Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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history of rigged elections followed. A cynically imposed superstructure of what are locally called ‘pro-India’ parties, but are really disempowered proxies, now play out an elaborate charade of democracy. Faced with a massive upsurge in 2010, the Indian state seems to have reacted in the only way it knew. It ratcheted up the mechanisms of coercion.
Two recent images reflected this response. The first was a cosmetic makeover for the patrolling soldiers, as the paramilitary were deployed on the streets in futuristic new protective body-gear. This brittle air of menace, ‘Darth Vader in cheap black plastic’, as one acidic commentator in Srinagar called them, was shored up by new ‘non-lethal’ measures of crowd control. Proudly announced by the mandarins of the home ministry in New Delhi, they included a pressure-pump pellet-gun that shoots out hundreds of high-velocity plastic pellets simultaneously. (On the very first day it was used, in Sopore town in north Kashmir, a paramilitary soldier fired the ‘non-lethal’ gun at close range, and killed a man.)
More telling evidence of this battlefront panic was another, less obvious weapon that the paramilitary soldiers took to. Unable to stem the tide of protesters, and with a kill rate beginning to average one civilian a day, the soldiers began to aggressively use slingshots. They were loading catapults with a vicious charge of glass marbles and sharp pebbles, and this abomination led to permanent damage to the eyes—and sometimes even blindness—for scores of young protesters. But it didn’t kill them, which would have been bad for public relations.
In the full glare of the public eye, the contrast could not have been more stark and, in the end, more damaging for India’s image as a showpiece of Democracy at Work. Though padded up in their black armour, the soldiers appeared daunted by the raw courage of the young men. The stone-throwing sang-baz, in turn, with their faces covered, and their chests often bared, were seen as taunting and provoking the soldiers. A few hundred people on street corners in Kashmir were suddenly able to show up the emerging superpower.
It is these images of naked courage that allowed people in Kashmir to tremulously make a connection with the long and heroic resistance of the people of Palestine. And refer to the summer of 2010 as their intifada, the ‘shaking off’ of the chains of occupation.
Hindsight has made a prophecy of a dying whisper.
Mummy, mae-ae aav heartas fire. When that bullet tore through Fancy Jan in July 2010, the fire had indeed reached the heart. Something massive had been breached, and this may well have been the tightly controlled knot of memory of a new generation of Kashmiris. Unlike many others in the last twenty years, the brutal deaths of Inayat, Wamiq, and Zahid, and the meaning of their killing, were not easily interred at mazar-e-shouhda, the martyr’s graveyard. These were taken note of, and written about extensively; word was passed on and debated, and memories of struggle revived in very distinct ways.
Young people were dying, and it was other young people who ardently remembered them. This was a generation that had grown up within the searing conflict of the past two decades, but even amongst Kashmiris they had been frequently (although inexplicably) represented as apolitical, as disconnected, as innocent victims. Young Kashmiris, we had been told, had moved on, distracted by beauty parlours, coffee shops, pool tables and Internet cafes. The furious footfalls of the last three summers quickly rubbed away that spurious patina, making it clear that the young protesters refused to see themselves as outside of the events around them. The almost daily killings did little to subdue them, making them only more eager to be part of the confrontation.
This stepping out of young people on the streets was a major consequence of the recent transformation in the nature of the uprising in Kashmir. The strategic shift from the militant’s gun to unarmed—if stone-pelting—protest was nothing short of tectonic. Yet every attempt was made to disregard this reality, and the government and the media tried to run every possible spin on it. The crowds were mobilized by the Lashkar-e-Toiba, they said; these were hired goons paid for by Pakistan; they were drug-addicts who pelted stones only because they were on a high; they were social malcontents; urban detritus. The attempt to tarnish a reality that was quite evident to everybody may even have succeeded, but sometime in the middle of the summer of 2010 someone in the security establishment inadvertently pressed the wrong switch. With stifling curbs on the local print and television media already in place, a panicked government blocked the popular text messaging service on the cellphone network, a critical artery through which news—and rumour—circulates within Kashmir. For the next six months, subscribers could only receive commercial messages on their cellphones. (In the midst of adversity, a bonanza for advertisers!)
Choked at one place, news in Kashmir quickly found another way to move—travelling like quicksilver through the newly arrived phenomenon of Internet-based social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had emerged as a critical arena of contestation in Kashmir. Instead of only speaking to each other, Kashmiris were suddenly speaking to the world.
Daily, and sometimes hourly, updates on the protests began to appear. Within days the response to the Aalaw (the Call) group had clocked up thousands on Facebook. (Today it has 17,500.) Bekar Jamat (Union of Idlers) signed up nearly 12,000, offering methods of dealing with the effects of tear gas, and even first-aid tips for shooting victims. When Bekar Jamat was mysteriously hacked, it cheekily reappeared as Hoshiar Jamat (Union of the Vigilant). Like the covered faces and the bared chests of the young stone-pelters on the streets, the identities were a message in themselves: Aam Nafar (Ordinary Guy), Dodmut Koshur (Burnt Kashmiri) and Karim Nannavor (Barefoot Karim) joined other proletarians, like Khinna Mott (Snot Crazy), Nanga Mott (Naked Crazy) and Kale Kharab (Hot-head). Meanwhile ‘Oppressedkashimir1’ was recording video images of the street protests, probably on his cellphone, and joining dozens of others in uploading them on YouTube.
Through the summer, as the stones pelted on the streets held down the police and paramilitary forces, a simultaneous barrage of news and commentary on the Internet had equally serious consequences for the mainstream Indian media. Unused to any sort of scrutiny, comfortable and unchallenged in their representations of the unfolding situation, the protection of the newsrooms was suddenly not swaddled enough for the journalists and television anchors of New Delhi. They found themselves inundated with alerts and corrections, and inevitably, some abuse. International observers had the equivalent of a ball-by-ball commentary of street battles, with a rich context that was impossible to ignore. Watchful young people from small towns across Kashmir were reminding the Indian establishment that communication on Twitter was two-way, and that Facebook was, after all, available to millions on the worldwide web.
A deluge of well-argued commentary and analyses began drawing in the intellectual resources of a virtual community from across the world, and these were not all Kashmiris either. Suddenly there were vibrant alternatives to the stale shibboleths of the official Indian line, challenging it at every step. The protests on the ground were also able to provoke the international community into a new appreciation of events in Kashmir. Where not so long ago masked gunmen had read out old-fashioned press releases from one or the other militant tanzeem, there was now a massive opening out of the language in which Kashmir was being spoken about. On the Internet, there was news, and analyses, but there was also a spate of music videos, which cut images from this week’s protests (usually shot on cellphones) into next week’s rousing protest anthem. ‘Stone in My Hand’, by the radical Irish American rap singer Everlast, was an early, and unexpected, hit. Young stone-pelters were known to cruise the streets listening to the song (naturally on their cellphones). There were stories, often elliptical, yet highly political, including a short graphic novel exquisitely drawn in black and white, about the Kashmir ‘Intifada’. And it was the Internet again that would soon carry out the words of teenaged Kashmiri rap artists, like the nineteen-year-old MC Kash, ‘Coming to You Live from Srinagar Kashmir’, as he promised. As the summer slowly wound down, it was impossible not to be snagged by the closing lines of his runaway hit, ‘I Protest’:
I Protest, Fo’ My Brother Who’s Dead!
I Protest, Against The Bullet In his Head!
I Protest, I Will Throw Stones An’ Neva Run!