Praveen Swami - The new language of rage: Delhi’s reverie is rudely interrupted by Kashmir reality again
NB: Two things are striking about developments as far apart as Kashmir and UP. One is the evidence pouring in of the terrible wounds, including blinding, of Kashmiri youths shot at with shotguns by the police. Will the Indian security establishment tell us whether they considered using shotguns against the rioters in Haryana a few months ago? Or anywhere else? The other piece of news is that a local court in UP has directed an FIR to be lodged against the
50-year-old dead man (Mohd Akhlaq) and six members of his family. Akhlaq was beaten to death in September last year while eating his dinner. Recently a Union Minister Sanjiv Baliyan, demanded court action against Akhlaq's family. His wish has now been granted. The heartless mind-set that can drag this bereaved family to court after the husband was murdered in a communal frenzy whipped up by the associates of the Sangh Parivar is breathtaking. So is the mind-set that can order stone-throwers to be disciplined with shotguns. Are the police out on a partridge hunt?
The politics of the Sangh assumes (and behaves as if) there is an irreconcilable division in Indian society. This is not only a form of racism, it is also a self-fulfilling prophesy. The recent appearance of a fake-encounter accused policeman in the company of the RSS leader shows that the Sangh wishes to normalise arbitrary killings by the police. This kind of behaviour has become so shameless that a retired police officer has denounced the governments nefarious machinations.
If this is how our establishment wishes to maintain 'national integrity', let us be clear that they are only driving people to despair. Crowds cheering Modi in foreign countries will not assuage the pain you are inflicting on ordinary Indians. Shame on you. DS
Praveen Swami - The new language of rage
The politics of the Sangh assumes (and behaves as if) there is an irreconcilable division in Indian society. This is not only a form of racism, it is also a self-fulfilling prophesy. The recent appearance of a fake-encounter accused policeman in the company of the RSS leader shows that the Sangh wishes to normalise arbitrary killings by the police. This kind of behaviour has become so shameless that a retired police officer has denounced the governments nefarious machinations.
If this is how our establishment wishes to maintain 'national integrity', let us be clear that they are only driving people to despair. Crowds cheering Modi in foreign countries will not assuage the pain you are inflicting on ordinary Indians. Shame on you. DS
Praveen Swami - The new language of rage
Tens of thousands of
people, some newspaper accounts say, marched to the Eidgah in Srinagar on a
grey spring morning in 1990, defying a curfew, to bury Ashfaq Majeed Wani, icon
of the Kashmir insurgency.
His claims to sainthood were dubious, at best: He’d kidnapped a civilian,
now-Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s sister Rubaiya Sayeed, menaced the Pandit
minority, before ending his career by accidentally blowing himself up with a
grenade in a botched ambush near Srinagar’s Firdaus Cinema, the only actual
military operation he is documented to have participated in.
In 1990, even a
second-rate martyr sufficed. “Mothers would put mehendi on their sons going to
Pakistan”, recorded the scholar Navnita Behera. “Children carried placards
saying ‘Indian dogs go home’ or ‘Mujahideen qaum zindabad’”.
The startled surprise
with which many in India have responded this week, to the violence unleashed by
the killing of Burhan Wani is testimony to the amnesia and denial which
surrounds national conversations on Kashmir. Having imagined that politics in
Kashmir was engaged in a process of reconciliation with the ethnic-religious
nationalism that long drove jihad, New Delhi’s reverie has been rudely interrupted
by reality.
Burhan Wani was, as
his critics contend, a terrorist, not a feckless innocent. To end the
conversation there, though, is to also miss the point. Like Ashfaq Wani, more
than a quarter century ago, he was significant as an aesthetic, not an individual.
The question New Delhi should ask is why unarmed young men are hurling
themselves in the direction of bullets to defend that aesthetic.
Fiction on Kashmir, by
sheer repetition on prime-time television, has acquired the magical quality of
reality. Facts matter, though, and this one more than others: There is no
escalation of terrorist violence in Kashmir. Bar a small uptick in 2012,
violence in Kashmir has been declining since 2002. The number of active
terrorists, too, has fallen steadily. Last year, there were 148 who carried out
143 attacks — less than one per terrorist per year, the laziest insurgency in
the annals of warfare.
There is no upsurge of
Kashmiris joining jihadist groups, either. Last year, 66 youngsters were
reported to have joined jihadist groups, from 16 in 2014 — a figure newspapers
read as a sharp escalation. In context, though, 2010-2013 were years of
exceptionally low recruitment; the numbers are now closer to their general
level this past decade.
