Marshalling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extraterritorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation.
Hindu majoritarianism – the cultural nationalism and political assertion of the Hindu majority – anctifies India as intrinsically Hindu and marks the non-Hindu as its adversary.6 Hindu majoritarian culture has been consolidating its power despite the interventions of secular, syncretic, and progressive stakeholders. Race and nation are made synonymous in India, as Hindus – the formerly colonized, now governing, elite – are depicted as the national race.7
India’s contrived enemy in Kashmir is a plausible one: the Muslim ‘Other’, the historically manufactured nemesis of Hindu-dominant India. India’s political and media establishments caricature the Kashmiri Muslim as violent, impure, anti-national, as one who does not belong and who has refused political, cultural, and economic assimilation. The Kashmiri, historically residing outside the present Indian nation, is branded ‘seditious’ for seeking a different self-determination, for not belonging, and for not accepting annexation.
Amid the unresolved histories of the subcontinent, the resistance in disputed Jammu and Kashmir has been ongoing since 1931, when it was signalled by the 13 July uprising and the establishment of the All India Kashmir Committee.8 The conflict morphed in October 1947, with the increasing encroachment of repressive Indian sovereignty.9 The period between 1947 and 1987 witnessed locally motivated, non-violent struggles for popular sovereignty and political self-determination.10 In the post–Cold War era, the Kashmir conflict has been framed by discourses on ‘terror politics’. The armed resistance in Kashmir began in 1988 and intensified following the Gawakadal killings in Srinagar in January 1990. The armed struggle abated between 2004 and 2007, yielding to a new phase of non-violent resistance.
The Indian state, however, propagates the misleading idea that the resistance movement is not locally inspired, that it aspires to violent resolutions, and that such aspirations are subsidized by Pakistan. These misconceptions ignore the fact that although Kashmiris did travel to Pakistan to seek arms training, such activity was largely confined to the early days of the armed resistance, the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Today, the crisis of state in Pakistan, and the role of its ruling elite in vitiating people’s democratic processes, does remain a pitfall for regional security. Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), responsible for domestic and foreign intelligence, with its perilous links with terror groups such as the Taliban, continues to infiltrate borders and endanger the region.
State racism – the primacy of Hindu majoritarian will in state decisions – orders India’s rule in Kashmir.11 India’s rule in Kashmir merges neoliberal democracy with authoritarian practices. The Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Armed Forces neutralize the independent functioning of the judiciary, educational institutions, and the media in the name of national security, continuing what is in effect military governance.
India, the post-colony, silences revolt. In Kashmir, violence is part of the fabric of everyday life. India’s governance of Kashmir requires the use of disciplinary practices and massacre as techniques of social control. Discipline is used on individuals and collectives by those authorized to perpetrate violence in the interest of the ‘national good’: the police, intelligence agencies, and paramilitary and armed forces. Discipline is effected through surveillance and punishment, in order to exact fear and obedience. Discipline flows through the formal and extra-legal capillaries of the state. Death is disbursed both through ‘extrajudicial’ means and those authorized by law. Discipline rewards forgetting, isolation, and depoliticization.
Summer 2010 saw a new phase in India’s manoeuvring against Kashmir’s determination to decide its own future. Amid the civil society’s indefatigable uprisings in favour of azadi in this third summer since 2008, the recurring use of violence by the Indian forces has been deliberate; their tactics have been cruel and precise.12
Summer 2010 witnessed strikes and mass protests, as hundreds and thousands of people marched through the streets, in cities, towns, and rural areas across Kashmir to protest against the suppression of civil society. Graffiti, songs, comic strips, prose and poetry were all used as mediums of dissent. Crowds carried banners demanding ‘Go, India, Go Back’; they daubed ‘Indian Dogs Go Home’ on the pavements; the call for India to ‘Quit Kashmir’ rent the air. It was reminiscent of another epoch in history, the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942, against British colonial rule.
Dominant Indian representations of the situation described the mass civil disobedience as something engineered by pro-freedom groups or cross-border interests, rather than a spontaneous response by the people to their experience of subjugation. Armed forces personnel characterized it not as civil disobedience but as ‘agitational terrorism’, and criminalized Internet-based protest, terming it ‘cyber terrorism’.
Between 11 June and 22 September 2010, India’s police, paramilitary, and military killed 109 Kashmiri youths, men, and women. Indian forces opened fire on crowds, tortured children, detained elderly people without explanation, and coerced false confessions. There were seventy-three days of curfew and seventy-five days of strikes and agitation. On 11 September, the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, celebrating the end of Ramadan, the assault continued. Large demonstrations, identified as a threat rather than an expression of rightful civil disobedience, were targeted by the Indian forces. The paramilitary and police verbally abused and physically attacked civilian dissenters. The Indian forces acted with the knowledge and sanction of the Government of India and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir.
Summer 2010 was not unprecedented. It was not the first time that the use of public and summary execution and civic torture had been considered necessary to subjugate Kashmir. The violence was a ritualistic reassertion of India’s power over Kashmir’s body.
