[Reader-list] "Kashmir: a place of blood and memory" Nitasha Kaul

[Bipin Trivedi]

Nitasha Kaul says/writes, "The demand of the Kashmiri people is ‘Azaadi’. Freedom. Freedom to be themselves, to choose their national destiny. We are not Indians. We are Kashmiris. We have a history, a language, a culture that demands recognition."

OK. If agreed that few Kashmiri demands as above written, than we have to divide state since except valley people Jammu and Ladakh will not agree for division and prefer to stay with India only. So, those believe for azadi agreed to divide the state first? If no than forget your demand and if yes then India will prefer to give full independent including financial aspect. No financial aid can be provided from India once the freedom is given. However, after azadi you are free to take aids from Pak, US or anyone if its suits you like Pak to remain bagger.

In that case after few years of azadi, I am sure Kashmiri people will start reverse agitation and urge India to free from separatist. They will agitate to join fully with Indian continent and if it is happen what will separatists do? I am sure it will going to happen if azadi is given to Kashmiri.

Thanks
Bipin Trivedi



-----Original Message-----
From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of Sanjay Kak
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:01 PM
To: Sarai Reader List
Subject: [Reader-list] "Kashmir: a place of blood and memory" Nitasha Kaul

One of the exciting developments of this summer has been the explosion
of writing on Kashmir: along with the stones, we have been showered
with new voices. In place of the conditioned blather that we in India
have grown up with, there is a wide range of new positions and
approaches.
I'm posting this excellent piece by Nitasha Kaul, writer (and economist).
Since its long, I'm prefacing it with two excerpts. Just to whet your
appetite...
Best
Sanjay Kak

------------------------------

"Kashmir is not an ‘integral’ part of India. It is a disputed
integral, in fact, as I have argued, the Indian attitude to Kashmir
can only be understood in the wider context of the failed political,
economic, and social promises of post-colonial India. In the name of
‘national integration’, India is occupying a region against the will
of the people who live there. Kashmir is ‘integral’ only to the life
of Kashmiris....

-------------------------------

"The demand of the Kashmiri people is ‘Azaadi’. Freedom. Freedom to be
themselves, to choose their national destiny. We are not Indians. We
are Kashmiris. We have a history, a language, a culture that demands
recognition.
Instead of recognising this gut-wrenching, existential cry of the
Kashmiri people, the Indian state sends in more guns, more troops,
more rolls of barbed wire, more bribes, more bullets. When this does
not work and the Kashmiris scream ‘Go India Go’, they send in a
battery of words – Development, Employment, Infrastructure, Laws,
Training, Security, Curfew. The big words fall flat and disappear
without trace between the folds of the pheran, in the wrinkles on the
face, on the marks on the graves, and in the flow of Kashmiri blood.
Here’s a valid question to ask Indian political leaders, bureaucrats,
army chiefs, right-wing extremists, the ignorant layperson: Are you
blind? Can you not see that we want a recognition of our identity as a
people?
Burn your Bollywood movies. Come to Kashmir. Walk through our cities.
The bridges. The ruins. The graves. Look at what we eat. Look at our
buildings. Our shrines. Our architecture. Our speech. Our history.
Speak to us. See how we live. We are not you. We have never been you.
We don’t want to be you."

------------------------------

http://www.opendemocracy.net/nitasha-kaul/kashmir-from-contact-zone-to-conflict-zone#comment-535383

Kashmir: a place of blood and memory
Nitasha Kaul, 31 August 2010

In attempting to suffocate a separate Kashmiri identity, India reveals
the cracks in its own idea of nationhood, argues Nitasha Kaul.

About the author
Dr Nitasha Kaul is an economist and a writer.

When you try to locate the territory of Kashmir on a world map, you
will find it partitioned into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK, called
‘Azaad Kashmir’ and ‘Northern Areas’,  in Pakistan), India Occupied
Kashmir (IOK, called ‘Jammu and Kashmir’ including ‘Ladakh’, in
India), and areas such as Aksai Chin and Shaksam Valley under Chinese
control (part of ‘Xinjiang autonomous region’ in China).Partitioned
Kashmir, courtesy of Wikimedia

Yet, even as it is devoured by the big states that surround it,
Kashmir cannot be understood through the simplistic framing of ‘India
versus Pakistan’, ‘Hindu versus Muslim’, or ‘China allied with
Pakistan versus India’. Instead, see Kashmir as a vital link in the
Himalayan mountain chain; a historic part of the Silk Route, that is
now a violent battleground. Why? Because people in none of these three
regions identify themselves as primarily and ‘above all’ Pakistani,
Indian, or Chinese. Neither should they be forced to.

Cartography might lie, but topography and cultural geography does not.
Kashmir is not India. Kashmir is not Pakistan. Kashmir is not China.
Kashmir is the boundary zone of India-China-Pakistan. But it is
distinctively Kashmir. And its people – whatever their religion or
national identity – are Kashmiris. In the guise of crude nationalist
narratives peddled by the surrounding post-colonial states for
internal politicking and international leverage, their history is
being stolen from the Kashmiri people. Wherever in Kashmir they are,
their options boil down to bullets or ballots – bullets if they
protest being co-opted into the big country which is not their
homeland, and ballots if they agree to being co-opted into the big
country which is not their homeland. How can a Kashmiri live under
this perpetual erasure of his or her identity? The same way that every
colonised people has survived through the ages: by interpretation and
by insurrection. Interpretations enable a re-understanding of the
identity choices available to a person, and insurrections allow a
collectivity to challenge unjust dominance by force.

In the last years, regions of the POK saw nationalist Kashmiri
protests against Pakistan (for example, in Muzzafarabad in December
2009), and, at the moment, nationalist Kashmiris in IOK are witnessing
a harsh repression at the hands of Indian security forces; on average
a person a day has been killed in the last two months since June 2010,
nearly half of them have been teenagers (my focus is IOK, in
particular the ongoing brutality in the Kashmir Valley, and the
various erasures of blood and memory that surround it). Some in IOK
give rallying cries in support of POK (‘Muzzafarabad Chalo’), and in
turn others in POK warn that they will cross over to ‘help their
brothers in IOK’. Moreover, even during periods of so-called
‘normalcy’, people in both POK (some being Shia ethnic minority in
Sunni-majority areas) and in IOK (being a Muslim majority region in a
Hindu-majority India) often live with severe restrictions on their
freedom and face multiple levels of discrimination. No wonder
Kashmiris who live under occupation feel a solidarity for their kind
across the boundary lines.

