My Home Truth

The Caging of America

2012-01-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Why do we lock up so many people?
by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012 (The New Yorker)
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

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The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

The first Sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

2012-01-25T01:41:00.000-08:00

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change
Faramerz Dabhoiwala
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012 22.55 GMT
We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.
The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution
by Faramerz Dabhoiwala

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Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.
When I stumbled on the subject, more than a decade ago, I could not believe that such a huge transformation had not been properly understood. But the more I pursued it, the more amazing material I uncovered: the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.
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Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church's view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray. By the later middle ages, it was common in places such as London, Bristol and Gloucester for convicted prostitutes, bawds, fornicators and adulterers to be subjected to elaborate ritual punishments: to have their hair shaved off or to be dressed in especially degrading outfits, severely whipped, displayed in a pillory or public cage, paraded around for public humiliation and expelled for ever from the community.
The reformation brought a further hardening of attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war, executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already were.
Of course, sexual discipline was never perfect. Men and women constantly gave way to temptation – and then had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined and shamed to reform them. Many others, especially the wealthy and powerful, escaped punishment. As was the case with other crimes, the full rigour of the law was never uniformly or consistently applied. All the same, sexual discipline was a central facet of pre-modern western society, and its unceasing promotion had a profound effect on ordinary men and women. Most people internalised its principles deeply and participated in the disciplining of others. There was no coherent philosophy of sexual liberty, no way of conceiving of a society without moral policing. It seemed obvious that illicit sex had to be combated because it angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations and undermined social order. Sex was emphatically not a private affair.
So pervasive was this ideology that even those who paid with their lives for defying it could not escape its hold over their minds and actions. When the Massachusetts settler James Britton fell ill in the winter of 1644, he became gripped by a "fearful horror of conscience" that this was God's punishment on him for his past sins. So he publicly confessed that once, after a night of heavy drinking, he had tried (but failed) to have sex with a young bride, Mary Latham. Though she now lived far away, in Plymouth colony, the magistrates there were alerted. She was found, arrested and brought back, across the icy landscape, to stand trial in Boston. When, despite her denial that they had actually had sex, she was convicted of adultery, she broke down, confessed it was true, "proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin … and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice". On 21 March, a fortnight after her sentence, she was taken to the public scaffold. Britton was executed alongside her; he, too, "died very penitently". In the shadow of the gallows, Latham addressed the assembled crowds, exhorting other young women to be warned by her example, and again proclaiming her abhorrence and penitence for her terrible crime against God and society. Then she was hanged. She was 18 years old.
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That is the world we have left behind. Over the following century and a half it was transformed by a great revolution that laid the ground for the sexual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of our own day.
The most obvious change was a surge in pre- and extramarital sex. We can measure this, crudely but unmistakably, in the numbers of children conceived out of wedlock. During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.
Just as striking was the collapse of public punishment, which made this new sexual freedom possible. By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law. This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. At the end of the middle ages only about 40,000 people lived there, but by 1660 there were already 400,000; by 1800 there would be more than a million, and by 1850 most of the British population lived in towns. This extraordinary explosion created new kinds of social pressures and new ways of living, and placed the conventional machinery of sexual discipline under growing strain.
Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.
This was crucial to the development of the ideal of sexual freedom. By the later 18th century, for the first time, many serious observers had come to take it for granted that sex was a private matter, that men and women should be free to indulge in it irrespective of marriage, and that sexual pleasure should be celebrated as one of the purposes of life. As well as reinterpreting the Bible, they found support in new ideas about the importance of personal conscience and in the laws of nature, which were regarded as more clearly indicative of God's will than the inherited dogma of the church and the text of the scriptures. In his 1730 work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, the Oxford don Matthew Tindal ridiculed traditional sexual norms as priestly inventions, no more appropriate to a modern state than the biblical prohibitions against drinking blood or lending money: "Enjoying a woman, or lusting after her, can't be said, without considering the circumstances, to be either good or evil. That warm desire, which is implanted in human nature, can't be criminal, when perused after such a manner as tends most to promote the happiness of the parties, and to propagate and preserve the species."
In a similar vein, the Rev Robert Wallace, one of the leaders of the Church of Scotland in the mid-18th century, wrote a treatise seriously commending "a much more free commerce of the sexes". By that he meant complete liberty for people to cohabit successively with as many partners as they liked – "A woman's being enjoyed by a dozen … can never render her less fit or agreeable to a 13th". As John Wilkes's 1754 Essay on Woman put it: "Life can little more supply / Than just a few good Fucks, and then we die."
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It's no accident that all these early celebrations of the new sexual world were voiced by white, upper-class men. In practice, sexual liberty was limited in important ways. The bastardy laws continued to apply to the labouring classes: their morals remained a public matter. The new permissiveness towards "natural" freedoms also led to a sharper definition and abhorrence of supposedly "unnatural" behaviour. Homosexual acts in particular came to be persecuted with increasing violence: throughout the 18th century there were regular executions for sodomy. Even after 1830, when hanging for the offence was ended, thousands of men were publicly humiliated in the pillory, or sentenced to jail, for their unnatural perversions – Oscar Wilde's imprisonment with hard labour for two years in 1895 is only the best-known example.
Yet the general advance of sexual freedom and the expansion of urban life also fostered the development of an increasingly assertive homosexual sub-culture. Some of the most remarkable utterances of the 18th century were the first principled defences of same-sex behaviour as natural, universal and harmless. One night in 1726, William Brown, a married man, was arrested at a notorious pick-up spot with another man's hand in his breeches. When surrounded by hostile watchmen and challenged as to "why he took such indecent liberties … he was not ashamed to answer, 'I did it because I thought I knew him, and I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body'". That sodomy had been accepted by all the greatest civilisations of the world was one of the themes of the young clergyman Thomas Cannon's Ancient and Modern Pederasty (1749). "Every dabbler knows by his classics," he pointed out, "that boy-love ever was the top refinement of most enlightened ages." Arguments of the same kind were developed systematically by the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister (1791-1840), who set down in her diaries the first full justification of lesbian love in English, and by Bentham, the most influential reformer of the age, who defended the rights of homosexuals in countless private discussions and over many hundreds of pages of notes and treatises.
Attitudes towards women's sexuality underwent similarly dramatic shifts. The idea that sexual freedom was as natural and desirable for women as for men was born in the 18th century. By the early 19th century, many feminists, socialists and other progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic decried marriage and advocated free love as a means to the emancipation of women and the creation of a more just society. Among those who held such views were Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Robert Owen and many Owenites, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the long term, this egalitarian way of thinking was to provide the intellectual foundation for women's sexual liberation more generally.
Yet more immediately the rise of sexual freedom had a much more ambiguous legacy. Women who were rich or powerful enough to escape social ostracism could take advantage of it: many female aristocrats had notoriously open marriages. But on the whole female lust now came to be ever more strongly stigmatised as "unnatural", for it threatened the basic principle that (as one of William III's bishops had put it) "Men have a property in their wives and daughters" and therefore owned their bodies too. Thus, at the same time as it was increasingly argued that sexual liberty was natural for men, renewed stress was placed, often in the same breath, on the necessity of chastity in respectable women.
The effects of this sharpened double standard can be seen everywhere in 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century culture. James Boswell's diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong:
"She was a subtle philosopher. She said, 'I love my husband as a husband, and you as a lover, each in his own sphere. I perform for him all the duties of a good wife. With you, I give myself up to delicious pleasures. We keep our secret. Nature has so made me that I shall never bear children. No one suffers because of our loves. My conscience does not reproach me, and I am sure that God cannot be offended by them.'"
A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared "that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature." But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man "may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection", but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter's divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.
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Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.
A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust. This was an unprecedented development. In all earlier times, women's direct intervention in public discussion had been very limited. Men monopolised every medium in which male and female qualities were prescribed and reinforced – fiction, drama, poetry, sermons, journalism and so on. But from the later 17th century onwards, women emerged for the first time as a permanent part of the world of letters. As playwrights, poets, novelists and philosophers, women influenced male authors, looked to one another, and addressed themselves directly to the public. And in much female writing about sexual relations, the bottom line was, as the teenage poet Sarah Fyge explained in 1686, that men were always trying "to make a prey" of chaste women. Male bluster about female lust was but to make women "the scapegoat" – it was men who constantly pressured and ensnared women, who were insatiable in their thirst for new conquests, and shameless in their commission. As the feminist Mary Astell put it bitterly in 1700, "'Tis no great matter to them if women, who were born to be their slaves, be now and then ruined for their entertainment". No woman could ever "be too much upon her guard".
None of these ideas was entirely new, but it was only from around 1700 that they came to be put forward publicly, in a way that discernibly changed the culture of the age. Especially influential in the long term was the role of women in creating the new genre of the novel, which by the middle of the 18th century had become the most influential fictional form and become a central conduit of moral and social education. Samuel Johnson noted in 1750 that women's breaking of the male monopoly on writing, and their "stronger arguments", had overturned the ancient masculine falsehood that women were the more fickle and lecherous sex.
All this explains why the first major novelists of the English language were so obsessed with seduction. Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison were the most sensationally popular and influential pieces of fiction of the 18th century, was a classic instance of the growing power of female viewpoints. For all its originality, the general approach and subject matter of his fiction owes an obvious debt to the stream of earlier novels about heroines courted, seduced, raped and oppressed, which had flowed from the pens of pioneering female writers such as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Rowe. A wide circle of women acquaintances, readers and correspondents helped him; in turn, his work presented eyewitness perspectives of respectable women under threat from rapacious superior men. Right through the 19th century, it is hard to think of many serious novelists who did not pursue the seduction narrative.
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Equally important to modern ways of thinking was the increasing sexualisation of race and class. The presumption that lower-class and non-white women were less sexually restrained became a matter of both investigation and titillation. As sexual norms were increasingly held to vary according to race, class and sex, so the transgression of such boundaries (in reality and in fantasy) became ever more erotically charged. This was the origin of the great British obsession with sex and class, which equally affected homosexual passion. "We don't like people like ourselves," explains a middle-class character in one 1950s novel about gay lust. "We don't want anybody who shares our standards. In fact, we want the very opposite. We want the primitive, the uneducated, the tough." Even some of the most basic features of our sexual desire are therefore not natural and unchanging, but historically created. What we think of as "natural" in men and women, where the boundaries lie between the normal and the deviant, how we feel about the pursuit of pleasure and the transgression of sexual norms – all these are matters on which our current attitudes are fundamentally different from those that have prevailed for most of western history.
The new fascination with class and licentiousness helped to transform attitudes towards prostitution. The conventional view had been that prostitutes were the worst reprobates of all, deserving of the harshest punishments. But from the middle of the 18th century this perspective was matched, and often overshadowed, by the presumption that prostitutes themselves were ultimately the innocent victims of male lust and social deprivation. Vast efforts were poured into the foundation of asylums, workhouses and other charities for fallen women and girls at risk of seduction. Many contemporaries saw obvious parallels between black and white slavery. "What are the sorrows of the enslaved negro from which the outcast prostitute of London is exempted?" asked one late-Georgian activist. "A seducer or ravisher has torn them both, for ever, from the abodes of their youth … Is the bosom of the unhappy girl less tender than that of the swarthy savage?"
The rescue of fallen women, and the abolition of "white slavery", consequently became a craze to which some of the most prominent figures in public life devoted great energy. At the height of his fame, Charles Dickens threw himself into the foundation of a refuge for penitents, with the financial backing of the millionairess Angela Burdett-Coutts. His fellow novelist George Gissing tried (and failed) to redeem a young prostitute by marrying her himself. William Gladstone called the issue "the chief burden of my soul", and for decades, even while prime minister, roamed the streets at night attempting to save prostitutes.
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The final notable feature of the first sexual revolution was the birth of a new kind of media culture, in which private affairs and personal opinions were given unprecedented publicity. The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity. The sayings and doings of famous courtesans now came to be routinely analysed in print, and their portraits were endlessly painted, engraved and caricatured. Many of them skilfully promoted themselves, keeping their names and faces in the public eye by publishing memoirs and publicising their image. By the middle of the 18th century, a visitor to any of London's print shops could have bought dozens of different portraits, in all shapes and sizes, of Kitty Fisher, Fanny Murray, Nancy Dawson and every other well-known lady of pleasure. Cheapest of all were tiny prints made to fit inside a gentleman's watch case or snuff-box, the mass-produced equivalent of portrait miniatures. For threepence, or sixpence "neatly coloured", a man could carry his favourite harlot around with him in perfect privacy, gazing upon her whenever he felt like it. The foundations of today's celebrity sex scandals were laid a long time ago.
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The ultimate legacy of the first sexual revolution has been far from straightforward. In place of a relatively coherent, authoritative worldview that had endured for centuries, it left a much greater confusion of moral perspectives, with irresolvable tensions between them. That has been part of our modern condition ever since. What's more, as the history of the past few decades shows, its consequences are still unfolding, in different ways across different western societies. It is equally clear that the 18th century marked the point at which the sexual culture of the west as a whole moved on to a new trajectory.
In many parts of the world, by contrast, sexual ideals and practices reminiscent of pre-modern Europe continue to be upheld. Men and (especially) women remain at risk of public prosecution for having sex outside marriage. Often, the word of God is supposed to justify this. The Ayatollah Khomeini affirmed in 1979 that the execution of prostitutes, adulterers and homosexuals was as justified in a moral society as the amputation of gangrenous flesh. In some countries, imprisonment, flogging and execution by hanging, or even by stoning, continues to be imposed on men and women convicted of extramarital or homosexual relations. Even more widespread and deep-rooted is the extra-legal persecution of men and women for such matters. These are the same practices that sustained western culture for most of its history. They rest on very similar foundations – the theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, and the belief that men alone should govern. How they help to maintain patriarchal social order is obvious; so too is their cost to human happiness. How durable they will prove to be remains to be seen.
(Extracted from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, to be published by Allen Lane on 2 February at GBP 25.00)

Just 121m net users in India !

