[Reader-list] Fwd: A Just Peace in Kashmir? Reflections on

[Kshmendra Kaul]

Dear Sanjay

You suggest 'serious engagement'.
 
With whom?
 
Kshmendra

--- On Fri, 8/7/09, Sanjay Kak <kaksanjay at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Sanjay Kak <kaksanjay at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: A Just Peace in Kashmir? Reflections on
To: "Sarai Reader List" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Friday, August 7, 2009, 8:45 PM


Yes, I do agree with Junaid that Kshemendra Kaul should engage with
Richard Shapiro's arguments, rather than summarily dismiss them...
I just received a fwd about the Shapiro piece where Kshemendra's
dismissal has already become a venerable quotation for Aalok!

Before it becomes graven in stone, we all look forward to a serious engagement.
In the spirit of this Reader List, if nothing else!
Sanjay Kak


---------- Forwarded message ----------

Date: Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:01 PM
Subject: -=Kashmir-Interchange=- Requesting KP intellect - Please
respond toRichard Shapiro
To: KPNetwork <kpnetwork at yahoogroups.com>,
kashmir-interchange at googlegroups.com, kp-middleeast at yahoogroups.co.in


Without any doubt there is a Bank of Intellect that exists amongst
KPs, even though it might not be reflected in such habitual
'Hate-Mongers' who while not contributing anything productive to this
world only do harm to the KPs and to India.
This request is for the KP Bank of Intellect and not the 'Hate-Mongers'.

Reproduced below is a piece by Richard Shapiro "A Just Peace in
Kashmir? Reflections on Dynamics of Change"

As can be seen after a read, the article (as someone described it):
       "...is replete with prejudice, bias, ill-concieved presumptions
and mis-constructed deductions.
The sweeping generalisations he makes and his misrepresentations
bordering on outright lies are only to be expected with his more than
evident prejudice and bias."

Richard Shapiro is "Chair and Associate Professor, Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco. (CIIS)"

Shapiro is reported as being the spouse of Angana Chatterji who is
"Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute
of Integral Studies (CIIS)".

Those who know about Angana Chatterji's  'work' will immediately
recognise not only the connections but also the commonality of
attitudes towards India  and Kashmir.

The KP Bank of Intellect is requested to suitably and through
appropiate forums counter the 'case' being presented by Richard
Shapiro.

Again, the "Hate-Mongers" are requested not to try and essay responses
to Shapiro because both their intellectual bankruptcy, ill-informed
and compartmentalised world-view and foolish attitudes will be
counter-productive.


...... aalok aima



South Asia Citizens Web



"A Just Peace in Kashmir? Reflections on Dynamics of Change"



Tuesday, 4 August 2009



RICHARD SHAPIRO



sacw.net





What are the various roles that diverse constituencies must play to
facilitate political processes that undo militarization and
subjugation in Indian administered Kashmir? How can systemic
structures that institutionalize violence, cultural annihilation,
economic impoverishment, and political disempowerment be countered
through non-violent, ethical resistance? What alliances are necessary
to allow hope for overcoming cycles of oppression and breaking with
histories of domination? How can international, national, and local
actors and institutions work together to disrupt socially unnecessary
suffering and ameliorate the conditions of existence? What forces must
cohere to enable a just peace to emerge in a democratic Kashmir in the
foreseeable future?





Numerous obstacles present tremendous challenges to movements for
social justice. The current world order is predicated on systems of
inequality that hierarchically divide countries, peoples, cultures,
classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and faith traditions to
the benefit of the few and the detriment of the many. Dominant powers
prescribe the rules of the game to their advantage and utilize
knowledge, technology, and markets to structure social relations in
their interests. The new global order presents itself as the best of
all possible worlds in which sovereign nation-states organized through
representative democracy, rule of law, free markets with government
regulation, Enlightenment rationality, and human rights are promised
as the solution to the problems of poverty, war, ecological
devastation, genocide, and terrorism.





