[Reader-list] Kashmir, September 2010. The Reichstag Fire (dispersed) Redux ?

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all,

The burning of a school can never be justified, not even in protest  
against the burning of a holy book. The situation in Kashmir once  
again seems to be spinning out of control of the initiatives that had  
come out of the spontaneous, peaceful protests. There is something  
deeply disturbing in the recent incidents of arson, leading to  
massive retaliation by the police and paramilitaries. Please see  
below my attempt to make sense of what is going on. Hoping for some  
sane and reasoned responses. Apologies for cross posting on Kafila.org

best,

Shuddha
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Kashmir, September 2010. The Reichstag Fire (dispersed) Redux ?
Shuddhabrata Sengupta

September 14/15, 2010

As if by magic, those who had hidden themselves for the past few  
months in Kashmir are leading mobs and setting schools and public  
buildings on fire. And many more people have died tragic and  
unnecessary deaths. This time, unlike in the past,  the blame must be  
squarely shared between those who fired the bullets, and some of  
those who led the incendiary crowds. Perhaps Kashmir has just entered  
a new and darker phase, brandishing a burning torch. This situation,  
in order not to be irreversible, needs the urgent and sane attention  
of Kashmiris themselves, and of all those who wish Kashmir and its  
people well.

We could do well by way of beginning by turning our attention to a  
surprising detail hidden within the reports of the recent events of  
arson. National Conference apparatchiks, who did not even dare appear  
in public till recently for fear of being attacked for their role in  
sustaining the occupation of Kashmir by India's armed might, are now  
allegedly seen openly goading mobs of zealots to burn down a school  
in the name of the defence of religion. If this is true, the what we  
are witnessing is the realization by them of  a wonderful opportunity  
to wear new costumes and speak new lines in the unfolding theatre of  
the moment.

-------

See - The Indian Express Report - 'Valley Fires Rage, Omar feels the  
Delhi Chill' that lays bare the incidents of the day, including the  
burning of a school at Tangmarg.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/valley-fires-rage-omar-feels-the- 
delhi-chill/681260/0

-----------

Almost automatically, the tentative signs of even a partial climb- 
down by the Indian state or even a cosmetic dilution of measures like  
the hated Armed Forces Special Powers Act are being backpedalled at a  
furious pace. Almost magically, the shame and utter disgust  
associated with the discovery of videos of hideous instances of the  
naked humiliation of young men in Kashmir by the forces of the Indian  
state is drowned in a chorus of pious indignation at the sight of  
flames leaping in the skyline of Kashmir's towns and summer capital.

What a profound victory for the intelligence-military-spin doctoring  
establishment in Delhi and what a bitter prospect of another  
impending setback, yet another foolish 'self-goal', for the  
beleagured people of Kashmir.

The higher echelons of the Indian political military and security  
establishment have reason to be thankful to the lunatic who sparked  
all this off by posing smugly for television cameras with a few  
burning pages of the Quran in hand in far away New York. They have  
reason to thank Press TV, and even more reason to thank some of the  
people eager to be seen as zealots of Islam in Kashmir, and the likes  
of the NC leader Ali Sofi of Tangmarg for his sudden discovery of  
himself - as both - wounded Muslim and calculating arsonist.

It is also important to remember, that the Eid day incident of arson  
of a few government buildings in Srinagar, which is a precursor to  
the current wave of attacks on public property,  took place in highly  
suspicious circumstances. Each of the targeted buildings is under  
heavy security cover at all times, some even have round the clock  
CCTV surveillance. It is extremely surprising as to how an as yet  
unidentified group of arsonists could set fire to installations that  
were/are by no means neglected from the point of view of security.  
There appear to be no witnesses to the event either. The event, which  
drew the immediate condemnation of the Mirwaiz, was nevertheless  
attributed by government agencies to sections of the crowd provoked  
by his speech, and an FIR was duly lodged against him.

Other sources, claim on different fora, that people recently  
recruited into the dreaded Ikhwani counter insurgency irregulars,  
were seen in the vicinity of the targeted buildings. The truth, could  
be somewhere between the two. It could be that ikhwani elements were  
motivated by secret agencies to act as 'agent provocateurs', it could  
also be true that they had been mingling in the the otherwise  
peaceful protesting crowd that marched to Lal Chowk on Eid afternoon.  
Both are possible. Anything is possible in the shadows of Kashmir.

