Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak

men,

       Har zaalim se takraaenge,

       Tum samjhaute ki aas rakho,

       Ham aage barte jaenge,

       Har manzil ae azadi ki kasam,

       Har manzil par dohraenge,

       Yeh kis ka lahu hai kaun maraa.

       Whose blood is this? Who is dead?

       In our hearts we are resolved,

       Every tyrant we will smash.

       You can hope for compromise,

       We’ll continue to stride forward.

       Each step ahead we swear by freedom,

       Each step we’ll swear again.

       Whose blood is this? Who is dead?

       Saturday, 31 July 2010

      We have a young neighbour who steps out at 5 a.m. every morning to see if he can buy lavasas or girdas (local rotis made in a tandoor) and milk, and he does the same for us. Bakeries and other stores shut by 6 a.m. so that people can be home before the curfew is enforced, but today he comes back to say that the bakery has not opened. Given how wedded Kashmiris are to their lavasas, this is as pronounced a symptom of civic disorder as any.

      The curfew, we are told, is to be enforced more closely today, but that does not seem to stop people from taking to the streets all over the valley; the list of towns and villages in which people mobilize knits together north and south Kashmir, as well as Srinagar, in a network of protest: Sopore, Pampore, Naidkhai Sumbal, Pattan, Handwara, Kupwara, Kreeri, Varmul, Bijbehara, Kakpora, Ganderbal (the chief minister’s constituency). Two (or is it three?) more are shot by the police and CRPF, many more injured, hospitals in Srinagar report a shortage of blood. The pattern of daily protest and firing is now firmly in place: people gather to raise slogans and march towards government buildings, the young throw stones, the CRPF retaliate in kind (including, in a species of collective punishment, by breaking the windows of homes in the urban areas where protesters originate), use tear gas, and then, after they fire warning shots, shoot to kill and maim.

      But there are variations in these seemingly established patterns, new participants in these protests. In several instances, women are at the forefront, and we see images of young women throwing stones at the security forces. Today also sees a demonstration at Uri, which is close to the border and home to a great army presence; but mercifully, they do not intervene as protesters make clear that their protests are directed elsewhere. Today also sees substantial damage to government property: a building at the Amargarh station at Sopore, police vehicles, two Indian Air Force trucks. And where larger crowds gather, as at Kreeri, they burn a camp of the Special Operations Group (the SOG is a police auxiliary recruited locally, including surrendered militants, and is loathed because they are often used by the security services to do their dirty work for them). One story that makes the rounds—no news channel in Kashmir or elsewhere confirms this—is that two army vehicles were burnt when the soldiers in them refused their officer’s order to take action against the protesters who had stopped them. We will not fire on the unarmed, they are supposed to have said.

      Kashmir has never seen such widespread anger and mobilization, say those who lived through the worst episodes of armed militancy in the 1990s. Then state forces fought those equipped to fight back, and civilian casualties (and there were many) could be blamed on insurgents and counter-insurgency tactics. Now there are no armed militants, only people, their voices, and their bodies on the road, and of course there are stones. Policemen do get hurt, and isolated government officials are thrashed, but the only people who are shot are civilians. A Delhi-based news channel used the word ‘miscreants’ to describe the protesters who burned a building, and once again I was reminded of the chasm that divides opinion-makers in Delhi and events on the ground here. Would we ever call those who marched for freedom against the British ‘miscreants’? Even those who torched the police station at Chauri Chaura? (It is another matter that Gandhi called a halt to the movement in the face of that incident; but this is another time and place, and there is no Gandhi here).

      And that is an important part of the problem in Kashmir. If the British had insisted that Gandhi was not to be dealt with as a politician, that he and his politics had no locus standi, a different map of protest would have emerged all over India. Our home minister’s line on Kashmir has been clear: emboldened perhaps by the election results in 2009, he had declared the separatists irrelevant. But they have never been that, and in fact are the only set of politicians who have consistently argued the need to reexamine Kashmir’s status within the Indian Union. There are those amongst the Hurriyat who are amenable to the development of political systems in J&K that will in fact put into practice the autonomy, the special status, constitutionally available to this state. There are those who are much more independentist in their aspirations, and there are a few (and increasingly fewer) who think of a merger with their Islamic neighbour, if only because that was the principle of the merger of majority populations that was supposed to govern the allotment of territories during the Partition process of 1947. Successive regimes in Delhi have sought to delegitimize this entire range of political opinion, and that has been a huge and arrogant miscalculation. Kashmiris have seen too much suffering over the past two decades (and before) not to see themselves as at the receiving end of the policies of an imperial state. The security apparatus is too visible and intrusive on a daily basis to be understood as anything other than a reminder of an occupation force and a subject people. And there has been no justice offered for even the most egregious acts of violence committed by the military, the paramilitary, or the police. There have been spectacular instances of murder, torture and rape, and no immediate moves to bring criminals to justice, and that has been the case all of this year too, from the killings at Macchil to the unprovoked shooting of boys in Srinagar.

       Sunday, 1 August 2010

      I read about a statement issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India—CPI(M)—offering an ‘Inquilabi Salaam’ to Kashmiris who, in their pursuit, of self-determination, are being crushed by their common enemy, the Indian state. The enemy is the same, they say, in Dandakaranya as in Kashmir. What they self-servingly omit to mention is that their political and military methods are not those of Kashmiris today. And this is an important distinction, and crucial to understanding why the valence of the state ‘crackdown’ is not the same in each theatre of conflict. Some Kashmiris have a different comparison for their struggle: their resistance is like the Palestinian Intifada (minus Hamas), and the visual analogy—stone-pelters versus armed state forces—is compelling.

      And the situation worsens today: eight more are killed, including a young woman, scores wounded, another SOG camp is burned, as is a tehsildar’s office. Villagers who live in areas adjoining the Jammu–Srinagar highway are blockading sections, which invites swift reprisals, since that is the primary road link between India and the Valley. The range of protests widens, and it is clear that no official response, however swift, is working. There are ministerial delegations visiting districts in north and south Kashmir, but members of the government have no credibility at all, and their meetings with local officials seem to be exercises in futility. Mehbooba Mufti of the Opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is refreshingly honest when she says that there is no point in mainstream politicians like her attempting to speak to the people now—they will not listen, she says.

      The conversation here shifts increasingly to the imposition of governor’s rule, and the handing over of roads and major installations to the army. However, a friend points out that Delhi is able to perform this sort of deployment even when there is an elected government in place, so why would they remove the fig leaf that Omar Abdullah provides them? In any case no political activity of any sort is feasible before this cycle of violence—demonstrations and official reprisals—is broken, and no one, least of all the government, seems to know how to enable that. I am reminded of Jayaprakash Narayan’s comment on the imposition of the Emergency: ‘Vinaash kale vipreet buddhi’. It is true that in difficult times, when you need them most, the buddhi, the mind and the imagination, work least well. In this case, the political imagination has been caused