On the night of August 17, the police sealed the city. Streets were barricaded, thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads leading into Srinagar were blocked. For the first time in eighteen years the police had to plead with Hurriyat leaders to address the rally at the TRC grounds instead of marching right up to the UNMOGIP office on Gupkar Road, Srinagar’s Green Zone, where, for years, the Indian establishment has barricaded itself in style and splendor.
On the morning of August 18, people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the valley. In trucks, jeeps, buses, and on foot. Once again, barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were faced with a choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre. They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.
The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air. Everyone had a banner; houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers, doctors. One said, “We are all prisoners, set us free.” Another said, “Democracy without Justice is Demon-crazy.” Demon-crazy. That was a good one. Perhaps he was referring to the twisted logic of a country that needed to commit communal carnage in order to bolster its secular credentials. Or the insanity that permits the world’s largest democracy to administer the world’s largest military occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.
There was a green flag on every lamppost, every roof, every bus stop, and on the top of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs to Hazratbal, Batmaloo, Sopore were painted over. Rawalpindi, they said. Or simply Pakistan. It would be a mistake to assume that the public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates into a desire to accede to Pakistan. Some of it has to do with gratitude for the support—cynical or otherwise—for what Kashmiris see as their freedom struggle and the Indian state sees as a terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and doing what galls India most of all.
It’s easy to scoff at the idea of a “freedom struggle” that wishes to distance itself from a country that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that has, for the most part, been ruled by military dictators. A country whose army has committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are important questions, but right now perhaps it’s more useful to wonder what this so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it so.
Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry: “Pakistan se rishta kya? La illaha illallah” (What is our bond with Pakistan? There is no god but Allah).
“Azadi ka matlab kya? La illaha illallah” (What does Freedom mean? There is no god but Allah).
For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hard—if not impossible—to understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said, “What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?” Her reply silenced me.
“The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. It’s all being stirred into a poisonous brew and administered intravenously, straight into our bloodstream.”
Standing in the grounds of the TRC, surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or ignore the deeply Islamic nature of the uprising taking place around me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jihad. For Kashmiris it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties, and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any means call itself pristine and will always be stigmatized by, and will some day, I hope, have to account for, among other things, the brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire community from the Kashmir valley.
As the crowd continued to swell I listened carefully to the slogans, because rhetoric often clarifies things and holds the key to all kinds of understanding. I’d heard many of them before a few years ago at a militant’s funeral. A new one, obviously coined after the blockade was: “Kashmir ki mandi! Rawalpindi!” (It doesn’t lend itself to translation, but it means: Kashmir’s marketplace? Rawalpindi!) Another was “Khooni lakir tod do, aar paar jod do” (Break down the blood-soaked Line of Control, let Kashmir be united again). There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: “Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do” (Oh oppressors, oh wicked ones, get out of our Kashmir). “Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, voh Kashmir hamara hai!” (The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours!)
The slogan that cut through me like a knife and clean broke my heart was this one: “Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan” (Naked, starving India, more precious than life itself—Pakistan). Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who are not nanga or bhooka are—and have been—complicit in complex and historical ways with the elaborate cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal. And third, because it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much themselves, mock others who suffer, in different ways, but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.
It took hours for Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani to wade through the thronging crowds and make it onto the podium. When they arrived they were born aloft on the shoulders of young men, over the surging crowd to the podium. The roar of greeting was deafening. Mirwaiz Umar spoke first. He repeated the demand that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Disturbed Areas Act, and the Public Safety Act—under which thousands have been killed, jailed, and tortured—be withdrawn. He called for the release of political prisoners, for the Srinagar–Muzaffarabad road to be opened for the free movement of goods and people, and for the demilitarization of the Kashmir valley.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the Koran. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to turn to the Koran for guidance. He said Islam would guide the struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam and that that goal should never be subverted. He said just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan. He said minority communities would have full rights and their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was applauded.