Relentless state violence and the criminalization of nonviolent means of self-expression led Kashmiris to resort to stone-throwing. Continued repression prompted the civil society to engage in acts of violence and arson in some instances. Each instance of civilian violence was fomented by the Indian forces’ indiscriminate and pre-emptive use of force on civilians, force that included extrajudicial killings. The effect was cumulative. In peaceable civilian demonstrations, women and men protested the actions of Indian forces. Individuals caught in the midst of the unrest, or gathering to mourn the death of a civilian protester, were fired upon by state security, leading to more protests and to the ever greater use of force by the police and paramilitary: torture, killings, vandalizing of neighbourhoods. In response to that came larger, and sometimes violent, civilian protests, which in turn precipitated further state repression.
Paramilitary and police killings were not limited to encounters with protesters. On 12 June, Muhammad Rafiq Bangroo, twenty-four years old, was standing near his home watching the protests when he was set upon and severely beaten by the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). He died a week later at the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital in Srinagar. Yasmeen Jan, age twenty-five, from the Srinagar town of Dander Khah, was killed by a bullet fired into her chest by CRPF and/or police personnel on 6 July, while she stood near a window inside her home.
On 19 July, CRPF and police personnel fired at a peaceful funeral procession carrying the body of Faizan Bhuroo. Faizan, a minor, drowned on 17 July after he jumped into the Jhelum River when Special Operations Group personnel attempted to arrest him as he returned home from the Main Chowk in Baramulla district. Faizan’s funeral procession was intercepted while on its way to the district commissioner’s office to lodge a protest. The procession was attacked without provocation; in the clashes that followed, a large gathering of protesters thre
w stones. Police opened fire, killing Fayaz Ahmad Khanday, twenty-three years old. The crowd, infuriated, escalated to acts of arson, including an attempted attack on the house of a police officer allegedly involved in the drowning of Faizan Bhuroo.
Sameer Ahmad Rah, nine years old, died from the beatings he received from CRPF personnel on 2 August. Found playing near where a demonstration had taken place earlier in the day, he was grabbed, mutilated and killed by CRPF personnel. The torture they inflicted on him included driving a bamboo stick into his mouth.
In India, politicians and the media blamed protesters for the remorseless violence of the state. But civil society demonstrations in Kashmir are not, as has been reported, a law-and-order problem. Stone-throwing and acts of arson are not the causes of the violence that is endemic in Kashmir today. Nobody has been killed by protesters throwing stones.13 Pro-freedom leaders (the Indian state uses the reductive term ‘separatists’) have emphasized non-violent civil disobedience and have exhorted people not to react violently to the violence and killings by Indian forces.
Distinctions in method and power – dissimilarities between the strategies of the Indian state and those of Kashmiri dissenters, between stone pelters and armed soldiers, between ‘terrorists’ (as Kashmiri dissenters are branded by the state) and ‘freedom fighters’ (as Kashmiri protesters designate themselves) – are ignored. In summer 2010, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, focused on the need for efficient tactics in ‘crowd control’. India’s intelligentsia, inured to the idea of ‘rational’ state violence, assessed the costs and benefits of military action. State violence is accepted as the sine qua non for the maintenance of the Indian nation.
The Government of India continues to monitor the resistance movement, shifting the definition of what does or does not constitute an acceptable exercise of civil liberties. Kashmiris are allowed to protest in New Delhi, but in Kashmir, sloganeering is met with force. When in July 2010 Masarat Alam Bhat, a rising pro-freedom leader, issued a written appeal to Indian soldiers to ‘Quit Kashmir’, Indian authorities banned its circulation.
As state-sponsored aggression increased, protestors were provoked into further acts of violence. On 13 September 2010, crowds protesting Florida pastor Terry Jones’s call to desecrate the Quran torched a Christian missionary school and some government offices. On that day alone, eighteen civilians were killed by Indian forces across Kashmir; a police officer also died. Provoking Kashmiri dissenters to violence served to confirm the dominant story of Muslims as ‘violent’, even though several pro-freedom leaders condemned the attack on the Christian school and renewed their call for non-violent dissent.
On 25 September, while the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly met in New York City, New Delhi announced an eight-point plan, the object of which was to maintain the status quo in Kashmir while keeping the disorder and violence there concealed from the international gaze. The plan committed India to releasing youths who had been arrested and detained without trial during the protests that summer; that commitment was never acted upon. The plan also proposed setting up task forces in Jammu and Ladakh to monitor and assess the situation in Kashmir. However, no task force was proposed for assessing the impact of India’s governance on Kashmir. Neither did the plan propose any reduction in troops.
The plan did promise compensation payments of 500,000 rupees (rather than the customary 100,000 rupees) to the next of kin of victims killed by Indian forces. However, it made no commitment to investigate the killings of more than a hundred Kashmiris by the Indian forces that summer. ‘ “Shining India” can afford to pay a larger price for murdering Kashmiris,’ one Kashmiri youth noted derisively. ‘Is the plan to continue to kill us, just for a better price?’14
The plan proposed one billion Indian rupees to rebuild Kashmir’s educational infrastructure. What is the status of academic freedom in Kashmir? Students in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences who seek to study the conflict and issues of violence and militarization are rarely permitted to do so. Kashmiri students who are related to former or deceased militants have not been permitted to travel abroad even when they have secured scholarships to do so.