2012-01-04T03:53:00.000-08:00

3 January 2012
It is estimated that as many as 121m people in India use the internet - while that's a big number it's still a relatively small proportion of the country's 1.2bn population.
The numbers using the web are predicting to rise at a fast pace in the year ahead.
So, how will people in India be logging on and what are the biggest challenges when it comes to getting the country more connected. Rajini Vaidyanathan reports for BBC

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

2011-02-09T00:33:00.000-08:00

A Tale of Kashmir, War and The Elements of Business

Riyaz Masroor

To a whistle-stop reader, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator may appear a great throwback to The Five Find-Outers and Dog. There is passing mention of The Famous Five (that is the most popular of children’s writer Enid Blyton’s mystery series) when the nameless protagonist is reminded of his friend Ashfaq’s wish to see all the five buddies cross over to Pakistan. Hold the novel up close and the work looks lot more than the kid-stuff, as few of Kashmir’s big writers tend to view it; it appears a great beginning of Kashmir’s English fiction writing.

Mirza has doubtless indulged in extravagance of emotion, which many would find little upsetting, but this indulgence, it seems, helps the author to doubly emphasize the climax, which is the most powerful refutation of state-backed violence and state-backed counter violence: May your bones rest in peace, after they are licked dry by rabid, man-eating wolves.

For its bold indictment of ‘war’ in Kashmir, extremely graphic portrayal of tragedies, inestimable depth and a dash of literary innovation, the novel would sit comfortably amidst Earnest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and more closely with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas. Mirza’s novel, first by any Kashmiri Muslim, seems a resounding invite that Kashmiris return to all the post-war English classics.

Captain Kadian carries a noticeable resemblance with Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, who is a brute ivory trader on a colonial mission in the interiors of Africa. Pairing literary texts in a review is not possible but an example seems befitting. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, hears of the colonist’s brutal ways from a Russian admirer: ‘There was nothing on earth to prevent Mr. Kurtz killing whom he jolly well pleased.’ See how Captain Kadian echoes Kurtz when he reprimands his Collaborator over the latter’s lurking guilt for wanton killings. ‘Forget it man, this is war, and these are elements of the business here.’ (Page 278).

This ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ and the colossal losses accrued thereof are the main staple of Mirza’s storyline, much like fine threads that are entwined in an intricately woven Kashmiri carpet. The ‘grandest bed’ adored with a Kashmiri chain-stitch piece in Captain Kadian’s apartment is the subtle representation of these losses. One is reminded of Mr. Kurtz’s chamber where the glittering mats, woven by natives, decorate walls and windows.

These losses become even more manifest in the remark of Farooq’s father – his younger son crosses over to Pakistan and the elder one is brutally beheaded by army and the head flung into his compound – speaks to a village quorum. ‘I had two sons, two…one ate the other, you say hai, hai…!’ (pp 199) This heart-aching statement seems to couch an unsettling question: Does revolution really eat its own children?

Set in a far-off LoC village, the novel has cast much-awaited spotlight on the life on border. Many in the world still assume LoC as a mere line on the map with no life, only skirmishes. The Collaborator tells us what life means when it is trapped in a 740 Kilometer long and 34 Kilometer wide Line of Control, where scores of villages exist, some of them divided between India and Pakistan, most of them weighed down by the ‘curfew within a curfew’. And, what it means when army is deployed to ‘cleanse this place of anti-f****** national elements’. This is valley strewn with skeletons, the Valley of death, defenselessly residing on the frills of Koh-e-Gam, the mountain of grief; or, Conrad’s Grove of Death. This, in the words of The Collaborator is a ‘no-man’s land – what happens here is off the record, means nothing to anyone.’ The Collaborator, it seems, is an attempt to unveil this invisible, off-the-record Kashmir; ‘truth stripped of its cloak of time’.

This moving story also provides greater insights into the aftermaths of an armed movement and the near-colonial response it evokes from its adversary. It depicts the desolation of a beautiful land after it gets virtually de-populated in the name of brining peace or liberation. Over a light talk between Captain Kadian and his boss ‘Mehrotra Sir’, The Collaborator’s muted response bemoans this tragic aspect: Things have improved, f****** sir. People have left. People are killed. No people, no trouble, isn’t it? A professional colonist, as was Conrad’s character Marlow, considers populated areas as ‘blank spaces’ – people don’t matter, spaces do. Blank spaces…

Through The Collaborator’s love-hate emotions for Pakistan, armed resistance and militant groups, one gets a faint sense of why the narrator is nameless. Now there is thrill being part of the movement, now the zeal begins to wear off; now he draws a distinction between ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ militants, now he is told ‘they are all the same’; now he wants to kill his tormentor , now he learns Kadian is just a ‘blow’ of a ‘sister-f****** giant with countless limbs’.

The novel at times seems a shrill elegy punctuated with this bare sense of dilemma. For instance, The Collaborator tells us, ‘Pakistan, that goddamn country a few kilometers across the border which is never at rest and will never let anyone else rest.’ But soon the indignation gives way to lurking prevarication, ‘I hate it when KD starts abusing Kashmir, Kashmiris or Pakistan…it’s difficult to maintain straight face when he does that.’

The protagonist’s flip-flopish attitude seems reflective of the constant ambivalence of Muslim Kashmiris regarding a host of issues. Are we Pakistanis? If not, why this repression by Indian forces? Besides, there are host of Should-Wes and Shouldn’t-Wes hemmed nicely between the lines. Every Kashmiri would find himself in front of a mirror or a ‘thought-sensor’ while reading these lines: Why can’t they have another war instead … a proper war …why can’t they just have proper go and finish this damned unfinished business once and for all…come, come my Pakistani brothers, come inside, come right inside and then stay, don’t you dare leave this time, stay and let me sleep.

The author seems in full control of the plot and the characters through all the chapters. While highlighting abject poverty of Khadim Hussain (the recluse recruiter for militancy who starts with his son) the author introduces a charming Sopore boy Rouf Qadri, who despite prosperous upbringing, is sucked into militancy following arson and massacre by troops.

That Hussain and Ashfaq and Muhammad and Gul would often bunk those post-prayer meetings in the newly built mosque is a nuanced projection of Kashmir’s traditional aversion to radicalism; the novel shows absence of this even among communities that live along LoC, closer to Pakistan.

The whole point author seems to hammer is this: Pakistan, in her fatalist eagerness to ‘bleed India through Kashmir’ might have entailed a bonfire of people alaaw but the youth’s will to die owes itself to something else. Sadly, India through her ornamental peace missions has always failed, or wanted to fail, to kill this will to die in Kashmir even as this was easier than it would be in Palestine or elsewhere. Mirza has subtly reinforced this thought by pointing out the classic Bollywood numbers especially the ‘sultan of music’ Muhammad Rafi being the common favorite of both people as well as army.

Cover to cover, the novel gives out a long litany of losses and in the midst of every expression conveys, very forcefully, the dilemma of war-trapped people and their constant disdain for the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’. The horrid hold this war has had on the collective consciousness of Kashmir is masterfully portrayed in the sequence where Firdous Ali’s little son starts marking his sister’s throat soon after Farooq’s beheading, leaving the girl in a fit of depression. Like that ill-fated child people in Kashmir have long been living on ‘Doctor Bijli’s Calmpose pills’, which only prepare them for tragedy, tragedy, and tides of more tragedy.

The chapter dealing with the foreign militants and their wrongdoings is enough to provoke introspection among espousers of the “cause” on both sides of the LoC. But the author has steered clear of the internecine battles among Kashmiri groups and their impact on youth psyche even as the novel is set in 1993, the peak of fratricide in Kashmir.

Matching the much admired style of Hemingway and Conrad, the author has employed multiple symbols to communicate the layered messages and his artful rebuttal of violence and counter violence. Death, blood, lacerated bodies and weapons are some important symbols besides water, fire, cold and sun. ‘Wind, wind and more wind’… ‘Cold air hung like a curse’… Cloud-bothered sun’…‘The sky had turned flaming red Qayamatuk Rang’ etc. A dagger-in-chest effect of grief, and what it means when bullet-ridden bodies crowd out flowers, is created when Khadim Hussain’s dead body is described as ‘red body’.

Whatever the scales to adjudge a pure literary work, The Collaborator appears a standard war novel much like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind that recounts the American civil war or Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s – the only difference being those were written when the war was over, The Collaborator came up while the ‘war’ and its ‘elements of business’ are going on.

(riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

Woke up before dream ended? Write your own ending !

2010-11-13T23:14:00.000-08:00

Riyaz Masroor

Almost six weeks ago, when Kashmiris were in the middle of their ‘dream’, thirty-nine lawmakers from Indian parliament visited Kashmir amid mourning and a curfew-induced calm. As if the visit was to change the DNA of cops and troopers, the cycle of killings stopped. People got awakened before their dream would lead to the long cherished ending. Now, we are divided into two sets – one set regrets over the lost ending and the other wonders how to write the ending of our own, of course without again pulling over the quilt.

Dreaming is easy but scripting your own ending if awakened halfway is a rarity. Charles de Gaulle in Europe and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Asia aptly represent the quality of carrying forward the incomplete dream to a real-world ending. Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) too owes his literary success to an unfinished dream, which he later devoutly completed after throwing off his bedclothes. It’s an interesting story.

Having suffered almost two decades of failure, one night Stevenson had a terrible dream. Frightened by his outcries, his wife awakened him. “Oh, why did you wake me up?” he exclaimed, “I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He had just reached the moment of Dr. Jekyll’s first transformation and he was eager to see what manner of evil man might evolve before the sleep would be broken by his wife Fanny Osborne. But Stevenson employed his brilliant imagination and set out to write his own ending.

He wrote the first draft and threw it into fire after Fanny argued over the absence of metaphor; he began anew with appropriate allegory. Stevenson was so enthusiastic that he blended his dream with the conceived ending in next three days. The work came about as a novella, “Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It is about a passionate, noble scientist who ventures into splitting his bad self and names it as “Mr. Hyde” but it is not long before the personality of Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll’s affairs.

This nineteenth century epic was an instant hit. The title later became part of the language, with the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” implying a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

How Stevenson turned a dream-without-ending into an opportunity is a food for thought. History, geography or geopolitics apart, the idea of Freedom is after all a romance, a dream. We have been having this dream ever since long. When the dream was peaking, Sheikh Abdullah awakened us. He then chose to write his own ending in 1953. Baffled, he preferred sleep in 1975 and left the job of writing the ending of the dream to the next generation. Now, people again had a dream but they were awakened and are now being led to a “proper” ending. That ending will look “appropriate” and “genuine” as long as the dreamers don’t set out, like Stevenson, to write their own ending. How profound was Wordsworth when he said, “Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending”

America and Kashmir’s tea-party delusions

2010-11-01T05:55:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor

When a frail Kashmiri, according to a local maxim, was beaten by a street goon, he shouted back: my big brother will kill you. During past six decades Kashmiris have been receiving wound after wound but every time they are deluded into believing that the ‘Big Brother’ (America) will avenge their sufferings and force the ‘street goon’ to leave them off. Curiously, the ‘Big Brother’ has often looked the other way, and many in Kashmir, chiefly the ‘Hurriyatists’ (let’s admit Hurriyatism exists), still believe that ‘India hoodwinked’ Him.

Most of the local observers shared with Hurriyat this hoodwink theory when New Delhi appointed a panel to explore new contours of its relationship with J&K. Indeed the appointment of low-key individuals to perform a bigger task appeared a non-military offensive from New Delhi. Yet, the Kashmiris lapsed into the lyricism of resistance rather than attempting to carefully understand the move. Hurriyat must remember that it cannot always hide its political incapacities behind the readymade pretext that India had played a ‘dirty trick’ to ‘hoodwink the world community’ – the world community in Hurriyat jargon is a convenient euphemism for United States. So far, the Hurriyat politics in Kashmir is defined by several such platitudes such as South Asia will burn if talks are delayed, India will break up without resolving Kashmir or the movement is at a crucial juncture. But the most clichéd of all is ‘India is hoodwinking the world’. Can India really hoodwink America on Kashmir? We need a little elaborate answer.

