Rahul Pandita - Burhan Wani-wali azadi? Leftists have succumbed to narrow view of Kashmir // Kunwar Khuldune Shahid - Disown jihadist ‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir
From the discourse of
the past two weeks on Kashmir, it would seem as if the people there have risen
against India because of pellet guns. There is no doubt that these guns, used
by the police and the paramilitary forces, have caused terrible injuries. Every
act of cruelty undermines the legitimacy of the state even more, and fuels
further radicalisation - and this is true of Kashmir as of anti-Maoist
operations or operation against militants in the North East.
But it is also a fact
that the security forces in Kashmir have had to deal with extremely hostile
crowds. In the skirmishes of the last few days alone, over two thousand
policemen and over one thousand personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force
(CRPF) have been injured. Two policemen have lost their lives, one of them
after his vehicle was pushed into the Jhelum River from a bridge by protestors.
One CRPF jawan, hit by protestors on his head with a brick, is in a critical
state. Dozens of police stations and army posts have been attacked by frenzied
mobs.
It is still
understandable that in a display of anger against the Indian state, or because
they support Burhan Wani's vision, many Kashmiris came out to protest his
death. But it is baffling why a section of leftists in India, who are advocates
of azadi in Kashmir, would mourn the death of the commander of a terrorist
organisation that has not only killed security personnel but unarmed Kashmiris
as well, including many from the Hindu minority, in several cases dragging them
out of buses and shooting them dead in cold blood.
No matter what stories
are attributed to Wani's reason behind joining the militant ranks, their
tautology serves the same purpose: the Indian State and its troops, whose
numbers in Kashmir are highly exaggerated in this discourse, are responsible
for innocent, young men like Wani turning into jihadis. But behind the
decorous restraint of his father, the support for the path his son chose to
adopt comes across very clearly. In comments after comments, including in this 2013 interview with the journalist Jason Burke,
the senior Wani clearly says that he is proud of his son and that he is ready
for him to die. In another interview, he says that Islam prepares
them for only two things: victory or martyrdom, and that surrender could only
be possible in front of Allah.
What do you say to
such a man? Or to his son who, before he died, appeared in videos, asking young
men to join him in his fight for establishing an Islamic caliphate? It is one thing to be
in favour of azadi, but do the leftists realise that azadi in
Kashmir means Burhan-wali azadi? Between Khalistanism and
Kashmirism, the leftists seem to have forgotten some important lessons. In the
heyday of the Khalistan utopia, a few comrades were of the opinion that the
Sikhs are the core of the Punjab nationality. They dreamt of sustaining
independent Khalistan's economy by growing Gobi (cauliflower) and selling it
directly to Pakistan. But then sense prevailed, and a majority of the leftist
spectrum opposed the idea of Khalistan. Several comrades lost their lives while
resisting Khalistani extremists.
But on Kashmir, the
comrades failed to take into account that the pro-azadi sentiment is confined
mostly to the Kashmir Valley, and there too among certain groups, and that the
views of the other people in the state also need to be taken into account.
While haranguing about the Kashmiris' right to self-determination, they forgot
that the 'self' is not only a particular section of Muslims.
As a result, they
even forgot their own people in Kashmir who would have offered resistance to
this
amalgamation of religious and national identity. So, while communists in
Punjab who sacrificed their lives resisting Khalistan were remembered, people
like Abdul Sattar Ranjoor were forgotten (The veteran Kashmiri Communist leader
was shot dead at his home in March 1990 on the orders of Hizbul Mujahideen –
the same organisation to which Burhan Wani owed allegiance to).
As the azadi brigade
in Kashmir led brutal ethnic cleansing against the minority Pandits, the
communists remained silent. During Kashmir's Islamisation, hundreds of temples
were vandalised or completely destroyed. There was not a whimper of protest on
the exodus of 400,000 Pandits. Would the leftists be silent if four lakh
Muslims or Dalits would be driven out of their homes and villages? And once
they accepted religion as an ideological component of resistance, did they
consider the fact that they would lose the moral grounds to oppose Savarakarite
militarism?
With the Pandits gone,
a wave of intimidation silenced saner and liberal voices in Kashmir. Was there
any attempt by the leftists to reach out to these voices? Did they make an
attempt to say a word about veteran Pandit communist leaders like Motilal Misri
and NN Raina, who founded and nurtured the communist movement in Kashmir? Did
they ever try to resurrect the memory of the young Pandit comrade, Somnath
Bira, who died while saving a group of Muslims from a mob of Hindu fanatics
between Bhadarwah and Doda in Jammu 1947?
Instead of fighting Kashmir's
descent into Theo-fascism, the leftists find no contradiction in calling a man
like the Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani to Delhi and
elsewhere to their public meetings on democracy and civil rights – a man who
has said publicly that
he abhors socialism or secularism and that these are not meant for Kashmir, and
that Islam alone will work there.
Look at a Facebook
message posted by the pro-azadi filmmaker, Sanjay Kak on 9 July. He narrates an
incident the morning after Wani's death when a Hindu man walked by a barricade
in Kashmir manned by local policemen. The man was hoping to pass when he got slapped
twice by one of the policemen who berated him for going to work on a day when
Burhan Wani was "martyred.” (Quoting Kak: "It's only Saturday for you
is it?” the cops said to him, "today is the day Burhan Wani was
martyred”). Kak described it as an "anecdotal evidence to get a sense of
the mood,” and it is clear that he approves of it.
Now, imagine a similar
episode in Ahmedabad where a Hindu policeman is manning a barricade put up in
the city immediately after the Godhra riots and slapping a Muslim worker.
Actually, it is not a correct analogy. Imagine a Hindu policeman in Ahmedabad
manning a barricade on the day Babu Bajrangi is being sentenced in the court
and then slapping a Muslim worker saying, "It's only Saturday for you, is
it? Today is the day when Babu Bajrangi has been sentenced to life
imprisonment.” Is the slapping of a man by a policeman who thinks that a
terrorist is a martyr a matter of upbeatness?
Are my pro-azadi
friends okay with Kashmir becoming an Islamic state? When they say azadi for
Kashmiris, do they even take into account the rights of the minorities in
Kashmir, including the Pandits? When they felicitate their friend Geelani, do
they ask him how the minorities will live in a place, which he says will be run
not on secularism but according to Shariah?
In a recent,
remarkable essay,
the scholar Mukul Kesavan argues that the monument for India's pluralism is its
Constitution and that "this is a claim to Indian exceptionalism (as
opposed to the common identity of South Asia) because India's neighbours were
either built on the wretched idea that nations are owned by religious
communities or later succumbed to it.”
Why would those who
claim to believe in India's pluralism succumb to the wretched idea of Kashmir
being owned by one religious community? But that is what, sadly, the leftists
in India have largely succumbed to.
http://www.firstpost.com/india/burhan-wani-wali-azadi-leftists-have-succumbed-to-narrow-view-of-kashmir-2915774.html
The Nation - July 15, 2016
Disown jihadist
‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir
by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
Burhan Muzaffar Wani’s
killing in an encounter on July 8 has resulted in absolute bedlam in the
Kashmir Valley, with death toll rising to 39 as of yesterday evening. The
21-year-old commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen has been compared to Bhagat
Singh – both to credit and discredit Wani’s struggle, depending on who’s doing
the juxtaposition. But notwithstanding the often ignored evolution of the moral
spectrum on the use of violence in contrasting eras, the crucial differential
between the two was their ideological positions. Wani was the offspring
of the global jihadist movement that emerged in the last quarter of the
previous century, hammering Muslim-majority freedom movements into Islamist
struggles wherever the occupying force was ‘non-Muslim’– including Palestine,
Kashmir and East Turkestan. And the problem with any Islamist ‘freedom’
movement is that it intrinsically contradicts the very idea of freedom.
Hizbul Mujahideen,
whose supreme commander Syed Salahuddin had claimed responsibility for the Pathankot
attack as the chairman of the United Jihad Council, is a jihadist organisation
whose very vocal ambitions aren’t limited to ‘liberating’ Kashmir from India.
Hizb overlaps with Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba that in turn work in
tandem with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, to lay a radical Islamic network from
South Asia to the Middle East, with Turkistan Islamic Movement and its Syrian
branch combining with Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to fasten together this
massive jihadist conglomerate. This expansionist jihadist superstructure feeds
off movements like those in Kashmir and Palestine to discredit genuine
struggles for self-recognition and battles for human rights.
The greatest partners
in crime for Islamist terror-mongers masquerading as freedom fighters are often
the left-leaning opinion-makers, the torchbearers of resistance against all
kinds of colonialism, which (mis)use prevailing economic disparity and their
dutiful obsession with demographical morality, to create alibis for violently
imperialistic jihadism.
It is these same
liberals – who might not have offered the same courtesy to Hafiz Saeed or
Masood Azhar for example – that have bought the Islamist narrative making Wani
the poster boy for Kashmiris’ fight. If Wani is representative of Kashmiri
Muslims, their Islamic supremacist movement shouldn’t be confused with
freedom-fighting. And if the Hizb commander does not reflect the average Muslim
mindset, there’s no bigger disservice to the Kashmiri cause than extolling
Wani’s ‘struggle’.
Wani, like countless
other youngsters, unfortunately fell prey to jihadism in a land becoming
increasingly fertile for radical Islam. Losing elder brother Khalid Muzaffar
Wani at the hands of the Indian Army’s brutalities last year pushed him further
toward militancy. Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani has reduced the probability
of his relatives being victimised by Indian forces, with both his sons living
hundreds of kilometers away from Kashmir in Rawalpindi and Delhi. Meanwhile in
October last year, Hurriyat Conference Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq warned
Kashmiris to “beware of the expansionist plan of the Ahmadis in Kashmir” in his
latest call for Ahmadis to be declared non-Muslims in India, during the Friday
khutba.
With Islamists like
Geelani and Umar Farooq spearheading the Kashmir movement, and Wani becoming
the face of resistance, little wonder that the struggle has continued to
diminish in the recent past, mirroring the Palestinian movement being usurped
by jihadism as well.
Just like Kashmiri
leaders’ Islamist fantasies, the Palestinian National Authority embedded Sharia
as the ‘main source of legislation’ in their Constitution framed after the Oslo
Accords. In fact it is the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 – a persistent remnant of
Palestine’s Islamist colonial past – which paradoxically facilitated Jewish
settlements in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights.
Hamas’ takeover of
Gaza has further exacerbated the plight of Palestinian Christians that have
already been reduced to around 1% of the Palestinian Arab population from 8% in
1946. This is similar to the Pandits expulsion from Kashmir, with 99% of the total
Pandit population (150,000 to 160,000) believed to have left the Kashmir Valley
by 1990.
Both Palestinian
Christians and Kashmiri Pandits have been – and many still are – strong
proponents of their respective nation’s right to self-determination from Israeli
and Indian occupation. But when those nations chose – and continue to choose –
to define themselves along religious lines, the movement for freedom became a
paradox. The Kurdish struggle
for autonomy in Turkey – oft ignored by the Muslim world owing to the identical
religious identities of the occupier and the occupied – is a classic example of
modern-day freedom struggles striving on political nous more than militancy.
The militant Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane’s (PKK) achievements are nonexistent
compared to pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party’s (HDP). Balochistan
pragmatists have long suggested that the quest for Baloch autonomy should take
a similar route.
That HDP’s gains in
June elections last year were undone by ISIS bombing the Turks into voting for
the right-wing, security-driven Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the
November reelections, perfectly outlines the discrepancy between political
struggle for freedom and jihadist expansionism. A similar story can be found in
the contrasting fates of the Hui and Uighur Muslims, despite the prevalence of
East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Western China.
None of this is to
deny the brutalities and human rights abuse of Indian and Israeli (or Turkish,
Chinese and Pakistani) occupations. But the geopolitical realities of the 21st
century dictate that actual battles for freedom are fought in the political
chambers, and not on the ground. Any struggle claiming to be a freedom movement
would need to exhibit the ideals that it demands among its own ranks. Case in
point: HDP’s persistent support for secular and liberal causes and human rights
– spearheaded by women and LGBTQ rights.
And so, actual
well-wishers of Kashmiris and Palestinians should be vocal in their
denunciation of any form of supremacism and bigotry instead of misrepresenting
jihadism as fight for freedom and summoning apologia for terror-mongering. For,
armed liberation attempts aided by jihadist neighbours have failed in both
territories for the past 70 odd years. Realism dictates abandoning
the gun, and battling the opposition in the political arena. For, no occupier
in the history of humankind has given up an inch of territory, just because it
was the ‘right thing’ to do.
see also
'In solidarity with all Kashmiri students': An appeal by a group of Kashmiri Pandits
Samar Halarnkar demands justice for the victims of Pathribal'
Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, CPI(M) MLA, J&K: ‘Serious dialogue need of the hour’
Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, CPI(M) MLA, J&K: ‘Serious dialogue need of the hour’
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