The plan stated that New Delhi would support the efforts of the Government of Jammu and Kashmir to review and repeal detention cases filed under the Public Safety Act (PSA) of 1978. No action has ensued. The PSA is a preventive-detention law that, among other provisions, authorizes incarceration for up to two years on grounds of unconfirmed suspicion. In March 2011, Amnesty International reported that between eight thousand and twenty thousand people have been held under the PSA over the past twenty years.15
On 13 September 2010, the Government of India stated its willingness to engage with Kashmiri groups that reject violence. New Delhi did not apply the same precondition of non-violence to itself. Nor did it acknowledge that pro-freedom groups have repeatedly opposed the use of violence in recent years. Misogynist and violent groups such as the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba (a Pakistani group), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are mercenaries looking for takers in Kashmir. Per the Indian state’s pronouncements, there are between only five hundred and a thousand militants in the Kashmir Valley today. These groups have been unsuccessful not because the Indian army is effective in controlling them but because Kashmiris have been uninterested in alliances with them.
If India fails to act, if Pakistan acts only in its own self-interest, and if the international community does not insist on an equitable resolution to the Kashmir dispute, it is conceivable that, forsaken by the world, Kashmiris will be prompted to take up arms again. If state repression persists, it is conceivable that the movement for non-violent dissent, mobilized since 2004, will erode. Signs indicate that it is already fraying. It is conceivable that India’s brutality will induce Kashmiri youth to move from stones to petrol bombs, or worse.
If the mass movement in Kashmir descends into widespread violence, India will take advantage of the situation to reject Kashmiri demands for demilitarization and conflict resolution and to further entrench what is a civic and legal ‘state of exception’. India will then reinforce further its armed presence in Kashmir, which is presently 671,000 strong.16 If India succeeds in both provoking local armed struggle and in spreading the idea that Kashmiri resistance is linked to foreign terrorism from Pakistan and Afghanistan, rather than being the locally grown independence movement that it is, New Delhi will acquire international sanction to continue its Government of Kashmir on grounds of national security.
This policy of incitement is a mistake. Such legitimation of military rule will produce intractable conflict and violence. All indications are that in Kashmiri civil society dissent will not abate: it is not externally motivated but historically compelled. Repressive regimes tend to overlook that freedom struggles are not about the moralities of violence versus non-violence, but reflect a desire to be free. The oppressors forget that the greater the oppression, the more fervent the resistance. Violence is apt to reproduce itself in cycles.
Whether dissent in Kashmir continues as mass-based peaceful resistance or turns into organized armed struggle will depend upon India’s political decisions. Any future mobilization by Kashmiris would involve an even stronger mass movement than that which occurred in 1990 and between 2004 and 2007, led by youth whose lives have been shaped by two decades of militarization. If this transpires, it may well be impossible to avoid the infiltration of violent groups into the Indian subcontinent – making such infiltration a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who wants that? Can South Asia, already nuclearized, survive that? The onus is on India to keep this from happening – not through the use of unmitigated force, but through listening to the demands for change made by Kashmiris.
I spent considerable time between July 2006 and January 2011 learning about and working in Kashmir, making sixteen separate trips to the region. In July 2006, the noted human rights lawyer Parvez Imroz invited me to collaborate in instituting the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Ju
stice in India-administered Kashmir, which we convened on 5 April 2008, together with Zahir-Ud-Din, Gautam Navlakha, Mihir Desai, and Khurram Parvez.17
In undertaking work for the Tribunal, I have travelled through Kashmir’s cities and countryside, from Srinagar to Kupwara, through Shopian and Islamabad/Anantnag.18 I have witnessed the violence that India’s military, paramilitary, and police perpetrate against Kashmiris. I have walked through the graveyards that hold Kashmir’s dead, and have met with grieving families. I have listened to the testimony of a mother who sleepwalks to the grave of her son, attempting to resuscitate his body. I have met with the grave-diggers who were terrorized by Indian forces into performing the task of burial.
I recall Atta Mohammad’s testimony from June 2008. In his seventies, he is the grave-digger and caretaker at Bimyar, where he buried 203 bodies between 2002 and 2006. He told me, ‘My nights are tormented and I cannot sleep; the bodies and graves appear and reappear in my dreams. My heart is weak from this labour. I have tried to remember all this . . . the sound of the earth as I covered the graves . . . bodies and faces that were mutilated . . . mothers who would never find their sons. My memory is an obligation.’19
I have met with children and youth who were orphaned. I have met women whose sons were disappeared, and have witnessed the daily upheaval of anticipation and hopelessness in their lives. I have met with ‘half-widows’, women whose husbands have been ‘disappeared’. Half-widows do not qualify for state support, such as the pensions offered to ‘widows’. Women have been forced disproportionately to assume the task of caring for disintegrated families and to undertake the work of seeking justice following disappearances and deaths.
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom Page 10
