[Reader-list] ‘Kashmir’s struggle and the injustices’

[Sanjay Kak]

‘Kashmir’s struggle and the injustices’ appeared in the Dawn, Karachi
this week.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/jawed-naqvi-kashmirs-struggle-is-just-one-of-many-fighting-indian-injustices-690-sk-05
(The article is pasted below my comment)

I found this commentary by Jawed Naqvi deeply disturbing, from its
very opening, where he draws attention to the ‘political bankruptcy’
and the ‘warped mindset’ that currently prevails in the Kashmir
valley. And no, he’s not talking about Farook Abdullah and the
tattered remains of the National Conference draped around his son’s
shoulders. And no, its not about the circus of ‘pro-India’ parties
like the Congress and PDP, who won’t win an assembly seat without the
support of a massive military-state apparatus. His critique is
reserved for the ‘movement’, the omnibus word which right now probably
invokes everyone from Syed Ali Shah Geelani to the stone-throwing
protestors on the street.

At a time when Kashmir is burning, I must be forgiven for thinking
that ‘warped mindset’ is more appropriate for the militaristic,
colonising imagination that is evident in the pronouncements coming
out from the Home Ministry. (And the BJP headquarters). The evidence
offered for Jawed sahib’s critique is a slogan that will “put off any
sensitive sympathiser". ("Bhooka nanga Hindustan; Jaan se pyara
Pakistan”.) Ignore the fact that I haven't heard of this slogan raised
this year (or even last year?). Put aside the fact that provocative
slogans are often raised by unarmed protesters in Kashmir, as an
expression of rage and helplessness, and to taunt and insult the
oppressive security forces (Remember “Aiwa! Aiwa! Lashkar-e-Taiba”?)
You have to ignore these observations because the article moves on to
shakier ground: the corporate land grab in Chhattisgarh, Orissa,
Jharkhand and Bihar are made equivalent to the situation of Kashmiri
Pandits who had to leave Kashmir in the 1990s. How this outlandish
parallel between two unlikes is arrived at, we don’t know.

But it’s not these egregious errors that trouble me. After all, Jawed
sahib is a distinguished journalist, with a track record of courageous
writing that unerringly rattles the right-wing Hindutva fascists in
this country. So what makes him drop his legendary guard, and loosely
toss out charges at people who have “lived with naked military
repression for more than 20 years” and are “reeling under Indian
occupation”? (His words, please note.) If this is so, why then are
Kashmiris suddenly being asked to dwell on the thousands of suicides
by indebted farmers? And take on board the suffering of Irom Sharmila
and the people of Manipur? Why are they cast as the selfish recipients
of the support of Canadian Sikhs and Indian Tamils? How do they become
a movement “so self-absorbed that it didn’t have a policy much less a
worldview about other people’s sufferings? Kashmiris did speak up once
for the Palestinians, but now it seems they do not have the energy for
even that.” On what basis these assertions are being made I don’t
know, but I wonder: is this being asked of people in Jaipur? Or Patna?
Or Lucknow? When was the last time Indians in these towns came out in
support of Irom Sharmila, to protest farmers suicides, or Operation
Green Hunt? Or is such sympathy only incumbent on those who are living
in conditions that are slowly approximating war? The charge of
self-absorption seems a mite unfair when people are being shot on the
streets. Were I living in Kashmir the last three months I know I would
be pretty self-absorbed. (It helps if you are trying not to get
killed)

But for me the crux of Jawed’s piece is not that he wants to encourage
Kashmiris to develop a more rounded sense of injustice. The real
center is illuminated by his reference to a conversation he had in the
aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, when an unnamed
Kashmiri politician expresses disinterest in the plight of the
traumatized Indian Muslim. This is the familiar charge that is always
flung at the movement in Kashmir: do you not realize that your
‘separatism’, your desire to unhitch yourself from the ‘socialist,
secular, democratic’ wagon of India may dangerously rock the boat for
Indian Muslims? I don’t know what answer he would have got eighteen
years ago, but I can guess what many Kashmiris would tell him today.
They would say that if India’s treatment of its minorities, including
its Muslims, loyal Indians all of them, is so fragile, and so
contingent on the settlement of the Kashmir issue, then is it worth it
for Kashmiris to be a part of that India? They would at least point to
Gujarat. If the promise of Indian secularism is as hollow,
conditional, and belligerent, is it worth it to be a part of that
nation?

