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

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Sanjay, Kshmendra, Junaid, Inder, Dear all,

I have read with care the post forwarding Professor Richard Shapiro's  
essay on the situation in Kashmir (originally circulated on South  
Asia Citizens Web). I looked very carefully to see if there were  
indeed any 'sweeping generalizations'  and 'misrepresentations', as  
Kshmendra insists this essay has embedded within it, I also looked  
for any evidence of 'anti India biases and prejudices', and I have to  
say that i found none.  And, I would urge Kshmendra to actually enter  
into the engagement that Junaid invites him to undertake. I remain,  
of course, willing, as ever, to be swayed by cogent reasoning in any  
direction.

A sweeping generalization would be a statement that would be  
insupportable by concrete evidence, or that could be vigorously by  
contrary evidence . None of the statements made by Dr. Shapiro, in  
his characterization of the development of nation states and  
capitalism, seems to me to be unsupportable by evidence.

He begins by asking what can be done to work towards a just and  
democratic peace in Kashmir. He prefaces his subsequent comments by  
drawing a world picture that says - that the challenges towards  
finding a way towards such an end lie in the fact that -

"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."

(I can see no fault with this statement)

"Dominant powers prescribe the rules of the game to their advantage  
and utilize knowledge, technology, and markets to structure social  
relations in their interests."

(a banal statement, but nonetheless. unequivocally true)

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.

(again, true)

The challenge, then, for anyone seeking to work towards a just and  
democratic peace in Kashmir would be to think outside this frame,  
which means, thinking outside the frame provided by the dominant  
world system, of thinking in terms of Capitalism, and the nation  
state. As far as I know, none of the so called 'resistance' movements  
in Kashmir is currently engaged in this process. And, no, In my  
opinion, saying that an 'Islamic' Kashmir, would in some ways be  
something outside of capitalism or the system of nation states, does  
not hold up to scrutiny. That, to me, would be dangerous, if not  
devious, dissimulation. So, in my view, (and I am not saying that  
Shapiro says this, though I think he does imply it, and I will  
demonstrate, later why). The current level of political intelligence  
and imagination of the 'resistance' to the Indian (and in some cases,  
Pakistani) occupation of Kashmir, is as much part of the problem, as  
is the occupation itself. But we can come back to this point later.

In my understanding, the sharpest criticism that Dr. Shapiro makes of  
the evolving character of the Indian state (and of post-colonial  
states in general, he does not hold India out as an exception) is the  
following:

"...(The) 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” inspite 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."

I could not find a single phrase in this statement that rung untrue.  
Has the nation state in India, as represented by successive  
governments, regardless of party affiliation, not followed policies  
that have continued to ensure that 40% of the population not remained  
economically destitute? Have the needs of the vast majority of the  
population, in any form, be they in areas like education, health,  
nutrition, housing,  land reform, amenities in the work place, social  
security, or public transport ever been met? Has not a bloated  
military and security apparatus, and the sheer waste of a nuclear  
weapons based security policy led to any improvement in the quality  
of life of the majority of the population? Have large dams fed anyone  
other than cement mill bosses and construction-contractor lobbies?

Has the nation-state form in India not reproduced the 'structures of  
colonial oppression' and 'organized themselves to become players in  
the existing global order as militarized, hyper-masculinized, nuclear  
powers'?

If at least this were not to be the case, we would have seen a large  
and impressive array of repressive insitutions, laws, and forms of  
executive functioning perfected during colonial rule be replaced,  
repealed or at least politically challenged by the new 'independent'  
nation state's ruling elite. That has never been the case in India,  
and in many other states like India, including, Pakistan, Bangladesh,  
Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. Neither Dr. Ambedkar, nor  
Jawaharlal Nehru, (who's observations on the 'rights of the deviant'  
as paraphrased in the recent salutary Delhi high court judgement on  
Section 377 are indeed valuable to me) nor Vallabhbhai Patel, thought  
it necessary to introduce measures for the effective dilution and  
democratization of brutally centralized power in the Indian  
constitution (pious declarations in the 'directive principles'  
notwithstanding). No organized political formation (across the entire  
political spectrum from the parliamentary Left through to the extra- 
parliamentry Right) in India has ever thought it necessary to re- 
order the ethos of the military, security and intelligence agencies,  
which were cultivated by the colonial power to view the 'subjects'  
they watched over with an essential hostility.

