JOIN USFor the past few days, commentators have been scrambling to explain the tumultuous outpouring on the streets of Kashmir following Burhan Wani’s killing, refusing to wane under either bullets or pellets.
The first response generally is that of absolute and uncomprehending bewilderment. The second of outrage and indignation: look at them mourning a declared enemy of the state, look at them pelting stones at the army. The third is to fall back on the familiar, comforting narratives. Here, one has the luxury of drawing upon layers of sedimented common sense.
When our group, Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association, was compiling cases of malicious frame-ups by the Delhi Police’s elite Special Cell, we discovered that in 18 of the 23 cases the Special Cell had passed off Kashmiri businessmen, students, and sundry travellers passing through New Delhi as Hizb or Lashkar operatives.
Who would after all raise doubts about these Kashmiris terrorist links? No one did. Between Kashmiri the terrorist and Kashmiri the stone pelter is a difference only of degree in our common sense. Both are ultimately unreasonably opposed to our nation. Both are prone to violence.
What has been laid bare in the days past is the intimate link between gross institutionalised communal prejudice that exists in India and the militaristic response to Kashmir, of both, the state and its propaganda underlings, the assorted experts and TV anchors. Night after night, stars of television news scream into the camera that the stone-wielding teenager is either a shield for a terrorist who hides behind him or a Jihad-crazed maniac radicalised by a virulent form of Salafism which has supplanted the earlier gentler Sufi traditions.
Nice, Syria, Bangladesh–and preacher Zakir Naik thrown in for good measure–are all linked up to proclaim the onset of a global jihadist project in the Valley. Leaders and anchors excoriate anyone grieving the blindings and the killings: troubled by blood on the paved road? Where is your patriotism and loyalty towards the uniformed men?
The events of the past fortnight, the explanations and the manic commentary around it, hold up a mirror to us, not the Kashmiris. And the image in that mirror is grotesque. We have turned into primal hordes of automatons, exulting in blind jingoism. We are being asked to not feel pain. On the contrary, to take pride in these nationalist kills. We are being asked to abandon understanding, and empathy. We are not to ask why thousands of young people throng the graveyards to offer prayers for Burhan Wani. Indeed, it is not relevant to seek the roots of their rage, a rage so seething that it has inured them to all danger. What matters alone is that Kashmir remains the crowning glory of our sacred map.
When an army veteran writes a letter to the dead Wani, warning him–but really, the warning is to those in the streets because the dead don’t read letters–that the Indian Army “will kill you”, he is talking to us too. He is asking us to corrode our humanity, to leach ourselves of any sensibilities. Death is all that they deserve, even desire. Even to those of us who may be ambivalent about the meanings and consequences of “Azadi”, it is obvious that Kashmir can only be held by force, awful brutal force.
It is immaterial whether pellets can be substituted by a “less lethal, non-lethal” method of crowd management. Democracy in Kashmir will continue to be endless crowd management, and management of dead bodies and graves. Do we want blood on our hands? Remember that war always comes home. It brings with it its logic and symbols.
Technicolour nationalism
Why has the prime minister called upon his workers to undertake tiranga yatras at this moment? The directions are quite specific: BJP leaders are expected to carry flags aloft on an 8-feet pole, ride a two-wheeler, and chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. It is to be a spectacle par excellence. This technicolour nationalism fluttering in the air is meant of course to validate the war in Kashmir, but also to protect the “gau rakshak” vigilantes who skin Dalits and lynch Muslims, to prepare us for a possible aerial bombing in Chhattisgarh, to render us quiescent in our own surveillance, to normalise, even legalise, communal profiling and to ratchet up the already skyrocketing defence budgets.
Possibly at the very moment Wani was shot down by security agencies, I was reading a brief life sketch of Pt Rughonath Vaishnavi by his granddaughter, the anthropologist Mona Bhan. Vaishnavi was a vociferous advocate of Kashmiri nationalism.
His paper Jamhoor (Democracy) was banned in 1952. Vaishnavi was jailed repeatedly over the next few years and his habeas corpus petition was rejected on grounds that the protection flowing from the Constitution were not available to him.
His writings bear witness to midnight arrests and detentions of Kashmiri partisans–thrown into dark cells without being assigned any reason. Vaishnavi’s life and writings force us to look at the past and our present anew, and to imagine possibilities other than those thrust on us. Is it not possible to excavate these histories, to complicate the army veteran’s understanding of Kashmir as an “artificially manufactured conflict” with no history and no legitimacy? Perhaps, it is possible to pause for a moment and turn off the jingoism and simply reflect on the unfolding tragedy.
Let us not allow these deaths to become bald and sterile statistics. Let us not allow the Indian state’s hubris to blind us. Listen to what the Kashmiris are saying – not because it will change official policy, but because in that conversation lies our, and India’s redemption.
(The writer is the author of Kafkaland: Prejudice, Law and Counterterrorism in India)