Oddly enough, the apparent doctrinal clarity of what he said made everything a little unclear. I wondered how the somewhat disparate views of the various factions in this freedom struggle would resolve themselves—the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s vision of an independent state, Geelani’s desire to merge with Pakistan and Mirwaiz Umar balanced precariously between them.
An old man with a red eye standing next to me said, “Kashmir was one country. Half was taken by India, the other half by Pakistan. Both by force. We want freedom.” I wondered if, in the new dispensation, the old man would get a hearing. I wondered what he would think of the trucks that roared down the highways in the plains of India, owned and driven by men who knew nothing of history, or of Kashmir, but still had slogans on their tail gates that said, “Doodh maango to kheer denge, Kashmir mango to chir denge” (Ask for milk, you’ll get cream; ask for Kashmir, we’ll cut you open.)
Briefly, I had another thought. I imagined myself standing in the heart of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or Vishwa Hindu Parishad rally being addressed by L. K. Advani. Replace the word “Islam” with the word “Hindutva,” replace the
word “Pakistan” with “Hindustan,” replace the sea of green flags with saffron ones, and we would have the Bharatiya Janata Party’s nightmare vision of an ideal India.
Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious states handing down a complete social and moral code, “a complete way of life”? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism, from having enormous emotional stakes in the society in which we live. What our neighbors do, how they choose to handle their affairs does not affect our argument, it only strengthens it.
Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamic project (which is as contested, in equally complex ways, all over the world by Muslims, as Hindutva is contested by Hindus). Perhaps now that the threat of violence has receded and there is some space in which to debate views and air ideas, it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans, and vague generalizations. Those who wish to turn to the Koran for guidance, will, no doubt, find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Koran does not make any place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for sixty-one years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas (rascals) and writers who do not agree with the “complete social and moral code”? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression, and bloodshed continue? History offers many models for Kashmir’s thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?
At a crucial time like this, few things are more important than dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and honestly. It could be argued that the prevarication of Maharaja Hari Singh in 1947 has been its great modern tragedy, one that eventually led to unthinkable bloodshed and the prolonged bondage of people who were very nearly free.
Already the specter of partition has reared its head. Hindutva networks are alive with rumors about Hindus in the valley being attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to flee. (Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.)
There is absolutely no reason to believe that history will repeat itself. Not unless it is made to. Not unless people actively work to create such a cataclysm. However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for freedom justified the colonial project.
Of course, there are many ways for the Indian state to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope the people’s energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try and fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish this nonviolent uprising and reinvite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half a million to a whole million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances, and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.
The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going ought by right to be spent instead on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnutritioned population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire, and more prisons in Kashmir?
The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. It’s all being stirred into a poisonous brew and administered intravenously, straight into our bloodstream.
At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force?
India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much—if not more— than Kashmir needs azadi from India.
This essay first appeared in the Guardian, on August 22, 2008, and in Outlook, on September 1, 2008.
NINE IS NOT ELEVEN (AND NOVEMBER ISN’T SEPTEMBER)
We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our twenty-four-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, US senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was “India’s 9/11.”1
But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.
It’s odd how, in the last week of November, thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India’s richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara—one of Kashmir’s most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur, and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects in these previous attacks, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something’s going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television, you might not have heard that ordinary people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish center.2
We’re told that one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That’s absolutely true. It’s an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) said, “Hungry, kya?” (Hungry, eh?). It then (with the best of intentions, I’m sure) informed its readers that, on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn’t that war. That one’s still being fought in the Dalit bastis (settlements) of our villages; on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo Rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram,
Singur, and Lalgarh in West Bengal, in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa, and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities. That war isn’t on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially “Islamist” terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit, and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography, or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try to place it in a political context, or even to try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself. Side B believes that, though nothing can ever excuse or justify it, terrorism exists in a particular time, place, and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself.
The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing; hates Jews, Shias, and democracy; and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he said are: “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them—cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.”3 And: “India has shown us this path for jihad … We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir.”4
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera):
My Seditious Heart Page 47
