Aarti Tikoo Singh - Free speech in Delhi, a barricade in Kashmir
Kashmir’s grief is
acute. The scars of the brutality and indignity suffered by its people are very
deep. Try thinking of
Kashmir summer 2010, of the three poor porters who were looking for work but
ended up dead in cold blood in a staged encounter by security forces. Of a high
school teenager returning from a tuition centre, suddenly hit by a tear gas
canister that ruptured his skull. Of wailing mothers over the dead bodies of a
hundred sons covered in shroud. All of it is very difficult to imagine, let
alone to live. Kashmir’s agony is mind-numbing.
Comrade Abdul Sattar Ranjoor (CPI), killed by terrorists March 23, 1990
read more about Com Ranjoor here; here; and here
If you can’t empathize
with the common innocent Kashmiris who lost someone to the violence of the last
25 years, there is something horribly wrong with your moral compass. On that account,
CPI(ML) firebrand Kavita Krishnan shows empathic disposition. She can connect
with the anguish of Kashmiris whose lives have been affected by the police and
military repression in Kashmir. Never mind, her selective silence on the
violence committed by militant separatists against Kashmiri people. So, I
am with Krishnan who has exhorted the NIT Srinagar students amidst
an ongoing crisis, to take the opportunity to talk, listen and empathize with
people in Kashmir instead of demanding the campus be shifted out of the Kashmir
Valley.
That said, it is a bit
rich that Krishnan who stood by the JNU student dissenters and protestors
in Delhi in the name of free speech, and rightly so, chose to give a
sanctimonious lecture to the already traumatized NIT students in Srinagar on
how it was not constructive on their part to raise the Indian flag and slogans
in Kashmir.
She preached to the
NIT students, “Much needed mutual empathy is impossible if a wall of slogans
and flags is erected, if cricket matches become barricades. NIT students from
outside Kashmir, try and speak to Kashmiri fellow students, and understand why
they may not feel emotional over the Indian team in a cricket match… If
violence has been done to them in the name of India, is it any surprise that
students of Kashmir and the North East tend to lose little love for Indian
symbols?”
Krishnan delivered
these homilies to the beleaguered NIT students, some of whom are still
hospitalized after a high-handed police action, and some of whom disclosed on
Wednesday that they have been issued rape threats in Kashmir. “If one of you
gets raped, the rest will fall silent,” one of the NIT female students broke
down while recounting the abuse and threats non-Kashmiri girls often receive on
the campus in Kashmir. The NIT students, it is clear, are seeing themselves as
unwanted Hindu minorities in a Muslim majority valley.
Instead of showing
empathy for the intimidated girls and expressing outrage against such sexual
harassment, the cause she is generally seen to espouse, Krishnan went on to
give sermons to the students from her Marxist-Lenin pulpit. She could have
given the same advice to the Kashmiri students who issued war threats in JNU
recently, and who erected a wall of Pakistani slogans in a Meerut college two
years ago.
It would have been a
great leap in constructive politics had Krishnan counselled the Kashmiri Muslim
students studying outside Kashmir, to take the opportunity to understand and
empathize with the psyche of non-Kashmiris who too are tormented by hundreds of
terror attacks and four wars over Kashmir. The entire country from Kashmir to
Delhi to Gujarat to Mumbai bears the marks of violence perpetrated in the name
of Kashmir. So is it any surprise that non-Kashmiris look at Kashmiris with
suspicion and hostility? No, it is not and yet Krishnan doesn’t feel the
necessity to evoke the ‘peace mantra’ and mutual empathy?
She also doesn’t
consider it important to dwell on more obvious and logical questions related to
free speech. How can nationalistic slogans and Indian flag in Kashmir be a
‘wall’ but ‘nationalistic or anti-nationalistic slogans‘ in Delhi be free speech?
Either both are covered by the right to freedom of speech, which from my
perspective they are, or both are a ‘wall’ that needs to be dismantled to allow
mutual empathy, peaceful coexistence and respect.
Until the 80s, both
Indian and Jammu & Kashmir flags coexisted in Kashmir and both the Indian
and the Kashmiri identity accommodated each other. However, Pakistan’s
relentless campaigns and socio-religious engineering in Kashmir severed its
inclusive identity, which of course was also facilitated by India’s various
political follies and machinations. It was the Pakistan gun wielded by Kashmiri
separatists that silenced and gagged everyone who disagreed with Kashmir’s
separation from India. After 26 years of violence, it is still possible that
the Kashmiri and the Indian live and flourish together provided they are not
made to contest each other by the divisive conniving politics of the anarchic
Leftists and the Kashmiri exclusivists.
The way forward is
mutual and not selective empathy. But the problem with all political ideologies
is that they cannot go beyond the biblical text in which they are theorized and
defined. So any empathy derived from a political ideology is never going
to be uniform, even and consistent. It will always be selective. Kavita
Krishnan’s empathy, drawn from Marxist-Lenin scriptures is extremely narrow and
politically driven.
See also