The story of the mountain-peoples of Eurasia is, by and large, a
tragedy. Run your index finger on the multi-coloured land surface of a
modern day political world map, and you will see how many ‘problem
areas’ (some states, some sub-state entities, some overlapping zones
of displaced peoples) – Tibet, Kashmir, North Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria – were thriving zones of
contact between diverse communities that traded goods and exchanged
ideas along the arteries of the ‘Silk Route’. Like many of these other
places, Kashmir, a Himalayan zone of contact between diverse peoples
in history, has become a zone of conflict, due in large measure to
modern boundary-making processes which evolved to accommodate economic
privileges and political trade-offs with rivals that were necessary
for European (especially British) colonisation of the region.

Genesis of the ‘Mandarin-Machiavelli interaction’

Empires of the ancient world had a fluid notion of boundaries. In
parts of the Himalayas especially, there were multiple systems of
power transmission – these ranged from marriages to tributes to
reincarnations. The idea of people owing an overarching allegiance to
a national identity (over religious, ethnic or other forms of
affiliation) is a relatively modern construct. The British Empire in
south Asia was nitpicky and dissonant, it was an empire run by a
democracy, that expanded by median diplomacy, strategic but grounded
thinking, conceptual reconstruction, and accounting, as much as it did
by force. Unlike the earlier rulers who came from central Asia, the
British operated primarily on the dual bases of economic rationality
and assumed moral superiority. They often drew lines on maps
opportunistically, and in time, these ‘boundaries’ would get
transformed into ‘frontiers’.

In the case of the Himalayan mountains, the British never saw much
advantage in direct control (they calculated that the administrative,
policing, transportation costs were too high and the returns not
worthwhile when compared to the fertile and bustling plains) and
preferred, instead, to follow a stated policy of “controlling the
hills from the plains”. In order to do this, the administration at the
centre needed to depend on local elites in the peripheral regions. So,
the system was set up during colonial times – the bureaucrats at the
centre would be the administrators and policy makers and they would
cultivate local aristocratic, political and business elites in the
peripheral regions. Often, they would patronise rival elites in a
peripheral region and ‘activate’ their influence as and when required.
In the middle of the twentieth century when the British formally left,
the post-colonial Asian states inherited this mindset and this system
of governance. To this day, the Indian state manages its peripheries
in this way. Both Kashmir and the ‘North-East’ are examples.

Why does this matter? Because it sets up structures of power and
responsibility that do not overlap meaningfully. The bureaucrats and
politicians at the centre do not have direct interaction with the
regions; their interest is only to have a ‘reliable’ power base in the
periphery. Equally, the local elites in the periphery exaggerate
reports of their influence over ‘their’ people in order to gain
maximum advantage from the centre. This pattern of (what I would call)
Mandarin-Machiavelli interaction has characterised the relationship of
India with Kashmir (or rather of New Delhi with Srinagar). Neither the
centre nor the periphery has any interest in being genuinely concerned
about the people in whose name they wield power and exercise
authority. What is more, in such a scenario, there is enormous
potential of corruption as long as it doesn’t harm the ruling
interests of both ends of the chain, and any dissent will only be
tolerated if it can be channeled for political gains. Otherwise, those
dissenting or seeking change will be punished and brutalised. This is
exactly what is happening in IOK today.
Kashmir as India’s disputed ‘integral'

IOK (‘India occupied Kashmir’, called ‘Jammu and Kashmir’, including
‘Ladakh’, in India) has never been an indisputable part of India.
Paradoxically, presenting this historical fact invariably causes most
Indians to assert even more vigorously that Kashmir is an ‘integral’
part of India. Why? Why is Kashmir so fundamental to the Indian
psyche?

The average Indian insists that Kashmir is an indisputable part of
India to be held by force when necessary in the same way that the
Indian state insists that Kashmir is an ‘integral’ part of India while
occupying it by military means. Indians and the Indian state find it
necessary to repeatedly state this because they know that Kashmir is
not actually an indisputable part of India and this galls them.

It is no coincidence that Kashmir and the North-East were two of the
least involved regions during the nationalist freedom struggle which
led to India’s independence, and it is these regions which have
remained least understood in the mainstream nationalist imagination.
In Kashmir, for example, in the 1930s and 1940s, it was the Kashmiri
Nationalists (led by Sheikh Abdullah) and the Kashmiri Communists
(both Hindu and Muslim) who shaped the pre-1947 political landscape by
their opposition to princely rule (of the unrepresentative Dogra
monarch); integration with India was an ‘unintended consequence’ of
their progressivist leanings. With time, their faith in India was
rudely jolted – independent India came to fear two things most –
Muslims and communists (Kashmir had both).

This way Kashmir is viewed in the mainstream Indian imagination is
linked to the wider evolution of Indian self-perception in the decades
after independence and more specifically to the quantum shift in the
political and economic structure of Indian society in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.

The Indian nation that had been born (from a partition) with
idealistic anti-colonial promises saw its first national event in the
assassination of its biggest moral voice – Mahatma Gandhi – at the
hands of a Hindu fanatical extremist. The successive decades saw an
undoing of the social, political, economic, and moral ideals which had
motivated the people in their anti-colonial independence struggle. The
two biggest, and significantly reactionary, transformations that India
has seen since its independence became most visible in the late 1980s
and early 1990s – the rise of economic and religious fundamentalism –
neo-liberalism and Hindutva. From the late 1940s to late 1980s (with
the exception of the rather telling ‘Emergency period’ and its
aftermath), electoral politics in India was dominated by the
traditional elites. Within such a system, there was a continued
‘capture’ of the Indian state by the privileged, the only route into
the political imagination left for others was through asserting
‘identity politics’ (especially caste-based identities, as in the case
of the BSP or Bahujan Samaj party, and the Mayawati – their leader –
phenomenon).

The founding myth of the post-colonial Indian state was that of a
‘sovereign democratic republic’ (original preamble to the Indian
constitution) and it was later amended to become, ‘sovereign socialist
secular democratic republic’. The same amendment  (the 42nd amendment
to the Indian Constitution in 1976) that added the words ‘socialist’
and ‘secular’, also inserted the word ‘integrity’ in addition to the
‘unity’ originally mentioned; the changed preamble went from ‘unity of
the nation’ to ‘unity and integrity of the nation’. It is of crucial
importance that the labels confirming India as ‘socialist’ and
‘secular’, and the pledge for ‘integrity’ came about in 1976 during
the Emergency era (1975-1977) which witnessed a general curtailment of
the freedoms of most ordinary Indians, especially those such as
religious minorities and the economically deprived. In other words, by
the 1970s, India’s founding myths were already severely challenged,
and therefore needed to be proclaimed as an exercise in
self-justification. There was discrimination against religious
minorities (for example, as an unstated rule, Muslims were never
placed in ‘sensitive’ government positions – not that this has gone
away – click here for a recent report that state-run banks in India
routinely turn away Muslims), hence India needed to call itself
‘secular’. There was growing inequality and continued widespread
poverty, hence India needed to call itself ‘socialist’. There was
justified alienation in various parts of the country due to ignorance
and corrupt misgovernance enabled by the Mandarin-Machiavelli
relations (and the ‘integrity’ of India’s neighbour Pakistan had been
challenged with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971), hence India’s
‘integrity’ needed to be affirmed.