Rewind to 1989 when the Kashmir movement turned violent. Gun-totting boys would conduct daredevil actions against India’s ill-prepared CRPF and stage armed parades on Aug 14 to observe Pakistan’s Independence Day. India did not want to let America know how Kashmiris were defying her rule in Kashmir when William Clark took charge as U.S. ambassador to India. During the welcome briefing to Clark, Delhi chose to ‘hoodwink’ the world community by brushing aside Kashmir and projecting Punjab, where the militancy had almost died down, as India’s major worry. But, the ‘hoodwink operation’ came to a naught because Walter Anderson, head of political desk in the Embassy, had already prepared a detailed note on growing disaffection within Kashmir and predicted the dangers. Clark had gone through Anderson’s note and corroborated it with other intelligence sources before he flew from Washington. India could not hoodwink America on Kashmir militancy. Phew!

In May 1990, the U.S. dispatched an experienced intelligence officer, Robert Gates to Pakistan where he would try to convince authorities on ending the ‘Kashmir operation’ in lieu of a guarantee that India would be asked to initiate some ‘CBMs’ and an “effective intelligence support from the U.S. to monitor the LoC.” Pshaw! The ‘Big Brother’ was rather hoodwinking Pakistan.

In fact, America’s Central Intelligence Agency had started to pry intelligence from the region way back in 1970s, soon after India and Pakistan started acquiring nuclear arsenal. In July 2004 a Brazilian journalist Sao Paulo wrote in the monthly Caros Amigos (meaning Dear Friends) an exhaustive analysis on the dispute titled Kashmir: Occupied, Partitioned and Disputed. The report says, “There are as many CIA agents in Kashmir as there are Al-Qaeda members (in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan)”.

Such suspicions were visibly corroborated by the fulltime intelligence operation of FBI in Kashmir between July 1995 and May 1996. A group of foreign tourists had been kidnapped while it was trekking at South Kashmir’s Pahalgam heights. Veteran U.S. diplomat Howard B Schaffer disclosed past year how the U.S. Army’s “Crack Delta Force” and elite British and German counterterrorism groups were mounting secret missions in Kashmir to hunt the kidnappers. The CIA papers that were declassified in 2004 have revealed that the CIA sleuths had interrogated some arrested militants of Harkat-ul-Ansar, the group they suspected had masterminded the abduction under the front name of “Al-Faran”. And, the think tanks are still debating whether CIA knew in advance what was happening on the heights of Kargil.

These references prove that the Americans don’t need Hurriyat caveats against India as they get down focusing on Kashmir? They know enough of it, more than Hurriyat and perhaps India. Before tossing up the hoodwink theory Hurriyat camp should have recalled that Loy Anderson was the first U.S. ambassador to India who visited Kashmir way back in 1950. And, a year later, Frank Graham whom the United Nations Organization had appointed as special negotiator on Kashmir, too was an American. Hurriyat expelled Shabir Shah in 1996 for lending audience to Frank Wisner, then U.S. ambassador to India. Was it afraid India may hoodwink U.S. if Americans engaged separatist leaders?

Howard B Schaffer was part of the state department’s South Asia mission and used to frequent Kashmir since 1960s. Writes he: “In pursuing an active U.S. role in Kashmir settlement American officials have stayed well informed about Kashmir developments. They have been in touch with all the organizations concerned with Kashmir and been privy to back-channel talks.”

In this backdrop, the platitude of ‘hoodwinking America’ appears laughable; it shows incapacity of separatist camp to tackle certain political challenges. When you dismiss a government action as something to hoodwink a superpower you absolve yourself from a desired response, a need to critically understand the move. If India needs just a retired journalist and a trendy academic or for that matter a shamelessly rigged election to hoodwink America, then better be with India to safeguard Jammu and Kashmir from any future invasion. The Brazilian monthly has also quoted some NATO policy documents which say, “After 11 September 2001, the United States does have a legal justification to invade J&K.”

When the state acknowledges only 17 out of 111 killings , that too subject to a lengthy, unending probe, Hurriyat and those peddling its hoodwink theory, better come out of their tea-party delusions. Ever since 1995 – when the government of India chose to initiate dialogue with five militants who had shunned arms – Kashmiris have been fed on mere noise of the dialogue while the economic and political benefits have been reaped by the ruling class in the state’s neighboring regions.

In response to the four-month unrest in Kashmir that saw 111 deaths and inexplicable tragedies, Delhi has appointed sitting executives of Planning Commission to rehabilitate the economic and social security concerns of people in Jammu and Ladakh. This implies ‘direct aid’ via Planning Commission. And for Kashmir, the government of India picked up some ‘thought engineers’. No wonder if Azadi is being subjected to rigorous debating across India because Professor Radha Kumar has enough skill to reinterpret this so far objectionable word to suit India’s foreign policy needs. And the ‘Big Brother’ will keep watching.

This is the time to shun this India-hoodwinking-America stuff from the menu of Hurriyat politics. The ‘Big Brother’ much in the Orwellian sense has all along been around us, but “He” is already friends with the “street goon”.

(email: rmasroor@gmail.com)

A transition from rhetoric to realism

2010-05-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement.
Riyaz Masroor
Many years ago, a Kashmiri lawyer had to cut a sorry figure in a European capital where he was invited to speak on the human rights situation of J&K. It was fashionable those days to speak in ‘thousands’ and ‘lakhs’. Separatist leaders would say ‘thousands have been martyred’ without quoting figures. The lawyer followed suit and thus spoke to the learned audience: “Thousands have disappeared in Kashmir, most of them while in custody.” The participants were moved by the word ‘thousands’. At the end of the session, an HR activist approached the speaker with the request: “It’s really a grave issue, can you cite three examples so that I study the whole thing.” The lawyer, as per his own admission, had no handy references so he chose to avoid the query till next morning and forwarded three examples only after seeking them via phone from Kashmir. The lawyer returned home with his lifetime lesson: Shun rhetoric, gather realities. No wonder, the same lawyer is now Kashmir’s leading human rights defender.
In June 2008, when the Kashmiri separatists started the epic campaign against a government decision to transfer around 100 acres of land to a Hindu Shrine Board, Hurriyat Conference was reborn. Not just in the sense that it revived its lost contact with masses but in the sense that it started speaking on real issues harming Kashmiri interests. The campaign forced the government to revoke the order and the land title was restored. Bar Association and Hurriyat celebrated the revocation of order as a ‘victory for Kashmiris’. It was for the first time since 1989 that Hurriyat had opposed any government order , got it revoked through peaceful campaign and later celebrated the ‘victory’. And yes, the peaceful method cast moral isolation upon the authorities who would lob tear-smoke shells on unarmed civilians.
But for that unfortunate economic blocked forced on Kashmiris from Jammu, this small victory would have served a long way in reorganizing Kashmir’s rights movement into an orderly resistance. Nonetheless, 2008 marked a significant transition; the transition from violence to reconstruction, from rhetoric to creativity. In all these years, when had Geelani said India earns Rs 36000 Crores annually from Kashmir through taxes and food imports? When had Mirwaiz wondered over absence of water and power in rural Kashmir saying people pay taxes against no amenity? When had we experienced a different Geelani who wants to substantiate his claims of Indian occupation through figures? A Hurriyat (G) pamphlet, whose authenticity may be debatable, records the volume of land occupied by Indian army in different districts, it says more than 350,000 acres of land has been grabbed.
The issues which in yesteryears were a plain no-no for Hurriyat leaders have suddenly come alive for them. They are reacting to government decisions and processes – a decade ago such reactions were considered taboo. Hurriyat (all shades including JKLF) is increasingly becoming democratic in its conduct and response to the socio-political issues. For example, never had Hurriyat asked people to participate in a process directly controlled by New Delhi. In 2001, they called for outright boycott of census but are now urging people to stand up and be counted, though with a word of caution. It is definitely a welcome transition. By simply shutting our eyes whole world will not turn black.
It would be foolhardy to say that post 2008, Kashmiris began to hate militant violence as a means of resistance; they cannot unless the means of repression remain intact. But we cannot overlook the fact that the culture of peaceful and democratic resistance has taken root after 2008 uprising.
Many would agree that the post-89 resistance against Indian rule in J&K was clearly modeled after the legendary Tehreek Mahaz Rai Shumari (Plebiscite Front Movement). Whole architecture of Hurriyat politics could easily be gleaned from the 22-year PF movement that was spearheaded by many big names but actually inspired by then popular leader Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who remained in jail for most of those two decades. Shutdowns, processions, sit-ins, slogans, speeches, secessionist songs etc everything one could witness post 89 had actually happened between 1953 and 1975. It would not be inappropriate to say that whatever Hurriyat, except for militant outfits, did till 2008 was just a replay of PF movement. Isn’t it a fact that while Sheikh would bask in the glory of rising popularity his detractor and then Prime Minister of J&K, Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was eroding the autonomous status of the state? For that matter, PF movement too was an abstract activity that kept people aloof from what was happening around them. Interestingly, if in past Sheikh’s PF movement had got consumed into rhetoric, now Hurriyat is trying to remodel itself over realities rather than rhetoric. The heightened alertness about census and the new recruitment law is a glaring proof of that. If Hurriyat has abandoned the ‘secondhand ideas’ and chosen to embark a new route of democracy and peace, shouldn’t one welcome it as a positive transition?
Mian Abdul Qayoom, President of Kashmir Bar Association, could not understand the nuances of this argument when this writer spoke to a seminar titled “Census and reservation bill – a bid to darken our future” organized by Geelani-led Hurriyat Conference on 22 May 2010. “I completely disagree,” he said and employed all his acumen to disprove the transition highlighted by this writer. Ironically, the lawyer who on his return from Europe had admitted a flaw and got down to work only to create a huge bank of realities was present in the seminar. It would, perhaps, take another session to make Mr. Qayoom understand that the transition does not necessarily mean from bad to good, it is also from good to better. Is there any harm in admitting that things have changed? Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides the answer: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
Feedback: riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Mom Balpuri’s Cow and Demography Cry

2010-05-11T05:57:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor
The noisy Tuesday was virtually the first day of Durbar in Srinagar; Monday had gone into calm, hassle free reopening and gossip. Irked by the deafening sirens, gridlocks, flag cars and road barriers, I vomited out my anger before a friend who happens to be a police officer. “Why should large contingents escort even insignificant persons,” I asked angrily. “After all, who will take care of Mom Balpuri’s naughty cow?” the officer hurled a counter question.
The response baffled me. What the hell is some Balpuri’s cow to do with the mess the Durbar has brought out on Srinagar’s fast narrowing roads. But, as probed further, Mom Balpuri appeared a character portraying the Kashmir’s ruling class, and his cow a metaphor for the social liabilities of this class. Small wonder, these liabilities are being taken care at the cost of public convenience. Alas! Balpuri’s cow did not get enough care.
Ghulam Muhammad Ganaie was perhaps the only bet for National Conference in Budgam’s Khansahib constituency when it fought elections in 1996. He was the party’s block president and was more famous by his nick name Mom Balpuri, probably after his native village Balpur. Despite being a grass-root worker, this rustic, simpleton farmer would wonder why a bevy of gun-wielding Personal Security Officers (PSOs) would follow him like his shadow, though he later came to know that he was a ‘protected person’ after NC got the crown.
Mom Balpuri had a cow that he was very fond of. He would cherish even his cow’s naughty antics – it would cross over to neighbour’s paddy field, hit a kid or two or snap the rope and shove into some grocery shop. Youth of Balpur still remember how Mom Balpuri would struggle to prevent his pet from hurting others. After becoming the ‘protected person’ Mom Balpuri would chase the freaky cow while his PSOs would follow him, wielding guns. He would rebuff them to help him leash the cow by surrounding it rather than following him. “But how can we do that sir, we cannot move to your front, we have to be at your back and guard you.” This would put off Mom Balpuri because the cow would run even faster sensing not just Balpuri but several men with guns following it. This went on till 17 March 2001 when the assailants murdered Balpuri at his residence. His PSOs must be sad why they could not help him leash his cow, or save him from the assailants.
What Mom Balpuri in his pastorally honest sense would want his PSOs to do is being done by almost all the PSOs who are attached to VIPs and VVIPs. Then it was only the matter of comforting an ill-tamed cow, now it is about almost everything – rearing children, ferrying them to school, going shopping with the madam, mowing the garden, attending telephone calls, fixing meetings and much more.
From all ministers to lowbrow politicians, PSOs are flanking every individual who has something to do with the ruling regime. There are PSOs who go for extended leave, take vehicle from the ministerial staff and roam around in his home town, flaunting his false errrr real power across his neighbourhood. Who is paying for all this luxury? Masses.
Coming back to roads, Our VIPS travel with a false sense of being superior to the rest. Their well-guarded vehicles zoom through busy roads with frightening speed. Later in the afternoon, as I started to check the day’s happenings a citizen journalist came to me with a startling complaint.
“Please inform SP traffic that PRO of the Works Minister G M Suroori has left office with a PWD vehicle 9330 JK 02 L (Bolero). He is now enjoying in his village, patrol bills will be paid by the government,” he informed. I simply passed on the information to Police high ups, just to satisfy the citizen journalist, though I was sure the complaint will be junked. But I began wondering if the PRO was taking care of Suroori’s or his own ‘naughty cow’?
Mom Balpuri was not to blame when he saw himself in the security ring. The ruling regime wanted to leave an impression in the area that they have the ‘presence’. The PSOs would serve as an advert of POWER; people with smaller problems would be psychologically drawn to Mom Balpuri, considering the Police escort he had around him round the clock as an indication of POWER. The innocent old man, Mom Balpuri was isolated from his earthy lifestyle and squeezed into the new frame of POWER.
Fourteen years after the PSOs scared that naughty cow in Balpur, the VIP culture has spawned a new social class comprising everyone who is followed by a security van and flanked by gunmen. People belonging to this class believe they have the first right to move on the road. Policemen or Traffic Cops have no teeth to regulate their movement or discipline them.
Democracy, they say, is a great leveler. But here the democracy, believed to have returned in 1996, has further fragmented the life. There are people with LINKS to power. There are people with ACCESS to POWER. There are people with CHANNELS in bureaucracy and then there are people who have the BUSINESS with the POWERFUL. Masses are at the bottom of the pyramid.
Separatists are crying hoarse that the eight percent reservation in government jobs for scheduled caste candidates would affect the state’s demography. The chief minister has reassured them that it was not the case. But the fact is the demography has long changed. The VIPs are eating into the social space of the masses that are now worse than the underclass of a totalitarian state. A Kashmiri threatening another Kashmiris’ social identity, no hartaal for this please!

(Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

Kashmir via Kabul

2010-01-27T05:58:00.000-08:00

What does peace in Afghanistan bode for J&K?

Riyaz Masroor

What does London Conference on Afghanistan, beginning January 28, mean to us? This crucial question requires an elaborate answer.

Kashmir shares an interesting relationship with Afghanistan. Not just because Afghans ruled the ‘paradise on earth’ for 67 years but because peace in Kashmir is inversely proportional to war in Afghanistan.

In 1979, when Russia’s Red Army forayed into rugged, war-torn Kabul, Kashmir was basking in a newly-bought peace under Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah. The decade of Soviet occupation in Afghanistan was marked, in Kashmir, by relatively poised regimes except for a brief trouble under G M Shah, who had toppled Farooq Abdullah’s government in 1984. Back then Pakistan’s official media would gloat over the Afghan Jihad but people responded not beyond listening to radio dispatches from Peshawar or Kandahar.

But that was soon to end. Russia’s exit plan was conceived little later than mid eighties. Before that plan could be executed Kashmir saw the resurrection of separatist movement. A large coalition of separatist groups, Muslim United Front, ran for state elections in 1987. The poll was brazenly rigged to prevent MUF, purported to comprise anti-National Conference vote bank, from assuming power.

Most of the modern historians unwittingly believe that the electoral fraud of 1987 has actually rooted the cult of violence in Kashmir. That may be a reason but not the reason. It was very well known that Pakistan had been bankrolling Afghan Jihad and in the event of Soviet retreat the forces of violence were being unleashed across the subcontinent, partly due to the compulsion such operations incur and partly to keep Indian army bogged down in Kashmir. Had there been no rigging in 1987, Russia-made AK 47 rifle would still make its debut in Kashmir; because the Afghan front had now cooled down. The poll debacle only hastened the process and provided a readymade excuse to the supporters of the armed uprising.

However, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the violent explosion of 1989 as entirely a ‘proxy war’. Pakistan, no doubt, supplied the guns but India’s long running apathy toward local emotions had been so acute that it induced a ‘will to die’ in the otherwise docile, easygoing Kashmiris. Proxy wars can be easily defeated if the population is free from any sense of deprivation, occupation or discrimination– let’s call it the 3D crisis.

If Kashmir had started limping back to normalcy in the early years of past decade, it was not only due to 9/11 strike on US. Neither was it because India had woken up to the need to accommodate the Kashmiri concerns about deprivation, dispossession and discrimination, yes the 3D crisis. The nine-eleven had, in fact, triggered a new war in Afghanistan, this time America sticking in the quicksand.

It is interesting to note how Afghanistan and Kashmir share a strange war-peace relationship. As NATO, with the help of Pakistan army, began their share of Afghan mission in 2001, Kashmir started showing signs of calm. Much like the 1979-89 decade the 2000-2009 witnessed lull in Kashmir violence and among other things a sudden reemergence of pro-India politics.

The reason why the Afghanistan conference that began in London on January 28, will have direct bearing on Kashmir is that it has been organised to legitimize the fresh call for engaging Taliban and sharing Afghanistan’s political and economic power with them. The call is simultaneously coming from Islamabad, Kabul and Washington. No wonder why J&K’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has given out a matching call urging militants for negotiations.

The crucial London summit should, therefore, not be mistaken as yet another conference on counter terrorism. It rather represents America’s radical switchover vis-à-vis its latest war. General McChrystal, US Army’s Afghanistan Chief, has made no bones about the need to negotiate peace with Taliban. Even an average analyst would see this statement as a stark admission of ‘defeat’. Remember, four-star general of a superpower army does not speak in air; the opinion that war in Afghanistan is increasingly becoming unwinnable has been sinking within the military discourse of Pentagon and its allies for past few years. If you cannot secure the palace of your loyal president in Kabul even as you fight the insurgents with full might for nine years, you better switch to plan B. Obama is already on way to implementing this plan B, which includes ‘re-empowering’ Taliban in lieu of peace ( or may be a graceful exit).

As the pattern sine 1979 goes Kashmir needs to prepare for a fresh bout of disturbance. A new ruling coalition largely dominated by Taliban would not just represent America’s ‘tactical surrender’, it would embolden Pakistan. Pakistan army, as a host of news reports suggest, has all along been involved in Afghanistan insurgency by proxy. Now, if America is taking Pakistan on board and offering political power to Taliban, it only signifies Pakistan army’s second ‘victory’ since it connived with US to defeat the former superpower USSR in the same Afghanistan. Moreover, if Obama-Karzai-Zardari trio has its way in forging a pro-Taliban regime in Kabul, the forces that were running the show there, may be tasked to reorient themselves. China’s troubled Xinxiang won’t make a choice owing to Beijing’s solid ties with Islamabad and the of late ‘patch up’ with US. So, will it be Mission Kashmir II?

It is difficult to say with certainty that the ‘Afghan wave’ would be finally made to spill over to Kashmir. But the major policy transition in US and Kabul makes it appear all too likely. India may be alive to the military challenges such a scenario could throw up but the question is has it been able to eliminate the ‘will to die’ from within the Kashmiri population.

If the incidents that occurred in past few weeks are any indicator, the 3D crisis seem running deeper than it was in 1989. Earlier we didn’t see people staging demonstrations during gunfights. Is it really hard to discern why Kashmiris would opt for violence if yet another anarchic moment came their way?

Kashmiris have never fought a war of choice. In all these 421 years of 3D crisis, they have always fought wars of survival. New Delhi cannot bring saints and monks together to curse Afghanistan that never-ending war inflict the country so that Kashmir remains peaceful. Afghanistan’s peace has always entailed war in Kashmir only because the ground here has all along remained fertile. Now, if India wants to eliminate the reasons for Kashmiris to revolt again, it should not wait for formal US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A word of caution: All the guile has been used up since 1947. Rallying Kashmiris around a mirage would be difficult now. Something real, yes real, need be done before the ‘Afghan wave’ touches our shores.

(Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

No tricolour at Lal Chowk ! What next?

2010-01-26T02:39:00.000-08:00

Riyaz Masroor
On the eerily quiet day of January 26, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), locally called CRP, chose to shun the 20-year-old practice of unfurling Indian tricolour at Srinagar's commerical center, Lal Chowk . Troops have been observing this practice ever since BJP’s Murli Manohar Joshi dared to reach Lal Chowk in 1991 and after alighting from an armored military vehicle unfurled the national flag atop the Clock Tower popularly known as Ghanta Ghar, a conspicuous city symbol. In this backdrop, the practice of hoisting tricolor, on national days such as January 26 and August 15, that too barely half a kilometer from Bakhshi Stadium, where the main function is held, reeked of a jingoistic political symbolism.
This business hub, it must be noted, has a political significance. It was here that in 1947 India’s first Prime Minister rubbed shoulders with Kashmir’s popular leader Sheikh Abdullah while promising the right of self-determination to the people of J&K; it was here that in 1975 hundreds of thousands of people received him after he entered into a deal with Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, then Indian premier; and it was from here in 1994 that the pioneer of Kashmir insurgency, Muhammad Yasin Malik, declared his transition from violence to nonviolence and struggle for democratic rights. In the light of this historical record, Lal Chowk represents political evolution. Murli’s flag-hoisting recipe, actually, wanted to undo this tradition and make Lal Chowk appear as a symbol of military conquest.
Having remained witness to significant political evolutions, this trade hub also bore lot of violence and saw lot of bloodshed. In April 1993 the troops allegedly set ablaze a huge shopping complex following a gunfight with militants. Besides killing of scores of civilians in the crossfire, around 200 shops and five commercial buildings are reported to have gutted in that devastating fire. Inayat Khan of Dalgate is only the latest victim. Following his murder allegedly by CRP sleuths early this month; local traders staged demonstrations seeking removal of CRP men from the ruined Palladium Theater.
The Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has announced a Rs 2 Crore plan to revive the "pristine glory" of Lal Chowk. Will that happen while keeping the garison-like image of this historic place intact. The chief minister must get down to first things first: remove CRP from Palladium, demilitarise Ghanta Ghar, put a ban on laying concertina wires on Lal Chowk roads etc..can you do at least this much, Mr. Omar!

Neelofar and her mates

2009-06-16T01:59:00.000-07:00

Chatting in the fairyland
Riyaz Masroor
The skyline, frilled with clouds, reflects in the calm, crystal-clear waters of the splendid river, as if the heavens have descended on earth. The ambience on the riverside appears even more awesome because Romana and Sabrina are ensconced in the warm squeeze of their mates, in their new everlasting world – the Paradise. Tabinda Gani of Handwara and scores others from Shopian’s Saidipora, Kupwara’s Kununposhpora and other areas are unmindfully frolicsome.
“Thank God you too are here. You are the only ones closer to my age,” Romana tells Sabrina and Tabinda Gani in a husky tone as others, elder to these teenage girls, talk fun. Sabreena and Tabinda enjoy the swing made up of flower stems, which don’t break and are more durable than the worldly carbon fiber.
Suddenly a hush wraps this jovial scene as a boll of cloud rolls itself into the premises and evokes a silent yet awed response from the God’s favorite women in Jannah. The cloud boll looks like a space ship but it doesn’t work on laws of force or motion but a Godly command.
Landing from this ‘space ship’ are Neelofar and her teenage sis-in-law, Asiya, their sparkling hazel eyes enhancing their fresh and rosy aura. Fairies sing paeans. Ahlan wa sehlan marhaba Welcome! Welcome! God be pleased with you! Romana and Sabrina warmly hug Asiya while Neelofar makes her way into the elder club of women who are pampering themselves near the gushing streams of milk, honey and rose water.
Neelofar gives a warm hug to Tabinda, tears trickling down her graceful cheeks. “My dear sister, the beasts, who outraged your modesty, have not been hanged and your family, like ours, is waiting for justice ever since those brutes molested and murdered you on 20 July 2007. How shall I tell you I and my darling Asiya went through the same ordeal at the fateful sunset of 29 May 2009. How shall I…how shall I…how…?”
Hearing her Bhabhi’s frantic sobs, Asiya rushes to the scene and attempts to mellow down the gloom Neelofar’s tears have set in. “We are God’s favorites. We faced whatever we faced. That’s not for our fault but for the fault of the hyper masculine lust. God has taken care of us by hosting us here in the paradise; God will hold the neck of those who outraged us.”
A bevy of white-winged fairies stream through the walkway; they are holding a whole range of bouquets. “I don’t like white rose,” yells the young Sabrina, “give me the yellow one.” A fairy stretches her hand out in the air and pat comes a yellow fragrant rose in her hand, bringing cheerful smile on Sabrina’s face.
Romana is told that on 23 August 2007 Sabrina had gone out to fetch something from a locality shop at Ikhrajpora in central Srinagar and vanished only to be traced dead, her body bruised confirming rape. “O My God!” Romana exclaims, trying hard to withhold her tears.
In order to mollify Sabrina, who is in preteens, Romana asks her: Ever heard of Shabnum? The little Sabrina responds with a quizzical gaze. “I will tell you,” Romana quickly resumes. “She is one of us but she survived the assault, not before the army men would molest her.” She is actually referring to the rape of Ayesha and her daughter Shabnum who were living a modest yet happy life in a two-and-half apartment in Badrapayeen, a hamlet in Kupwara district, till everything shattered in the night of 6 November 2004. Initial reports had said some Major Ramman, who TV Channels later insisted was actually Major ‘Rehman’, was found guilty and subsequently ‘suspended’ by his superiors as a mark of ‘justice’.
Romana informs Sabrina that a little known NGO, run by a Kashmiri Pandit, who has long been settled in Pune, has taken Shabnum to an Orphanage there. In the orphanage many like her spend days and nights in an alien ambience. “I had read some reports and articles in newspapers about her.”
As if talking to her own self, Romana tries to imagine how Shabnum of Kupwara’s Badra Payeen area would react if given a chance to speak. “You know what pains an outraged girl more than the fact that she was raped?” Romana tosses up the question, which she says Shabnum would have asked. An unstated remark of Shabnum starts crossing everyone’s mind: “When the rulers deny, it hurts. I think I was raped twice, first by the army major and then later by Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, then CM, who said Beti ka rape nahin hua...maa ka hum dekh rahe hain.”
Romana gives Sabrina graphic details of the incident as she had read in newspapers; how the uniformed army men had locked the door from inside and raped Shabnum in the night intervening 5 and 6 November 2004 and how the life had come to a stand still for weeks together.
“What probe? What? What? What probe?” fumes Neelofar, her eyes exuding both helplessness and anguish. “And look how the present chief minister Omar Abdullah denied a fact that was later evidenced by his own subordinate institutions.” Neelofar displays a strange sense of rebellion. “I know what happened to Major Ramman, who rapped the mother and the daughter in front of each other…an army court later acquitted him of the charges of rapping.”
Neelofar argues that it is not just the unbridled hyper masculine lust but a racially motivated hatred that prompts such wild, barbaric rapes in Kashmir. “I cannot explain what exactly I went through… I was hearing the moving shrieks of my dear one Asiya…the merciless rapists smeared her head with red sindoor (The vermilion powder Hindu groom puts between the bride’s parted hair). For a moment I thought we represented the nation Kashmir and the rapists represented the state of India; it was the Hindu India raping the Muslim Kashmir…I wish whole India is not like that…I simply wish all Indian army men are not like that…I hope the Indian rulers know what it means when army of a democratic nation goes on raping spree…I just hope India doesn’t break for all these crimes…..”
Compared to others, Romana is being seen lucky for she preferred death over being outraged when the prodigal youth of a politically connected family drove their Alto car against her on 03 May 2009. “But,” Neelofar raises her voice, “we too would happily die if given a choice. The claws of power-sodden uniformed men sank into our frightened body and soul and we would wish death that didn’t come till we were murdered.”
Neelofar says that Romana set an example. “I don’t know if all the Indian soldiers are beasts like the ones who molested us. I would suggest let all the girls, whom we left behind in the world, emulate Romana in a different sense. Let them carry a poison pill with them. If, God forbid, they are caught, let them swallow the poison and embrace death and defeat the evil military man of the world’s largest democracy.”
Meanwhile fairies begin their job; hairdressing of Neelofar, Asiya, Romana, Sabrina and Tabinda with diamond-studded combs having bristles made from peacock feather. Romana whines when the comb entangles her blonde hair. “I have been through more than this…so combing won’t hurt me,” responds Tabinda recalling how her doctor brother would often advocate death sentence for a rape.
After Tabinda was gang-raped and murdered, her brother would for long cite a similar case that took place in Delhi in 1998, in which the exemplary death sentence was awarded by the session’s court, Delhi, to a 30-year-old man in Ghandi Nagar, East Delhi in 1998, for the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl who was on her way from school.
“Come on! We would not have been together now had the culprits who outraged you (Tabinda Gani) been hanged …or awarded a lifer..! But I am sure God has his own ways of punishing the wrongdoers.” The Godly women disperse in groups and begin their routine chores in the Paradise.
riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Will Obamantra settle Kashmir?

