[Reader-list] Some more Idiotspeak from Giorgiana Violante

[Kshmendra Kaul]

"I am being hunted by Indian intelligence for telling the truth on Kashmir"
 
By Giorgiana Violante on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
 
“Dear Giorgiana,
I think your article has created ripples and has not gone well with the Intelligence Agencies of the Govt. So they are looking for you. C.I.D. department wants all your particulars. I am apprehensive they might frame you in some case or something. So it would be advisable to delay your visit. You don’t know the ways and the paths our police works on.”
 
I have received this email, amongst others,  after an article appeared in the printed press and online, in which I wrote about the unlawful brutality  of Indian Army troops in Kashmir. How interesting that I am being hounded like a criminal for reporting upon the criminal behaviour of the troops lording it over the Kashmir Valley. If the Indian Government had been instructing their troops to behave in accordance with moral standards of  law enforcement then why have they sent their government monkeys out in search of me for reporting upon the reality of the situation?
 
I have been advised to lie low and not board any internal flights or do anything else that would involve showing my documents as I can expect to have drugs planted on my person at the airport or in my hotel room or some other such cheap trick characteristic of uncivilized countries. But I am staying in a hotel, and they do, of course, have a copy of my passport. As I lay in bed last night staring at the ceiling at 3 am with a head full of paranoid CID sleeplessness I vaguely considered procuring myself a dog or a husband or some other smelly aggressive entity as a protective measure. But I am not sure which option disgusted me more. Not normally given to fear, possibly the most repulsive realization is that I fell prey to it. After all, if the CID were clever enough to find me and stupid enough to do anything to me then they would have a few foreign embassies on their back given my multiple nationality status.Thank God I am not Kashmiri, and am
 therefore, probably, relatively safe.
 
But if the government has nothing to hide why have I had to go into hiding?
 
Ironically, I am presently living in an army cantonment area somewhere in India. It was my intention to try and speak to army officers here, in order to understand why the troops in Kashmir behave the way they do. However after having met a number of  men with family histories of government army employment, I am even more shocked and perplexed. The army officers I have encountered here are amongst the most upright, morally laudable gentlemen I have ever met in my life. I have rarely, if ever, met men and boys of such upstanding manners and honourable comportment. When they talk to me they don’t even dare raise their eyes to look at me.
 
Whereas in Kashmir I was often prone to being followed by army officers hissing and clucking at me as if it were I who was the farm animal, rather than they. They’d often call repellently after me as I walked by, things like ‘Hey sexy, you are looking so hot in Indian dress. Hey sexy, Hey! Come back.’ If it was a group of them instead of just one, they would all start laughing thereafter. In Europe a man in uniform would get hauled before the courts for accosting a female in the street without just legal cause. But in Kashmir on many occasions over the past year I have been stopped in the street in a very formal manner by Indian army officers who start by asking for my name and passport, then my place of residence in Kashmir and invariably the questioning ends in queries as to my marital status. It becomes suddenly clear to me at this point that the reason I have been stopped is purely due to sexual motivation. A few times I have then found the
 same man  lingering around outside my hotel for a few days. I had to change hotels twice last year before I learnt to simply keep walking when men in army uniform asked me to stop.
 
However here I am, being helped by Indian Army employees, instructing me as to how to avoid the trouble that I am facing from the government they work for but do not trust. I am receiving this kind treatment from army officers following an article , which they know I wrote, about what ‘pigs’ the Indian Army forces in Kashmir are. Clearly there is a vast schism between the bestial thugs sent to lord it over Kashmir and these decent individuals I find myself amongst here. One of them is trying to procure false documents for me as, apparently, if I am tracked down by the CID I can expect to be subjected to a nice dose of imprisonment full of rape and AIDS, after having some false crime hung around my neck.
 
The manager of my hotel keeps asking me if I want my sheets cleaned. Now I have never ever heard of anyone in India asking if you want clean sheets. Mostly they don’t use sheets and the ones you find on the beds of even the expensive hotels are usually dubiously  littered with pubic hairs and a vague scent of vulgar perfume which you can  assume to be  the remnants of some rich businessman and his whore. Expensive hotels look cleaner but feel dirtier beneath the surface. This hotel I am staying in is relatively cheap and the manager’s insistence about coming into my room to change the sheets is making me increasingly paranoid. I keep wondering if I would find clean sheets (finally!) but also find something vaguely drug-like hidden under them. His peculiar sheet persistence keeps tempting/scaring me but I am not sure I am willing to risk my freedom for a couple of clean sheets.
 
