[Reader-list] Azadi(Freedom) and swaraj( Self-Rule): Save the idea of India

[Bipin Trivedi]

Dear Gowhar,

Your suggestion perhaps to the Kashmir solution, will it not be one sided?

So, you believe that authority imposing curfew unnecessarily. If disturbance continued, curfew bound to be there. Concentrate to stop the disturbance or put pressure on separatists to stop the disturbance, curfew will be removed automatically. No one wants to put armed forces in civilian area willingly. So, let the protest end, military will leave from the civilian area. Put pressure to stop infiltration across the border and terrorism activity, armed forces will removed fully from the civilian area and restricted to border places only.

You said that Kashmiri leaders from the prisons should be released, again one sided suggestion? Are they ready to give affidavit that they will not involv in any separatists activity? 

Ruin in the valley? Who ruined it? It was not ruined by India or even common people of Kashmir. It is ruined by separatists of Kashmir involved in anti national activity supported by the rogue state, Pakistan.

Who are you to suggest to government about foreign affairs. Earlier many times government tried to talk in open manner with Kashmir separatist leaders, what was the result? Separatist insists Pakistan for joint talk reflects their malign intention. Why they want to include pak in talk? Who is pak to decide in our internal India matter?

You quote Gandhi and advised to learn India from Gandhi taught lessons. Do not forget that while pin pointing something, 3 fingers lean towards you. All the separatists and Pak have to learn lesson of ahimsa from Gandhi.

Thanks
Bipin Trivedi


-----Original Message-----
From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of gowhar fazli
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 6:55 AM
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Subject: [Reader-list] Azadi(Freedom) and swaraj( Self-Rule): Save the idea of India

Azadi(Freedom) and swaraj( Self-Rule): Save the idea of India
 
 A few things must happen in Kashmir before a political solution is found. There have to be public apologies and reparations from both the state and central governments for the deaths of civilians, particularly minors and women, in the summer of 2010. Curfew has to be lifted. Bereaved families have to be permitted peaceful, dignified and safe funerals for their dead. Orders to shoot-at-sight and fire live ammunition at protesters should be withdrawn with immediate effect. Representatives of the state government must show greater empathy for the people who elected them, especially by visiting the wounded in hospitals. 

A phased scale-back of paramilitary forces has to be announced, with numbers and dates, to be executed over the next three years, until eventually the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) may be repealed altogether and troops confined to border areas only. Policies that provide monetary incentives and fast-track promotions in counter-insurgency operations must be scrapped. 

Kashmiri leaders in prisons or under house arrest should be released and allowed to go about their business, including addressing public meetings, talking to the press, leading prayers at mosques and shrines, and entering into talks with the government. A timebound government-appointed commission of independent investigators needs to prepare a comprehensive report on the deaths, disappearances, unlawful detention, rapes and torture cases in Jammu and Kashmir, between 1990 and 2010, to be presented to the Indian Parliament. 

All of this is not just imperative for Kashmir to survive the immediate crisis — it is necessary for India too, to weather this storm. If Kashmir’s future is the primary responsibility of the people of Kashmir, then it is the responsibility of Indians to save the idea of India and bring it back from its near-total ruin in the Valley. One thing all players can agree on: the house has to be set in order without any reference whatsoever, in the first place, to third parties. 
After the Indian state and the people of Kashmir have taken these steps together , then comes the time to open up the issue for multilateral talks, with Pakistan , the UN, the US, and international humanitarian organisations. The process cannot reach the point of dialogue without an intensive period of soul-searching , homework and justice within the Indian Union. The Pakistanbacked militancy of the ’90s is in the past. Once India has established the rule of law to its utmost capacity, I am convinced it will have nothing to fear from any external agency. Kashmiris may still demand partial autonomy or complete secession, but that is a bridge to be crossed only after a bridge has been built. 

Talking about Gandhi in Kashmir (or in Maoist India) seems laughable. But Gandhi it was whom India listened to, when it fought hardest for its own decolonisation between 1920 and 1950. Throughout this time, the Mahatma tried to establish certain core ethical values for a new politics of swaraj. Among these were ideas that had a long history on the Indian subcontinent, such as ahimsa. We usually translate this as “non-violence”, but what Gandhi really meant was the moral courage necessary to relate to another person without the desire to harm him. 

THIS moral courage is difficult to achieve between any two persons, but it is hardest, and most essential, that ahimsa prevail in the relationship between adversaries, so Gandhi believed. He got the lesson of ahimsa, oddly enough, not from Asoka the Mauryan emperor of the 3rd century BC, who became a pacifist after causing great carnage , nor from Jain doctrine, which enshrines ahimsa as a key practice, but from the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna teaches Arjuna how to put up a good fight, without compromising his basic sense of morality and decency. 

But Gandhi also insisted on satya, the truth, enshrined in India’s national motto, satyameva jayate, “truth alone prevails” . In addition, he wanted India to recover its oldest tenets of ethical sovereignty : anukrosha, from the Ramayana , the capacity to feel another’s pain; aanrishamsya, from the Mahabharata, the elimination of cruelty from one’s conduct, which Yudhisthira recognised as the highest dharma, the norm-ofnorms , especially for a king. Gandhi sought not just political independence from British rule, but a truly liberating political culture, grounded in age-old ethical norms like non-violence , moral courage, non-cruelty , truthfulness and compassion. Without these values in place, he said, India would never be free, never have true swaraj. 
Most Indians have little sympathy for an independent Kashmiri nation. But an Indian mother would feel the pain of her Kashmiri counterpart whose teenage son was brutally killed while shouting slogans in a street demonstration. 
 
 
Ananya Vajpeyi 
Ph.D., University of Chicago (2004); M.Phil., University of Oxford (1996); Rhodes Scholar (1994-96)
Areas of Special Interest
 
Professor Vajpeyi teaches South Asian history, with a focus on caste, violence and non-violence, modernity, as well as nationalism and the state. She also teaches courses on imperialism, colonialism and decolonization in Asia and Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, she is interested in intellectual history and the comparative history of ideas in India and Europe.
Contact Information 

Office: McCormack 4-626
Phone:               617-287-6877         617-287-6877
E-mail: ananya.vajpeyi at umb.edu


      
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