[Reader-list] The Deception of the Indian Liberal Discourse on Kashmir

[Sanjay Kak]

An interesting post from the blog Mazameen-e-Ghai`b
http://bluekashmir.blogspot.com/
Enjoy.
Sanjay Kak


The Deception of the Indian Liberal Discourse on Kashmir

After two months of almost continuous clampdowns and lockdowns, 50
systematic killings, and hundreds of incarcerations, the debate in
India about protests in Kashmir has continued to hover between
bleeding-heart liberal talk and state attempts at dissimulation. While
state deception, and the Hindu right racket, is obvious, expected, and
nothing new, the increased space for liberal discourse has given a
false impression that there is a change in heart. The liberal
discourse in India on the question of Kashmir is not open, fair, or
objective, but often borders on, and oftentimes overlaps, the more
popular, explicitly nationalist polemics.

>From news shows to newspaper articles every death in Kashmir is slyly
or openly justified. Since the day some protestors in Pampore and
Srinagar burnt a few police jeeps and a couple of decrepit old,
low-level government office structures, fit not even to be cowsheds,
the Indian media suggested that people are shot because they attack
public property. They tried to conceal the fact that most of the
victims were killed before those structures were burnt down. But then
even before the Pampore incidents big media in India tried to create a
moral equivalence between intentional murders of dozens of unarmed
Kashmiri protestors and Indian paramilitary soldiers not getting
enough rest, or their jeeps getting a few bumps.

India’s “Kashmir experts” (some of them from Kashmir as well), who
fall over each other to get a place on noisy and bogus talk shows in
Delhi, have been bandying about that the current series of protests
began with the June 11 killing of Tufail Mattoo. The fake encounter
killings of three young men in Machil and of a 70-year-old man in
Kupwara, the fatal shooting of another man in Keller forests, the
wanton killings of Zahid and Wamiq in Srinagar, and numerous others
preceded Tufail’s death. Not only were these other killings
deliberately forced to recede from the public view, but the immense
suffering, the daily grind, humiliation and torture that marks life in
Kashmir under military occupation continues to be glossed over. The
gloss often is the much-abused fabrication that Kashmiris live off
Indian taxpayers’ money. Somehow it is assumed that Kashmiris don’t
pay taxes, or that Kashmir doesn’t have an economy of its own beyond
the government dole. The fact deliberately obscured is that the very
thin slice of Kashmiri society that does benefit from Indian handouts
is the one the Indian state has actively promoted as a class of
collaborators in Kashmir. These are mostly the people who appear on TV
shows in Delhi, and their view is projected as the countervailing view
to the Indian hawks, who saturate the public sphere in Delhi
newsrooms. The problem is that these same people openly announce that
common Kashmiris will lynch them if they went out of their security
cocoons.

Then there are the nauseating media pundits who, on one side, show
injured young children with bullet marks on their chests and, on the
other, bring heavy mustached ex-military generals to offer their views
on why children get shot. They implicitly announce that if Kashmiri
children have to live, their parents better keep them inside their
homes. This is the liberal Indian media. On the more popular
platforms, like Rediff News or Times of India, respondents openly call
for genocide of Kashmiris. It is crucial to read the low ethical
barometer of this Delhi based media since it directly generates much
Indian public opinion about Kashmir. How do societies become so
pachydermic to gulp down with eager credulity such moral depravity?
Even in the left–liberal big media, the systematic nature of deceit is
clearly visible to the point that it has become farcical. The Hindu
published an editorial that unscrupulously tried to make a case for
curtailing Internet services to Kashmiris, one of the few places where
the Indian government has not been completely successful in muzzling
dissent. So disgruntled was this calumnious piece’s author that he
created fictitious names to smear all the protest Kashmiris express
online.

For long the existence of Kashmiri protest was shrugged off as
directed by Pakistan. Now after those theories have fallen flat,
attempts are made to mystify what Kashmiris want. Isn’t it truly
baffling that, while the rest of the world clearly know what Kashmiris
want, India’s liberal experts have a hard time comprehending this
resounding reality? For the last 20 years these experts have
repeatedly asked the question: “But what do Kashmiris want?” Kashmiris
have declared what they want in clear, succinct slogans (always in
English, and in Hindustani) over microphones, on banners, and in
protests, by raising fists, throwing stones, and firing guns, through
their tears, cries, and wails, through burnt homes, imprisoned lives,
and wounded, life-deprived bodies.