This dominant narrative of progress through the spread of capitalism
organized in nation-states and guided by knowledge has attained
hegemony as it has captured the imagination of postcolonial nations
like India. Postcolonial nations have largely reproduced the
structures of colonial oppression and organized themselves to become
players in the existing global order as militarized,
hyper-masculinized, nuclear powers measuring their worth on the basis
of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Emerging middle-classes of massive
proportion in postcolonial nations like India buttress this process of
nation building that mirrors and enforces dynamics of globalization
through the production of unparalleled poverty, massive and multiple
dislocations, genocide of indigenous peoples, ecological disaster, and
abundant psychological malaise. India is embraced by the international
community, meaning largely the United States and Western Europe,
precisely because it marches in step with the new world order. India
amasses great cultural capital as “the world’s largest democracy” in
spite of the fact that it is home to 40% of the worlds most
economically destitute, and seeks to constitute itself as a nation
through policies that disregard the needs of the vast majority of its
population.





India is inventing nothing new in its self-constitution as a powerful
nation-state. National identity is being fabricated through the
equation of India with Hindus, in blatant form in entities like the
RSS and BJP, and in more subtle form in the Congress and progressive
Indian citizens for whom nationalism linked to ’Hindu cultural
reassertion’ is an unreflective response to a colonial past. The
equation of Hinduism (unity in diversity) and Christianity with
tolerance for difference, and Islam with terrorism, backwardness, and
fanaticism, functions as a global trope supportive of unleashing
disproportionate violence on Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Palestine, as well as within the territory of India in Gujurat,
Orissa, and in the ’disputed territory’ of Kashmir. India forms itself
as nation with unexamined Hindu majoritarianism at its base, just as
unexamined Christian cultural dominance organizes the United States,
rendering explorations of the links between religionization,
nationalism and particular secularisms close to impossible. India is
also typical in its self-formation as nation in fashioning internal
and external enemies as crucial to defining itself, and
super-exploiting its most proximate ’others’ to fuel its prosperity.
European nations had the Jew as internal enemy. The United States is
founded on the backs of its twin others - enslaved Africans and
massacred Native Americans.





India has as its main ’internal other’ the Muslim, who can take no
solace in also occupying the role as external enemy in India’s
dominant narrative. This double site is what the state uses to
legitimate the brutalization of the Kashmiri people. Firstly, there is
India’s need for a majority Muslim state within its borders to
legitimate itself as a progressive, pluralistic, secular nation.
Without a Muslim majority state within India, India cannot as easily
legitimate itself as a progressive member of the new global order.
Secondly there is India’s need to establish national identities that
take precedence over regional, local, traditional identities. As a
nation, India is in the process of seeking: (1) to establish
territorial dominion over the current boundaries of the nation, (2)
attain a monopoly on the means of violence, and (3) organize human and
natural resources to enhance the productivity and power of the nation.
Every nation that has achieved the normative status of modern
democracy has utilized sustained and prolific violence to realize
these three imperatives and in the process establish its identity.
India is in a very vulnerable moment in this process as is evident
from an examination of the myriad territories and forces fighting for
autonomy in some form from the Indian state. Part of the strategy to
foster national identity, simultaneous to providing very little to the
vast majority of its population, and in fact fostering mal-development
that impoverishes and displaces poor, rural ’citizens’, is to
fabricate an ’us’ that must protect itself from ’them’. Without
internal enemies India cannot unify itself as a nation.





This internal enemy is also resolutely claimed as integral to India.
The state and its loyal subjects repeat the same refrain: ’Kashmir is
an integral part of India.’ ’Kashmir is integral to India.’ Kashmir is
the other that is integral to the self, a difference that is integral
to the identity of India. How then does India treat this other, this
integral difference? To debase, devalue, disrespect, destroy the
people, culture, history, land, waters, aspirations, imaginations,
passions, thoughts, of this other that is claimed as integral to self
reveals much about India’s current state of existence. What other
measure is available to us to assess ourselves as ethical entities
than how we treat the other, how we engage the differences to which we
are ethically obliged to respond? What nation has satisfactorily
answered to this call? If a day arrives when Kashmir is ’a nation unto
itself’, independent and sovereign, an equal to all other nations,
will Kashmir point the nation-state in a new direction? Will the
differences integral to Kashmir be respected, affirmed, heard and
engaged? Will ’the other’ be the call to ’the self’ to practice
hospitality? Will the Gujur, the village woman who buried loved ones
and waits in silence for words of/from other loved ones, the atheist,
the ardent believer, the Shia, the Sufi, the pundit, the Buddhist, the
differently abled, the homosexual, the beggar, the prostitute, be
welcomed as participants in constructing a nation that will be ’a
light unto other nations’? Will the other be welcomed without the
demand or structural incentive to assimilate, to mirror/mimic
dominance to be recognized as human? These questions are too much,
perhaps even unfair. Yet, is it not necessary to raise them?





