A Kashmiri Muslim family runs for cover as protesters clash with Indian security forces in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Sunday, July 10, 2016. Dar Yasin /Press Association. All rights reserved.What is the
difference between a funeral and a demonstration? In Kashmir, there is none. As
the killing of 30 civilian protestors by the armed forces of
the state in the last two days shows, in Kashmir, every funeral is a
demonstration and every demonstration is a funeral.
Every time people gather in
any significant protest against the Indian state — which claims the territory of Kashmir in its entirety
and holds on to two thirds of it by the force of nearly 700000 troops, making
it the world’s most militarised zone — people are killed by the bullets of the security
forces; and every time there is a funeral of those who protest and resent the
Indian state, massive crowds gather to demonstrate. And so the cycle repeats
itself. But is the world listening?
The jingoism
of ‘India rising’, which has a great hold on the
hearts and minds of the Indian middle classes and now increasingly pervades the
discourse in the west too, has no space for human rights, or indeed, any sense
of humanity. Masses of Indian public are fed the hypernationalist narratives
recycled in the media which only repeat “Kashmir is an integral part of
India”. They are utterly unable to
comprehend the mechanics of an occupation which is carried out in the name of a
‘democracy’.
Democracy,
however, looks very different in Kashmir, where opening fire on political
protestors is not unusual, access to telecommunications is dependant on the
whims of the authorities, there are daily curfews and emergency powers mean
that armed forces are immune to prosecution. The mainstream political parties
are seen as pro-Indian collaborators in most cases, while the ‘separatists’ who
have a mass following boycott the elections. Democracy as a system under such
circumstances does not represent the will of the people and has no purchase on
popular sovereignty.
A few days
ago, on July 8, when a militant commander and popular freedom fighter Burhan
Wani was shot dead by the security forces, numerous Indians celebrated the
success, while an overwhelmingly large number of Kashmiris mourned. They
gathered in unprecedented numbers for his funeral, to express their grief and
to protest and raise their voices against the Indian occupation, saying what
they have been saying for decades now: “Go
India, Go Back”, “What do we want? We want Freedom (Azadi)”. Sadly and predictably, they are
shot at. Over a single weekend, until July 11, 30 people have been killed.
There is a growing death toll, ambulances have been attacked, scores of
Kashmiris have been blinded by pellet guns and hundreds are severely injured.
Internet and mobile services have been shut down, entire cities are under siege
(#KashmirSiege).
You would
think that would at least make the news abroad. But, of course, “the world’s largest growing free-market democracy” (the official slogan of Brand India) has its
advertisers abroad. India is not China. The Kashmiris who are killed are
Muslims. And so the deafening silence overseas. It seems that a hellishly large
number of lives need to be lost outside the west before the horrors
of such atrocities come to the world's attention. This is not the first time;
in 2010, during a monstrous summer of killing, over a hundred unarmed Kashmiri
youth were shot dead by the Indian state (the stone-pelting protests began when
a minor playing cricket was killed by the security forces as they used
excessive force against a demonstration) and the international community barely
murmured. The people of Kashmir have, for decades now, continued to gather in
mass public assemblies of protest to rage against the Indian occupation; with
all its military might and news censorship, the Indian state only achieves
short spells of uneasy silence.
The
philosopher Judith Butler in her recent book “Notes toward a performative theory of assembly” writes about the way in which the gathered bodies of
people in the public sphere is, before any utterance, itself a statement, an
act of resistance: “The assembly is already speaking before it utters any words
and its coming together is already an enactment of popular will”. Butler also
writes “the ungrievable gather sometimes in
public insurgencies of grief” – she means that those who are not
seen as being worthy of mourning by the public, sometimes gather to mourn in
public – making a funeral and a demonstration in some places look alike. In
Kashmir, the funeral and the demonstration do not just look indistinguishable,
but actually are necessary, continuous and the same. The funeral is an act of
grief that folds into protest, and the demonstration is fired upon and results
in funerals.
Kashmiri villagers carry body of Burhan Wani during his funeral procession, July 9, 2016. Dar Yasin /Press Association. All rights reserved. The hundreds
of thousands of Kashmiris who gathered for the funeral of Burhan Wani, whom
they saw as a freedom fighter and the Indian state saw as a terrorist, are
speaking loud and clear by their presence in the public sphere at the risk of
death and injury – ‘we do not want to be the disposable
bodies for the performance of your ‘democracy’, you do not represent us, we want
freedom’. And yet, unable to look past the
aggressive super-nationalist anchors on their TV screens, Indians wonder – ‘how can the Kashmiris be so
ungrateful for being included in the Great Indian Democracy, how can they mourn
the death of a terrorist?’
In the contemporary
world, a host of geographical, chromatist, and other identity markers
differentiate between those who are seen as worthy of being mourned and those whose deaths are seen
as ungrievable. The latter being the ‘Other’ – in today’s world, the refugees, the Iraqis,
the Dalits, the Kashmiris (the list goes on). Recently, when I spoke about the ‘precarity and performativity of democracy in India and
Kashmir’ at a UK university workshop, an
academic from a progressive Indian university responded with a reflex that
could perhaps best be characterised as methodological nationalism, saying that
no one knew what the reality is in Kashmir.