>From 1947 onwards, post-colonial India saw itself as an inheritor of
the British imperial mantle in the region. Indian leadership, while
aware of the negative legacies of the empire, also inherited its
realpolitik attitudes, which were made worse by a euphoria of emergent
nationalism and self-righteousness. The regime had changed but the
processes had simply replaced foreign elites with a home-grown
indigenous elite (for example, a significant number of rulers from the
erstwhile princely states were appointed as bureaucrats, ambassadors,
policy-makers). Add to which there was the personality cult of Nehru
whose personal friendships, affiliations, and dispositions could brook
little opposition and loomed large on the decision-making processes in
a democratic state. In the subsequent decades, notwithstanding the
official non-aligned third-worldist stance, India’s political
priorities – national and international – were shaped by its close
relations with the old and new imperial powers. An entrenched (often
English-speaking, Brahminical, Hindu) elite thrived domestically,
India began to be seen as a regional hegemon, relations with
neighbours (China, Pakistan) rapidly deteriorated, and electoral
politics became a game of patronage.

In the years following independence, India refused to negotiate with
China on the boundary issue (while simultaneously following a
less-than-pragmatic policy on Tibet), pursued an ill-advised ‘forward
policy’ in NEFA (North East Frontier Areas), and Nehru – a Kashmiri
himself and fond of Kashmir; Kashmir was special – promised Kashmiris
a plebiscite to determine their future.

In the middle of the twentieth century, my grandfather, then a young
man, stood among the crowd at Lal Chowk in the centre of Srinagar
(capital of IOK) listening to the Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar
Lal Nehru make a rousing speech to the people of Kashmir - ‘Kashmir ke
log koi bhhed-bakri nahin hain ki hamne kaha yahaan chalo ya wahaan
chalo’ (the people of Kashmir can’t be led like goat or sheep in one
direction or the other) – in which he promised them a choice to
determine their identity, specifically a plebiscite to determine their
own future. In later years, my grandfather would often recall those
words of Nehru apologetically (recently he passed away and I went
again to Srinagar to mourn for him in his birthplace, the land of my
lost memories). This Nehruvian promise came to naught as India’s
stance on Kashmir became ever more legalistic.

As for India’s claim that Kashmir is ‘integral’ to India to confirm
its secular credentials (being the only Muslim majority state in a
Hindu majority India): what an irony, since India’s secular
credentials (being an afterthought as the ‘Emergency’ time amendment
shows) were not ‘integral’ to the Indian state at its founding!

Internationally, the Indian state has thrived by trading on its
publicised self-image as democratic, secular, and peaceful. The
comparison has always been with neighbours like China and Pakistan -
one communist, the other theocratic (to the wider western world,
nothing could be worse than someone who is a ‘Commie’ or ‘Islamic’).
The world at large has been fooled for too long by the articulate, if
not argumentative, Indian upper-class governmental and corporate elite
and their publicity machines. So successful is this illusion about
India, that the world media consistently under-reports the Indian
state’s brutality when it comes to Naxalites, the ‘North East’ (the
only part of the country which is referred to by geographical
co-ordinates; a telling synecdochic use of the generic term ‘north
east’ to refer to one or all of the seven different states together),
and always, Kashmir.

India is demographically a Hindu majority state, and for all its talk
of ‘unity in diversity’, it is intolerant towards its minorities. That
discrimination and intolerance flourishes in Pakistan or China or the
West is no justification for ignoring this fact in India. For
instance, there is a violent ongoing repression of the tribals, there
is recurrent and extreme state brutality in Kashmir, there have been
orchestrated pogroms against the Muslims (Gujarat 2002), violence
against the Sikhs (Delhi 1984), the Christians (Orissa 2007-08), add
to which, there is a constant ongoing broad-ranging discrimination
against people in terms of their religion, caste, class, gender,
sexuality. Of course, India is democratic, secular, and peaceful,
except when it needs to suppress those that don’t look like mainstream
Indians (the Hindus) - these ‘others’ include its tribal and
indigenous people, ‘lower’ castes, its minorities, its ‘north eastern’
peoples (ethnically different, they are derisively referred to as
‘Chinks’, often confused for Chinese in the main metropolises, and
seen as different and separate), and Muslims. The people who fit
India’s self-narrative best are affluent Hindus.

Today, India wishes to be recognised as a ‘superpower-in-waiting’, yet
like other superpowers (to wit, the USA) it is rotting from within.
After the end of the Cold War, both the blatant privatisation
(euphemistically called ‘liberalisation’) of the Indian economy, and
the overt  ‘Hinduisation’ of Indian polity (rise of right-wing parties
like the BJP) came to full flowering in the 1990s; together this
created an intolerant and unholy consensus in the arenas of politics
and economics. Today, both the main national parties – Congress and
BJP – converge on the ‘free-market’ economic fundamentals and the
political space is given over to divisive ‘vote-bank’ driven identity
politics. Over time, this has resulted in greater inequality, more
deprivation, and a disenfranchisement of large sections of the
country, but it has been politically profitable for those who
instigated these changes. The Hinduising, reactionary BJP came to
power spreading its message of bigotry, and the Congress leader with a
carefully maintained image who engineered the neoliberal restructuring
of the country (as the finance minister) in the early 1990s, is the
prime minister of the country today. In his recent remarks, he
(bizarrely) used the public reaction to his budget in 1991 as a
counter to the criticism of his Nuclear Bill in 2010.

In so many regions and in so many ways, the project and vision of
postcolonial India is coming apart at the seams. The same-old routine
use of the narrative of ‘national integration’ and ‘outside
infiltration’ (Pakistani trained terrorists in Kashmir, China-trained
Maoists in Eastern India) cannot inoculate a country that is failing
its people economically, politically and socially.