Kashmir occupies a literal and imaginary border as inside and outside
of India in ways that structure an impossible predicament. The state
(and its elites and middle-classes) does not trust Kashmiris whose
allegiance is always presumed to lie with Pakistan as an Islamic
Republic, thus denying Kashmiris the rights of citizens of India,
while asserting the inviolability of its sovereignty over Kashmir as a
secular, democratic nation governed by equality under rule of law. The
distrust legitimates military rule organized through special laws as
necessary to provide law and order as a matter of internal security.
Thus, on the basis of being part of a democratic state, the rights
granted citizens of such a state are denied to Kashmiris. Inclusion in
nation is coupled with dispossession from historical memory, rights,
and life. India legitimates its mistreatment through a logic
originating with European nation-states. This denial of civil and
human rights, rule of law, and the freedoms of citizenship to
Kashmiris is because the state must protect itself from forces within
itself that threaten its character as a lawful, democratic nation.
India must violate what is most inviolable, through a state of
exception (the use of law to suspend law as definitive of
sovereignty), to protect itself. The discourse requires the allegiance
of the Kashmiri people to India, as proof that Kashmiris are not what
the nation suspects - traitors and terrorists, as precondition to
access to the rights of citizenship. These same rights of citizenship
provided by the nation, while denied to Kashmiris, are used by India
to justify its claims to being a legitimate state entitled to act as
it does in Kashmir. As a legitimate state, India is predicated on
civil rights and rule of law that it may legitimately suspend in the
name of national security. Kashmiris must align with India given this
legitimacy, while living as subjects without rights in so far as the
state defines them as a threat to its sovereignty. India must violate
what gives it legitimacy in order to protect itself from the internal
enemy integral to it. India must destroy itself to protect itself. The
state of exception produces a state of autoimmunity. India is also
asserting itself as superior to other regional nation-states, and an
emerging player in relation to Western Europe and the United States.
Like other powerful democracies, India is entitled to do whatever is
necessary to fight terrorism and strengthen itself as a powerful,
sovereign, capitalist nation, aligned with the movement of progress
(dominance).





Kashmiris are placed in a situation where allegiance to India as
prerequisite to participation in a lawful democracy involves
allegiance to a state that has no rational basis to demand or expect
allegiance from the people of Kashmir. India needs to exaggerate the
degree of cross-border infiltration and armed Islamist militancy to
rationalize 500,000+ troops, blurred boundaries between police and
army, and massive intervention in daily life through systematic
surveillance, land seizures, checkpoints, torture, disappearances,
gendered and sexualized violence, fake encounter deaths and countless
daily humiliations calculated to break the spirit of the Kashmiri
people. This reality is currently resisted through mass
demonstrations, regular protests, strategic use of elections,
strategic boycott of elections, navigating restrictions on ’free
press’, civil society mobilizations, legal cases, an International
Tribunal, and regular acts of dignity, courage, and faith that
characterize the present in Kashmir. India demonstrates the persona
all too common in the ’league of nations’ - to act with impunity and
disregard for international law and local demands for justice. India
uses this fiction of the Kashmiri as existing in the shadowy space of
inside/outside the nation to legitimate an occupation that ignores the
historical particularity of Kashmir and the promises made to the
people of Kashmir to determine its own future. The plight of Kashmiri
pundits also becomes an opportunity for the state to legitimate
regularized violence and systematic oppression of Kashmiris. Were all
Kashmiris, whether currently residing in the state of Jammu/Kashmir or
elsewhere, to be given voice to express their will, free from
coercion, retribution, and manipulation, the outcome would not be in
doubt.





