[Reader-list] "PM’s butt-numbing speech"

[Sanjay Kak]

Here is a piece that makes me want to retract all the nasty things
I've ever said about the Indian media, and its ways...
Enjoy!
Sanjay Kak
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PM’s butt-numbing speech

http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/columnists/pm%E2%80%99s-butt-numbing-speech/197921.html

Aditya Sinha

When I read the prime minister’s speech this week on Kashmir, I too
wanted to pick up a stone and hurl it at the government. Not because
the speech was, as with most of Manmohan Singh’s speeches,
butt-numbingly boring. Not because it was, as a Kashmiri facebook
friend put it, “the same old rhetoric”. It was because the prime
minister, being the head of the government of the second largest
population on the planet, speaks for that population with a certain
gravitas; and all that this well-respected mild-mannered academic
could think to do was offer the Kashmiris a bribe. It wasn’t an
original brainwave at that; prime ministers since Jawaharlal Nehru
have adopted bribery as their Kashmir policy. Kashmiris gave their
verdict on the speech by returning to stone-pelting. That boys are
picking up stones at the risk of catching a bullet (fired in warning)
with the middle of their foreheads tells you how hoary the
bribery-policy is. That youngsters continue to retaliate to bullets
with stones instead of crossing a hill and picking up an AK-47 tells
you a lot about self-restraint. If events during the past few weeks in
Kashmir weren’t so pessimism-inducing, one might say the boys were
Gandhians with stones.

Manmohan Singh — forgive me, I’ve lost too much respect for him to
address him as prime minister — is no orator and so it would be
unfair, after over 50 deaths of mostly students, to expect him to
reach out to the Kashmiris with a poem instead of blithely stating
that “I share the grief and sorrow” of every Kashmiri mother. His
predecessor was eminently capable of crystallising in a poem the
empathy that Kashmiris need to hear from the vast nation of India that
they now see as an occupying, totalitarian state. His predecessor
followed a political ideology but when it came to this very complex
issue, he became pragmatic in the way that statesmen do. Manmohan
Singh cannot be pragmatic. It’s not only because he is not a
politician (you merely need to take a hard look at Kashmir to see why
sneering at politics or politicians is always a lazy option); it’s not
only because his big political achievement during UPA-I, the Indo-US
civil nuclear deal, was the result not of political deal-making but of
strong-arm tactics; but it looks increasingly as if it is because
Manmohan Singh has no ideology. His party boss Sonia Gandhi is more
worthy because at least she publicly champions a left-of-centre
ideology. He champions none, other than perhaps the market.

The Kashmiris wouldn’t care a toss if Manmohan Singh had at least
hinted at the beginning of a political roadmap to sort out their
grievance. Instead, he made only one specific announcement, of the
constitution of an expert group to find jobs for Kashmiris, comprising
worthies like C Rangarajan, N R Narayana Murthy and Tarun Das. This is
laughable because it implies that the reason boys are on the streets
risking paramilitary bullets is because they don’t have jobs. It is
sad because Manmohan Singh is either unmindful or, worse, deliberately
ignoring the fact that Kashmiris with jobs — not just in the Valley
but outside as well — are among those on the streets. We can safely
say that the stone-pelting has nothing to do with employment
opportunities. This gives Manmohan Singh’s speech a sinister
character: for, by inference, it would appear that he has utter
disdain for the Kashmiri political aspiration.

He’s not alone in this disdain. An example of the avoidance of this
simple fact is what one former top espiocrat has written on the
protests: like many wonks who sit comfortably on their
butter-chicken-fed-backsides in the imperial capital, he ascribes the
stone-pelting to a well thought-out Pakistani policy; and further, he
blames Mufti Mohd Sayeed’s PDP for fanning the flames by pushing an
extreme autonomy position instead of swooning at Delhi’s
pseudo-autonomy promises (which are about as genuine as promises of
full employment or total eradication of poverty). Firstly, “well
thought-out Pakistan policy” is not just an oxymoron but a logical
impossibility. Secondly, the PDP is a political party that responds to
issues that through its cadres it recognises as relevant to its
people. A party that addresses issues relevant only to Rome does not
remain a relevant party for long. If a Tamil party invokes issues of
Tamil pride, a Kashmiri party will do the analogous. The PDP is not
being irresponsible — to its people. It knows that soft autonomy isn’t
going to cut it now. The only way to get people interested is to talk
hard autonomy. Give the PDP credit for at least keeping within the
mainstream, even if it doesn’t look that way to a bunch of North Block
whiz-kids.

You could defend Manmohan Singh saying that he has to be careful in
his speeches because as prime minister he has to represent all shades
of opinion and when it comes to Kashmir there are some very strong
views, particularly among the conservatives. These views are not new,
subtle or even well thought out: a corrosive former editor used to say
that India should keep the land and throw out all the Muslims. This
kind of thinking belies the general belief that Indians are an
intelligent race, inventors of the zero and masters of modern software
coding. The alarming part however is that Manmohan Singh is bullied by
this opinion. Again, it is strange that when it comes to a foreign
country, Pakistan, Manmohan Singh is willing to defy the BJP and try
out new things, to the extent of making concessions like he did at
Sharm-el-Sheikh, to the dismay of many Indians. And he has kept at it,
not looking over his shoulder at Indian public opinion, despite the
Pakistan Army’s obvious impatience to launch another terrorist strike
at India. Yet when it comes to Kashmir, which is supposedly an
inalienable part of our nation, Manmohan Singh is less than bold and
less than generous. It can only mean he is less than interested.

Besides making some of us want to pick up a few stones and hurl it at
Manmohan Singh, his lack of interest in sorting out Kashmir makes you
wonder why it fails to move him. One can only guess, but again why not
contrast him with his predecessor, who was actually keen on a
settlement. His predecessor was a political prime minister, worthy of
his office. This man is not. India deserves a better PM standing at
Red Fort on its 63rd Independence Day.

editorchief at expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express and is
based in Chennai.