Using that circle as a metaphor, Kundera sounds a warning against
all closed, exclusionary systems of political organization, whether that be
a State or a revolution bent upon overthrowing a State.

Despite all the failed and tragic examples that litter history, I still look
forward to seeing my first proper revolution. I hope it will come soon,
while my knees can still hold up some (non-circular) dancing. Even though
I've reached what is supposed to be an anti-revolutionary-devolutionary age,
I have nothing against revolutions *per se*. I crave transformation for my
society, I dream of radical change for the better that's brought about
quickly and dramatically, but preferably without blood being shed. The thing
is, having lived in this West Bengal, in a state of constant 'People's
Anti-Fascist Revolution' for over thirty years, I tend to be suspicious of
things that look like revolutions but might not be them.

Equally, having lived under the Central Indian Imperium, I am not very fond
of States, or countries, or flags, or the national anthem that Indian
soldiers make you get out of the car and sing if you happen to be a Kashmiri
taxi-driver on a suspicious route. If guns were pointing at me, I too might
forget the words. And I really don't want to be shot if I mix up the order
of Gujarat, Banga, Utkal, Dravid, Tendulkar etc. Given this allergy, I get
confused when friends, People Like Me, (PLM: writers, film-makers, artists,
that ilk), people who've detested 'Statism' and all its toxic derivatives as
much as I have, suddenly start singing birthing songs for yet another new
country.

"How do you know what kind of a state the Kashmiris will create for
themselves?" some PLM ask, "To project failure upon a yet-to-be-formed
Kashmir is using the same argument the British deployed when trying to deny
us independence." Others throw down rhetorical challenges to the nascent
Azad Kashmir "Will you create yet another Islamic state? Will you hang
people like me? Will you stone adulterers? Will you chop off my hand?" These
are very good questions indeed, but the PLM don't seem to be really asking
them, they seem to be intoning them like poetry while dancing in a
celebratory circle. The effect is that the questions look like they've been
addressed whereas, actually, they've been chopped off at the elbow, with a
quick tourniquet of mellifluous prose put around the stumps.

I'm not doubting the motives of PLM: the starting place of this impulse is a
place I share.*Jana, gana, mana* as the *adhinayaka* — yes, but no Bharat
as *bhagya vidhaata* — not, if that leads to the regular slaughtering of
13-year-olds for throwing stones. I'm not questioning what the PLM have
witnessed. If, as a father of a teenage daughter, you're filming a man
weeping over the grave of his murdered teenage son, natural identification
can mean that those army bullets go into your own child and not the dead
boy. That then becomes your frame, and the grieving father's tears the
non-neutral filter affixed in front of your lens. I'm not questioning the
PLM's feelings, their sentiments or their emotions; I'm deeply sceptical and
anxious about their analyses.

I remember a quiet and intense Iranian called Manouche I knew in New York
City, in 1982. One day I made some flippant comment about Ayatollah
Khomeini, who was by then well-installed as the Supreme Leader of Iran.
Manouche sat me down, slammed two beers on the table, and proceeded to tell
me what he and his comrades in the Iranian Communist Party had been through,
first at the hands of the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, and then, after
the revolution, at the hands of Khomeini's butchers. He described in detail
the torture he suffered under the Shah and the executions of his friends
under Khomeini's regime, he mapped out for me how the dawn of the longed for
Iranian *azadi* had turned into the darkest night of repression and terror
for a majority of Iranians. I also remember an Irish friend once explaining
how the IRA destroyed the non-violent women's peace movement in Northern
Ireland. Those Provos may not have chopped off hands, but they certainly had
a habit of shooting off people's knee-caps for the smallest offenses.

There was never any doubt over the British army's brutality in Northern
Ireland. There was never any question that the SAVAK needed to go. There is
no question that the Indian security forces in Kashmir need to be stopped
from operating the way they have been. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act
is a criminal act worthy of a Niazi or an Idi Amin, and the Indian military
has used it for fifty years, committing the worst crimes against people we
like to call our own. But, just as Kashmir is not East Pakistan, Iran,
Palestine or Northern Ireland, we are not now in '71, '89 or '95, we are in
2008. The old solutions are dead; mid-wifing yet another potentially fascist
state should not be an option that seduces us. If we link an arm and dance
in a circle with a man like Ahmad Shah Geelani, we might as well entwine our
other arm with Geelani's ideological twin-brother, Pravin Togadia.
Looking at Kashmir from where I am, other places barge into the foreground,
Singur gets in the way of the sight-line to Srinagar, as do Orissa and
Karnataka, as does Gujarat. Just as I don't think the bringing of Narendra
Modi to justice for 2002 should be held hostage to the un-prosecuted
Congress goons of 1984, I don't think there can be a queuing and privileging
of *azadi* for one area of this sub-continent: Singur and Nandigram need
freedom from both Buddhadeb and Mamata just as much as the people of the
Kasmir Valley need freedom from the Indian army, the Salafi-Jihadi butchers,
the ISI and the machinations of the CIA, just as much as the people of
Chhattisgarh need to be free of the Maoists, the Salwa Judum and the
'crack', jungle-trained security forces. India and Kashmir can azadofy from
each other about as much as Ripon Street can from Rajarhat. Looking at all
these different, seething struggles, reality becomes very clear: it's not
what we do now as a country but as a *jana* and *gana*, not as Indians or
Pakistanis, Kashmiris or Bengalis, but as South Asians, that may one day
allow all of us to dance in the free formation of a genuine freedom.