The Indian political class is superbly corrupt. Entry into politics is
seen as a route for upward class mobility by enabling wealth
accumulation; generally only the sons and scions of those with
pre-existing political connexions rise through the ranks, unless one
is a goon with a criminal record! Indian bureaucracy has a reputation
for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian
bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious, unwilling to learn or
exchange ideas from any but the most hawkish and pro-establishment
intellectuals. The large swathes of Indian middle classes are stuffed
with intolerance, unthinking mass entertainment, and over consumption
– fed by a corporatised media that ‘manufactures consent’ in a
textbook Chomsky way. The mix of ignorance and blustery
self-confidence that one encounters in middle-class Indians rivals
Americans (they share this ‘superpower’ trait!). All of the above – a
corrupt political class, a smug bureaucracy, an unthinking and avidly
consuming middle class – makes India a wonderful ‘market’ globally.
This is the reason why the world keeps silent when the Indian state
commits or abets violent atrocities, both inside its boundaries and
outside.

In such an environment, proper political consciousness is rare. Indian
people are fed the ‘national integration’ mantra and they lap it up,
unable to perceive the way in which people such as the Kashmiris are
being dehumanised. The average middle-class Indian (who grows up
learning in history and geography books at school about everywhere in
the world except for the countries that are India’s neighbours) is
intolerant of Pakistan, suspicious of China, unwilling to commingle
with Muslims or ‘lower castes’, and willfully blind to the poverty
that surrounds them – s/he is focused on making money, spending money,
and occasionally, redemption through self-help. Kashmir is a distant
nightmare for them.

Indian politicians ultimately don’t care for Kashmir. When the
situation looks extremely grim, as now, they make a few statements, a
few changes happen at the state level, a few lies are spun, and some
schemes are floated to keep public opinion on board. The leadership
is, by turns and at different levels, dull, corrupt, and lacking in
morals.

Most importantly, the compulsions of India’s domestic politics ensure
that there is no real potential for dialogue and understanding on
Kashmir. The entrenched national narrative is so strong that any move
forward is seized by the opposition as ‘compromise’ and ‘betrayal’.
Given the circumstances, even the most measly statement made by
government representatives that recognises any problem in Kashmir or
questions the Hindu right-wing is challenged by the xenophobic
intolerant right-wing politicians (BJP and their ilk) and exploited
for political gain ( e.g. the BJP asking the Home Minister to
apologise for commenting on ‘saffron terror’/Hindu right-wing
extremism, and the BJP challenging the PM for his statement on
autonomy for Kashmir).

What is more, India’s political, military and bureaucratic interests
in Kashmir are not coherently aligned, and are subject to the varying
intensity and profitability of India’s strategic international
alliances. The strength and honesty of political will of the Indian
government on Kashmir then becomes a pawn in line with India’s
interests in Afghanistan, and in turn hostage to US policy on ‘AfPak’.

Finally, India’s defence sector is rapidly modernising and therefore
internationally very lucrative at the moment. At the same time, there
is an excessive use of force in the occupation of Kashmir. Such
conflict then unleashes its own perverse incentives such as the
increased expenditure on arms and debilitates the initiatives for
peace. In any case, the militarisation of security in India is a
dangerous development for the dehumanising violence it enables (some
Indian military tactics in Kashmir are excessive even for the Israeli
IDF!).

Kashmir is not an ‘integral’ part of India. It is a disputed integral,
in fact, as I have argued, the Indian attitude to Kashmir can only be
understood in the wider context of the failed political, economic, and
social promises of post-colonial India. In the name of ‘national
integration’, India is occupying a region against the will of the
people who live there. Kashmir is ‘integral’ only to the life of
Kashmiris.
The tragedy of Kashmir

Having a historical legacy as a sacred site of early Himalayan
Buddhism, Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state in a Hindu-majority
India at the time of India's independence from the British; through
most of the last millennium, it was variously ruled by central and
west Asian originating Mughal-Afghan dynasties. In the nineteenth
century, it was ruled by Sikhs from whom the British acquired it and
sold it on to a Hindu Dogra King. As a people of the mountains who had
been bartered by the British, Kashmiris were aware of the oppression
they faced. The distinctive identity of Kashmir was shaped by multiple
influences and rulerships. Kashmir’s history is a knot of contested
interpretations made worse by ignorance.

The biggest myth of recent times is that of seeing Kashmir
historically in terms of Muslims versus Hindus, instead of Muslims and
Hindus.

Kashmiris did not see themselves in these terms until they were
classified as such by the political games of the later part of the
twentieth century. The centuries-old tradition of ‘Kashmiriyat’ bears
testimony to the identity of Kashmiris as a people who did not let
their religious affiliations overwhelm their ethnic and regional
commonality. Contemporary Hindu religious extremists/activists often
try to extrapolate selective facts from Kashmir’s rich history to push
their communal case – citing especially the forced conversions to
Islam (click here for a scholarly contradiction of this claim, notable
because it is written by a Kashmiri Hindu, so it defies assumed
communal viewpoint in this regard), and the 1989 exodus of Kashmiri
Pandits (minority Hindus) from the Valley as having been forced by
Kashmiri Muslims.

Kashmiris were a people who were somehow ‘bargained’ into nationhood
when the British left the region. From mid-nineteenth century onwards,
the practice of statecraft and governance came to be tied closely to
statistics, enumeration and classification (the first census in UK was
carried out in 1800s). In the colonies too, the British tried to
stabilise and centralise channels of power by classifying their
subjects and dealing with them in terms of race, genetic stock,
community leaders, and religion. Hindus and Muslims were two important
lenses through which people were perceived, roused, and then divided
during partition. In the case of Kashmir, this British formula was
messed-up – the Muslims were the majority in Kashmir, but the ruler
(Hari Singh) was not Muslim, Indian Prime Minister Nehru was Kashmiri
Hindu but close to Sheikh Abdullah, the most prominent Kashmiri
leader, a Muslim. Plus, the entire Himalayas, including Kashmir, had
been constructed as a strategic geopolitical buffer in the imperial
trajectory till then; the ‘Great Game’ was a kind of proto-Cold War.
When India and Pakistan were being carved up, Kashmir was coveted on
either side (this manic struggle over possessing Kashmir has led to
multiple wars – 1947, 1965, 1999 – between India and Pakistan – both
of whom use Kashmir as a propaganda pawn for their opportunistic and
hypocritical purposes – and a continued boundary stalemate, including
over the unpopulated Aksai-Chin area, between India and China).

In so many ways, Kashmir was ‘special’. The Kashmiri political voice
and consciousness was different from that of the rest of India. The
Kashmiris of an earlier generation – up until the 1980s – saw
themselves as ‘Kashmiris’, in spite of everything. Kashmiris as a
people have historically shared language, mannerisms, speech
inflections, customs and even some festivals (such as the springtime
‘Badaamwari’). Today, very little understanding of this commonality
remains. Why?

