SHAKIR MIR - It’s Time to Bring Kashmir’s ‘Miserable Guillotine’ Out from the Shadows
When the struggle against the tormentor
becomes a torment itself, it is imperative to speak out.
Srinagar: On a warm morning a few weeks ago, the
city was uncharacteristically serene. The previous night’s protests had
died down, giving way to a tranquil dawn. But outside my home in an old
part of town, a loud bang woke me up. I thrust my head out, eyes half-closed
with sleep. A knot of young men, their heads and faces wrapped in cloth,
had gathered around a grocery store whose owner had been tending to a line of
customers. In a flash, one of the men lifted a thick lathi into the air and
brought it down with full force. It struck hard. The first blow was furious, as
was every blow after.
The reason? By opening
his shop, the grocer had defied the state of collective defiance in the
Valley. His act was seen as an affront to those who willingly incurred losses,
inflicting harm on themselves in the hope that it would push India into
giving up Kashmir. From a distance, I saw his wife running towards him. Sobbing,
she pleaded for mercy with the assailants before herself passing out. The men
left. The neighbourhood women eased her into their arms, offering her water,
while the men watched impotently, muttering curses between their teeth.
For over two months,
the Valley of Kashmir has been convulsed by chaos. The trigger was the death of
a popular militant leader. Though it is said that he had not mounted a single
attack, the purpose of his killing is being questioned. He had been part of a
media blitz for over a year, yet the security forces never sought to close in
on him. The month before he was killed, he released two back-t-back video
messages. In one, he aspires to carve Kashmir into an Islamic Caliphate and
in the other, he promises attacks in case Jammu and Kashmir
policemen don’t come over to his side.
Whatever the reason,
the decision to kill Wani turned out to be a terrible error of judgment. It
mobilised thousands and thousands of people, spurring both peaceful protests
and widespread instances of rioting – leading to the death of over 80 people,
and injuries
to 12,000, of which more than 5,000 are police and CRPF personnel.
The government is
facing protests of the kind it does not know how to bottle. In trying to, it
ended up committing terrible acts of brutality upon the civilian
population using pump action guns, firearms, clubs and what have you. But then,
there is a reason why I began my essay with an incident so out of keeping
with events as we know them.
A few days ago,
Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani reiterated his message that azadi was
round the corner. He asked
people to keep steadfast and persevere until it drew nearer and
nearer. The more roads we fill, the more rocks we hurl, the closer it is
getting.
But is it? On the
contrary, we have embarked upon a great slide into a dead-end and azadi is yet
to show up across the horizon. It hasn’t and in fact, never will. Not at least
till another cataclysmic event embroils South Asia, dismembering the powerful nation
states of today, leaving a fertile ground for smaller states to seek their
separate nationhood. Britain did not relinquish control over India until it
felt the crippling pain of World War II – never mind how “steadfast” was
India’s struggle for freedom.
The current
groundswell in Kashmir is spontaneous. There can be no two views about this.
Separatist leaders have wielded formidable influence but they can do so only as
long as they don’t stop mouthing platitudes that are palatable to a large
section of the pubic. For instance, if the Hurriyat even tinkers with its
protest calendars – to make them more flexible for daily wagers and businesses,
perhaps – protesters will
cut them down to size. That is perhaps why even on Eid, thecompendium
of hartals followed the same course as on other days.
Spectre of public
fatigue
The truth is that even
the separatists are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand,
they cannot show so much as the merest sign of exhaustion. On the other, the
spectre of public fatigue has risen all around them. The craving for a normal
life is beginning to take hold among a cross-section of people as they come to
terms with the futility of self-harm. Anger against India is fine. Nursing
dreams of azadi is too. But how long can one do so at the altar of one’s own
livelihood?
The police will succeed
in breaking the cycle of violence. They did so in 2010, allowing the anger to
dissipate, rather slide, beneath an illusion of normalcy – only to turn
effervescent again and re-emerge out through the cracks, drowning Kashmir
afresh. All it needed was a trigger and there were always plenty of those.
The fatigue couldn’t
be more apparent when recently, despite announcing that fruit
growers have sworn allegiance to the Hurriyat and are ready to bear losses,
it suddenly turned out that 8876 metric tons of fruit had been hauled off in 953
truckloads outside the state in the first half of August alone. There is no
telling what mark it touched thereafter.
The separatists have
channelised public anguish in a direction into which it is destined to peter
out. Had it not been so, the situation of the 1990s would have reigned till
today. The violence that flared in 2008 and 2010 would not have ended either. This is not because
fellow Kashmiris are prone towards treachery or that their conscience is
shallow but because human beings are hardwired to not want to live by violence
for too long. The bedrock of the secessionist movement has always been the
angst stemming from atrocities Indian soldiers commit. When the excesses halt,
so does the angst and every other consequence it had branched off into.
The movement is intrinsically unsustainable once the dynamic of the “oppressive
military presence” is taken out of the equation.
A case in point is
what happened on August 29, when the authorities lifted curfew for the first
time since it was imposed on July 8. The response surprised everyone. Besides
the re-eruption of protests across Kashmir, people came out in hordes in those
areas which saw incredibly lower levels of violence – such as Srinagar.
Traffic trickled past the streets once again and store owners lifted their
shutters. By evening, the situation had all reversed. Frequent mob attacks
coerced people into scaling back. So scandalised was Geelani by what had
happened, he openly warned shopkeepers the next day that if they acted
“traitorous”, they would be “wiped out like straw.”
In one fell swoop, the
ageing leader also alienated thousands of taxi drivers and auto-wallas when
he accused them of acting on India’s behest and
receiving bounty for taking out their vehicles to commit an act no
less sinful than scraping together a living.
I asked an ardent
pro-azadi friend to show me this stash of money which the ‘deviant’ and
‘corrupt’ taxi drivers were drawing cash from. “I will tell a couple of
auto-walla acquaintances so that they don’t have to starve,” I told
him, tongue firmly in cheek. He smote his brows together before mumbling a few
unintelligible words and leaving in a huff. I smiled inwardly, both at his
naivety and the utter irony of the moment.
For India, Kashmiri
protestors can only be provocateurs driven by Pakistan and Hurriyat to
instigate trouble. For their part, the Hurriyat see ordinary Kashmiris who are
desperate to make a living in trying times as “Indian agents” – entrusted by
Delhi to “derail the movement.” Both sides see events though their own black
and white vision, overlooking the real people out there with aspirations
spanning a million shades of gray... read more:
http://thewire.in/68602/kashmirs-miserable-guillotine/see also
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The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
RSS tradition of manufacturing facts to suit their ideology
