Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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state and the single-minded separatist slogan of ‘Azadi’. I ask a wise friend here what he thinks might happen if tomorrow the Centre says that they would talk to the entire range of Kashmiri political opinion without preconditions, that is, without insisting that Kashmir’s future necessarily lies within the parameters of the Indian Constitution. I don’t know, he says, and in any case these moments of heightened violence are not a good time to begin to think about such future possibilities. Times of peace, or rather, times when daily violence is absent, those are the right moments to initiate political dialogue and action, but those are precisely the moments when governments, lulled into a false sense of security and complacence, do nothing. In any case such inaction suits the government, whose actors seem to believe that economic development and employment, thin as they are in practice, will be the magic wands that wave away political aspirations.
There is no peace, not today. In fact there has been enough violence for the Prime Minister to call a late-night meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security. Everyone waits to hear what will emerge, and the results are predictable. Omar Abdullah’s government is asked to intervene more personally and capably, punishment is promised to all those who take the law into their own hands (that is, all those on the streets who disobey curfew restrictions, and worse, revenge themselves upon those elements of the administration they have come to hate). Abdullah has also appeared on television to make a tepid appeal for calm, but it is too little, too late. His pained face and tone lack conviction.
We hear the sounds of massed people in the first half of the night, and occasional shots. But our neighborhood, like so many others in Srinagar where the well-off live, is quiet, quiet enough to let the sounds of struggle elsewhere waft indistinctly but ominously into our homes.
Monday, 2 August 2010
The action on the street shows no let up, and Omar Abdullah is in Delhi for a meeting with the Prime Minister and others. He emerges and makes an eloquent appeal for peace (the police have been instructed to be restrained, but violence will have consequences, he says) in his English-language press conference afterwards. He repeats his request in Urdu later in the day for local consumption here. He calls for a calm that will allow the proper education of children and young adults so that they can be competitive in the job market. He also promises the massive recruitment of young people to an unspecified set of jobs—once again, the government offers its payroll as a solution to the problem of political disenchantment. But he does offer a phrase that should be remembered at all times, not just in this moment of crisis: he has told the Centre, he says, that Kashmir needs a ‘political’, not just an ‘economic’ package. There are no details offered, but at least there is now a phrase to work with.
Phrases to work with, a new and respectful semantics—a journalist friend tells me that that is what both the government and Kashmiris need. The government plays strategic games in which the vocabulary they use for the political (not the parliamentary) opposition is charged and designed to belittle: they are the instigators of unrest, they are irrelevant, they are obstacles in the path to development. Small wonder then that Kashmiris see the government as colonial, mainstream politicians as stooges, and the military and paramilitaries as an occupation force. In the absence of a new, more innovative, more polite idiom, there is going to be no way of climbing out of the deep rut in which we find ourselves.
Sadly, eight more people are shot dead, and people have lost track of numbers of the wounded. I keep thinking of the multiplier effects of such violence: for each person dead or injured, there are a score personally affected, and each funeral cortège reminds larger groups of past losses. But then these are the most recent, intense episodes in a longer history of violence. If 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed (regardless of by whom) in the last two decades, then there is virtually no family exempt from the eddying effects of such loss. This is the reservoir of grief, anger and frustration that produces the flood of emotion that moves people into risking their lives on the street; and sometimes, as we know, floods overwhelm the thickest embankments we build to contain them.
There is also the highly intrusive security footprint to think about. I had travelled in Punjab in the worst years of the Khalistan movement, and I remember just how humiliating and fear-inducing it was to be stopped and questioned over and over again, to have your car searched, and occasionally to be patted down. This is how Kashmiris have lived for twenty years now. No one goes anywhere, even in times of relative peace, without being aware of surveillance and check-points. An entire generation—the young on the streets now—have grown up with no other sense of the Indian state. India is the jawan who slaps you because it has been a long day and you are less patient in the checking-line than he would like; India is the officer who smiles sardonically as you are pushed to the ground and kicked for good measure; India is the force that tears you and your family from your home to stand around for hours as entire neighbourhoods are cordoned off and searched. And this is low-level business. There have been far harsher crimes committed by state agents, but no one has been punished, and that fact alone rankles and will not die.
I speak on the phone to a relative who was a career bureaucrat: utter lawlessness, he says, it needs to be put down firmly, no one should feel entitled to damage property or attack the police. He wonders why things have been allowed to slide in the past few days. I suggest that we have been on this slope for at least twenty years now, and that we have a political rather than a law-and-order problem, but he wants none of that. Various friends and relatives have been calling to ask after us—we don’t leave the house and are fine, we say. No, we aren’t planning to leave. This is home, my mother says, and the weather is lovely.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
A friend with a press pass escorts me past the razor wire that closes off our neighbourhood from Maulana Azad Road. We are asked a few questions by the police, which I let him answer, and then we step into the shuttered world of the market. On our route, we pass by a government office protected by CRPF jawans. They are used to seeing my mother walk by—she is the only woman in a sari for miles—and they ask my journalist friend about the day’s events. He tells them, and then I say to one of them (miles away from his home in Tamil Nadu): this is all terrible, is it not? He nods wanly, and says, ‘Kya karein, aisa hi ho raha hai’ (‘What to do, this is what is going on’). My mother tells me that these jawans wish her and talk to her each time she walks by them, and that their loneliness is palpable. They are young men, far from home, under-paid, under-rested, and occasionally under-fed, deployed in a situation in which they know that they are loathed for their uniforms. No shining nationalist zeal or commitment brings them here; their poverty renders them cogs in the machinery of the state, and they well know that.
There are only police on the streets—there is after all a ‘shoot at sight’ order in place—and I smile at the young policeman who has been issued a lathi for offensive action and worn out batsman’s pads as defensive equipment. What kind of game do the police authorities think they are playing? What manner of crowd control might be enabled by such equipment? We walk across the market and into the Press Enclave. Reporters and photographers have been spending nights in their offices, since they are never sure that they will be able to make it to their homes at night or back to their offices the next day.
Five more are dead today (twenty-seven in the last five days), and, worst of all, an eight-year-old boy has been beaten to death. The police issue a statement saying that he died in a stampede of protesters, but there are eyewitnesses who say that he, cricket bat in hand, was raising slogans for Azadi and was not quick enough to run away when the CRPF charged. Several jawans beat him, dragged him into their vehicle, and then decided to dump him on the side of the road. He died, not long after, in hospital. Clubbing an eight-year-old boy to death? What kind of harm could he have done, mighty with his cricket bat? (Ah yes, perhaps he too picked up and slung stones at the police.)
There seems no escaping the impasse here: more dead protesters, more angry protest, more protesters killed. Upon the chief minister’s request, the home ministry has flown in 2,000 paramilitary men, but it is clear to no one what purpose such reinforcements will serve. They are trained no differently from the hundreds of thousands of uniformed men already in service in Kashmir, so how will their presence be a deterrent? They will join the daily rotation, I’m sure, and allow some others overburdened with duties some respite, but it isn’t