Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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and not about the larger issue of Azadi. Informally, police and intelligence officials made the gloomy admission that a turnout of 35 per cent would leave them very satisfied.
Yet, when the results started to come in, and the turnout began to creep past these modest expectations, and eventually rise to 60 per cent, no one admitted to being surprised. (In 2002 the figure was just under 32 per cent) Such was the din of celebration, deftly orchestrated by the mass media, that an election fought on the mundane platform of bijli, sadak, pani was suddenly being served up as a referendum. Kashmiris had embraced Indian democracy, they said. Kashmiris had rejected separatism.
There was no mention that to stall anti-election protests, most districts had been under curfew for weeks before polling. Or that almost 700 key activists of the summer’s protests spent the months in the run-up to the election in jail, locked up under the PSA. There was silence about the sudden and ominous reappearance of the dreaded ikhwani counter-insurgents, their murderous operations now dressed up in the constitutional uniform of Special Police Officers, as part of the Special Operations Group, and even the Territorial Army. (Word of their renewed presence alone was enough to terrorize people in the villages.) No one drew attention to the fact that in addition to the soldiers already in place, nearly 450 additional companies (50,000 paramilitary troopers) had arrived to ‘assist’ in the elections, allowing the government to flood each constituency with khaki and olive green before the polling, which was held in an unprecedented seven stages.
Of course there were the more familiar reports of straightforward rigging, of bogus voting and booth capturing. But on the whole the strategy seemed designed not to favour one party or the other, but to simply ensure a turnout. The more subtle strategies included the sudden nomination of thousands of candidates, most of them independents, but others from parties that had little or no presence in Kashmir. In the midst of a fierce poll boycott, and a tense campaign, candidates suddenly showed up from the BJP, the Samajwadi Party (SP), Janata Dal (JD [Secular]), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Janata Party (JP), Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), All India Forward Bloc (AIFB), Forward Bloc (Socialist), Republican Party of India (Athvale), Samata Party, Socialist Democratic Party, National Lok Hind Party . . . An endless list of Indian political formations had lined up at the hustings. They clearly hadn’t hoped to win, and almost 1,100 such candidates lost their deposits. But whatever the inducement to stand, these candidates were probably expected to poll only a few hundred votes each, often just from family and neighbours.
In the end it did all add up, they did deliver a few percentage points in the voter turnout. ‘We had several different strategies in place,’ I heard from a senior police officer, some months after the elections, ‘and all of them luckily fell into place.’ He could not stop grinning. ‘Of course we will never again have this level of force available to us, never,’ he added emphatically, ‘so it will be difficult to replicate.’
That is what the 2008 elections in Kashmir eventually was: an exercise in pushing up the turnout to a ‘respectable’ level, to once again demonstrate the validity of Indian democracy in Kashmir. It did not matter what Kashmiris thought of it. So that when the new coalition government between the Congress and the NC, and headed by the telegenic Omar Abdullah, was sworn in early in 2009, all that grey was forgotten. In the noisy triumphalism generated by the Indian media, the spin masters in Srinagar and New Delhi seemed to so enjoy the din that they appear to have begun to believe in the implausible script they had written. These elections had pulled Kashmiris back into the mainstream, they said. Something akin to a ‘post-conflict’ euphoria permeated the atmosphere, and the air was thick with talk about a ‘reconciliation’ commission.
It took only a few months for the illusion to fall apart, to understand what Kashmiris thought of all this delusionary behaviour. By May 2009, the rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, in which the security forces were widely believed to have been implicated, led to another massive round of protests. If the protests in the 2008 Amarnath land issue were marked by huge unarmed processions, now the overwhelming feature was civil disobedience. Shopian town remained shut for forty-seven days, this unprecedented hartal itself called by a non-political formation of citizens, the Majlis-e-Mashawarat, the consultative committee. It was the Majlis who made sure that daily wagers and petty shopkeepers were given rations to survive the long shutdown.
But wrapped up in its hubris, and swaddled by a pliant media—and an intelligence structure dulled by complacency—New Delhi was unable to grasp what was developing. Opaque to the terrible bottled-up anger of people, Omar Abdullah’s government responded with a series of callous statements about the death of the young women, and the Jammu and Kashmir police followed up with a series of bungled investigative procedures. These eventually threw up so many contradictions, and started to look so shabby, that the government of India had to rope in the Central Bureau of Investigation to put a lid on it. (The CBI promptly concluded that it was a case of death by drowning, in a stream with less than a foot of water). Today the case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations. In Shopian, the anger remains in place.
This week I was suddenly reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with a committed separatist, a former militant, and ex-chairman of the United Jehad Council. (He spoke about carrying an AK-47 for seven years, but was oddly proud of himself for never having fired it.) He’s now a quiet scholarly presence, retired to a spartan hut in his sister’s compound in Srinagar.
‘We didn’t want an Azadi where all our young men were dead,’ he had said, suggesting tactical withdrawal before the might of the Indian Army, not a defeat.
‘There were 30,000 armed militants once,’ I insisted, ‘what happened to their weapons?’
‘Well, guns are not like fruit, my friend, they don’t come off trees, they don’t just rot with age . . .’ he had answered thoughtfully. Then added, ‘They must be somewhere, mustn’t they? There must be many, many weapons buried in the Valley. Plenty of ammunition too . . .’
I regret not having asked him about the fighters, the survivors amongst the 30,000, those who were not killed, or jailed. (Or arrested and broken by torture.) How many of those are there? Where are they? What must they be thinking of what is going on? As the streets are taken over by younger people, the stone-pelting children of the tehreek, what counsel do they have to offer to this new generation of Kashmiris, who grew up in the tumultuous 1990s? What lessons are these veterans in turn drawing from the young?
The last three summers have seen an argument about resistance slowly taking shape in the Kashmir valley. The tenacity of the sang-bazan only caps a political debate that Kashmiris have been engaged in for the last twenty years. (And in some ways, all the way from 1947.) The difference is that this time the stone thrown on the street is being intelligently shadowed by a sharpened understanding of the oppression. It’s no more a secret understanding, open only to a few select leaders. It’s available on the Internet, on social networking sites. But it still is a debate. And the form of the resistance is fluid, and can easily swing back to the place where it has come from.
What is buried in the Valley, as my friend had hinted, can always be resurrected.
That is a debate that should engage all of us, Kashmiris and Indians.
This article first appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, 11 September 2010.
When poems written about totalitarian regimes echo in the hearts of a people purportedly living in a democracy, it is time for