Mukul Kesavan - A daily plebiscite: Kashmir, the Northeast and India
Regarding Kashmir and
the Northeast, mainstream Indian political opinion - with some exceptions -
ignores or underplays the violence inflicted on people who are formally
citizens of this republic. The violence of the past few days in Kashmir - five
civilians killed in army and police firing, amongst them a schoolboy - is the
latest instalment in a long history of mayhem. In a few weeks (or less) it will
become another forgotten episode in this endless serial, a tribute to our
genius for pretending that Kashmir is a series of noises off. This
self-deluding gift leads to a set of diagnoses and arguments that are
quasi-colonial in their logic:
1. The troubles in
Kashmir and the Northeast are the work of foreign powers and do not represent
the views of the silent majority of these regions.
2. The insurgencies in
the Northeast are, in fact, a series of protection rackets and criminal
enterprises that has nothing to do with self-determination or subnationalism.
3. The troubles in
these regions represent not a general disaffection, but the irrational
hostility of one malcontented sect or ethnicity. In the case of Kashmir, for
example, it is often argued that the troubles are confined to the Valley and a
few contiguous districts. The movement for azadi is sometimes
called a Sunni insurgency. At other times, we are told that the troubles are no
more than an urban derangement with rural Kashmiri Muslims living in a state of
bucolic calm.
These explanations are
close cousins to the arguments used by the raj to discredit
anti-colonial movements of resistance. All of them contain a measure of truth,
but all of them wilfully underestimate the scale of alienation in these
regions. They do so because to recognize the enormity of the problem would mean
acknowledging the violence done in our name.
By underplaying the
problem, we become complicit in not acknowledging the viciousness of the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act, a piece of emergency legislation that has been in
operation in India's borderlands for decades. AFSPA is incompatible with the
rights of citizenship; the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission recommended its
repeal more than ten years ago. AFSPA's imposition creates a state of
continuous emergency where citizens become colonial subjects without rights or
legal protections.
A law that effectively
renders the military personnel of the Indian State immune to punishment for
rape and murder is a law that should have no place in the life of a democratic
republic. Under AFSPA, soldiers can be prosecuted only with the consent of the
Indian government. In Kashmir after two decades and more of conflict and violence
where no one, not even the Indian State denies that the police and the army
have been responsible for atrocities, the permission to prosecute soldiers
has never been granted.
Kashmir and the states
of the Northeast have been subject to AFSPA for decades. We cannot, in good
faith, both claim the residents of these states as citizens and treat them like
helots. By doing this continuously, by deferring to the army's need for
impunity, we effectively treat Kashmir and Manipur and Nagaland as real estate,
as empty landscapes voided of true citizens.
The republican State
has used AFSPA in ways that are more draconian than the practice of the
British raj during times of serious insurgency. An AFSPA-like
ordinance was passed during the Quit India movement in 1942, when Britain was
fighting for its life against Germany. But even in that context, the colonial
State required an officer of the rank of captain to invoke its draconian
powers. In republican India, that authority has devolved to sergeants.
We speak glibly of the
integration of Kashmiris and people from the Northeast into the Indian economy,
we cite their diasporas in the rest of India as signs of assimilation. But
someone who moves from a state of republican freedom to a state of colonial
subordination by taking a train home, is not a citizen but a subject. I
experienced subject-hood for two years between 1975 and 1977. Northeastern
friends of mine have lived their lives in the shadow of emergency laws. There
is a whole genre of writing in the Northeast centred on the Armed Forces
(Special Powers) Act. Poems, stories, novels, plays, explore military violence
and the Kafkaesque consequences of military impunity.
In February, the
Indian army was ordered into eight districts in Haryana to control the
insensate violence visited upon the state by angry Jat agitators. During curfew
hours, the army was ordered to shoot-on-sight. Despite the burning and looting
and killing, the army went to extraordinary lengths not to fire upon rampaging
mobs for fear of civilian casualties. Through days of mayhem, it didn't fire
once. Contrast this with the army's hair-trigger willingness to fire upon young
protesters in Kashmir.
The difference isn't hard to explain: AFSPA turns
citizens into subjects and a republican army into an occupying legion. Even if
Kashmiri protesters don't consider themselves Indians, the Indian State doesn't
have the luxury of treating them like hostiles. A republic can't disown its
citizens.
For us to look the
other way, to ignore AFSPA and all that it implies, is cowardly. AFSPA
compromises our claim to being a democratic republic. It endangers us all;
draconian laws invariably end up being used on the general population, not just
in insurgent areas. We can't invoke India's inalienable right to Kashmir if we
are unconcerned about the suspension of the civil rights of Kashmir's Indian
citizens. Unless, of course, we're keener on Kashmiri houseboats than Kashmiri
human beings.
The azadi campaign
does itself no favours with its trivialization of Kashmiri Pandit suffering.
The 'serve-them-right' dismissal of their exile, the insinuation that Pandits
brought this upon themselves as pliant stool pigeons of the Indian State, has
been an unattractive characteristic of spokespersons for Kashmiri
self-determination. The argument that Kashmiri Pandits were willing accomplices
in a State-inspired conspiracy to create a countervailing grievance, is an
odious one. Given the documented violence against Kashmiri Pandits in the
Nineties, to argue self-victimization at the GOI's behest demonstrates an
almost ironical lack of empathy.
The Indian citizen
outside the valley has three options. He can support self-determination in
Kashmir knowing that it might mean either a sectarian Muslim statelet or more
territory for a larger sectarian state, Pakistan. He can endorse the military
occupation because, in the larger scheme of things, Kashmiri Muslim suffering
is the price that must be paid for the greater good of a pluralist India. Or he
can press for the abolition of AFSPA, the demilitarization of Kashmir and the
Northeast and the institution of a process by which atrocities by the security
forces, especially in the period between 1989 and 1996 are investigated and the
guilty punished. If the Indian republic wants to demonstrate its good faith, to
make some reparation for the history of State violence there, this is the
absolute minimum that it must do. If it claims the allegiance of the people in
these areas, it must treat them as rights-bearing citizens, not mutinous
subjects.
Indians committed to
the nation's territorial integrity need to recognize that a democratic
republic's claim on its constituent territories is, in the last instance,
under-written by consent. Unless the republic creates the conditions for
earning that consent by withdrawing AFSPA and returning the army to its
barracks, it runs the risk of permanently damaging its claim to political
legitimacy. Without legitimacy, governance shades into occupation.
In his famous lecture
of 1882, "What is a Nation?", Ernest Renan dramatized this principle
of consent with a metaphor: the nation, he argued, is a daily plebiscite. In
AFSPA-land, this is a plebiscite that the Government of India is in danger of
losing by default. The first step towards trying to win it ought to be the
summary abolition of this nation-corroding, anti-republican law.
see also
