Anj — Arundhati Roy — Azadi
Topic(s): India | Comments Off on Anj — Arundhati Roy — AzadiAzadi
by Arundhati Roy
Outlook Magazine, September 01, 2008
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080901&fname=Arundhati
+Roy+(F)&sid=1&pn=1
For the past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the
people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense.
They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-
sights of half-a-million heavily-armed soldiers in the most densely
militarised zone in the world.
After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian
government’s worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the
militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-
violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage.
The Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true. Having
declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced
with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to
manage.
This one is nourished by people’s memory of years of repression in
which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been
‘disappeared’, hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, raped and
humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily
be tamed, re-bottled and sent back to where it came from.
For all these years, theIndian State, known amongst the knowing as
the Deep State, has done everything it can to subvert, suppress,
represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchase—
and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It has used
money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation,
propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and
informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged elections to
subdue what democrats would call “the will of the people”. But now
the Deep State, as Deep States eventually tend to, has tripped on its
own hubris and bought into its own publicity. It made the mistake of
believing that domination was victory, that the ‘normalcy’ it had
enforced through the barrel of a gun was indeed normal, and that the
people’s sullen silence was acquiescence.
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on people’s behalf,
informed us that “Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace”.
What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never
clarified. Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has
brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir’s sorrows
could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was
always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir
had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace they yearned
for, but freedom too. Over the last two months, the carefully
confected picture of an innocent people trapped between ‘two guns’,
both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.
A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of
100 acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which
manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir
Himalayas) suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into
a barrel of petrol. Until 1989, the Amarnath pilgrimage used to
attract about 20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a
period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamic militant
uprising in the Valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindutva
in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase
exponentially. By 2008, more than 5,00,000 pilgrims visited the
Amarnath cave in large groups, their passage often sponsored by
Indian business houses. To many people in the Valley, this dramatic
increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by
an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian State. Rightly or
wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge.
It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an
elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements, and change the
demography of the Valley.
Days of massive protest forced the Valley to shut down completely.
Within hours, the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young
stone-pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired
straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the
government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early
’90s. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal and police firing,
while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with
committing every kind of communal excess, the 5,00,000 Amarnath
pilgrims completed their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by
the hospitality they had been shown by local people.
Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the
response, the government revoked the land transfer.Hadn’t anybody
noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like
water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To
threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political
suicide.But by then the land transfer had become what senior
separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani called a “non-issue”.
Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There, too,
the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to
raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian State. (For
some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.)
The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the
only functional road link between Kashmir and India. The army was
called out to clear the highway and allow safe passage of trucks
between Jammu and Srinagar. But incidents of violence against
Kashmiri truckers were being reported from as far away as Punjab
where there was no protection at all. As a result, Kashmiri truckers,
fearing for their lives, refused to drive on the highway. Truckloads
of perishable fresh fruit and Valley produce began to rot. It became
very obvious that the blockade had caused the situation to spin out
of control. The government announced that the blockade had been
cleared and that trucks were going through. Embedded sections of the
Indian media, quoting the inevitable ‘Intelligence’ sources, began to
refer to it as a ‘perceived’ blockade, and even to suggest that there
had never been one.
But it was too late for those games, the damage had been done. It had
been demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir that
they lived on sufferance, and that if they didn’t behave themselves
they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of essential
commodities and medical supplies. The real blockade became a
psychological one. The last fragile link between India and Kashmir
was all but snapped.
To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn’t anybody
noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like
water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To
threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political
suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the Government of India has tried so
hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds
of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities,
their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily
armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable
display of raw courage.
Raised in a playground of army camps, checkposts and bunkers, with
screams from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation
has suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the
dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for
themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an
epiphany. They’re in full flow, not even the fear of death seems to
hold them back.
And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second-
largest army in the world? What threat does it hold? Who should know
that better than the people of India who won their independence in
the way that they did?
The circumstances in Kashmir being what they are, it is hard for the
spin doctors to fall back on the same old same old; to claim that
it’s all the doing of Pakistan’s ISI, or that people are being
coerced by militants. Since the ’30s onwards, the question of who can
claim the right to represent that elusive thing known as “Kashmiri
sentiment” has been bitterly contested.This time around, the people
are in charge. The armed militants, who through the worst years of
repression were seen carrying the torch of azadi, are content to let
people do the fighting. The separatist leaders are not leaders so
much as followers.
Was it Sheikh Abdullah? The Muslim Conference? Who is it today? The
mainstream political parties? The Hurriyat? The militants? This time
around, the people are in charge. There have been mass rallies in the
past, but none in recent memory that have been so sustained and
widespread. The mainstream political parties of Kashmir—the National
Conference, the People’s Democratic Party—feted by the Deep State and
the Indian media despite the pathetic voter turnout in election after
election appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi’s TV studios, but
can’t muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The
armed militants who, through the worst years of repression, were seen
as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are
around at all, seem to be content to take a backseat and let people
do the fighting for a change.
