Shah Faesal: Kashmiris trapped in deadly politics of grief, must abandon macabre heroism // Al Jazeera debate: Is self-determination on the cards for Kashmiris?
NB: A thought-provoking meditation by a courageous civil servant. It deserves wide circulation and serious debate. His point about violence is especially well-taken. Meanwhile the ideologues of the Sangh Parivar currently in power in India's central government are trying to enforce their own version of 'nationalism' upon all Indians. They may or may not learn anything from this article. But the rest of us should keep in mind that communal politics of each and every variety, only reinforce one another. Thank you Shah Faesal. DS
Looking at the Muslim
world’s crisis, it will serve Kashmiris well if we abandon false hope and work
towards a dignified exit from the conflict.
When I thought of
“India” as a child, I thought of a distant, stiflingly hot place beyond the
hills of my village, from where came cheerful hawkers with cloth-wrapped
backpacks, barefoot fortune-tellers with curly hair and unfriendly, uniformed
men who stole apples from our orchard. Rather than being
right here, India was somewhere out there. Even in school, when lessons on
identity were given, they went well when they were about my village, district,
state; the moment it came to my country, the teacher either got tongue-tied or
the school bell would chime, class was over and we’d be left guessing. As the
conflict intensified, we grew up as confused citizens of a country in the
making.
The politics of hope
is a dangerous thing because it can trap people into a flawed reading of
history. That is exactly what happened to us. There was a cultural backdrop. We
spoke with a cadence of Pashto; our faith was Arab; our mornings began with
recitals from Sa’adi Shirazi; we ate in Turkish utensils; our bedtime stories
had scenes from Shahnameh. It was easy to make us believe that one more nudge
and history would witness a dramatic reversal; a transformative cataclysm - azadi - was just round the corner.
Expectedly, there came
a time in Kashmir when bus conductors were asked to prepare route plans to
markets across the border. Peshawari prayer rugs started appearing in homes,
wrist watches were turned half an hour behind Delhi time, bridges were burnt,
so the enemy couldn’t walk over to our side. Most importantly, all men and
women whose loyalties were suspect were hung from elm trees. In a complete
withdrawal from reality, people gathered around radio sets to listen to
official announcements of freedom, reassuring one another that something was
about to happen.
Years passed.
Thousands of lives were lost. Millions got displaced. In take two, the
destruction which the politics of hope brought to Kashmir generated an even
deadlier politics of grief. Kashmiris now memorialised the sorrow that was a
consequence of the confrontation with a mighty state. Dying became an end in
itself. Alienation from the state extended into alienation from one another. An
entire generation of Kashmiris sought refuge in the glorification of pain.
Rational fear made space for romantic fearlessness. Dissent became more
technology-driven and virtual. Growing religious consciousness became a way of
life.
Every new agitation in
Kashmir has had this familiar tetrad of eruption, hope, bereavement, despair.
By the time the first stone was pelted in the July uprising of 2016, the
outcome was already known to everyone. It is this predictability which has
begun to worry Kashmiris now. Revolution cannot be an annual summer carnival.
If today, Kashmir is the most unlikely new nation to enter the world map in the
future, the blame is not on India. It is a flaw in the fundamental design of
the Kashmir project.
Firstly, all these
years, Kashmiris have given conflicting signals to the world. For those who
compared Kashmir to Palestine, East Timor, Kosovo, the problem is that it is
hard to frame the Kashmiri question properly. Is it separation from India,
annexation with Pakistan, the search for an Islamic caliphate or a secular
democracy? Has it factored in sub-regional and diverse ethnic aspirations? If
it is self-determination, then who are these people queued up outside polling
stations? If the slogan is “azadi”, why is the Pakistani flag raised? Is it class-neutral
or only a proletariat dream? Is it territory or ideology, economics or
politics? Today, in Kashmir, it is hard to ask these questions because there
are no answers. And because there are no answers, every such question is seen
as a provocation or obfuscation of the truth about Kashmir.
The second problem is
using violence as an instrument of grievance redressal. For 30 years, Kashmiris
have been trying to explain to the world the difference between militancy and
terrorism. The sooner it is understood that in a post-9/11 world, no theory of
organised violence can be accepted as good enough for justifying it, the
better.
Thirdly, the
indiscipline we saw on the streets during 2016’s unrest has the potential to
criminalise society forever. It was not the state as much as people to people
violence, the humiliation of bystanders, vandalism against schools, damage to
public property by misguided teenagers that exhausted Kashmiris, reducing a
mass movement to a movement of mass from one corner of the street to the other
corner.
With fresh wounds in
the 70th year of J&K’s accession to India, Kashmiris have no choice but to
go back to the drawing board and see what went wrong. India is an emerging
superpower - it is there to stay. Looking at the crisis in the Muslim world, it
will serve us well if we help ourselves out of the time warp we are stuck in,
abandon false hope and macabre heroism and work towards a dignified exit from
the conflict. One possibility is to accept that in spite of all its
infirmities, India is the only country in the world with which a culturally diverse
and politically disparate entity like Jammu and Kashmir can find anchor.
The author is a
Kashmiri civil servant and writer
Watch video:
Is self-determination on the cards for Kashmiris? - Ather Zia and Sualeh Keen debate the case for independence
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