Unfortunately Jawed sahib is not alone: the best part of Indian civil
society is quite firmly in sync with the position that his piece
suggests. Is it because deep down, even the anti-establishment
positions of India’s liberal, progressive, leftist tradition are
somewhere umblically tied in with the increasingly exhausted notion of
Nehruvian ‘secularism’. To the invitation to be part of that dream, I
imagine today's Kashmiri saying: ‘aapki ganga-jamuni tehzeeb aap hee
ko mubarak ho’. Notwithstanding the tragic departure of the Kashmiri
Pandits in the early 1990s, which haunts Kashmir even today, located
at the trijunction of three great civilisational (and religious)
traditions, Kashmiris may already know a few things about coexistence.
And before Indians discovered secularism. (As an aside: in 1947, when
something like 50,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the streets of
Jammu–under the direct supervision of the Maharani, let it be
said–Kashmir didn’t show a flicker of the same horror)

Why does the Indian liberal-progressive-left (LPL!) position finds it
necessary to stuff events in Kashmir into the template that they are
already having to wrestle uncomfortably with. Unless the Kashmiris can
repackage their struggle into forms that fit into the undeniably
useful framework of class, Kashmiri concerns about ethnicity,
identity, self-determination are all somehow lesser political goals.
Why are we in India not looking at the recent history of Kashmir,
where an anti-feudal movement against the Maharaja turned into a
movement for self-determination? Why do we not recall that Jammu &
Kashmir was the only state to implement land reforms in the heady
years after 1947? (Not just land to the tiller, but land to the
landless too.) And finally, what role have the failures of Indian
democracy played in giving this ‘separatist’ movement a pronounced
religious turn?

Last month, in what was possibly a historic first in New Delhi,
protesting Kashmiri students mustered the courage to gather at Jantar
Mantar to raise their voices against the killings in the valley. We
heard ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi’ for the first time ever, yes. We also
heard ‘Nara-e-takbeer! Allah-o-akbar’. And in those few hours we heard
passionate arguments about both sets of slogans. (All this openly, on
the microphones, while the Special Branch no doubt watched.) But late
in the evening we also heard the voice of the radical Telugu poet,
Varavara Rao. He saluted the movement on behalf of his party, the CPI
Maoist (present in 22 states in India as he cheekily reminded the
audience!) Varavara Rao read out a poem that he had written in
Hindustani, in order to be understood by the Kashmiri audience. He
ended by saying that if in the ‘60s their slogan was ‘Amar nam, tumar
nam, Vietnam, Vietnam’, now he wanted to add: ‘Amar nam, tumar nam,
Kashmir, Kashmir’. I don’t know if the young audience understood what
that fully meant (or whether they were appropriately touched by the
solidarity). But I certainly know that Varavara, like any fighting
revolutionary, did not appear in their moment of crisis to hector
Kashmiris on their lack of concern for the beleaguered adivasis of
Bastar, or for their blinkered lack of internationalism.

I cannot help but think that when Jawed Naqvi’s commentary appeared in
Dawn, readers in Pakistan, many of them part of the same
liberal-progressive-left crowd, will no doubt be deeply satisfied.
Like their equivalents here, they will be reassured that their growing
disinterest in Kashmir is justified because the Kashmiris are narrow
and parochial. Perhaps they deserve what they are getting.

Sanjay Kak

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Kashmir’s struggle and the injustices
By Jawed Naqvi
Monday, 06 Sep, 2010

A particularly disturbing slogan heard in the Kashmir Valley, where
its young school-goers and old patriarchs, angry women and restive
youth are courageously defying Indian rule, is enough to put off any
sensitive sympathiser. “Bhooka nanga Hindustan; Jaan se pyaara
Pakistan.” (Starving and tattered India we reject; Pakistan - land of
our dreams - we embrace.)

This slogan conveys acute political bankruptcy in a region which has
lived with naked military repression for more than 20 years. I’m sure
any Pakistani with a sense of justice would also be uncomfortable with
the warped mindset the slogan betrays.

That Kashmir is reeling under Indian occupation is not a secret. That
Pakistan has played a questionable role there is also well known. Yet,
for Kashmiris to see their struggle as part of the many battles being
waged by the poorest of the poor against the Indian state’s
multi-pronged injustices against its own people, would not compromise
or be a contradiction in Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination.
The simple question for Kashmiris to ask themselves is, isn’t the same
state that has killed 60 young Kashmiris in three months, also
responsible for tens of thousands of suicides by indebted farmers in
India? Does Sharmila Irom, who is fighting to repeal the law that
gives unbridled powers to security forces in her Manipur state have no
relevance for the same struggle in Kashmir?