Close on the heels of the Eid incidents came yesterday's highly  
regrettable action of a mob torching a branch of the well regarded  
and respected Tyndale Biscoe School under the expert guidance of a  
National Conference leader, Ali Mohammed Sofi in Tangmarg, ostensibly  
to protest against the isolated incident of a lone person burning a  
few pages of the holy Quran in New York (as reported by a satellite  
TV channel close to the Ahmadinijad Regime in Iran - Press TV). The  
unrest, reported to have begun in Shia neighbourhoods of Budgam in  
the aftermath of the Press TV broadcast, was swiftly contained by  
Shia clerics themselves, before spreading to other areas, apparently  
at the unlikely behest of Hurriyat(G) activists, acting in a strange  
concert with their arch-enemies - NC loyalists. Details of this murky  
scenario are still unravelling.

Fortunately, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, currently the most respected  
voice within the separatist camp, and the undisputed leader of the  
Hurriyat(G) faction, despite his reputation as an Islamist hardliner  
has strongly and unequivocally condemned the school burning and other  
acts of arson in protest against the desecration of the Quran. His  
statement, carried in today's Greater Kashmir newspaper, deserves a  
lengthy quotation, because of the seriousness of the situation, and  
the need for saner voices, such as that of Geelani (in the current  
context of mobs intent on arson) to prevail.

The report is as follows -

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

Geelani calls for restraint in protests over Quran ‘desecration’

GK NEWS NETWORK

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2010/Sep/14/geelani-calls-for- 
restraint-in-protests-over-quran-desecration--11.asp

Srinagar, Sept 13:The Chairman of Hurriyat (G) Syed Ali Shah Geelani  
has called people of the Valley to exercise restraint over the  
allegeddesecration of Quran in US.
The veteran leader condemned the attacks on Christian Missionary  
School in Tangamarg terming it handiwork of vested interests.
“I can understand that emotions of Kashmiris Muslims have been hurt  
by the desecration of Quran. But at the same time, we have to control  
our emotions and not create such a situation which could given chance  
to vested interests to defame Islam and our movement,” Geelani told  
Greater Kashmir.
In a bid to calm down angry protesters who had taken to streets  
against Quran desecration, Geelani addressed the protesters through  
telephones in various parts of the Valley.
Geelani said Quran does not approve attacks on the minority  
communities or their establishments. “I urge the Muslims to protect  
the members of minority community and their religious places. We  
should at any cost maintain the age old communal harmony and  
brotherhood for which Kashmir is known World over,” he said while
hailing the role of Christian missionaries in dissemination of  
education.
Strongly condemning the desecration, Geelani said such acts show the  
frustration of US and its allies over the popularity of Islam. “Quran  
is in our hearts. By desecration of Quran the US has accepted its  
defeat and shown its cowardice,” he added.

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

However, the damage had been done.

The police responded to protests, not all of which were intent on  
arson and destruction of property, with massive gunfire, people died,  
which precipitated more protests. News spread in the valley faster  
than fire spreads in unprotected wooden structures. More protests,  
more firing. The result, a shocking number of sevehteen more dead in  
one day, smug television anchors nodding to the rhyhtm of their 'I  
told you so' incantations, and headlinesed that screamed -  'Kashmir  
Burning'.

For detailed reports of the day's violence see -

---------

BLOODBATH IN VALLEY: 17 killed, 100s injured; Toll 88

Greater Kashmir, 15 September

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2010/Sep/14/bloodbath-in-valley-17- 
killed-100s-injured-toll-88-28.asp

-----------

Within a flash, the image of the resistance in Kashmir was  
transformed from being an example of the massive moral strength of  
unarmed, leaderless crowds to the picture of orchestrated mayhem and  
destruction at the behest of a few individuals, seeking to usurp  
'leadership' from a functioning, well organized, peaceful,  
articulate, resistant, anarchy, mainly of the young and the very  
young.  Every effort needs to be made (on the ground, in the web, and  
face to face) now to ensure that this is only a temporary setback,  
and that the powerful, leaderless and unarmed character of the  
protests is not hijacked by a new crop of 'leaders' bent on  
subversion of hard won successes.