No effort was made to repeal laws like the 'Defence of India Rules',  
which, promulgated as a war time measure during the Second World War,  
continues to be the fountainhead and inspiration of every single  
piece of repressive anti-civil liberties legislation (from AFSPA to  
MISA to NSA to POTA) that has ever been placed on the statute books  
in the history of independent India.

Not even the token effort to create and design a democratic city was  
made by the native inheritors of the Raj's legacy. The disaster that  
is the 'incorrectly' named Lutyen's Delhi (should be 'Lutyens and  
Bakers Delhi') which created concentric 'cordon sanitaires' between  
the rulers and the ruled, and effectively blanked out the organic  
evolution of democratic public and civic space in the post war  
metroplitian spurt, is a sign of the seamless continuity between the  
colonial and the post colonial imagination. In which of these  
instances, can we fault the spirit of Dr. Shapiro's gesture?

In actual fact, we have seen repressive laws being strenthened by  
even sterner measures. Those who have short memories may balk at the  
idea that the darlings of Indian 'democracy', Jawaharlal Nehru and  
his cabinet, ordered the aerial bombing of a city like Imphal by the  
Indian Air Force, or that they summarily used draconian military  
power to dismiss constitutionally elected bodies of governance in  
what is today called 'India's north east' (see the sad history of  
Manipur to know how and why) but unfortunately, the historical record  
is plain to see.

It is true, large parts of India, were spared the intense and brutal  
repression that accompanied military dictatorship in states like  
Pakistan and Bangladesh, and autocratic monarchy in Nepal, but then  
again, large parts of the territories held by india, which included  
the Kashmir valley and many regions of the north east, (and now  
include vast swathes of Central India) have had to deal with the  
effective suspension of civic rights (including the most basic -  
rights to life and liberty) due to the continued operation of laws  
such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. In these areas, the tom- 
tomming of Indian 'democracy'  (routinely to the accompaniment of  
elections held under the shadow of conditions approximating what  
happened during 'elections' in the erstwhile Soviet Union, and in my  
opinion, today's Iran) sounds shrill and hollow, at least to my ears.  
Of course, what this situation has engendered is its own pathological  
mirroring, and I have no doubt at all, that the various 'liberation  
fronts' and 'people's armies', 'hizb's', 'lashkars' and other sundry  
armed bands that striate the tragic history of insurgency in  
Republican india act only as shadows and mirrors, in their equally  
brutal functioning, of the state that they claim to oppose.

The processes of the tightening of state security systems, increasing  
militarization, dispossession of people from their access to  
resources in the name of 'development', cultural majoritarianism that  
threatens and intimidates expressions of diversity, the increasing  
invocation of a state of exception (the usage of law to suspend law)  
and the spectre of the 'internal enemy' who is also claimed as the  
privileded subject on whose (if necessary, forcible) integration into  
the 'mainstream' of the Indian nation, the entire discourse of  
nationhood (in its communal or secular reading) rests - is not  
particular to the history of the Republic of India. It would do just  
as well for a description of the structural processes at work in  
every nation state in the world, to greater or lesser degrees,  
depending on the extent of power that the apparatus of the state and  
its allied core constituencies in the society and economy can  
marshall to itself, in each instance.

