Over the last few months, one has observed the developments in the Kashmir valley at first with concern, and now with a growing sense of dismay and disgust.
The sentiment on the streets of Srinagar is that Azaadi is around the corner even as our print media and electronic media have shed copious tears in ink and airtime at the plight of the poor Kashmiri. The villains of the piece, in all these narratives, are the security forces, more specifically the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the CRPF in the recent past, and, more generally, the Indian Army and the AFSPA. The conventional wisdom of our chatterati seems to be that if not for these murderous monsters in khaki and olive green, the Valley would have been a Garden of Eden, seamlessly integrated and absorbed within the Indian Constitution and the Republic it enshrines.
For Kashmiri separatists, who have always looked to Pakistan as their saviour and now increasingly to radical Islam as their salvation, to demonise the Indian state and its security forces is entirely understandable. For so-called mainstream Kashmiri politicians too, who for the last 60 years have proved themselves quite adept at running with the separatist hare and hunting with the nationalist hound, this stance is quite consistent with their existential dilemma. What is disturbing is that our so called civil society, vociferously led by the media, but now with an impressive array of academics, artists and activists joining the chorus to seek justice and dignity for the hapless Kashmiri, has painted the Indian state and our security forces in uniform shades of black. So one sided has been this debate that it seems we might as well be discussing the American invasion of Iraq.
Not for once have they attempted to describe or engage with the plight of our brave jawans who are deployed in the valley. The constant sense of physical danger along with complete uncertainty about its timing and intensity are the defining characteristics of the worldview of a jawan manning a security outpost in the Kashmir valley.
One simply does not know whether the missile being hurled at you is a bomb, a grenade, a Molotov cocktail or a ‘harmless’ rock. One does not know that an armed mujahideen may be hiding amidst a funeral procession apparently full of grieving women and children, ready to open fire in close proximity. One does not know if a burqa clad woman approaching your check post is simply going about her innocent chores or is a courier ferrying weapons or, worse, is a suicide bomber ready for martyrdom and houris in heaven.
This year alone nearly 60 security personnel and about 30 civilians have also been killed in terrorist strikes, as this year’s contribution to a death toll that has reached nearly 6,000 security forces and 15,000 civilian casualties since 1988. These 6,000 dead come from all four corners of the country but we don’t see any scribes and cameramen going to talk to their families, to understand their sense of grief and loss, their suffering and sacrifice for the idea of India. Whether it was the Shopian case last year or the unrest this year, we are quick to assume the worst about our security forces, even when, as in the Shopian case, investigations by the CBI unearthed a sequence of events completely at variance with the popular sentiment in the valley.
Comparisons are made with crowd control techniques in the West, with emphasis on better training, improved protective gear for the police personnel and use of non-lethal alternatives for crowd control. These suggestions, coming in the wake of the very graphic and distressing images of dozens of young men killed and injured in police action on television, are no doubt inspired by genuine concern and good intentions within our civil society for the plight of the ordinary citizens of Kashmir. However, they are essentially a knee-jerk response with little understanding of the evolution of the Kashmiri separatist movement, from an essentially local movement, based on a sense of ethnic identity and political grievances, to another front in the global Jihad waged by radical Islam, a struggle to reclaim the lost glory of the Ummah. It is not for nothing that both Osama Bin Laden and the Supreme Leader of Iran speak of Kashmir in the same breath as Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a shift we ignore at our peril.
Through the early 1990s the Kashmiri Pandits were driven out of the valley in one of the most despicable acts of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century. The subsequent targeting of innocent civilians including foreign tourists, the Taliban style fatwas against western style clothes, TV, films and other elements of mainstream Indian culture, the stain of open association with elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda post 9/11, all chipped away at the domestic and international acceptability of the separatist cause. As things stand today, the two nation theory, unabashedly updated with liberal doses of jihadi ideology has openly become the basis for Kashmiri separatism.
What is the basis for the demand for Azaadi? Is the history and culture of Kashmir so distinct from the rest of India as say Afghanistan or Iran is or is this sense of identity a recent construct? Our civil society takes claims of Kashmiri identity for granted and approaches the issue from a misplaced sense of historical guilt. The Dogra kingdom of Kashmir existed from 1846 to 1948. Going back in history, till 1349 Kashmir was a Hindu kingdom. Then for about 175 years it was ruled by the Swati dynasty begun by Shah Mir. Subsequently, it became a part and parcel of the Mughal Empire till the mid 18th century when it passed into a period of Afghan rule. From 1820 to 1846 it was a part of Ranjit Singh’s kingdom before the Dogras purchased it from the British. So, one can clearly see that for the major part of recorded history, the political and administrative fortunes of Kashmir have been very much aligned with the rest of modern India. Culturally, linguistically and racially Kashmir possesses certain distinctive features but it is no more or less unique than, say, the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of Uttarakhand or the Lahaul-Spiti region of Himachal Pradesh.
By giving it a special status in 1948, by denying the citizens of the rest of India the right to permanently settle in Kashmir, by hastily agreeing to the demands of Sheikh Abdullah for unprecedented autonomy, we have created a situation where on one hand a Kashmiri boy can appear for and end up topping the IAS exam, and on the other hand the rest of Indians can’t live or work freely in Kashmir.
‘Peaceful’ protestors can pelt our security forces with stones and missiles, and even try to lynch them at will, while Geelani can launch his Quit Kashmir movement posing himself as a Mandela or a Gandhi even though he has instigated some of the most parochial and rabidly extremist terrorist groups in Kashmir, that have been armed and funded by his Pakistani mentors across the border.
We have hobbled ourselves, and as long as the present constitutional anomalies continue, the Kashmiri separatist will continue to draw sustenance from the Indian Constitution in his efforts to destroy it.
Nation building is not an exercise in the poetry of idealism alone; it has to be also backed by the prose of realism. To that extent the present mess in Kashmir is of our own naïve creation.
Vilify and demonize us to your heart’s content, but we will never accept another partition of India on any grounds. You can choose to happily integrate with the rest of the country and participate in the success of a vibrant, growing economy or you can continue this path of jehad inspired violence and carry on subjecting the law-abiding ordinary citizens of the valley to an unending state of curfew and siege. Kashmir belongs to India and India belongs to Kashmir.
People of India did not put half a million troops in Kashmir out of a sadistic desire to alienate and humiliate the inhabitants of Kashmir valley. It was the brazen assault on the idea of India, exemplified by barbaric ethnic cleansing (so much for the tolerant Kashmiri identity), and the flirtation with Jehadi Islam and its Pakistani flag bearers, that is the real cause of the long shadows of bayonets and jackboots in the valley.
The stone pelting young men of the valley who died this tragic summer are not alone in having grieving mothers and sisters. Each soldier and policeman who has died in Kashmir was someone’s son and someone’s brother too.
So stop pelting your soldiers and policemen with stones, stop flirting with Jehadi ideology, stop harbouring foreign militants and abandon this chimera of Azaadi that is the real cause of your alienation from the rest of India.
Despite the 6000 dead and counting, there is no shortage of young men in India who will proudly don the uniform and continue to man the peaks and valleys of Kashmir, ready to kill and die for the idea of an indivisible India.