The ones, who have finally managed to read the writing on the bloodied
wall, fulminate in self-righteous anger that India will never give
azadi to Kashmiris. This rejection of Kashmir’s freedom takes
supercilious forms. They tell us Kashmiris to see ‘reason.’ Free
Kashmir is not viable. In return, we ask them, if unfree, occupied
Kashmir is viable for Kashmiris? They tell us Kashmir will become
another playground for Great Power politics, and we ask them if
India’s denial of Kashmir’s right to self-determination has not
already turned Kashmir into one. Some of them warn us that independent
Kashmir will be taken over by the U.S. But we ask them, have India and
Pakistan not been ‘taken over’ by the U.S. already? Didn’t India
eagerly, and without being asked, offer the U.S. its bases to attack
Afghanistan? Don’t India and Pakistan race to Washington to get a
little smile, a nod, a shoulder brush, an acknowledgement from
Americans? They even tell Kashmiris that we will not survive, because
we are landlocked, as if through history, which we successfully
survived, we weren’t landlocked. (Are there no landlocked countries in
the world?) And when these arguments sound all speculative, they tell
us that Muslims in India will come under great threat from the
majority Hindus if Kashmir separates from India. And, in the same
breath they hasten to add that Indians are a tolerant, pluralist
nation.

Only in the end they tell us that we need to see the “harsh reality”
of India’s power. Well, this is an argument that is shorn of fake
sympathy for Kashmiris, of moral self-righteousness, and of the
supercilious concern for the viability of an independent Kashmir. This
is an argument, which one can grant a degree of objectivity, if not
morality. The argument that uses the rationale of India’s superior
military power against the logic of the Kashmiri struggle for freedom,
however, also lays bare the irreconcilable interests of the present
nature of the Indian state and those of the Kashmiri people. To that
question, however, we ask them, who more than Kashmiris has faced, and
knows about, the “harsh reality” of India’s power? According to their
argument it is clear that Kashmiris should live with the occupation,
if they must at all. Some even point out that gradually the
“perception” of military occupation will go away.

For instance, in a number of circles in India, it has falsely been
argued that killings happen in reaction to protests, rather than the
other way round. It is claimed that if protests were to stop, the
so-called “cycle of death” will stop as well—a thesis India’s prime
minister also delineated while asking Kashmiris to end protest. The
fact is that the killings, protest or no protest, are intimately tied
to the grating reality of the military occupation. This occupation,
which lets half a million military personnel, along with a chain-link
network of dark operatives of intelligence agencies, sit atop a
dissenting population as a force for suppressive pacification, has
uses for these regular killings. Regular killings, maiming, rapes and
molestations, random raids and arrests, merciless beatings, forced
labor, daily dishonor, are all employed to destroy our social bonds,
to pulverize our sense of self, to create utter disillusionment and
despondency, to demolish the basis for any claim to self-respect, and
ultimately to tear apart being political from being Kashmiri and
achieving the death of these feelings of belonging. Or better, kill
politics and turn us Kashmiris into artifacts of our presumed culture.
Is this in the Kashmiri national interest, one may ask those who
justify it all in the name of “Indian national interest”?

Occupation is a vicious process. It has gradually entered, and
continues to enter, all aspects of Kashmiri life. Mass protests are
outbursts, impassioned attempts to wriggle free. Freedom from this
occupation is not just an aspiration, a wish, or a longing for a
pipedream, but a desperate need. The struggle for life in Kashmir is
the struggle for freedom. The protests surely intensify the
occupation, but they also render the beast more visible, and easier to
grasp. Ending protest will definitely not end the occupation, only it
will be a sure, if slow route to a form of death down the road. The
liberal discourse covers up all the contradictions present in the
forced relations between India and Kashmir, and sells the dream of the
Great Indian Democracy, a dream which large number of Indians
themselves hardly believe in any more. This liberal discourse, which
is too close to power, doesn’t mediate between Kashmiris and the
Indian state. It is often just a face of the latter, even if a more
slippery one.