Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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tore it up and asked, ‘Where is your bloody curfew pass now?’ I had had no time to get a curfew pass. I just showed my Hindustan Times ID card. I presume the word ‘Hindustan’ did the trick.
The next few days were spent in exhausting discussions on politics, in parks and the Mughal Gardens, leaving us with an aftertaste of impotent rage. The calm instilled by Delhi was wearing thin. I had always loathed the term ‘objectivity’ when it really meant balancing truth with a healthy dose of falsehood—or, even worse, ‘national interest’. Much of the media were doing that. The state and central governments were in a state of denial, effectively blaming the people for the mess. For the first time I felt like an ordinary Kashmiri and wanted to react like them. I was with other journalists when we went to Kawdara in the old city, where separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was leading a demonstration that soon morphed into a clash between youth and CRPF soldiers (camping in a bunker as old the insurgency itself).
I picked up a stone from the debris of the housing cluster burnt by CRPF soldiers in 1990 and threw it at the soldiers, a few of whom were filming the stone-throwers with mini-cams. Caught, I could have been booked under the Public Safety Act and jailed for two years without a trial. I would also have been jobless because no news organization would have a felon on its desk. But I threw more stones. I later realized it was an atavistic reaction, as if it was the only legitimate thing to do in that cursed place. I had thrown stones twenty-three years ago when three people were killed for demonstrating against a hike in power tariff, an event that would catalyse the uprising of 1989. My journalist friends restrained me. Disoriented, I walked to my birthplace, Nawab Bazaar, in the old city, a kilometre from Kawdara.
Nawab Bazaar was as furious as it was twenty years ago. Angry youths whom I had seen growing up were pelting the CRPF bunker there with stones. Back then, militants had attacked it with AK-47 rifles. For me, the bunker represents an occupation of memories. It was built on the spot where a man sold phirni and children would line up for the sighting of the crescent, a harbinger of Eid. A short distance away, the Dogra maharaja’s soldiers had shot dead my great-grandfather in 1931. Twenty years ago, when the bunker was being constructed, my father’s bosom friend, a fanatical Congress supporter, prophesied that ‘your eyelashes will turn grey, but the bunker will still be there’. He died last year. His eyebrows had started to grey and all his hair was silver.
Old demons were stirring up inside me. During nights I would look out of the window of my room, holding a digital recorder in any hand to catch freedom songs blaring from mosque loudspeakers and wafting through the quiet air. Twenty years ago I had heard and sung the same songs. The bunker in Nawab Bazaar has grown bigger and uglier, with all those barbed-wire loops, fences, gaudy paint and slits, demonstrating that the state does not tire. But neither do the people.
A shorter version of this first appeared in the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 7 August 2010.
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