Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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of newspapers, and on prime time television. The very abundance of such coverage seemed designed to obscure, a dense smokescreen on which many prominent Indian journalists could project a self-image of caring souls whose hearts bled for Kashmir.
The easy comfort with a military solution, and the near abandonment of the rule of law: many will recognize in Kashmir a set of tactics that the Indian state has since begun to deploy with avidity in other troubled parts of the country.
What has changed in the Valley since 2003?
In 2010, despite occasional lip service to the idea of troop reduction, the military presence remains unaltered, and the civilian population continues to suffer the full weight of the security apparatus. Despite the talk of normalcy, there has been only the rare instance when there was ‘troop reduction’. (One particular, well-publicized pullout of a battalion of the Indian Army translated into no more than a 1,000 soldiers on the ground. Out of an estimated 6,00,000.) In Srinagar the cosmetic changes have included replacing the Border Security Force (BSF) with an equal, perhaps greater, strength of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). There has been a visible reduction in the ubiquitous squalor of the brick and barbed-wire bunkers that puncture the daily life of its citizens. But in its place the CRPF have shifted to a more centralized ‘quick reaction’ deployment, with even more lethal consequences. The recent cycle of protests, for instance, saw patients pour into Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital with severe bullet injuries inflicted by security forces, sixty in the first fortnight of August alone. Surgeons at the hospital told the BBC ‘most of the bullet injuries are in the abdominal area, chest, eyes and neck. They are single and multiple bullet wounds. They are all young men, in their late teens or early twenties’. This week a new threat was unleashed in the streets of Srinagar: a ‘pressure pump’ gun. It fires highly damaging pellets which enter the body and destroy vital organs, but leave hardly any external marks. (The summer of 2010 left thirty-five people blinded in firing, and more than 110 have been killed. The security forces have reported no casualties.)
In the countryside, which has always been ‘held’ by the army, even less ground has been yielded. If anything, the army has visibly dug its heels in, with the defence minister firmly rejecting the possibility of a troop reduction. Earlier this year the army commander, northern command, waded into the debate around the removal of the draconian AFSPA, with a comment that displayed a dreadful lack of cultural sensitivity, describing the Act as a ‘holy book’ for soldiers deployed in Kashmir. Debate on the possible removal of the notorious Act has always been upstaged by considerations of the ‘morale’ of the Indian Army. What this word ‘morale’ effectively silences is the impact that half a million soldiers have on a civilian population. It starts with the colonization of scarce water resources in villages and the catastrophic effect of their presence on the forests. It is reflected in the high incidence of forced labour, begaar, around the army camps. And in the largely unspoken incidence of the sexual exploitation of women.
And yet, in discussions on this summer’s protests, all attention has been focused on the incompetence of the Omar Abdullah government, encouraging the impression that it lay within his powers to alter any of the key elements in the crisis. The reality is that within this present structure, were the prime minister of India arrange to have Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the separatist patriarch, recast as chief minister of the state, even he would be hard put to prevent further strife. Incidents like the fake ‘encounter’ in Machil, Kupwara, came and went, but were never allowed to disturb the tone of the official Indian position. But Kashmiris could not have forgotten that the protests this summer were sparked off by the cold-blooded killing of three innocent civilians in a faraway valley by Indian Army soldiers. That the soldiers were under orders from their officers, who tried to pass off the bodies as those of ‘militants’ killed in an encounter. Eventually when the story broke, and massive protests erupted, a colonel and a major were charged with murder. (Their motivation was not much more than a few hundred thousand rupees of ‘reward’ money.) The Machil incident was a timely reminder that India’s military presence in the Valley is not seen as some well intentioned—if occasionally clumsy—beast sent to protect Kashmiris. It is seen as an occupying force.
To dismiss such incidents as aberrations would be dangerous. The past two years have seen the unearthing of a series of mass graves in Kashmir, which could hold evidence of hundreds of Machil-style executions. There has been no considered official reaction to these revelations. Meanwhile, the government remains doggedly centred on the role played by Pakistan, the involvement of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, and for the good news, the 2008 elections and its voter turnout.
Over two decades of conflict, Kashmiris have lost the right to speech, assembly and travel; they have lost all guarantees of their freedom from violence, harassment and unlawful detention. They have seen every single substantive attribute of democracy give way under the pressure of militarization and the attitudes of those who administer Kashmir. The rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the civic responsibilities of elected politicians: as each of these protective pillars has been hollowed out, all that remains of democracy is the thin patina of elections.
And this record is itself such a shabby one, right from the first election of 1951, where the National Conference (NC) under Sheikh Abdullah won every single seat in the seventy-two-member assembly. (Only two seats were actually contested. No one else was allowed to file nominations, most of which were rejected at the outset.) But as long as he could deliver the Kashmiri ‘mandate’ to New Delhi, Sheikh Abdullah was left undisturbed. His successors, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, and G.M. Sadiq, were allowed to do the same, a tradition that has survived all the way into the present. Not surprisingly, elections are seen locally not as a measure of popular support, but the mechanism by which the writ of the Indian government can be stamped on the dispensation of its choice.
(Ironically, the only election that Kashmir will remember as ‘free’ was in 1977, in the aftermath of the declaration of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when the fractious coalition of the Janata Party was in power, and the ‘centre’ at it’s weakest. For a people who had not experienced a fair election in twenty-five years of voting, this brief tryst with democracy electrified Kashmir. But that moment of fairness passed too quickly, and as soon as the Janata Party coalition collapsed, and Indira Gandhi returned to power, things reverted to normal. This brief experience of free and fair elections, it has been suggested, could well have given a spurt to the secessionist movement in the early 1980s.)
Of course none of this sordid reality ever inflects the debate on Kashmir in India. This summer, while there was some grudging space for a ‘human-rights’ discourse, attempts to read events politically were viewed with distaste. ‘You are bringing politics into it!’ our TV anchors said in what could only have been feigned outrage. While on the streets of Kashmir, protesters are unambiguous, chanting ‘Go India! Go back!’ and ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ Like an article of faith common to the entire political spectrum, references to the voter turnout of the 2008 election recur all too frequently, from left-liberal to right-Hindutva. (With metronomic regularity, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Ravishankar Prasad offered us the non sequitur, ‘Why don’t the separatists stand for elections?’ He clearly chooses to be oblivious of the fact that during the last elections most separatists were in detention. Before, during, and after the polls.)
The quicksilver memory of our media allows us to forget that the 2008 elections were called at a moment spectacularly unpropitious for the government of India. It was a time not unlike the present. Through the summer, Kashmir had been rocked by protests against the state government’s acquisition of land for the pilgrimage to Amarnath. Massive unarmed marches, often with 20,000 people, had snowballed into the most outspoken expression of public sentiment since the troubles began. After years of looking frayed at the edges, the numbers on the street suggested that the sentiment for Azadi was back. The palpable air of defeat one had sensed only a few years ago seemed to be a thing of the past.
Not surprisingly, the two principal ‘pro-India’ regional parties, the National Conference (NC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), were both visibly reluctant to wade into this flood of separatist sentiment and canvass for votes. In the face of a poll boycott called by the separatists, a lacklustre and largely invisible campaign followed. Omar Abdullah and the NC in particular pointedly