Naeem Akhtar: The aftermath of Pulwama marks the retreat of political engagement with Kashmir // Mukul Kesavan:The road to ruin
Naeem Akhtar: The aftermath of Pulwama marks the retreat of political engagement with Kashmir
Mukul Kesavan: The road to ruin: The idea of Kashmiri Muslims as colonial subjects, who can be disciplined by shotgun pellets, comes easily to the BJP
Quite understandably, the
Valentine’s Day atrocity in Pulwama, which caused the biggest ever loss of
lives of security forces to violence in the three-decade-old strife in Kashmir,
sent shockwaves across the world. The outrage and anger were unprecedented,
given the fact that the fallen bravehearts came almost from every state. The
very sight of body bags triggered calls for revenge.
While the country is
trying to come to terms with the loss and is looking to the political and
military leadership to come true on its pledge to root out terrorism, there has
not been an adequate focus on its impact on ground zero — Kashmir. Nor has there
been any attempt to look into the recent developments leading up to a tragedy
of such a scale. A Kashmir perspective is absent in the current narrative,
except for the attempts by political leaders and social media activists to try
and save the harried students who became targets of revenge mobs in some
places.
For a state that has
gone through three decades of the worst violence and has actually never been
stable post-Independence, how is February 14, 2019, different? A
quarter-century back, 43 civilians were killed only a few miles away at
Bijbehara on the same highway. But the killing of CRPF soldiers is different
both for its context and fall out. The difference is
reflected in many ways. First, Kashmiri youth are retaliating through methods
that have been passed on to them, like a contagion moving through the air. From
street demonstrations, funeral congregations, stone-throwing, teenagers with
just a few days of experience with Kalashnikovs, mostly on social media, they
have now been converted into dynamite. Pakistan is an essential part of this
transformation, helping it along, but the problem remains exclusively ours.
That they maintain assets in Kashmir is a fact of life that should need no
proof. But does that affirmation help?.. read more:
Mukul Kesavan: The road to ruin: The idea of Kashmiri Muslims as colonial subjects, who can be disciplined by shotgun pellets, comes easily to the BJP
The horror of the jihadi ambush
that killed dozens of CRPF soldiers and its aftermath, the attacks on Kashmiri
students in India, is a clarifying moment. It demonstrates beyond
reasonable doubt that Pakistan is run by a deep State that uses terror in the
way a rogue dentist might use a drill: to deliberately and precisely hit a
nerve and cause agony. Terror for Pakistan’s military-jihadi complex
is a technology. For this vicious formation, the 22-year-old Kashmiri student
who died blowing up the bus was a remote-controlled drone, worth nothing alive
but a martyr the moment he died.
A State that traffics
in martyrdom, an army that funds fanatical subsidiaries like the Jaish to train
young suicide bombers, erases the institutional distinctions that make
democracy possible. Pakistan’s army and its pliant civilian politicians have
obscured the dividing lines between State and religion, civilian and soldier,
citizen and true believer, even the basic difference between the preciousness
of life and the desolation of death.
The nation state’s
massive capacity for violence, rooted in its monopoly of force, is contained by
conventions, laws and institutional practices that entrench these distinctions.
With their erosion, Pakistan has gradually become feral; the majoritarianism
injected into its foundation has corroded every institutional separation and
restraint that civilizes a republic. Pakistan is a rogue state in this precise
sense: it is Leviathan, unbound. India is not Pakistan.
It is important to say this not because this is an Indian paper but because
it’s true. India has managed to sustain the semblance and substance of
democratic politics through most of its career as a republic. It has been less
successful in sustaining its constitutional commitment to being a secular,
non-discriminatory State, but given the low bar set by its neighbours, it has
been an important exception to the South Asian rule that nations are owned by
their religious majorities. Unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar,
it has never written the supremacy of a single faith into its Constitution.
This might seem a
nominal distinction. Perry Anderson, for example, in his jeremiad The
Indian Ideology, sees the Indian republic as a Hindu majoritarian State in
secular drag but even lip service to a secular State matters in a way that can
be simply demonstrated. If Narendra Modi were to win a second term in office
and officially rebrand India as a Hindu rashtra, this would re-make
every Indian’s experience of India. Our conversations and arguments, our sense
of ourselves as citizens, would be defined by this re-naming. Hindus, whether
they like it or not, would now officially be the first citizens of this Hindu
Bharat and non-Hindus would become, by default, clients of this organic
majority, guest citizens of the republic. Words matter. But in the end,
actions matter more. The Indian State’s history in Kashmir is one of duplicity,
authoritarianism and, for the last quarter of a century, massive and
increasingly violent military occupation.... read more:
