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

[M Yousuf]

Dear Mr Naqvi,

This delayed response would match well with your assertions about Kashmiris
not being in sync and solidarity with all the wronged peoples in India and
the world.

Like most Kashmiris I do not claim empathy with people fighting their own
immediate battles agaisnt the Indian state and its presumed
socialist/secularist credetials but you seem complicit in suggesting that
holding a people hostage for India to survive as a 'secular' nation is a
justifiable position. This view I understand is informed by a territorially
nationalist bias that characterises the entire Indian spectrum of political
positioning between and including the left and the right when it comes to
Kashmir. Apart from any other reasons that Kashmiris as a people may advance
for the freedom of choosing thier own future - however flimsy, ahistorical
or unjustified they may appear to you - the line in your superficially
argued disposition becomes one of the principle reasons for Kashmiris not to
be a part of a nation that uses its constitutional promise to subvert its
own people.

I understand that in the Indian political space you could be easily
described as a 'good Muslim' but should that force you to look at the
political struggle of Kashmiris through the same communal lense that the
Indian state has refused to remove in order to justify 'naked military
opression' of a entire people? Suggesting Kashmiri people to seek an
alliance with the Indian Muslim is a communal stance in the first place and
an attempt to rob a political rights movement of its true intent. I wonder
how you understand the position taken by Kashmiris who are not Muslims (like
most Pandits) and what the basis of that position is. That political choice
divorced from the historicity of the Kashmir conflict is an alliance with
the fascist tedencies of the Indian state. And the slogan around which you
have evolved your caricature of the movement in Kashmir could just be a
response or a taunt, if you may, to the state's hypocrisy.

I have read you with great interest and always benefited from the
scholarship I find in your journalism. But I suspect your understanding of
what is and has been happening in Kashmir (in the name of Indians) comes
from the Kashmiri poster boys made familiar to Indians through the
'nationalistic' media, the intelligence community and some heads of state
you have interacted with.

Before you write on Kashmir the next time, I stronly recommend that a
journalist of your scholarship spends some time in Kashmir to feel the
existence of a world view an occupied people may have. A world view informed
by a civilisational connections made obscure to them by India's freedom from
colonialism. A world view that has not found accommodation in a state run by
the local replacements of their earstwhile colonial masters as much as it
has not accommodated the aboriginals/natives. More than that you may
actually discover some genuine limitations and problems that may have
escaped the attention of the Kashmiri people themselves.

Looking forward to reading more of you.

Yousuf

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Sanjay Kak <kaksanjay at gmail.com> wrote:

> ‘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
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
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