2009-05-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor

Two important events in South Asia and the latest buzz between South Asia’s nuclear cousins – India and Pakistan – give out a glimmer of hope about some sort of settlement over Kashmir dispute. As for events, the defeat of world’s most organized insurgency in Sri Lanka and the weakening control of Taliban in parts of Pakistan have cleared the doubts, if any, that there could ever be a military solution to any ethno-political or religio-cultural conflict in post cold war world.
Then there are important statements. On 9 May 2009, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told Jim Lehrer of American PBS TV that his country did not perceive India a threat. "Well, I am already on record. I have never considered India a threat. I have always considered India a neighbor, which we want to improve our relationship with. We have had some cold times and we have had some hard times with them. We have gone to war thrice, but democracies are always trying to improve relationships”. Exactly a fortnight later on 23 May , Chief of India’s formidable Air Force, Air Marshal Fali Homi Major, told Rahul Singh of Hindustan Times that China posed a more real and potent threat to India than Pakistan. “The way he (China) is growing, he definitely has the capability…we know very little about the actual capabilities of China, there combat edge or how professional their military is…they are certainly a greater threat.” This statement could be easily read as a more technical response to Zardari’s gesture. After all when India considers China a major threat in the neighborhood it points to the realization that Pakistan is no longer a threat. Though bit oblique, Indian assertion that Pakistan too is not a threat has paved a fertile ground for further build up on the path of peace and reconciliation.
The following week saw yet another exchange of peace gesture between India and Pakistan. On 21 May 2009, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit hoped that the new Congress-led government in India would resume the bilateral peace process with Pakistan “sooner rather than latter.” In his weekly media briefing Basit also appealed to the world community that it should play a “role” in strengthening the “strategic stability” in South Asia. Few days latter, on 25 May India’s newly appointed foreign minister S M Krishna began his stint by extending a hand of friendship to Pakistan. Stating that the neighbors cannot be replaced, Krishna linked reconciliation with Pakistan to the sustainability of India’s economic growth. The foreign minister, in his first media interaction, said the new government’s highest priority was to strengthen ties with the neighbors and further consolidate strategic partnerships with the U.S., Russia, China, Japan and the European Union. The Minister vowed to nurture close ties with its traditional partners with the aim of furthering India’s “non-aligned” foreign policy and strengthening its “strategic autonomy.”
The post-Bush America is encountering a different world with even North Korea, besides China and Russia, reasserting their antagonism toward the American hegemony. Since Kashmir is located at the strategic crisscross of big powers in Asia, a sharper US focus on the dispute is quite understood. We need not repeat how Kashmir was mentioned by the worlds’ biggies including Obama and David Miliband at a time when the people in Kashmir had left behind a bloody phase of Azadi movement and were voting in throes. The continuity of Obama’s Kashmir-is-the-key policy about South Asia peace is all the more palpable.
Of significant note is that Zardari made the statement about India not being a threat to Pakistan from the American soil. It is believed, says a Press Trust of India report, both Obama and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in their meetings with Zardari had impressed upon him that Pakistan should no longer consider India as a primary threat and rather concentrate its energies on fighting terrorism inside the country.
So, the American hand in Indo-Pak peace process is no longer “invisible” but the possibility of this “hand” delivering any results will entirely depend on how both India and Pakistan will play their cards. That the Pakistan has all along been advocating a third-party intervention in Kashmir is a proven fact, which was reiterated by the country’s foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit on May 21. If, on the U.S. insistence, Pakistan is more willing to resume the peace process, it is not so much surprising. What should be understood in a proper context is whether India has at long last grown comfortable with Washington’s mediation, which the Indian policy makers like to call as “facilitation”. A mild activity on Tract II has already began; advocates of people-to-people contact are again talking; a peace delegation from India that also involves some Kashmiris is about to leave for Pakistan and there is a gradual media build up that the peace process will take off soon.
Reading the subtext of whatever is happening on Track II is very difficult. However, the intonations suggest that both countries, with variable seriousness, appear to have been convinced that Kashmir’s non-territorial settlement was within the parameters of possibility. That is more or less closer to former Pakistani President and army chief General Parvez Musharraf’s four-point formula. The big question that will hover over the ensuing peace exercise in South Asia is whether Pakistan could afford giving up claim on Kashmir and if India would afford to stop linking the peace process with terrorism. Undue expectation from Obama administration is really unadvisable. But the emerging situation suggests that Obamantra should work in favor of South Asia peace.

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A Gatsby killed Romana

2009-05-22T06:42:00.001-07:00

Riyaz Masroor
Romana’s murder highlights the core of our societal malaise. Let’s look at the issue beyond the clichéd generalizations such as “social waywardness” and “social evils”.
The fresh spurt in crime rate in Kashmir appears to have two interrelated prongs: the state and the people. As for the state in Kashmir, it lacks popular sanctity for which a host of reasons could be cited. On the other hand, people are suffering from financial insecurity, which is part genuine part self-imposed.
The state here tends to tackle the issue of legitimacy through slogans rather than performance. For example, the slogan of progress, prosperity and development has induced among the masses a wild competition for financial uplift.
After all what does it mean when government resorts to radical discourse about progress and development? It obviously means more money to contractors, more corruption, more inequity and more frustration within disadvantaged sections. This prop-culture hoists a nouveau-riche section of people over the masses that have always remained at the bottom of the development pyramid. These pampered social upstarts vie for positions in power and jockey for bigger share in the state wealth; they get licenses, they get permits, they get lands, shops and other incentives. The masses are made to live on the mercy of these social biggies who have access to and stakes in the state power. Such a system cannot generate moral values even if we keep crying in mosques.
Amidst this organic tie-up between the state and the selfish layers of our society, a son murdering his father to lavish family fortunes on a rave party or a lovesick youth from moneyed family knocking the cute and innocent Romana to death should not surprise us.
If we are content with this mad rush for money, we better not bother about “social waywardness”. Some of the largest pay premiums, says Adam Smith, go to highly qualified people who are willing to do morally questionable work.
Let’s confess that we have serious moral issues and let’s admit that invoking religious traditions won’t help. We need a creative response to the aforementioned prop culture, which is spawning newer social diseases.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, James Gatz believes that his humble lifestyle makes him a mismatch for his coveted Daisy. So he renames himself as Jay Gatsby and labors to achieve material success on the grandest scale possible. Fitzgerald never reveals how Gatsby amassed his fortune. But he leaves little doubt that Gatsby’s work was not just morally suspect but well outside the law. In fact, a Gatsby killed Romana and other Gatsbys feel offended!

The K in Sri Lanka

2009-05-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor
Before the armed uprising in Kashmir, many of the Srinagar homes used to hang on their modest walls the portraits of M A Jinnah, S M Abdullah, Yasir Arafat and Imam Khomeini. People would identify themselves with the rebels of the time because the state in Srinagar was never organically wedded to the people. After the militancy broke out in 1989 the youth initially tended to deify Osama bin Laden but his portrait was never the part of Valley’s mainstream home décor; if the militant defiance against the “American Empire” was to be displayed Hassan Nasrullah of Lebanon was the preferred choice.
These choices signify the inherently pacifist behavior of Kashmiris. They liked Jinnah for his liberal outlook and pluralistic ideals; they adored Yasir Arafat for his pragmatism; they revered Khomeini not because he confronted USA but for his model of nationalism that was non-racist – Khomeini’s La Sharaqiyah, La Garabiyah slogan was a bold attempt to undo the menace of East-West divide. Why people followed Sheikh Abdullah? Borrowing Shamim Ahmad Shamim’s observation would be apt: “We owe to Sheikh Abdullah both our sunrise as well as our sunset.”
Any anthropological study of Kashmiri behavior would conclude that Kashmiris might be acutely conscious of their cultural identity but they are not the type of Al-Qaida or Taliban. The 20-year separatist campaign that has been marked by a decade of active insurgency also points to how the popular aversion to violence and bloodbath facilitated the transition from violent to the nonviolent mode of resistance. JKLF Chief Muhammad Yasin Malik chose to leave the path of violence in 1994 – barely four years after the militant uprising. His decision did not evoke a large-scale welcome but his shift was silently endorsed by the majority. Many used to argue that India coaxed Pakistan into a proxy military confrontation in Kashmir so that the nationalist resolve of Kashmiris could be crushed. It was, however, not because of these tales that the Kashmiri started rethinking over the means of his struggle but because the violence as a means of social resistance was genetically unpalatable for Kashmiri people. Unlike Arabs Kashmiris don’t slaughter the sacrificial lamb of their own; they hire the services of a professional butcher.
Then why Kashmiris resorted to gun in 1989? The almost worn out answer to this question is that for forty two years they had exhausted all democratic options including the participation in polls. But that is half of the actual answer. Untold part of this answer is that India through military means and political subterfuge had created enough reason for Pakistan to meddle militarily in Kashmiri region, which has never attained complete political cohesion with Indian mainstream. Now that the insurgencies are waning in South Asia – from Swat to Sri Lanka – the Srinagar is calling for serious attention from New Delhi.
Cold war has taught us that armed separatist movements that espouse the cause of religion, ethnicity or communism in Asia have spared big powers the hazard of direct wars; they fought proxy wars against each other in Vietnam, Afghanistan and now in Pakistan.
As for India it grew in size and status for past decade just because its neighborhood was mired in these insurgencies. When smaller powers falling in the neighborhood of a bigger power, remain restive the bigger power has the natural space for maneuvering. We saw Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan in the history’s worst phase during past twenty years. But now we see Nepal being ruled by Maoist rebels who are sympathetic to their ideological cousins active within India; we see Pakistan army chasing away Taliban and we see LTTE, India’s longtime ‘strategic asset’, having been routed from the island nation, mainly with the help of China and Pakistan.
China’s presence in Sri Lanka is perceived as the beginning of India’s encirclement on the Indian Ocean. China has already set up Hambanthota port in Lanka and is now eyeing on Trincomalee port. Russia too has of late grown ambitious about Sri Lanka’s strategic sea-lanes. China is reported to have invested $1 billion in Sri Lanka for a naval base, and has supported the Lankan Army in its war against the Tamil tigers.
Having China, the country that won the 1962 war, on its southern shore, India has reason to be worried. The Tigers, if victorious against Sri Lanka state, would have supported India in her foreign policy ambitions, are down and out. In such a scenario the fear that China may attack India from South does not seem out of place. After all Tamil Nadu is still pro LTTE and the politics in South India has the same texture. In the event of any future war between China and India, or Pakistan and India, which way Sri Lanka will go, is anybody’s guess.
A Times of India blogpost on 20 May 2008 by a Bangalore reader said, “Chinese have port facilities around India: Hambantota (Sri Lanka), Chittagong (Bangla Desh) and Karachi (Pakistan). We are being hemmed in nicely.” But India has a nice option to avert any future war: Kashmir. And the bottom line is that no reason be left in Kashmir that would facilitate China’s overt or covert intrusion. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is right. Kashmir solution is the key to permanent peace in India. Let the decision makers in Delhi remember that when Pakistan meddled in Kashmir in 1989 its growth rate was barely three percent and the USSR was intact; now Pakistan economy is being padded up by US coffers and the China is spreading influence in all fours. Let’s not leave a fertile ground for another proxy war.

riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

From weapons to words

2009-04-22T07:28:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor

Dr Sheikh Showkat Hussain appears an old-fashioned, aging professor who wears short beard and is never seen in a full business suit or necktie. But those who’ve seen him up close are in awe of him. In this self-effacing teacher, the young find a warm companion who shares their youthful aspirations without dismissing them as passé.
These attributes of Dr Hussain were loudly manifest when his work Facets of Resurgent Kashmir (Kashmir Institute 2009) was released on 19 April 2009 during a simple yet impressive gathering in a Srinagar Hotel. For one, most of the audience that turned out at Hotel Meridian comprised youth in their twenties and thirties. Two, Dr Hussain’s 212-page book stands out for its sobriety and low price, Rs 135 – though just the compilation of articles he wrote for several newspapers including Rising Kashmir, it does not carry the author’s profile.
For the record, Dr Hussain’s sense of history and political insight has won him admirers here and abroad. He has frequented several Asian, African and European countries, teaching students from almost half of the world. Currently Dr Hussain teaches International Law and Human Rights at Kashmir University. His unpretentious speeches, often in understandable accent, are devoid of rhetoric and carry loads of insight. It would not have been probably so difficult for him to project his academic muscle through this work but he chose not to.
Book launches in Kashmir generally lapse into a political get together where politicians from either side of the ideological divide spew clichés and the speakers shower praises on the author and on each other, turning the occasion into a society of mutual admiration. In contrast, the Sunday at Hotel Meridian had a different ambiance. The author himself conducted the proceedings and the speakers including Ved Bhasin, Advocate Zaffar Shah, Advocate Mian Qayoom and Dr Altaf Hussain spoke their heart out. One may not agree with Dr Hussain’s views was the buzzword in the function but every speaker candidly acknowledged Dr Hussain’s stoic denial to career intellectualism and termed his writings as a “step in right direction”.
The occasion bore a mark of symbolism. Inayatullah Khateeb – father of a slain militant commander Nadeem Khateeb from Chenab region’s Doda district – released the book and handed it over to a 10-year-old boy who was among the audience. This gesture symbolized a very significant transition. Many in the audience were reminded of a similar bequeathal in early nineties when Azam Inquilabi, then a militant commander, handed over his Russian AK 47 to a 12-year-old Muhammad Bin Qasim somewhere in Pakistan and shunned the career of militancy. What ensued is too fresh to be repeated but the context needs a brief revisit.
The contemporary Kashmir movement owes its ideological idiom to the Plebiscite Front that grew out of New Delhi’s ‘constitutional suicide’ on 9 August 1953 when the Kashmir Prime Minister Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah was deposed and thrown in jail. That two-decade movement created a host of anti-India slogans, which served as a catalyst in the society. Boycott of elections, shutdown, demonstrations, stone pelting et al are actually the making of the PF. One could safely say that this phase set in motion a particular culture of resistance within Kashmir society. This phase later gave way to a second phase in early nineties when Azam Inquilabi handed over the gun to Muhammad bin Qasim getting us in the lap of a deadly spell of violence.
Following those slogan-churning and gun-roaring eras is a more emancipated, much more progressive phase of writing. The arrival of this ‘Golden Era’ was aptly symbolized on 19 April when Dr Hussain handed over to the forthcoming generation a more civilized form of resistance. Someone has appropriately said in times of war words are weapons. Transitions could be either for good or for worse. We saw two of them between 1953 and 1990, both had merits as well as demerits. We just hope that our transition from violence to peaceful writing brings us back from the chaos where we had descended during past many years.
In fact, this culture of reflecting the popular aspirations through dispassionate narrative has already taken some root. Let the late Agha Shahid stand out from the rest, he represents the Kashmir’s freedom narrative in West. We have had a young author Basharat Peer recently telling our story to rest of the world through his much celebrated Curfewed Nights; Human rights defender and noted journalist Zahiruddin summed up cases about custodial disappearances in his debut work Did They Vanish in Thin Air and followed it up with Bouquet that features Kashmir’s important personalities; Delhi-based Kashmiri scribe Iftikhar Geelani’s Jail diary was published by Penguin in both English and Urdu editions(first Urdu book from Penguin); P G Rasool has written an insightful Urdu account on 1947-Kashmir and is working on a couple of projects related to Kashmir situation ; Poet and columnist Maqbool Sahil has penned his prison notes in Urdu;; Syeda Afshana’s lyrical response to Kashmir conflict Fugitive Sunshine is a commendable effort and of late Sheikh Abdullah’s biography by Ashiq Hussain was taken fairly well in Kashmir’s Urdu knowing audience. We have also heard of another young columnist Arjimand Hussain Talib coming out with a book on Kashmir’s political economy and the noted journalist Muzamil Jaleel probably putting together personal conflict experiences as narrated by 20-something boys and girls.
Let it be clear that these lines are not to promote the idea of writers becoming moral and political custodians of Kashmir society. No way. History bears witness that the educated have always made the common cause with power. Political theorists agree that where the educated ally with the power there is little likelihood of social unrest and upheaval because only the educated can supply the catalyst of words that turns a dormant mass of people into a resisting society. We are rather keen to underline the transition from Weapons to Words. Let’s pray this transition benefits the people more than it may benefit the power.

riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Crime and Punishment

2009-04-15T01:36:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor

Soon after becoming the “prime minister” of “free Kashmir” in 1947, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah had realized what New Delhi expected of him. He was sent to United Nations to support India’s case. But, as records suggest, Sheikh sounded politically correct and chose to criticize Pakistan rather than appeasing India. "We shall prefer death rather than join Pakistan. We shall have nothing to do with such a country."

Though Sheikh would exaggerate Indo-Kashmir affinity at many occasions – in Kashmir and New Delhi – in UNO his tone sounded nationalist. The statement was open-ended and would not necessarily suggest that Kashmiris wanted to remain with India. Within a space of few years Sheikh was seen hobnobbing with American establishment through US embassy in New Delhi. Sheikh’s “diplomatic feat" in United Nations and his covert engagement with US discomforted New Delhi, especially the religion-obsessed bureaucracy.

Sheikh’s overtures were seen as an “unacceptable” nationalist assertion that was coming from a supposedly pro-India Kashmiri leader. An anti-Muslim agitation ensued creating a scare for the majority Muslims; the agitation was sponsored by the pro-Hindutva Praja Parishad. Sheikh suspected Congress that was ruling India. Many believe that the roots of a religion-inspired armed uprising were sown during the Praja Parishad movement, which seemed a counter assertion against Sheikh Abdullah’s UN speech. This agitation led to the dismissal of the government of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953 and Abdullah’s arrest on 9 August same year plunging the state into a 22-year chaos.

In 1974, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was about to reinstall a defanged “Lion of Kashmir”, Sheikh’s flamboyant Son, a not-by-choice doctor, was consorting with JKLF leaders on the foothills of Pakistan administered Kashmir. During his stay there Farooq is said to have taken an oath for the “liberation of Jammu and Kashmir from the yoke of Indian occupation.” This was also a nationalist assertion by the ambitious son of a pro-India Kashmiri politician.

Farooq’s nationalist assertion had already started weighing heavy on the minds of Kashmir handlers in New Delhi; Farooq saw an unstable succession to power after Sheikh’s death in 1982. Then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted to assimilate National Conference into Congress fold so that the “Lion” could be completely “de-lionized”. Farooq resented the move and instead attempted to ally with parallel forces in Indian mainstream; yet another nationalist assertion by a Kashmiri pro-India politician. That too was followed by a consequence. Two years later Indira engineered a series of defections in National Conference leading to the dismissal of his government in brazen violation of democratic codes. It had dawned upon Farooq that he could not set right what had been wronged by his father’s surrender before New Delhi, so he capitulated in 1986 – Congress-National coalition came to power.

These nationalist assertions had been followed by humiliating surrenders but Abdullahs continued to enjoy the sympathy of Kashmiris as late as 1987, though not as manifestly as during Sheikh Era. Farooq staged a comeback in 1996 and bailed out New Delhi during worst times. His party fought elections at the height of turmoil and won effective majority in the JK assembly, though less than five percent turnout was recorded during polls.

In the summers of 2000 Farooq grew conscious about the fast eroding image of his party and his family and chose to mend it for good. He wanted to do it again through a nationalist assertion: NC drafted autonomy report and passed a resolution in the assembly. The fate of this assertion would not have been different than the assertions made by Sheikh in 1947 and by Farooq in 1982. The resolution was summarily rejected by then BJP-led coalition in New Delhi despite the fact that National Conference had sidestepped the Muslim sensitivities and allied with the BJP sponsored NDA. Whatever the sub context, NC later lost more than half of the mandate it had won in 1996 and a little known PDP rose to power with Mufti Muhammad Sayeed seeing his wish being fulfilled after nearly four decades.

Mufti subtly calibrated his relations with BJP as well as Congress and shot himself into prominence through his green mantra, which is soft separatism. While Mufti tried to build his empire on NC’s political ruins he too lapsed into the nationalist mode and began to assert before New Delhi. In 2005, during the snowstorm in Valley, Mufti is said to have virtually shouted down some senior Army generals telling them the army should not encroach upon the domain of state administration. He also engaged PMO over the issue of demilitarization; the catchword was first aired by then Pakistani President and Army Chief General Pervaiz Musharraf. What else should have been the result of this nationalist assertion? Mufti could not continue as CM and had to be content with the power sharing agreement even as the Prime Minister had promised an extension.

This takes us to the historical floor test of Congress-led UPA government in the Indian parliament on 22 July 2008. It was the time when a massive revolt in Kashmir was brewing over the land transfer to Amaranth shrine. Omar Abdullah, MP and Farooq’s tech-savvy son, gave the famous one-inch-land statement. “Jaan Dengay par ek inch zameen ka tukda nahin dengay (We shall prefer death rather than giving you an inch of our land),” Omar spoke to an unusually quiet Lok Sabha comprising 543 members.

Those angered with Omar’s nationalist assertion picked up threads from Praja Parishad agitation of 1950s and set off an orgy of communal violence across Muslim lands of Jammu and on the Srinagar-Jammu highway. But unlike in 50s and 80s New Delhi suffered a dilemma: How to ‘punish’ the pro-India politician who had committed the ‘crime’ of asserting before the ‘Raj’? Mufti was a choice but he had already gone overboard by pulling out of Congress-led coalition in J&K over the land row. Omar’s coronation on 5 January 2008 must have incurred a huge political cost. Ladakh? Bghlihar? NHPC? Or……? Think over it!

write back at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Taliban are coming?