The so called 'dilution' or partial repeal of the hated AFSPA, on  
which the Central Cabinet was supposed to take a decision, now seems  
highly unlikely. The fires, and those who started them, have done  
their work. The momentum that the sacrifices of the two month long  
period of peaceful protests had generated is now threatened by two  
days of arson. Shall the people of Kashmir, and those of us outside  
who are concerned by their fate, let this pass?

It is curious that the elements associated with the ruling NC, the  
puppet party of the Indian state in Kashmir have had such an open  
hand in the latest incident. This is an excellent opportunity for a  
section within the  NC to re-cast itself as a champion of Islam, and  
to steal the thunder of  a section of pro-Azaadi protestors by  
suddenly appearing to be even more ultra-islamist than the genuine  
Islamists. Similar situations have occurred before - the dubious role  
played by Kashmiri politicians close to Delhi (and secretly close to  
Delhi) in the protests surrounding the  episode of the theft and  
recovery of a holy relic (a hair of the prophet kept at the Hazratbal  
shrine) in 1963 which were defly handled by Indian intelligence  
agencies allowed an earlier generation to lose their focus, to  
realize, that suddenly, the wind was no longer in their sails. Then  
too, leading mobs against the 'desecration of a holy relic' was a  
National Conference emi,nence his name happens to be Farooq Adullah.  
The drift that set in during the seventeen days of crisis around the  
holy hair in 1963 was to the greatest advantage of the Indian state.

The same constellation of forces and opportunities seems to want to  
repeat itself today. A massive crackdown, no budging on AFSPA, and an  
opportunity for the NC and its allied cast of sleaze and shadow to  
reinvent themselves as the champions of Islam in Kashmir (with a  
little help from the - at worst, uncscrouplous, or, at best,  
unknowing, media hype of Press TV). For those who do not know it  
well, Press TV is not unlike a more urbane and sophisticated version  
of 'Times Now' in Iran, and acts as the notionally 'independent'  
mouthpiece of an increasingly unpopular regime that treats its own  
young people exactly as callously and brutally as the Indian regime  
does in Kashmir.

The raving book burning lunacy of a lone bigot in America is not a  
threat to the world of Islam, or to the people of Kashmir and their  
struggle. It should be treated as an isolated act that has received  
the harshest condemnation of a broad spectrum of the American people,  
including politicians ranging from Barack Obama and even Sarah Palin,  
secular commentators as well as the overwhelming number Christian and  
Jewish religious leaders, along with that of of world public opinion.  
Paradoxically, the threat to burn the Quran has generated more  
sympathy for Muslims in America, especially for American Muslims,  
amongst ordinary decent Americans, than any other incident has done  
so far. Even in the concerned video clip, we can hear the voices of  
numerous ordinary Americans loudly and clearly expressing their anger  
and outrage at the thoughtless assault by the lone-ranger on the  
freedom of Muslims to read and revere their scriptures.

This response (as is evident in the video, and in the broad based  
condemnation of the inicident) should be interpreted intelligently,  
as a clear victory for the rights of the freedom of worship and  
consience by Muslims in America, rather than as evidence of their  
marginalization, or threat of marginalization, by a lunatic fringe.
SAS Geelani is right in calling for restraint while protesting, but  
incorrect in implying that the people of the US as a whole are anti- 
muslim. Such broad generalizations are neither accurate, nor useful.

To be distracted, at this instant, from the pressing concerns of the  
people of Kashmir, which have to do with violence, human rights  
violations, disappearances, the AFSPA and the illegitimacy of the  
occupation itself into a wild goose chase in search of the global  
Muslim Umma's notionally wounded honour, and into an ersatz Anti- 
Indianism/Anti-Americanism/Anti-Semitism is to play directly into the  
hands of the state in India, USA and Israel, which can happily paint  
the people of Kashmir (and Muslims everywhere) as 'Islamist zealots'  
on the one hand, even as it stokes the fires of communal and  
secterian passion through the underhand games of its trusted clients.