Because mainstream India (and Pakistan) never understood Kashmir nor
cared for Kashmiri people.

When Pakistan and India came into being, Kashmir was attacked by one
side to obtain it by force and its unrepresentative ruler was forced
by the other side to sign an ‘instrument of accession’ as a condition
of providing help in repelling the attack. Where were the Kashmiri
people’s aspirations accounted for in all of this? In India, they were
promised self-determination but over the successive decades witnessed
a tug of war between the centre and periphery during which governments
in Srinagar were removed from power, puppets were installed, and
elections were rigged. India saw the people of Kashmir as inherently
‘alien’ and ‘untrustworthy’, somehow always already ‘tainted’.

The progressivist aspirations of Kashmir’s leaders and their openly
communist leanings from the 1930s onwards did not help either when it
came to the fast-polarising ideological alliances between states in
the Cold War era (various other larger factors were salient in this
framing also, such as the Dalai Lama’s exile to India, ZA Bhutto
forging the alliance with communist China). The Communists of Kashmir
had surnames that were both Hindu and Muslim. The intellectuals of
Kashmir had vivid memories of pre-independence Lahore, a centre of
gravity in those times. But, most people in India have never heard of
Kashmir and communism together in the same sentence[1]. The currently
evolving Chinese stance on Kashmir (China denied a visa in August 2010
to an Indian general posted in Kashmir) is news only to someone who
doesn’t know of Sheikh Abdullah meeting Chou-en-Lai in Algiers in
1967.

Those non-Kashmiri Indians who spew hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric today
and claim Kashmir as an undying part of India, do they know of one
festival or tradition of Kashmiri Hindus, let alone of Kashmiri
Muslims? But, why speak of festivals. Ask the average Indian what
happened in Kashmir in the late 1980s. Some might know about the
exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from the Valley from 1989 onwards (only
some, for mainstream India does not actually care for Kashmiris,
either Hindu or Muslim, they care for their own existential need to
control and possess Kashmir), but they are unlikely to know about the
elections of 1987, by which time India was acting desperate, rigged to
prevent the Kashmiri people from electing anyone but those ‘approved’
by New Delhi. Every grievance of the Kashmiri people (who are majority
Muslim) was seen through the anti-national lens. Is it any surprise
then that some of those Kashmiri Muslims, frustrated and pigeonholed
by India for decades, actually turned to radical political Islam,
given the role of the Pakistani ISI, the wider dynamics of the closing
Cold War (like Muslims everywhere else, Kashmiris too were/are
affected by radical political Islam, which in many parts of the world
was deliberately encouraged by the West as a counter to communist
‘red’ threat), and the Afghan and central Asian scenario at the time?

In the 1980s, radical Islamism rose in Kashmir. But let us not forget
the figure of Jagmohan, the governor of Kashmir in the 1980s
(1984-1989, again in 1990) who played a prominent (though not
exclusive) role in instigating the departure of Kashmiri Hindus from
the Valley. A communal right-wing Hindu who later joined the BJP, he
was the representative of the centre in Muslim majority Kashmir in
these turbulent years which included the 1987 election rigging[2].
Much more needs to be written about his terrible tenure in Kashmir in
the 1980s.

Still, as Pankaj Mishra details, “Jagmohan’s pro-Hindu policies in
Kashmir, and the lack of economic opportunities for educated Muslim
Kashmiris, drove many Kashmiri youth to support Islamist parties that
were gaining influence in the state”. These Islamist parties were
“helped by the growth of madrassas, the privately owned theology
schools which were often run by Muslims from Assam in eastern India,
over a thousand miles away, where mass killings of Muslims in the
early Eighties had forced their migration to Kashmir”. During
Jagmohan’s tenure there, the elected government of Kashmir was
dismissed twice, the number of Muslims being recruited in government
service went down, non-Muslims were encouraged to work in Kashmir;
also he sought to impose “a peculiarly Hindu modernity” on the state,
permitting unrestricted sale of alcohol but forbidding Muslims to
slaughter sheep on a Hindu festival day (see Pankaj Mishra, 'The birth
of a nation', The New York Review of Books). Jagmohan was removed in
1989, but reappointed in 1990 (at which the state government resigned
in protest) to govern Kashmir directly under central rule and deal
with the militants. In her analysis of ‘Kashmir and International Law:
how war crimes fuel the conflict’, Patricia Grossman writes, “In
response to widespread threats and targeted attacks and killings by
militant groups, many Hindus had fled. Jagmohan’s government
ultimately assisted some 90,000 Hindus in leaving the Kashmir Valley
for camps in Jammu and New Delhi”. What of those Kashmiris (mostly
Muslim) who remained in the Valley? Grossman documents, “In the weeks
that followed, Indian army and security forces opened fire repeatedly
on unarmed protesters, in some cases shooting to kill wounded
prisoners. These killings constituted a serious violation of
international humanitarian law. Foreign journalists were expelled from
Kashmir for several months, and new laws enacted granting the security
forces increased powers, limiting defendants’ rights, imposing
restrictions on public gatherings, and prohibiting virtual any public
expression of dissent”.

Many Kashmiris (and others in India; Sanghvi, the reviewer of
Jagmohan’s book – see link above – disparagingly calls them ‘secular
journos’) believe that he envisaged a ‘total solution’ for Kashmir,
and the reason he aided the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus was because he
planned to isolate the Kashmiri Muslims from the Kashmiri Hindus and
then ‘deal’ with them by violent means.

In a way that has come to pass. In a more fundamental way than
theocratic Islamic Pakistan could ever do with all its cross border
airwave propaganda and infiltration, a democratic India with its
bungling Hinduised outlook has managed to convert Kashmir into a sorry
communal battleground. The proliferation of the politics of hate has
meant that the rise of Hindutva in India has been mirrored by the
growth of Islamism in Kashmir.

The Kashmiris are alienated evermore each day. In the last two
decades, the Kashmiri psyche has been surgically cleaved into Kashmiri
Hindus and Kashmiri Muslims. An entire generation of Kashmiri Hindus
have grown up outside Kashmir in India where they have learnt to
identify themselves as ‘Hindus’ before Kashmiris, in accordance with
the right-wing Hindu sentiment of mainstream India. This generation of
young people is a recruiting ground for Hindu extremists for the RSS,
VHP, BJP and the kind. Their justified nostalgia for their homeland is
condensed into narratives of anti-Muslim hate which can be exploited
for political vote gain. Equally, an entire generation of Kashmiri
Muslims have grown up inside Kashmir where they have learnt to
identify themselves as ‘Muslims’ before calling themselves Kashmiris
in the environment of militancy and a brutal Indian military
occupation who view them only as latent Islamic fundamentalists. Their
justified aspirations of life and livelihood are daily denied by lack
of representation and discrimination. In their imagination, Kashmiri
Hindus are a traitorous pro-Indian minority, linked to the oppressive
Hindu Indian majority. Often, even the Valley leaders who supposedly
represent them are self-serving, corrupt, and manipulate their
sentiments for political gain.