This is just as true of the history of the United States of America,  
of the Islamic Republics of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, of the  
(former) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (and its satellites and  
successor states, including Russia), of the Peoples Republic of  
China, of the Republic of China, of the State of Israel, of the  
Palestinian 'territories',  of the United Kingdom, the various  
successive and parallel states that have laid claim to being  
representative of the German 'volk' in the modern world and of states  
as diverse as the United States of Nigeria, the Republic of Italy,  
the Federation of Nigeria and the Commonwealths of Canada and  
Australia. (My laundry list of modern states and state formations can  
be expanded in any direction, I list them somewhat obsessively only  
in order to show that I am not 'prejudiced' either for or against any  
particular form, mode or style of state power). In each of these  
instances, the historical record shows us the tighetening of the  
state apparatus, dispossession, ecological devastation, organized  
violence, either initiated and executed, or aided and abetted by the  
state, or tolerated by the state, against particular populations  
(some of whom may be citizens, while others need not be),  
pathological forms of cultural majoritarianism and intolerance  
towards minorities, ecological devastation, and (who would deny  
today) increasing immiseration and pauperization of large segments of  
the working population.

I now come to the question of an 'anti-India' bias in Prof. Shapiro's  
text. There would have been valid grounds to object against a 'bias',  
if Prof. Shapiro had held 'India' out as a nation-state acting  
against the grain of how nation states have historically acted and  
constituted themselves. If India were in some senses, shown by him,  
to be a 'rogue' state, that acted against the norms set by the  
behaviour of other nation states and the international community. On  
the contrary,

Prof. Shapiro, (repeatedly) says that India, acts exactly as other  
nation-states do. Here are three instances where this is the case -

1. "...India legitimates its mistreatment through a logic originating  
with European nation-states."

2. "...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)."

3. "...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."

4. "...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."

In each of these statements, Prof. Shapiro, is not suggesting that  
other nation states, be they European nation-states, or the nation- 
state form as it involved in his own country, the United States of  
America, have demonstrated evidence of conduct in any ways superior  
to the conduct of the Indian nation-state. In fact, he argues for a  
critique of the state form itself. He may, then, be legitimately  
accused of a bias against the state form itself, but not by any means  
of a bias against 'India' as such.

In fact, he makes it clear that he sees a broad alliance between  
people interested in peace and justice in India and in Kashmir as one  
of the essential factors that could possibly guarantee a workable and  
just solution. This call for an alliance between 'Indians' and those  
under de facto 'Indian' occupation, (which would not sit comfortably  
with the entrenched interests of either Indian or Kashmiri  
nationalists) is itself a sign that he values the participation of  
'Indians' in any efforts towards peace in Kashmir, and in South Asia  
as a whole, very highly.

While I do not  see any evidence of an 'anti-Indian' bias in Prof.  
Shapiro's text, I do see a thinly disguised form of 'Indian  
exceptionalism' in the assertion that he does betray an 'anti-india'  
bias. As a normal nation-state, the Indian state, like any other  
state, should be subject to criticism, or not, on the basis of its  
actions and policies. A criticism of the actions and policies of the  
Indian state is not evidence of an 'anti-india' bias, just as  
criticism of the actions and policies of the states of the United  
States of America, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the State of  
Israel, are not evidences of any biases against America, Iran, or  
Israel. On the contrary, criticism of the actions of a nation-state  
may be the highest form of solidarity with the people in whose name  
the nation state stands constituted. During Nazi rule in Germany, a  
criticism of the state was simultaneously a defence of the best that  
elements within what we call German culture and heritage had to offer  
to humanity as a whole.

Finally, let me come to a last, but very interesting point. (and I am  
grateful to Inder Salim for drawing our attention to this before me.)

Prof. Shapiro says -  "...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?"

Shapiro is implicitly urging us to ask whether there is any evidence  
to show that the imagination of the state upheld by the 'resistance'  
in Kashmir is going to lead to the emergence of a state form that is  
in any way different to the one that is seen as oppressive by them.  
The same question could have been asked of Indian nationalists in the  
heyday of their struggle against the unjust oppression meted out on  
to the subjects of the British Empire in India. The answer, I  
suspect, in either case, would have been identical.