No one knows?
To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, there are no ‘voiceless’, just the deliberately
silenced, or the preferably unheard. There is no dearth of critical texts
(articles, books, films, music) on Kashmir. And yet, the India versus Pakistan,
Hindu versus Muslim general canards have been repeated enough to almost become
self-fulfilling prophecies.
Because, it is
easier for the world to see Kashmir as a prize that two post-colonial ‘immature’ democracies can’t stop fighting over, and it is
certainly easier for Indians to see it only as good Hindus being driven out by
bad Muslims. Never mind the history, the accession, the subsequent machinations
of the centre-state relations, the poisoning of Kashmir from within and without
in the 1980s, the rigged elections, the crescendo of violence in the 1990s, the
still in operation emergency powers including the Armed Forces Special Powers
Act (AFSPA, which effectively gives the Indian armed forces immunity from
prosecution for killings in Kashmir).
Excuse the
imprecision of the brutal arithmetic, for the estimates vary, but as a result
of the conflict in the last two and a half decades alone, even by conservative
estimates, there have been over 70,000 deaths, 8000 enforced disappearances,
mass rapes, executions, well documented instances of torture camps, 250,000
displaced, and the list of horrors continues. Kashmir is a territory that has
been held by force by its neighbours against the will of the majority of the
Kashmiris, and hence, both India and Pakistan most fear an indigenous freedom
movement that is now firmly entrenched in Kashmiri soil. Burhan Wani was just
one prominent example of this sentiment.
There are some
in India who speak up for Kashmir and its claim to an Azadi (freedom). And they
face consequences, ranging from vicious trolling to physical attacks. Earlier
this year, university student leaders were arrested and assaulted in the court
room for allegedly having chanted slogans of freedom for Kashmir on the
anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man who was implicated
in an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and hanged not because it met the
required ‘rarest of the rare’ criterion, but on the basis of
circumstantial evidence, and as the judge noted in his judgement, “to satisfy the collective conscience of the Indian
nation”. Guru’s family was not informed and
his body was buried in prison.
While the general mass of public opinion in
India is obviously jingoistic (a popular rhyming slogan literally translates as
‘if you ask for milk, we will give
you pudding; if you ask for Kashmir, we will tear you to bits’), even otherwise progressive
voices (feminists, leftists) who speak of opposing racism, colonialism,
militarism, occupation in Palestine, often stay silent on Kashmir. This is a
cultivated ignorance which is a product of privilege of being able to afford
not to know about something. A generation of Kashmiris have grown up in the shadow of
guns, barbed wire, bunkers, torture, rapes, enforced disappearances,
executions, violence, displacement, religious radicalisation, and most of this
is near-completely blacked out from the general Indian consciousness (except
for politically opportune and erratic co-religionist sympathy towards displaced
and exiled Kashmiri Hindus, also known as KPs or Kashmiri Pandits).
Colonialism is
not only a western prerogative, and anti-colonial freedom struggles can be the
preserve of people of any religion. The struggle against India in Kashmir has
gone through many stages, and evolved to a point where it is no longer able to
be characterised in the familiar terms of being a ‘proxy war of Pakistan’, and is undeniably about self-determination,
freedom and human rights.
On the other
hand, the Indian stance on Kashmir has remained within the same ambit of
bribery, collaborators, stooges, espionage, surveillance, repressive laws,
violence, curfews and shutdowns. In fact, this position has even hardened as Modi-led BJP has made overtures towards
Pakistan making common cause against Kashmiri freedom from either state.
In May 2016, the
Government of India sought to introduce a Geospatial Information Regulation
Bill 2016 which would make any representation of Kashmir as it is commonly
known worldwide and as it actually exists (depiction of the Line of Control or
LoC, as after a UN ceasefire in 1948) an offence punishable by 15 million
dollars and 7 years in prison. Acccording to this wishful thinking, all of
Kashmir, including that part of it which has been under the continuous control
of Pakistan for decades is actually part of India. The deterrent effect of this
was directed towards international firms, and sure enough, within two days
Google altered its Indian maps of Kashmir to suit the dictates of India, never
mind accuracy or reality. India sees Kashmir as an unpeopled place, as an
existential territorial obsession.
And so, India’s unrequited love for Kashmir leaves Kashmiris dead,
disappeared, tortured, injured, traumatised, displaced, raped, shot, censored.
This unreciprocated and obssessive desire that India has for Kashmir can be
understood in terms of the theorist Lauren Berlant’s phrasing of ‘cruel
optimism’ in her theory of affect: “when something you desire is an obstacle to
your flourishing”. Indian desperation to possess the territory of Kashmir in
its entirety, even if it means sacrificing all Kashmiri, and many Indian,
lives, is a blot on Indian democracy and has succeeded not merely in dominating
Kashmiris but also in dehumanising Indians themselves. It is time the world
knew and faced up to its hypocrisy in dealing with the Great Indian Democracy.