2009-04-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

When the Kashmir society doesn’t identify itself with violence India better invest in peace building rather than glorifying Taliban
Riyaz Masroor
“We’re here for your safety but that is not enough. It’s you who will ensure complete safety. You will have to be vigilant and behave as good citizens. We know you hate violence and love peace but when a militant comes to you, counsel him. You can persuade him for surrender. Violence destructs, peace promises prosperity.”
This is just to recall those ‘nostalgic’ sermons an army commander or a CO of BSF/ CRPF would give at the end of every crackdown during early days of militancy in Kashmir. We’ve also witnessed the armed forces – which would be expected to handle the insurgency through military means alone – lapsing into the domain of public administration; a whole gamut of military administration came up in the form of Operation Sadhbhawana. Under the aegis of this operation, we saw schools, computer centers and orphanages being set up, mini-power projects, sports and cultural festivals being commissioned, student-trips across India (Bharat Darshan) being sponsored and rousing reception being given to Hajj Pilgrims on their return from the Holy city of Jeddah.
On the face of it, the motive behind the operation looked positive: to make the violence in Kashmir unpopular. Pundits of peace and conflict studies may agree with the fact that India in Kashmir never faced the crisis of control; it was trying to tackle the crisis of public alienation from the political mainstream, precisely the legitimacy. The main characteristic of Kashmir militancy was the social acceptance of violence against India and it was this social sanctity attached to the gun-wielding militant that was troubling Indian policy makers hence the attempt at “winning hearts and minds”. So much emphasis was given to stigmatize the violence that we saw a whole host of writers, newspapers, institutions , academics, separatists and semi-separatists promoting the idea that Kashmiris cannot afford violence for too long and they should stop counting on violence vis-à-vis their aspirations for Azadi.
Almost a decade went without any substantial impact and we even heard the most reasonable voices, including that of Late Abdul Gani Lone, welcoming the “Mujahideen” who had occupied the mountain peaks of Kargil in the summer of 1999. But at long last the Operation Sadhbhawana worked, though major part of the credit must go to nine-eleven. Thereafter we saw the separatist discourse in Kashmir performing a headlong. Hurriyat Conference, which by then would be seen as the over-ground face of militancy, would now advocate peaceful negotiated settlement, oppose innocent killings and ask militants to hold fire against Indian troops. The killing of top militant leaders would doubtless attract large funerals but the absence of support for a violence-driven resistance was conspicuous.
If there were any doubts that the violence was still popular, they were cleared in the summer of 2008 when around five million people marched during half-a-dozen Azadi rallies and militants preferred to retreat on the fringe, their guns downed. Not just this. Having seen at least sixty people dead during ruthless Police and Army actions, people lined up outside polling stations and voted in throes, ignoring the boycott calls from APHC while wearing the Azadi sentiment manifestly on their sleeves. Interestingly, all this happened when India and Pakistan were on the brink of a war following a terrorist strike in Mumbai on 26 November 2008. Indeed the collective peace overture from Kashmir showed that the purpose for which Operation Sadhbhawana was launched had been served to the fullest; not just separatist groups but people in larger numbers demonstrated their mutual aversion to violence and willingness to adopt democratic means of expression.
The violence lately became so unpopular that some sections even opposed the stone-throwing youth and wanted to devise even more “civilized form of resistance” let alone the option of gun. These impressions betray a loud urge for peace within Kashmir society. If the militancy in 1989 heralded an armed uprising it was because of a mass support. Would Taliban be so naïve to enter Kashmir at the height of popular distaste for violence?
Taliban are coming?
In such a fertile scenario for peace building in Kashmir, how should New Delhi proceed if there is really a Taliban threat? The answer is simple, it should consolidate the change of “hearts and minds” that has occurred post 9/11. Or to be precise, it should invest in people rather than Taliban. By glorifying the Taliban the country’s over-patriotic media is actually creating problems for the country. Neutral observers must be wondering why the authorities are scaring people of a specter, which is even abhorred by Syed Ali Geelani, whom the media portrays as the militant face of Kashmiri separatism, and also the sitting MP and PDP Chief Mahbooba Mufti. Both have questioned the government claims of spurt in militancy activities.
There is no formal word yet from home ministry or defense ministry. Director General of J&K Police Kuldeep Khudda has just pointed to the “possibility” of a Taliban spillover in Kashmir by arguing that after capturing Swat, Taliban have now reached to Lahore and “may be” interested in Pakistan’s Eastern borders. TV channels picked this up and made mountain out of a molehill. Even if the presumptuous TV disclosures about Taliban presence in Kashmir hold any salt, the standard way of dealing with it is not glorifying the intruder but building your fort. That is reinforcing the social stigma attached to violence.
Saner response from New Delhi should have been somewhat like this: “Taliban have no constituency in Kashmir. People have voted in larger numbers and rejected violence. People don’t want them here.” But it is a strange irony that the state and the society in Kashmir seem to have undergone a role reversal. While the state-backed media appears hell-bent to hammer the fact that Taliban are coming, the society is crying hoarse denying the possibility. Imagine if Taliban really come here, will they remain content with Kashmir alone? India better invest in peace building rather than glorifying Taliban.

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Kabul, Kandhar and Kashmir

2009-04-07T00:57:00.000-07:00

Tale of two Kashmiri academics – one warned British of dangers in Kabul the other is still testing Afghan waters

Riyaz Masroor

Mohan Lal (1812-1877) was an ethnic Kashmiri Pandit who pursued a career in British intelligence during first Afghan war; it was the time when the East India Company was relieved from managing India and the country was taken (or enslaved) into the direct domain of the RAJ. Mohan Lal was less likely to go with the freedom struggle because his father, a high-caste Brahmin, had also participated in a British mission to Afghanistan in 1808. He, therefore, went with the family tradition. Credible historians have recorded that in early nineteenth century Mohan Lal was the first Kashmiri to speak fluent English as he had graduated with first-class degree from Delhi English College that was founded by Charles Travelyan. It was Travelyan who had spotted Mohan Lal and sensed a spark of 'coercive diplomacy' in this dynamic Kashmiri young man. He had so impressed Sir Alexander Burnes that when Burnes was appointed British Resident in Kabul he invited Mohan Lal to become his partner in the mission.

Mohan Lal assumed the charge of Mir Munshi in 1831 amidst the Afghan resistance against the installation of Shah Shuja, a British prop. "In Kabul, he (Mohan Lal) was the Resident's ears and eyes, his silent partner and agile fixer, capable of becoming a fly on the wall, or a figure in the carpet," writes Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, who have jointly authored an exhaustive account of South and Central Asian conflicts. Pandit Mohan Lal's knack for counterintelligence was superb. He had engineered defection within Afghan warriors during the famous British siege of Ghazni. Historical accounts suggest he had long before recruited a defector at Ghazni who would later tip the British troops about a less walled up gate (other two gates were impregnable) that could be easily stormed.

When Kandhar fell and things were calm under Shah Shuja, Mohan Lal got reports about a clan chief Abdullah Khan having vowed to slay Burnes. The Kashmiri spy informed his mentor in advance but Burnes ignored the warning and stayed put in his Kabul mansion; two mornings later the British officer and his visiting younger brother Charles were hacked to death in the Resident House. Later, Mohan Lal would organize a sort of “operation clean-up” at the behest of Sir William Macnagten to eliminate the resisting Afghan chiefs. He would distribute Rs 10000 for the head of each of the “rebel Afghan chief”. Two chiefs including Abdullah Khan, who had slain Burnes, were assassinated during this “operation”. This too did not work to the Empire’s advantage and Mohan Lal could only ensure his own safety; he survived the disaster of British retreat that saw many bigwigs dead including Macnagten, returned to Delhi where he died almost unnoticed in 1877.

More than 170 years after Mohan Lal believed he could facilitate a British victory in Kabul, another bright Kashmiri Professor Amitabh Mattoo visited the war-ravaged Afghanistan in the spring of 2008. Mattoo, then Vice Chancellor of Jammu University, was received in Kabul by Afghan President Hamid Karzai with official protocol on 16 April 2008, two weeks after Professor Matoo had been nominated as Government of India’s nominee on the Board of Directors of India-Afghanistan Foundation (IAF) for two years.

Besides Karzai, Professor Mattoo had a long chat with the Afghan government’s National Security Advisor, Dr Zalmay Rasool whose great grandfather was the last Afghan governor in Jammu and Kashmir. It is interesting to note that in 1831 a Kashmiri academic reached Kabul with a mission and earned a significant if short-lived victory for the Empire and in 2008 another Kashmiri academic landed in Kabul to bolster India’s policy toehold in Afghanistan. Though known in the annals of history as a spymaster, Mohan Lal was a ‘principled intriguer’ who would advise his mentors to the best of his knowledge about Afghan resistance to British occupation.

Burnes ignored his advice and lost his life; Macnagten put down his word of caution against a withdrawal pact with Akbar Khan, son of the deposed ruler Dost Mohammad, and was shot dead with the pistol he had gifted Akbar sometime back; Macnagten’s body was dismembered, his head borne like a trophy and his corpse impaled on a meat hook. Not just this, in all around 12000 British troops and agents died in the much quoted “Death March”, which Mohan Lal had opposed. British did not listen to Mohan Lal and the war went wrong; we don’t know if Professor Mattoo will follow Mohan Lal’s principle, of being honest and accurate while assessing Afghan situation for the mentors, during his tenure as India nominee in India-Afghan Foundation.

Indeed Professor Mattoo and Mohan Lal represent two different eras of Kashmiri disempowerment. While Mohan Lal earned Kashmir a broader mention in the elite war history of British Empire, the community is keenly watching Professor Mattoo. Will he forge a grand reconciliation between Muslim and Pandit sections of the same ethnic stock of Kashmiri society or allow himself to become just an extension of Mohan Lal’s nineteenth century network of secret agents, more politely called as diplomats.

Tailpiece

Speaking in a seminar about Pandit heritage on 31 March 2009, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Chairman of JKLF, advised Kashmiri Pandits against collaboration with the government. “As a student of history I should say it is dangerous for minorities in conflict societies to be affiliated with the government.” Unlike their Muslim natives Pandits don’t lack intellectual capital but in order to stage a social comeback they should listen to this vital piece of advice from a non-intellectual Kashmiri liberal.

riyas.masroor@yahoo.com

Pitfalls of nonviolence

2009-03-21T03:10:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor

Violence is not an option for the weak because the outcome of unequal fights has always favored the strong. For past several centuries Kashmiris have always been weak against their tormentors and whenever they chose to confront they were either brutally crushed or sucked into an unpalatable system. The famous American social writer Eric Hoffer has rightly argued that if power corrupts, weakness corrupts too. So, then, is the nonviolence a best, or at least, a better option to usher in desired change? This question is currently a hot topic within our concerned sections.
If Kashmiri youth, who now appear more assertive but devoutly nonviolent, begin to feel that the nonviolence is not the right tool to usher in political change, the consequences can only be imagined. In the early days of the current movement Hurriyat was termed in newspapers as the “over ground face of militancy” and the state would loudly advocate nonviolence. Nine-eleven or whatever, Hurriyat ‘transformed’ into a louder votary of nonviolence and, shockingly, the state took recourse to the violence. We saw people guarding government and military installations during the past summer’s Azadi campaign and later we saw the same nonviolent crowds being dropped dead by the gun totting cops. A neutral observer would simply conclude that the Hurriyat and the State have contracted each other’s fundamental characteristics of violence and nonviolence. It’s an interesting tragedy that the state ended up ‘transforming’ the social forces but not without going itself astray. The State’s descent into immoral practice – showering bullets against stones – is more serious debate than the youth’s overindulgence in stone pelting. Whether they do it on the Hurriyat’s behest or in spite of it is a different topic.
The nonviolence essentially works on an emotion, which is shame. People in troubled societies tend to believe that for the State ordering massacres would be as equally a shameful act as it is for a civilian. But that, unfortunately, is not true for all regimes. When the privileged people at the top of a regime can remain untouched by massacres a soldier or a cop caught in the crowed will work only as tuned. We have been fed on the wrong diets of violence as well as nonviolence. Earlier the people held out their life for sacrifice when they were asked to grab the gun. Now, when they are being wooed toward a nonviolent form, they have already sacrificed sixty two lives and left thousand and a half wounded for life. London-based Independent journalist Gwynne Dyer wrote in 2008: “Nonviolent tactic (protest) does not work against a regime that is willing to commit a massacre, and can persuade (dictate) its troops to carry out its orders.” Who in Kashmir is the problem, the regime or the people?