I see no evidence to suggest that any current within the 'resistance'  
in Kashmir has anything substantive to offer in response to this  
question. And while, I do not share the caveat of the 'perhaps' in  
Shapiro's asking of the question. (No, I do not think that their  
asking is 'too much', or even, 'unfair'). I do agree with him, that  
it is absolutely necessary to raise them. One's responsibility  
towards one's friends, in my opinion, is to always ask them hard  
questions. To refrain from doing so, is not a sign of solidarity, but  
condescension. I am glad that Prof. Shapiro has asked (however  
cautiously) this hard question. It is up to our friends in the  
'resistance' in Kashmir, to provide a satisfactory set of answers.  
Neither the tired slogans of 'secular nationalism' nor the fading  
light of 'Islamism' (of any sort) will, I suspect, provide answers  
that are commensurate to the strength of the question.

I do hope however, that the call for the expansion and continuation  
of what Prof. Shapiro calls "..massive, non-violent, ethical dissent  
within Kashmiri civil society... 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" - and the explicit desire for - "leadership...(that can  
and) must form a unified
coalition that activates and learns from the multiple constituencies  
that make up Kashmiri society" - together with the a insistence that   
"... divergent desires and imaginations regarding the future of  
Kashmir... be encouraged and discussed, outside the search for  
homogeneity or conformity" - leading to the emergence of "...a  
Kashmir free of subjugation (that can) enable multiple forms of life"  
- can in fact be a beacon to the rest of South Asia.

In my understanding, neither the armed insurgent cadre, nor the  
'moderate' or 'hardline' separatist 'political' leadership within the  
Kashmir valley, nor the different 'pro-India', or 'pro-Pakistan', or  
'pro-Independence' elements have displayed, till now the capacity,  
intelligence, or imagination to come up with such responses. The  
peoples of Kashmir, have time and again, been betrayed by their  
leaders (and in this they share the destinies of many other peoples  
elsewhere in the world) and by many of those who claim, or have  
claimed, to speak on their behalf. Perhaps, it is time, that the  
initiative for the future of Kashmir was wrested away from these  
competing 'leaders and cadres' and restored to where it belongs - in  
the hearts, minds and conversations of ordinary people, Kashmiri and  
others.

I end with the hope that Prof. Shapiro's text and this exchange that  
follows from it, can contribute to the health of that conversation.  
All our futures, within and without Kashmir, depends on it.

best,

Shuddha

PS : And I also hope that the conversation can continue without  
having to take recourse to the drawing of post dated cheques drawn on  
self-constituting 'Banks of Intellect' - (and here I was, naiively  
thinking 'Banks' were having a tough time in the recession) amounting  
to the invocation of the identities of any one's spouse. A repetition  
of such a charge would amount to hitting a new low, even for a list  
as 'lively', as ours. :-)


  ------------
On 08-Aug-09, at 8:13 PM, Kshmendra Kaul wrote:

> Dear Sanjay
>
> "Engaging" with rantings with prejudice and bias embedded in them  
> is at most times foolish venturing.
>
> That is a "by-the-way" comment. A phrase often used in Kashmir  
> which Shapiro would not know about just as he knows little about  
> Kashmir other than through regurgitated Anti-India propaganda. By- 
> the-way.
>
> As I told Junaid, I will elaborate on my "summary dismissal" when  
> time allows me.
>
> But I would like to understand from you too:
>
> - Is it your position that Richard Shapiro has NOT made any  
> 'sweeping generalisations' and 'misrepresentations'?
>
> - Is it your position that Richard Shapiro's essay does NOT make  
> evident any (Anti-India) 'prejudice and bias'?
>
> As you would have read, Inder Salim has already drawn attention to  
> some of the critical flaws and comments arising from engaging in  
> half-truths by Shapiro in his essay.
>
> Kshmendra
>

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net