This two-fold absence – Kashmiri  Hindus whose memory is wiped clean
of Kashmiri Muslims as being Kashmiris and who have had to strike
roots outside their homeland and adapt to mainstream India, and
Kashmiri Muslims who have lived under militancy and an Indian military
occupation without the memory of Kashmiri Hindus being Kashmiris and
who are tired of being scapegoated for machinations beyond their
control – is the grafting of a virtual partition of Kashmir’s history
and identity.

Until the 1980s, a Kashmiri – Hindu or Muslim – might say, we the
people of Kashmir, do not belong to India, we are Kashmiri. Beyond the
Banihal tunnel (Jawahar tunnel) was the land of Lipton tea, not Mogul
chai. India was an ‘other’ to a Kashmiri as much as a Kashmiri was an
‘other’ to an Indian. Now, a Kashmiri will, in all probability, speak
in line with their location and their precise suffering will
systematically depend on their experience of where they spent the last
two decades – within the Valley or outside it.

The sheer toll on Kashmiri people has been staggering. Over 100,000
Kashmiri Hindus left their homeland, several hundred were killed,
numberless young people have grown up in refugee camps. Especially for
those who were poor and from rural areas of Kashmir, it has been a
journey of ruin and devastation. Having lost home and homeland, living
on handouts in the festering, sweltering chaos of refugee camps in
India, peddling wares, being discriminated against, they have no
political voice other than the high-pitched shrill of the right-wing
Hindu leaders. The Indian state consistently downplays their situation
and thus helps to channel their frustrations into Hindu extremism by
having no vision for their future, ignoring their specific plight on
the one hand, and by being generally Islamophobic, on the other.

The arithmetic gets really, truly miserable when it comes to the
Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley. Their tragedy is to live their life
under constant threat of militancy and an Indian military occupation
of anywhere between tens to hundreds of thousands security personnel
(and India being a big lucrative market that is ‘secular democratic’
and not Islamic, the world is happy to turn a blind eye to what
happens in Kashmir). Since 1989, over 60,000 people in Kashmir have
been killed, over 7,000 have gone missing, several hundred thousand
have been maimed, tortured,  and psychologically damaged. In addition,
there are thousands of unmarked graves, thousands of women have been
raped, tens of thousands widowed and children orphaned. In the crazy
count of violence, numbers lose meaning. The atrocities – murders,
rapes, torture, extra-judicial killings, forced disappearances –
committed by the Indian security forces in Kashmir are not
investigated properly (as in the recent Shopian rape case of 2009).

There are currently existing draconian laws, such as the Armed Forces
(Jammu & Kashmir) Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which was applied in
Kashmir in 1990 (click here to read about political violence in
Kashmir and AFSPA and here for reading on the genesis of the AFSPA
from the 1950s in India’s ‘North East’). This act gives the armed
forces carte blanche powers to search, arrest, and shoot people with
immunity (something that the army often does with impunity in the
‘disturbed’ areas). The people living in Kashmir for the last two
decades have only seen the inhuman face of an occupying force which
degrades and kills people if they dare to raise their voice, which
rapes women, kills young boys, kills beggars in fake encounters. Under
such circumstances, it is the paramount duty of mainstream Indians to
stand up and be counted, to convey the message to the Indian
government that such atrocities cannot and should not be committed in
their name.

Instead of rabid anti-Muslim hate-mongering and chanting how Kashmir
is ‘integral’ to India (which can only produce mirror responses of
hard-line intolerant Islamist ideologues inside the Kashmir Valley),
the non-Kashmiri Indians have a duty to recognise the rights of
Kashmiris as a people. Yes, the Kashmiri Hindus had to leave their
homeland, but how will the perpetuation of violence and hatred help
their cause?

Kashmiri Hindus themselves have been used as pawns by the Indian
state. Their story is one of a small but educated and comparatively
elite, affluent minority in a Muslim-majority state who had close
connections with the Indian establishment and were always targeted and
cultivated by Indian intelligence machinery as agents of RAW (Research
and Analysis Wing), IB (Intelligence Bureau) and the Indian state.
Such machinations over the decades since independence have only served
to widen the gulf between Kashmiri Hindus and Kashmiri Muslims.

The Indian state has failed both Kashmiri Hindus and Kashmiri Muslims,
failing to account for the aspirations of both communities; it has
however, succeeded in dividing them in a fundamental (hopefully not
irreversible) way. The tragedies of Kashmir are under-reported in
India and treacherously ignored worldwide.
What Kashmiris want

Since the late 1980s, Kashmir has been a war zone. Successive Indian
governments have let Kashmiris down. In its negotiations with the
leaders of Kashmir, India has been more willing to recognise the
‘politics of their struggle’ (who represents what voice, can be played
off against whom to what effect) as opposed to their essential
‘political struggle’.

The demand of the Kashmiri people is ‘Azaadi’. Freedom. Freedom to be
themselves, to choose their national destiny. We are not Indians. We
are Kashmiris. We have a history, a language, a culture that demands
recognition.

Instead of recognising this gut-wrenching, existential cry of the
Kashmiri people, the Indian state sends in more guns, more troops,
more rolls of barbed wire, more bribes, more bullets. When this does
not work and the Kashmiris scream ‘Go India Go’, they send in a
battery of words – Development, Employment, Infrastructure, Laws,
Training, Security, Curfew. The big words fall flat and disappear
without trace between the folds of the pheran, in the wrinkles on the
face, on the marks on the graves, and in the flow of Kashmiri blood.

Here’s a valid question to ask Indian political leaders, bureaucrats,
army chiefs, right-wing extremists, the ignorant layperson: Are you
blind? Can you not see that we want a recognition of our identity as a
people?

Burn your Bollywood movies. Come to Kashmir. Walk through our cities.
The bridges. The ruins. The graves. Look at what we eat. Look at our
buildings. Our shrines. Our architecture. Our speech. Our history.
Speak to us. See how we live. We are not you. We have never been you.
We don’t want to be you.

Freedom cannot be finally denied. Nations do sometimes let territories
go. Borders do sometimes get realigned. Small states can manage to
survive in the middle of large ones (I am in one: Bhutan).