Last night some English girl came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to a Sheesha bar with her and some friends. “Oh thank you,” I replied, “but I’m vegetarian”. She looked very perplexed and then explained that Sheesha bars are places where people smoke big pipes full of drugs. I had thought it was an abbreviation of sheesh kebab. I waited until she turned back to her friends and then quickly scuttled out of the restaurant. I am beginning to think that one of my professors back in Kashmir was right when, every time I got into trouble for saying or doing the wrong thing, he would tell me that he was not angry because it was just but because I was too innocent. I rather expect he will be feeling less indulgent now. My ‘innocence’ denotes that I never considered the trouble my previous article would cause the people who had housed me back in Kashmir and helped with my research project concerning   a comparative  study  of  Kashmir
  Mysticism, Shaivism, Buddhism, and  Sufism.
 
If I am an innocent (albeit of idiot stock) then I would definitely say that some of the young army cadets I am meeting here exceed me in innocence (of the noble breed) by a long stretch. I cannot fathom a single one of these boys ever behaving in the way the troops do in Kashmir. Not even in ten years. I consider it a strict impossibility. I therefore finally understand at least one thing, that being the fact that Indians are always so unwilling to accept the possibility that their armed forces might be violating their rights of power in Kashmir. When the army is composed of boys like the ones I am presently meeting, and if I had never been to Kashmir, I too would have assumed that all the reports of unprovoked violence and rape by the forces was pure Kashmiri fabrication.
 
***
Strangely enough it was one of the young army cadets who raised the subject of rape with me here. Even more strange was the fact that he has Pandits in his family and yet he was still capable of viewing the Kashmir situation with equilateral appraisal. I asked him, the same as I ask all of them, how it is possible that the troops behave in that way in Kashmir when all the individuals I was meeting from army families here in this cantonement seem so very decent. I asked whether the forces sent to Kashmir were a totally separate breed, separately trained and instructed… I imagined them being the rejects, too mentally deficient to make it into the army proper, of intellect so low and bestial that it would be considered  hazardous to their own health to be left alone in a room with a plastic fork, let alone let loose on an Indian State with batons and guns. Where in Hell are the Indian Government dredging up the thugs that they send off to Kashmir? Are
 they separately trained in the basics of  moral codes of order in the line of law enforcement?
 
“No No, I don’t know actually. But you know it’s not that the men are different to us. It’s just the atmosphere in Kashmir that makes them act like that. If I have the freedom to go into peoples’ houses raping women ‘n all and not get in trouble for it of course I will do it, he na? It is the atmosphere. They can do what they want. Do you know how many women have been raped in Kashmir?”
 
“I know how many have been reported over the past twenty years,” I replied. “And I also know that in this part of the world that signifies that the actual number is probably twenty times higher. That makes for an awful lot of noughts.”
 
I am incapable of believing this boy’s opinion. I do not believe that it is possible for normal boys to turn rotten enough to rape women in villages, beat children in the streets, simply because of the prevalent conditions in Kashmir permitting them such bestial largesse. Truly I am utterly confused.
 
All I understand now is the reason why Indians are so unwilling to believe the truth about what their government is doing to Kashmir. They are incapable of believing it for the same reason that I am incapable of believing that the army men I am meeting here would ever be posted in Kashmir, or are even trained at the same base camps. The forces in Kashmir are clearly being allowed/instructed to behave in total contravention to all honourable codes of law enforcement. I will never begin to understand the reasons behind this because fortunately my brain is not sufficiently filthy to get to grips with the inner machinations of politics. But how can Kashmiris be expected to feel as if they are a part of India when they have never been treated as such? Is it any wonder that a growing number of Kashmir’s desperate and hopeless youth is being seduced by the dubious pro-Pakistan preachings of bearded wahabis veiling their politics beneath the mantle of
 religion?
 
People need to cling to something. It is hard to live without hope. India has never given Kashmiris any. No hope, no dignity and no respect. They have been pushed into a corner which is beginning to look like Pakistan. Thanks to India’s policy on Kashmir over the past twenty years, Kashmiris hate Indians, mistaking them for their government, and Indians think Kashmiris are just troublesome, stone pelters instead of seeing them simply as their brothers, in trouble.