The people of Kashmir, if they do not wish to fritter away the gains  
of a sophisticated and maturing political language of action in this  
current phase of their struggle, must not let their movement be  
derailed by a newly discovered, self-declared 'Islamist' leadership,  
which is composed either of a section of delusional rank  
reactionaries, or of double-agents, willing to play the Indian  
state's dirty game to subvert the movement for Azaadi in Kashmir.

Those who know the history of the Palestinian people know fully well  
that the divisions within Palestinian society were used to the hilt  
by the Israeli military occupiers, who promoted the direct precursors  
of Hamas, through the seventies and the eighties, by turning a blind  
eye to 'Islamist' politics in the , as a means of destabilizing the  
unity, achieved through struggle, of the movement against the  
occupation of Palestinian lands. The result, several decades later,  
is a sclerotic, divided Palestinian resistance, more content with  
fighting within than with struggling against the enemy without, more  
busy acting in accord with the conflicting agendas of cynical  
puppeteers in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia (who express nothing other  
than a 'token' sympathy with Palestinians in order to mask the stench  
of their own regimes)

The bogey of 'Islam in Danger' in Kashmir is an instrument wielded by  
the clients of the shadowy operatives of the Indian state. The  
Iranian regime, as is to be expected, is also playing its dubious  
part. These may at first seem to be at cross purposes, but in  
reality, they are not very different from each other. Both have a  
stake (coming from different directions) in diluting the popular  
content of Kashmiri resistance into a 'pan-Islamic' movement that  
loses its specificity, its acuteness and sharpness, and begins to  
degenerate into the rhetorical banality of global Islamism  - a  
chimera that can very conveniently mean all things to all people, and  
nothing at all to those it claims directly to represent.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has consistently supported the objective  
reality of the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It has done this in  
order to bolster its own doctrine of suppressing the Kurds, Iranian  
Arabs and other Iranian minorities and to irritate Pakistan, which it  
has always seen as a client state of the USA, and with which it has  
issues of its own.

This said, factions within the current Iranian regime may appear to  
be moving in the direction of thinking of a replacement of Indian  
power in Kashmir, but this does not by any means signify that it  
wants to see the emergence of a stable and independent Kashmir. Its  
new found concern for Kashmir does not stem from a genuine sympathy  
for Kashmir, but out of its own geo-political concerns. It is  
competing with India to be a regional hegemon, and its dabbling in  
Kashmir's troubled waters is just an indication of the moves it is  
preparing to make. Kashmiri people by and large (with the exception  
of a few gentlemen in the separatist camp) have few illusions about  
the dubiousness of successive Pakistani state sponsored support for  
the 'Kashmir Cause'. It would be at tragedy if this measure of mature  
realism about Pakistan were to be replaced by an untimely and  
credulous enthusiasm for the cynical moves of the current Iranian  
regime.

The wider world  (beyond the reach of the cliches of the self- 
declared leadership of the so-called  Muslim umma, which never cared  
fundamentally for the fates of struggling people anywhere, within or  
without the Islamicate sphere) is just about beginning to be  
interested again, (and about time) in Kashmir. For this wider world   
to be suddenly confronted by images of bigots who burn schools in  
rage against bigots who burn pages from the scriptures is to  
virtually ensure that it's interest rapidly turns into indifference,  
if not into disdain. The people of Kashmir cannot afford to let that  
happen at this crucial juncture in their history. They must remember,  
that some fires, like the fire in the Reichstag in Berlin, at the  
beginning of Nazi power, are started precisely by those in power in  
order to put down the flames of liberty, and to give resistance a bad  
name. I hope that the people of Kashmir are not fooled into  
witnessing Kashmir's own distributed and dispersed version of the  
Reichstag Fire.

It is time that the broad masses of the people of Kashmir, and their  
friends outside Kashmir, understood this very simple fact. Stick to  
what is happening on the ground, to the evil that men do to men,  
women and children. Let offences against God and faith, be taken care  
of by God, if, whoseover he or she is, so desires.  And, burn nothing  
-  neither books, nor buildings, nor schools, nor places of refuge or  
worship, nor the remaining chances of the forging of a new, exemplary  
language of resistance in Kashmir.

END
___________
Shuddhabrata Sengupta