For over 50 years, every schoolchild in India has been fed lies –
shown an incorrect map of Kashmir that they only recognise as being
false once they see a map printed outside India.

What do Indians know about Kashmir anyway?

1. Exotic tourist version / Kashmir the beautiful (from holiday photographs)
Kashmir is a picture postcard beautiful land crowned by the lofty
Himalayas and marked by clear running streams. Old romantic ruins,
walnut trees, apple orchards, wood houses and rare flowers populate
the region. There are people huddling with cups of almond kahwa over
the kangri embers in winter, reflections of red Chinar leaves on the
Dal lake in autumn, bustle in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk in summer, and some
landslides when it rains. The children are excited for months before
the big festivals and pretty women in embroidered pherans are
everywhere. There are shikaras and houseboats, unrivalled wood
carvings, intricately decorated Papier-Mache boxes, and of course, the
shahtoosh, cashmere and pashmina woollens.

2. Security problem version / Kashmir the cruel (from media photographs)

The place on maps with the name Kashmir is a conflict-riven divided
territory where bloodshed has not ceased for decades now. In the name
of separatism, insurgency, militancy, freedom-struggle, territorial
integrity, occupation or terrorism, this bloody valley has seen people
dying, endless grieving and lost orphans. Kashmir is the name for a
problem – like Palestine. Curvy newsprint alphabets indifferently
remark the deaths in the Valley; some number shot by soldiers, shot by
militants. People read and often forget.

The political and public perceptions of Kashmir vary at the levels of
the Indian state and the Indian individual. For most Indians, Kashmir
is an exotic place, unreal and wholly imaginary. In the time-honoured
manner of stereotyping, the Kashmiris are not seen as real people,
they are ‘the other’; represented to suit the self-image of mainstream
Indians. In the pendulum swing between Bollywood movies and
Islamophobia, typically, Kashmir is either filled with an entire
assortment of enchanting people and precious things (rosy-cheeked fair
girls, apples, walnuts) or a dangerous place filled with a repugnant,
ungrateful, and violent Muslims and almost-Muslims. For the last two
decades, it has largely been the latter.

But this ‘wrecked paradise’ of Kashmir is inhabited by real people
with real lives and aspirations. The longer India occupies Kashmir
instead of understanding what the people there want, the more it will
pave the way for the influence of hard-line intolerance in the Valley
(already a land with famous women poetesses like Lalla Ded and Habba
Khatoon is becoming known for women like Asiya Andrabi, the head of
the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, or Daughters of the People, which seeks to
promote compulsory veiling for women and attempts to enforce rigid
Islamic values hitherto alien in Kashmir’s syncretic culture).
Protests by stones and phones

Nearly half of those killed in Kashmir in recent weeks were teenagers,
one butchered on his way to the hospital in an ambulance. Another
eleven year old killed as I write. The wider world, especially the
West, is ‘careful’ in how it reports Kashmir, always stressing that
the police were ‘provoked’, that the protestors were ‘anti-national’.
Far away from the raw fury of Kashmir, commentators in Delhi muse on
twitter “NOT condoning death: but WHY wd parents allow 11yrolds to
protest”. Why would parents allow a child to protest? I want to ask
the stranger back – Have you ever been to a war zone? The rules of
normal life are suspended in a place where brutality abounds.
Middle-class parents in comfort zones 'allow' their kids action in
line with what is good for them. In Kashmir where bullets zip past and
people endure daily humiliation, children too (as in Palestine) become
cannon fodder. By the time you read this, more will have died. What
image does the Indian state have of these children and teenagers -
child terrorists? child soldiers? Or, brutalised young people who only
have the weapon of the defenceless, a stone?

Kashmiris are not allowed to protest, denied freedom of assembly, even
as they are under occupation by a democracy. When they shout ‘enough’,
they are shot by ‘security’ forces. The Indian state announces that it
will create jobs, sends in more troops, announces a billion rupee
propaganda fund, places political leaders under house arrests, mulls
over ‘non-lethal ways of crowd control’ and intelligence gathering in
local languages. It does everything that confirms it as an occupying
force – it will spend money, it will send moles, but it will not
recognise the basic reason why people are fed-up to the extent of
throwing stones: their need for freedom.

Of course, the people of Kashmir are economically deprived, there’s
poor infrastructure, and the lack of even basic necessities like
electricity (routine prolonged power cuts in severe winters). On this
latter, the standard Indian answer is that there’s a lot of
power-theft in Jammu and Kashmir, but as a poet humorously wrote,
burning dinner is not incompetence but war, there are reasons why
disenfranchised people don’t pay bills (for example, the lack of
identification with the authorities, as in the case of apartheid South
Africa).

But, the experts analyzing Kashmir in terms of the development
critique forget that a prinked cage is still a cage. If a people have
been alienated over decades and truly yearn for freedom, then they
cannot be bought with promises of jobs.

By focusing on the stone in the hands of the Kashmiri protestors (for
an exception, click here), the Indian media manages to erase the
brutality of the pointed gun in the hands of the soldiers who face
them. The extreme methods of repression that India is trialling in
Kashmir will gradually find their way into the standard procedures for
dealing with protestors elsewhere too.

Moreover, the protestors of today have a way to document the
atrocities perpetrated on them – youtube, twitter, facebook. The world
may not be twitter-trending #Kashmir at the moment, but someday it
might. In the meantime, there are hundreds of videos and pictures
online that show exactly the kind of attitude the Indian forces have
towards the residents of Kashmir – charging at women, beating up
children, damaging private property, and being very violent towards
young men.

It is an irony of the ‘security situation’ in Kashmir today that the
security forces who are supposed to ‘secure’ the people, stand
barricaded behind razor wire rolls and camouflaged walls (adorned with
slogans like ‘Help us to help you’) wearing body armour.

Who are these soldiers? The average face of Indian terror in Kashmir
are uniformed men of the security forces who hail from poorer economic
classes of towns and villages in the plains of India – they have to
serve in the tough conditions of a Himalayan valley where theyare the
face of the occupation. They live under rough barricaded conditions,
feel hemmed in by the mountains; the food, climate, society is nearly
entirely alien to them. They have little knowledge of Kashmir’s
history, language, or culture (the wisdom of Indian defence seems to
be that soldiers who are able to empathise with people in the areas in
which they serve, cannot be effective). Many of them are devout Hindus
(some posted at a temple in Kashmir complain they are pelted with
stones, temple bells are unfastened, land is encroached). They are
ill-informed about the objectives of the Indian state or the
grievances of the Kashmiri people. Quite a few of them turn hostile to
the local population under such circumstances.