Moreover, the
large-scale killings of civilians in the communally-charged protests of 2008
and 2010 did not drive young Kashmiris into the ranks of terrorist groups:
Recruitment actually fell. Large groups of people, mainly youth, have been
gathering at the funerals of slain jihadists — in October 2015, more than
30,000 marched to bury the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s
southern division commander, Abu Qasim — but few joined their ranks.
“The language of war
is killing”, the philosopher Carl von Clausewitz taught. This youth cohort,
though, is choosing not to speak that particular language. The violence that
followed Burhan Wani’s killing, much as in 2010, involved storming police
posts. These were the acts of the suicide bomber, perhaps — but without the
bomb.
Kashmir’s
historically-unprecedented youth male cohort has found a new vocabulary, in
neo-fundamentalist Islam drawn off the internet. Islamist currents have long
existed in Kashmir. The Jama’at Ahl-e-Hadis, established in Kashmir in 1925, and
the Jama’at-e-Islami, wielded great influence over the jihadist movement. The
new youth cohort, though, has borrowed the aesthetics of neo-fundamentalism
without the rigors of membership of these parties. Internet Islamism appears to
offer a kind of moral liberation, free from the taint of compromise, the stuff
of real-world politics.
Ever since 2006, thus,
young people have found agency around aesthetic questions: Faith, religious
identity, issues of honour, particularly the protection of women’s chastity.
This is the classic material of ethnic-religious nationalist movements,
Islamic, Hindu or otherwise. Young people attacking the police find a sense of
agency, even heroism, in giving their blood to guard Kashmir’s cultural and
religious identity against what they imagine to be predatory Hinduism.
Politicians in Kashmir
have no reason to challenge this grim nihilism. Ever since democratic politics
resumed in 1995, it has had a minimal presence in Kashmir’s old cities,
heartlands of the jihad. This suits the political leadership, as low-turnout
elections here make re-election by party faithful predictable. To the south, in
Jammu, the Islamist rise in Kashmir serves a similar purpose, sharpening
boundaries between Hindus and Muslims.
Like elsewhere in India,
youth despair in Kashmir has flourished in a landscape characterised by high
levels of youth unemployment and lack of economic opportunity. In Kashmir,
there is an added twist: The absence of the promise of change. “Give me five
years of peace”, CM Mehbooba Mufti said at a rally in Udhampur in April, “and I
will give you development”. Her predecessor, Omar Abdullah, often said much the
same thing. “People have to decide how long they will wait for peace and
prosperity”, he proclaimed in Sopore in 2013, at a rally in the Islamist
heartland. This extraordinary consensus suggests people are responsible for
solving the crisis imposed by violence — not elected leaders.
In 2006, an expert
task force appointed by then PM Manmohan Singh made several recommendations to
address the firmament on which Kashmir’s youth crisis rests, proposing radical
initiatives to develop linkages between agriculture and industry, train young
people for opportunities in the services sector, offer land to business, and
build a new satellite city for Srinagar. Barely a single recommendation has
been implemented.
As politicians see it,
there isn’t a payoff for this kind of change. Disenfranchised youth aren’t
likely to vote for existing party networks, so it makes more sense to funnel
funds towards the well-oiled patronage networks that link contractors to the
political élite. Let alone development, politicians — in New Delhi and Srinagar
— haven’t sought to equip their police forces to deal with crowds. PM Singh,
after the carnage in 2010, promised a task force would be established to
“devise non-lethal ways to manage protests”. He didn’t. Today, the J&K
Police improvises, using shotguns firing pellets. The weapons are less likely
to kill, but near-impossible to aim, causing injuries to eyes. The force has no
training centre for modern riot-control tactics.
Kashmir’s New Islamist
rise is resistible, if confronted by genuine political activism — but neither
the will nor intention to do so is evident.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/kashmir-protests-burhan-wani-death-terrorism-mehbooba-mufti-hizbul-mujahideen-2914317/
see also
Six Outrageous Things BJP Leaders Have Said About Dadri Murder
NAUJAWAN BHARAT SABHA on attempts of 'Sangh Parivar' to foment communal tension in Delhi / Beef murder bid to stir hatred ahead of polls? / SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN: The fight is now over your right to not be killed for what you eat
NAUJAWAN BHARAT SABHA on attempts of 'Sangh Parivar' to foment communal tension in Delhi / Beef murder bid to stir hatred ahead of polls? / SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN: The fight is now over your right to not be killed for what you eat
The Broken Middle - my essay on the 30th anniversary of 1984
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
RSS tradition of manufacturing facts to suit their ideology
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
RSS tradition of manufacturing facts to suit their ideology