Kashmir is the longest standing disputed area in the United Nations,
the most militarized spot on earth, and a drain on the hopes for
prosperity, peace and freedom for people throughout the subcontinent,
and the world. There is no moving toward peaceful coexistence between
India and Pakistan, no stabilization of the region, no possibility for
global nuclear disarmament, no hope for forms of development that
prioritize sustainability and cultural survival over militarization,
urbanization, and middle-class consumerism, no space for the
impossible healing through mourning/memorializing the trauma of
Partition, without granting self-determination to the people of
Kashmir.





The realization of that which is demanded by rationality in service of
justice and emancipation is always against the odds. In relation to
Kashmir, a more peaceful future requires at least four interrelated
movements: (1) Massive, non-violent, ethical dissent within Kashmiri
civil society must continue and expand, attentive to alliances that
build stronger relations between men and women, youth and adults,
various faith communities, urban and rural, rich and poor,
facilitative of inclusive forms of polity that enable a diverse,
pluralistic movement for freedom. (2) Leadership must form a unified
coalition that activates and learns from the multiple constituencies
that make up Kashmiri society. Divergent desires and imaginations
regarding the future of Kashmir should be encouraged and discussed,
outside the search for homogeneity or conformity. A Kashmir free of
subjugation should enable multiple forms of life through participatory
democracy, just governance, and economic practice promoting health,
education, and individual and collective prosperity. Natural
resources, like water, should be both safeguarded, and utilized for
sustainable development. Cultural heritage should be understood as an
inheritance of all Kashmiris to fashion a unique society nurturing
hospitality, innovation, and multicultural polity. (3) Education and
mobilization to shift public opinion in India must be undertaken
throughout civil society to expand pressure on the Indian state.
Citizen delegations from the various states and communities of India
must visit Kashmir to learn first hand about the atrocities,
resistances, hopes, and concerns prevalent in Kashmir. Such
delegations must bring their new understandings to their
neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship to
facilitate discussion and reflection that expand the voices of those
who demand that illegal and immoral action in Kashmir done in their
name immediately cease. Institutions in India must sponsor delegations
from Kashmir, composed of diverse peoples who constitute Kashmiri
society, to share the realities they have suffered and the need for
alliance toward justice. Hindu faith communities must forge
relationships with social justice movements in civil society in
Kashmir to oppose Hindu majoritarian dominance and insist that the
Indian state demilitarize the state of Jammu & Kashmir, become
accountable to international agreements, rule of law, and human rights
as the first step on the road to affirming the right of Kashmir to
self-determination. Universities and the press must play a strong role
in addressing the history and present of Kashmir to empower students
and the citizenry of India to participate as informed members of a
democratic republic, whose resources and conscience are systematically
misused and violated by their government. (4) International
solidarities from citizens, governmental and non-governmental
organizations, students, workers, professionals, public intellectuals,
faith communities, and all interested parties must be organized to
educate, inform, advocate, and mobilize for the liberation of Kashmir.
International institutions must be both utilized and strengthened as
legitimate sites able to hold nation-states legally accountable for
their actions. Research, education, and publication on the reality of
present-day Kashmir and its modern history must be supported by and
within universities, think tanks, and civil society forums. Campuses
must become sites where students mobilize themselves to exert public
pressure to ethically resolve the situation in Kashmir. Resistance in
all four ’sites’ must struggle to establish alliances, clarify goals,
mobilize resources, deconstruct desires, and carve out space where
different forms of polity and community, promoting ethical dissent,
may live.





To commit to these practices secures no guarantees. The process must
draw from the resolve of Kashmiris to struggle for justice and
strengthen this resolve through principled alliance that breaks the
isolation and despair that accompanies any people subjected to brutal
mistreatment. The multiple legacies that inspire and haunt us must
become the very sustenance that, through sharing, nurtures our
struggle. Allow me to conclude by drawing from a source common to the
three Abrahamic traditions, and of universal relevance in the present,
Deuteronomy 16:20, Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue.





(Richard Shapiro is Chair and Associate Professor, Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco.)

http://www.sacw.net/article1090.html



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