On a recent visit to Srinagar, I was talking to an Indian CRPF
(Central Reserve Police Force) soldier at a prominent civic location
in the city who lamented to me that: ‘Kashmiri people are dogs. We do
so much for them and they are ingrate curs’. I disagreed, later
mentioning that I was Kashmiri myself. He was a young man, far from
home, trapped by circumstances, who dreamt of a place called Italy.
Periodically, in the middle of conversing, he or one of his colleagues
would randomly shout at local Kashmiri passers-by; rudely, brusquely,
asking them to stop, search them, call them names, shoo them away. The
interaction was obviously power-laden and inhuman; the Kashmiris
around him were nameless, faceless bodies. Soon after I left, I read
in the papers that there had been a blast at that site in which a
soldier was also killed. I always wondered whether he had been the
same man I had spoken to; the one who could not wait to get out of
Kashmir.

In Delhi, earlier this year, a Kashmiri Hindu stood posted at the
gates of the ‘Kashmir Expo’ (a handicrafts fair selling Kashmiri
clothes) and confidentially whispered to me that he was there to ‘keep
an eye’ on the Kashmiri Muslim sellers inside. Elsewhere, in Srinagar,
in the midst of playing cricket, small Kashmiri boys belted out
slogans about ‘azaadi’, reminding me of East Jerusalem or Ramallah.
Daily workers at neglected archaeological monuments rued their fate
about not being made permanent by the centre in their job for decades
because of their religion as Muslims. An elderly craftsman uttered the
precise and profound loss of the ‘Kalam’, the pen – writing, but also
perhaps what it enables: story, art, tradition.
Nostalgia for the Future

Kashmir is daily witnessing an attrition of its culture, literature,
architecture, psychology. At the centre of Srinagar is Lal Chowk (mark
the meaning, ‘Red Square’, renamed by Sheikh Abdullah), and at the
centre of Lal Chowk is the ruin of the Palladium Cinema; the once
thriving cultural buzz of Kashmir has been decimated in the wake of
the last two decades of mindless violence and cultural repression (the
last surviving cinema in IOK is under threat of closure). This
destruction of cultural objects in wars is continuous throughout the
history of the world (see Robert Bevan’s ‘The Destruction of Memory:
Architecture at War’). On the first day of new year 2010, when the
aeruginous near-full moon rose over the Zabarwan mountains at night,
very few Kashmiris were out to see the copper-coloured miracle. There
were no public celebrations at midnight. The city has been ghosted by
oppression, violence, and terror perpetrated by the
military/militants.

The Kashmiri Muslims being killed, raped, tortured, maimed in Kashmir
are my fellow country people. The Kashmiri Hindus displaced in India
are my fellow country people too (even as they classify me for my
Kashmiri Pandit Hindu surname ‘Kaul’ and curse me for expressing the
views I do). Other non-Kashmiri Indians insinuate treachery when I
call myself ‘Kashmiri’ instead of Indian. Never mind. I am Kashmiri. I
belong to Kashmir: my fatherland narrated to me by a father now dead.
My ancestral home by a river is a carved wooden house with many floors
and stairs leading up to an attic in a street named after a fifteenth
century Sultan who could read Sanskrit, Persian, Tibetan. The
meta-narratives of big states have eaten up my history, my identity,
my notion of a 'home'. And it the same for every Kashmiri. I am alive,
and for now, away. Those Kashmiris dehumanised and dying in the Valley
do not have the luxury of reflection.

Indians should stop firing at those who pelt stones. Instead of the
task force on crowd control, they might think about the meaning of the
endlessly gathering crowds, the message in the parched heart of each
stone. Any political movement always has multiple strands within it,
multiple aspirations, which is where leadership comes in, no doubt
partly manipulative. But the freedom of Kashmiri people to elect
political representatives into power was the most dangerous thing to
tamper with in a democracy. The ten percent turnout of the 1996
election goes back to 1987 and the lack of trust before that even. The
elections in Kashmir in 2008 were interpreted in India as a conclusive
vote in favour of development and India. Yet the design of the
electoral mechanism might have been salient too; ‘staggered elections’
(such as the one in 2008) are recognised in the scholarly literature
as being prone to ‘bandwagon effects’. Some believed that the violence
in the Valley prior to these elections (June to August 2008) was
deliberately engineered by Indian intelligence to ‘vent’ anger prior
to the elections (in November 2008) and ‘test’ the strength of
separatist sentiment in Kashmir. Messy political accommodation may
delay, but will not cure, the raw fury of the Kashmiri people who, at
the moment, face indoctrination or liquidation.

Every year in the middle of the month of August, on Independence Day,
Indians repeat the momentous 1947 midnight freedom speech of Nehru:

    “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time
comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly, or in full measure,
but very substantially…A moment comes, which comes but rarely in
history… when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”.

Let these magic words be true for the nation of Kashmir too. Redeem
the pledges, if not wholly and in full measure, then very
substantially.

Understand Kashmiris instead of attempting to ‘solve’ or ‘resolve’
Kashmir. Conventional strategists don’t always know best: demilitarise
Kashmir. Repeal the draconian laws. End the mistrust of the Kashmiri
people. Work with Pakistan and China to open borders and make the
nation of Kashmir a reality for Kashmiris. Freedom cannot be realised
without the capacity to conceive of the freedom of others.


[1] I recommend Andrew Whitehead’s recent article ‘The People's
Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s’, Twentieth
Century Communism, 2: 1 2010, pp. 141-168; it discusses the radical
‘New Kashmir’ manifesto of 1944 and the drastic land reforms, the
‘Quit Kashmir’ [note not ‘Quit India’] cries of 1946, the Kashmiri
women militia of 1940s who were the first women in India trained to
use rifles during the late 1940s, and the subsequent worries about the
spread of communism in Kashmir, both in India and beyond. Whitehead
quotes the diplomat Josef Korbel’s words from the 1954 book Danger in
Kashmir: “Kashmir might eventually become the hub of Communist
activities in Southern Asia”. Let me add that Korbel was the father of
Madeleine Albright and the mentor of Condoleezza Rice, both ex-US
secretaries of state

[2] His main achievement there was renovating the ‘Vaishno Devi’ Hindu
shrine; in 2010 he’s currently selling a book with the title
‘Reforming Vaishno Devi and a case for Reformed, Reawakened and
Enlightened Hinduism’, and being favourably reviewed in some media
with the words, “among the many reasons I admire Jagmohan, the former
BJP minister who sadly, seems to find no place in his party these
days, is because he has no hesitation in talking about Hinduism”.
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