The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not
leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal
spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on
Kashmir’s streets. The leaders, such as they are, have been presented
with a full-blown revolution. The only condition seems to be that
they have to do as the people say. If they say things that people do
not wish to hear, they are gently persuaded to come out, publicly
apologise and correct their course. This applies to all of them,
including Syed Ali Shah Geelani who at a public rally recently
proclaimed himself the movement’s only leader. It was a monumental
political blunder that very nearly shattered the fragile new alliance
between the various factions of the struggle. Within hours he
retracted his statement. Like it or not, this is democracy. No
democrat can pretend otherwise.
Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm around places
that hold terrible memories for them. They demolish bunkers, break
through cordons of concertina wire and stare straight down the
barrels of soldiers’ machine-guns, saying what very few in India want
to hear. Hum kya chahte? Azadi! We Want Freedom. And, it has to be
said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity: Jeevey Jeevey
Pakistan. Long live Pakistan.
That sound reverberates through the Valley like the drumbeat of
steady rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder before an
electric storm. It’s the plebiscite that was never held, the
referendum that has been indefinitely postponed.
On August 15, India’s Independence Day, the city of Srinagar shut
down completely. The Bakshi stadium where Governor N.N. Vohra hoisted
the flag was empty except for a few officials. Hours later, Lal
Chowk, the nerve centre of the city (where in 1992, Murli Manohar
Joshi, BJP leader and mentor of the controversial “Hinduisation” of
children’s history textbooks, started a tradition of flag-hoisting by
the Border Security Force), was taken over by thousands of people who
hoisted the Pakistani flag and wished each other “Happy belated
Independence Day” (Pakistan celebrates Independence on August 14) and
“Happy Slavery Day”.
Humour, obviously, has survived India’s many torture centres and Abu
Ghraibs in Kashmir.
On August 16, more than 3,00,000 people marched to Pampore, to the
village of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in
cold blood five days earlier. He was part of a massive march to the
Line of Control demanding that since the Jammu road had been blocked,
it was only logical that the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway be opened
for goods and people, the way it used to be before Kashmir was
partitioned.
On August 18, an equal number gathered in Srinagar in the huge TRC
grounds (Tourist Reception Centre, not the Truth and Reconciliation
Committee) close to the United Nations Military Observers Group in
India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to submit a memorandum asking for three
things—the end to Indian rule, the deployment of a UN Peacekeeping
Force and an investigation into two decades of war crimes committed
with almost complete impunity by the Indian army and police.
The day before the rally the Deep State was hard at work. A senior
journalist friend called to say that late in the afternoon the home
secretary called a high-level meeting in New Delhi. Also present were
the defence secretary and the intelligence chiefs. The purpose of the
meeting, he said, was to brief the editors of TV news channels that
the government had reason to believe that the insurrection was being
managedby a small splinter cell of the ISI and to request the
channels to keep this piece of exclusive, highly secret intelligence
in mind while covering (or preferably not covering?) the news from
Kashmir. Unfortunately for the Deep State, things have gone so far
that TV channels, were they to obey those instructions, would run the
risk of looking ridiculous. Thankfully, it looks as though this
revolution will, after all, be televised.
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 which is on Gupkar Road, Srinagar’s Green Zone where, for
years, the Indian Establishment has barricaded itself in style and
splendour.
On the morning of the 18th, people began pouring into Srinagar from
villages and towns across the Valley. In trucks, tempos, 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 freedom 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 lamp post, 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 a 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, the enemy, 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.
What will free Kashmir be like? Will the hundreds of thousands of
Kashmiri Pandits living in exile be allowed to return, paid
reparations for their losses?
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 ilaha illa llah. What is our bond with Pakistan?
There is
no god but Allah. Azadi ka matlab kya? La ilaha 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.
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 jehad. 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 stigmatised 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, woh 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 bhookha are—and have been—complicit in complex and
historical ways with the cruel 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 Umer 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 Umer spoke first. He repeated the demand that the
Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Disturbed Areas Act and Public
Safety Act—under which thousands have been killed, jailed and tortured
—be withdrawn.
Of course, there are many ways for the Indian State to hold on to
Kashmir. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted
assassinations, some disappearances and a round of arrests should do
the trick for a few more years.
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 demilitarisation of the Kashmir Valley.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the
Quran. 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 Quran 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 the 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 Umer Farooq 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 tailgates that said, “Doodh maango to
kheer denge, Kashmir maango to cheer denge (Ask for milk, you’ll get
cream; Ask for Kashmir, we’ll tear you open).”
Briefly, I had another thought. I imagined myself standing in the
heart of an RSS or VHP 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 BJP’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 neighbours 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 generalisations. Those
who wish to turn to the Quran for guidance will no doubt find
guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for
whom the Quran does not make 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 61 years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and
blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas 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 Kashmir’s great modern tragedy, one that
eventually led to unthinkable bloodshed and the prolonged bondage of
people who were very nearly free.
Already the spectre of partition has reared its head. Hindutva
networks are alive with rumours 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 non-violent 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 is money that ought by right to
be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished,
malnourished 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 victimise 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.