The tribespeople of Chhatisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal are
fighting for their fundamental rights. One of their demands is that
they not be evicted from their homes to accommodate corporate land
grab. Is this not what Kashmiri Pandits suffered at the hands of the
Indian state as well as non-state actors in their homeland without any
redress from successive Indian governments that claim to represent
them?

Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
have often cajoled dissident groups, including the banned Maoists, to
come for talks within the constitutional framework. Why can’t the
affected groups simultaneously expose the insincerity of the Indian
state? To take just one example, the preamble of the Indian
constitution describes the nation as a socialist and secular republic.

Socialism is thus the law of the land. Which Indian government,
including the one led by Chidambaram-Singh duo, has come anywhere
close to keeping the promise of socialism? Just the opposite. Both
have callously opened the country to the depredations of private
capital.

I met a Kashmiri separatist a few days after the Babri masjid was
razed in Ayodhya. He happened to be the only senior enough leader to
be still dodging the police in Srinagar. The rest were in jail. He
told me he didn’t care for the plight of Indian Muslims in the wake of
the Ayodhya outrage. “They have never helped the Kashmiris, so why
should we bother with them?”

The explanation for his aloofness was ironical. How can we forget the
senior Indian minister telling journalists during the Agra summit that
if Kashmir was to be given to Pakistan on the basis of religious
claims, should not the Indian Muslims then be packed off in special
trains to Pakistan? Kashmiris and Indian Muslims may see themselves as
separate entities with separate causes. But their detractors will
always see them as one headache. Check this out with Gujarat Chief
Minister Narendra Modi who knows Indian Muslims as children of Mian
Musharraf.

I put the question to some Kashmiri intellectuals in Delhi recently. I
asked them how was it that a movement with international ramifications
and wide support among a number of Muslim states could be so
self-absorbed that it didn’t have a policy much less a worldview about
other people’s sufferings. Kashmiris did speak up once for the
Palestinians, but now it seems they do not have the energy for even
that. On the other hand, there is no dearth of seemingly unrelated
groups that lend them moral support. A recent rally in Canada of Sikhs
and Kashmiri activists, who protested against India’s brutality in the
Valley, could be a case in point. A few weeks ago an obscure Tamil
group in India issued a statement in support of Kashmiris. Do the
Kashmiris want to know who the members of the Tamil group are?

There is something about this that reminds me of an interaction I once
had with Gen Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad. He had just returned from
a visit to Colombo where his government was giving military and
political support to the government against Tamil rebels. I said how
was the Tamil struggle any different from the Kashmiri movement since
both stemmed from the denial of the right to self-determination. Gen
Musharraf said he didn’t want to comment on another country’s internal
matter. So he too chose the injustice, which suited him most.

Vidya Subrahmaniam of The Hindu has done an interesting comparison of
three major pogroms in India, each fighting its own battle without
getting involved with the sorrows of each other.

The Orissa violence, in which Hindu-Adivasis targeted Dalit
Christians, was undoubtedly smaller in scale compared to Gujarat 2002
and Delhi 1984. “Despite…variations, the three pogroms could have been
written, produced and directed by a single satanic mind, judging by
the astonishing similarity in the detail and sequence of events and
the stunning brutality of the crimes committed,” says Subrahmaniam.

In his November 2002 foreword to the report of the Concerned Citizens
Tribunal, which collected 2,094 oral and written testimonies from
Gujarat’s victim-survivors as well as human rights groups, Justice
V.R. Krishna Iyer said: “The gravamen of this pogrom-like operation
was that the administration reversed its constitutional role, and by
omission and commission, engineered the loot, ravishment and murder
which was methodically perpetrated through planned process …”

Eight years later, as Subrahmaniam notes, the jury at the Kandhamal
Tribunal had similar words to say: “The jury records its shock and
deep concern for the heinous and brutal manner in which the members of
the Christian community were killed, dismembered, sexually assaulted
and tortured … There was rampant and systematic looting and
destruction of houses and places of worship and means of livelihood …
The jury is further convinced that the communal violence in Kandhamal
was the consequence of a subversion of constitutional governance in
which state agents were complicit.”

“When, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination,
thousands of Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi, the
commonly-held view was that it was an aberration brought about by an
extraordinary situation. Comparisons were made with the 1947 Partition
riots but few could have known at that time that the clinically
planned and executed anti-Sikh pogrom would serve as a model for two
more episodes of mass aggression against minorities,” The Hindu
analysis said.

India has spawned a coalition of injustices. For those in the Kashmiri
resistance to show solidarity with those fighting the same bloated,
militarised state that they are, will not compromise their goal. It
would only deepen their vision and sharpen their ideas of what kind of
‘azadi’ they are fighting for.