Author is a prominent journalist
(riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

Read ‘good news’ on the wall

2008-09-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

With Karzai on his beside, Zardari has signaled that he may try to get concession over Kasmir issue in lieu of a greater war against ‘terror’ in Pakistan and Afghanistan
By Riyaz Masroor
Politicians in the subcontinent have always chosen to think in headlines and speak in slogans, though their remarks were at times the indicators of future change.
The fresh face in Pakistan’s Aiwan-e-Sadar, Asif Ali Khan Zardari, despite his stigmatic profile, appears to have resisted the temptation of speaking in a slogan – he might have thought of a headline – as he began his Presidency with the K-word.
Although his promise of ‘good news’ about Kashmir contrasts his previous remark in which he had preferred to freeze the vexed Kashmir dispute for future generations, he craftily put across the point that Kashmir craved for resolution. And, more importantly, he did this without pinching India.
For Kashmiris, in the given context, the message is more important than the messenger. And the messenger’s new role has to be understood to ascertain the underpinnings of current diplomatic engagements between New Delhi and Islamabad. The new indicator has not come from Zardari the PPP cochairman or Zardari the widower of slain former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutoo; the promise has come from Zardari the President of Pakistan.
Zardari personally may not like to rake up Kashmir in the Indo-Pak context yet his domestic political needs would not allow him to manifest his personal wish hence a climb down from his leave-for-the-future-generation remark. He needs a loud “attention diverter” before he goes whole hog against the gun wielding militants along Pakistan’s tribal West.
Three hints
There are three broader elements in Zardari’s investiture speech. For one, he has walked past the old traditions in which the new incumbent would accuse his predecessor and claim to protect Kashmir for Pakistan; he did not vow to reverse his predecessor Parvez Musharraf’s policy; he talked about consensus and taking into confidence all political parties in Pakistan. Secondly, unlike the previous tradition, by involving Kashmir committee into the process of negotiations, the new Pakistan president has made it clear that in the emerging scenario, involvement of Kahsmiris was all the more mandatory.
And thirdly, the presence of Afghanistan President Haamid Karzai is the strongest element. Seen together with Zardari’s good-news promise, Karzai’s presence in oath ceremony and later the joint press conference with Pakistan’s twelfth president reveals Pakistan’s future plan on Kashmir.
New Kashmir policy
Keen Kashmir watchers believe that Karzai’s presence at this important occasion was a clear message to India that Afghanistan may no longer remain a battle ground for Delhi and Islamabad. More importantly, raking up Kashmir while having Afghanistan president on his beside, Zardari may have tried to signal that he might be more willing than Musharraf to become America’s second fiddle in Kabul if some effective concessions in terms of Kashmir come his way.
Earlier, Afghanistan seemed tilting the power balance hugely in favor of India but Zardari – knowing fully well his stakes in Pakistan politics and the simmering adversarial surroundings – looks keen to have a blend of Kabul and Kashmir policies to seek concessions on either front.
Zardari’s posturing is certainly an attempt to remain in saddle but it has provided a golden chance to the stakeholders in Kashmir’s resolution process so that they find ways to appropriate Zardari’s compulsions into their own gain.
While New Delhi may do that with comforting ease because it has cultivated a strong rapport with PPP over the years, the actors of Kashmir conflict will have to adopt a cooperative and consultative mechanism amongst them to secure their respective stakes. Competing zeal to become exclusively relevant in any sort of break through will not only abort the process it would also push these actors toward unpopularity or may be a war of attrition.
It is for the first time that Pakistan’s reference to the “people of Kashmir” is not limited to Hurriyat Conference alone. It has expanded the terms of reference to National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party and some peripheral mainstream outfits as well, though India is yet to reach this level of accommodation and is still beating around the constitutional traditionalism.
No doubt that the moral isolation of Indian state in Kashmir is total but the ‘rebels’ in the words of Gramsci, the great twentieth century theoretician and philosopher, don’t just need to outfight their adversary but to ‘out administer’ him as well.
If Hurriyat leaders and nationalist mainstream choose to shun their exclusivist approach and narrow future outlook, India will have no choice but to recognize the collective Kashmiri viewpoint while dealing with Pakistan. This is probably what Pakistan’s elite bureaucracy likes to happen but that will not happen as long as the Kashmir politics remains divided between Azadi and non-Azadi ideologies. It is for anyone to guess whom the radicalization of separatist movement will favor in the emerging South Asian scenario.
Options for Kashmiris
South Asia is currently witnessing two interrelated scenarios, one in Afghanistan, another in Kashmir. In Afghanistan, the resistance forces are locked in a deadly war with the same US forces to which they owe their wherewithal. It is a well known fact that ‘Mujahideen’ in Kabul are fighting their erstwhile masters, Americans. Same is happening in Kashmir but conversely. Here the supporters of a particular armed movement are bent to eradicate it. The recent agitation over the Amarnath land row has, in fact, vindicated that Pakistan has been pusuring a policy of demilitarizing the Kashmir’s anti-India movement. It is because of this policy that the most volatile public mobilization in 80 years remained completely non violent.
In the given scenario Kashmiris need to move with reason and creative engagement. India does not look eager to compromise on status quo in Kashmir and Pakistan does not appear potent enough to change the status quo unilaterally. History has evidently proved this because a huge chronicle of India’s failures in Kashmir could never translate into Pakistan’s gain. If, realizing this emerging reality, Pakistan is trying to use its geo-strategic relevance to extract some concession over Kashmir; stakeholders in J&K need to strive for collective relevance in the whole process.
National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party may not be considered sacred entities with reference to the sacrifices and the sentiment. Had it been so, the most significant CBM, cross-LoC bus service would not sound like a whimper. It fizzled out because the PDP attempted to own it rather than persuading all politics shades to rally behind it.
But Zardari’s off hand remark should, therefore, serve like a useful jerk to a student who wants to keep awake during exams. Advocates of Kashmir need both the popular sanctity and the institutional strength to engage with two nuclear rivals of South Asia. One cannot do without the other. If National Conference or PDP feel that they can outsmart the separatists by bailing out New Delhi at this crucial moment, they are again tilling the barren soil. Similarly if the separatist forces believe that the recurrent public mobilization will help them write off the mainstream forces they better wake up. Both sides have enjoyed power when India and Pakistan chose to outfight each other. But both will become dispensable if the peace process converges on the economic integration of India and Pakistan. Isn’t it time to start homework?
Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

BEYOND GEELANI'S GAFFE

2008-08-20T03:57:00.000-07:00

Syed Ali Geelani’s indiscretion at a historical moment is, in fact, the reflection of a deeper malaise Kashmir’s pro-freedom leadership is afflicted with, Riyaz Masroor tries to diagonose the ills afflicting Kashmir's separatist polity

Syed Ali Geelani’s gaffe during a massive public rally on Monday, August 18 2008, is too small to crowd out the popular urge, which is markedly aloof from any personality cult. However Geelani’s eagerness to sign in for an ‘unrivalled’ leadership role was not just unwarranted but also out of sync. It appeared as if he miscalculated the popular mood that greeted him in the form of a path breaking public rally.
Amidst the overcharged sloganeering and recurrent applaud Geelani was speaking crisply about the right of self-determination and the Kashmiris’ sentimental attachment to Pakistan. He even illustrated this renewed pro-Pak surge through a rephrased slogan: Hum Pakistani hain, Pakistan hamaara hai (We’re Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours). All was going well until he had a Freudian slip that did took spotlight off the uprising and all tongues began to wag in fear of any simmering discord between the torchbearers of this latest phase of Kashmiri uprising.
Mr Geelani took pledge from hundreds of thousands present in the rally and reinforced that “I AM YOUR LEADER”; when people concurred he thanked Almighty in a Quranic verse: Al-hamdu Lillahi Rabil Alameen. The enthusiasm began to pale with people wondering why the veteran leader wrote off his colleagues. Geelani was quick to tender a public apology but by then the damage had been done. The forces inimical to the unity of purpose amongst the leadership had rediscovered a handle to beat Hurriyat Conference with the devices of its own making.
Geelani was in fact a late starter. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik had spoken to the same gathering couple of hours earlier and were now waiting for Geelani to have his auspicious signatures on this momentous chapter of Kashmir’s history of resistance.
While Geelani’s error of speech remains just an aberration in a visibly momentous hour rest of what he and other leaders spoke is more significant. Except for some irrelevant bits in between and an undesirably stingy punch line, Geelani’s speech was precise and well crafted. He extended an emotional appeal to Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general of United Nations Organization and asked the world bodies to take cognizance of what “India is doing in Kashmir”. A visibly enthused Mirwaiz Umar shouted slogans in favor of Rawalpindi road: Kashmir ki mandi, Rawalpindi. He tried to build a case in favor of trade through two parts of Kashmir divided by the 734 Km long and about 35 Km wide Line of Control. And Muhammad Yasin Malik credited the people for having brought about a revolution that according to him was like the ones, which had brought down the bigger empires.
The leaders who until recently would not see eye to eye with each other were rubbing shoulders. Yasin Malik did not mind the presence of leaders from the rival faction of JKLF, Mirwaiz listened attentively to Geelani and Nayeem Khan was huddled closer to Shabir Shah. As if the clashing egos had converged to rally behind the people’s power. This must be a death knell to the believers of status quo hence the overemphasis on Geelani’s slip of tongue, which he rectified through a public apology.
The mistake may not affect the unity but it overshadowed the international import of Geelani’s speech. An aging Islamist from Kashmir seeking audience of the world powers was a clear indicator that Kashmiris were pinning hopes on the Christian West and the Communist China for intervention in Kashmir issue.
Yasin Malik’s signature campaign and Freedom March have already contributed hugely in the efforts Pakistan had been making to dissociate Kashmiri struggle from the global terrorism but Geelani’s posture looked more significant given his Islamist ideology. He did a greater service during the Plebiscite March on August 18 by effectively delinking the ongoing Kashmiri resistance from the terrorism US and India have been fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In spite of the popular impressions that the UN has been a tacit collaborator of US and NATO against Muslim insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Geelani held out a passionate appeal for help to the same world body. When Geelani said Kashmiris cannot be denied their right of self-determination just because they are Muslims it was like a perceived conservative Islamist speaking to the world through the idiom it best understands – humanitarian law. It appeared not just the usage of an acceptable global jargon but also an attempt to strike a middle ground with parallel yet equivalent ideological shades within and outside Hurriyat Conference.
Nonetheless Geelani’s indiscretion at a historical moment is, in fact, the reflection of a deeper malaise Kashmir’s pro-freedom leadership is afflicted with. It is a combination of egotism, megalomania and narcissism. The tendency of falling prey to the delusions of greatness is not an unusual trait among popular leaders particularly in a situation that is purely the making of one or several leaders. In early years of twentieth century the sycophants had instilled into Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah a sense of being the chosen one. He got carried away and stumbled. But now it is different. People create the situation by themselves and the leaders play the people’s proxy. If Mr Geelani and his colleagues feel that some personality cult is running the Kashmir movement they better wake up. The era of individual charisma is over. Gone are the days when Sheikh used to suffer alone and boast his individual sacrifices only to become the pied piper of this beleaguered nation. Today the nation is offering sacrifices, altering the situations and creating newer situations; the leaders are following. The speeches on bigger occasions like August 18 should see leaders taking pledge that they will not falter in following the people rather than the vice versa.

Will Abdullahs, Muftis bite Hurriyat’s bait?

2008-08-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor
Srinagar, Aug 16: When Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar, during their address to a mammoth condolence meeting at Pampore, sounded willing to embrace the pro-India politicians they actually manifested a significant transition in the separatist politics of J&K – the transition from an exclusivist and self-righteous political position to an inclusive and forward-looking approach. This ‘homecoming’ call has moral, ideological and political underpinnings.
Moral aspect
The backdrop of this ‘offer’ is so much heavily weighing in separatists’ favor that the mere invitation from Hurriyat bigwigs is a huge moral challenge for mainstream politicians. When the uprising in 1990 brought the spotlight back onto the separatist stage the mainstream camp left Kashmir for comfortable environs of Jammu and Delhi. But the latest phase of this uprising has seen them being banished from even Jammu and Delhi.
The humiliation National Conference and PDP leaders faced recently when the Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti vetoed their presence in the Governor’s all-party meet was so humiliating that they went into almost hiding after this incident.
Had it been like Laloo Yadaw versus Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Geelani-Mirwaiz duo had the most opportune time to sidestep the mainstream leadership. It would take Geelani and Mirwaiz few moments to direct the anger toward NC and PDP for both parties share culpability in the land transfer row. But on the contrary the separatists are calling home their mainstream cousins. So, with just a bit of reason and large-heartedness separatists have secured a moral point over their mainstream rivals.
Ideological aspect
Syed Ali Geelani was always seen as a ‘hardcore Islamist’ who would never reconcile to subtle political realities. By extending open invite to the mainstream leaders he has actually removed the abstract warp from his ideology of self-determination, making this concept open for all. It is also a magnanimous gesture for it has clarified that Geelani does not claim the ownership of the sentiment and is concerned about the effective advocacy rather than holding the right to decide the case. By not attaching the rhetorical riders such as “if they publicly repent on their sins” Geelani has, in fact, widened his audience and showed the much need statesmanship. So the mainstream camp will be shorn of any ideological pretext.
Political aspect
Mirwaiz’s moderate posturing has long been making the judgment of analysts difficult because his moderateness was always misconstrued as willingness to land in mainstream camp. But Mirwaiz is extending the invite to the mainstream at a time when he has already made his stand abundantly clear. He has rejected elections and is asking for UN-monitored plebiscite. And Geelani is endorsing him amid a renewed popular uprising. At this juncture Mirwaiz’s call to mainstream groups stems from a sense of strength not weakness.
Conclusion
Separatists have, perhaps for the first time, effectively blended the morality with politics. It is for anyone to guess how the mainstream actors would be viewed if they spurn the offer at a time when the sponsors of Jammu agitation don’t discriminate between Farooq Abdullah and Geelani for just one reason: They are Muslims.

Two tales of two cities

2008-08-06T04:35:00.000-07:00

The state response to public fury in Kashmir as well as in Jammu has been ideological rather than constitutional.
By Riyaz Masroor
Thanks to the state’s complicity in an avowedly anti-Muslim rioting across Jammu, the ‘iron curtain’ the successive governments in J&K had drawn around the frontiers of J&K’s Muslim regions over past decades is falling away. And with this the incipient feelings of aversion to Pakistan have once again cocooned into a stigmatic shell. Interestingly the state’s ideological response to the land row at Baltal has rekindled separatist Muslim aspirations in Pir Panjal (Rajouri, Poonch, Gool Gulab Garh, Arnas) and Chenab (Doda, Bhani, Bhadarwah, Kishtiwar, Rambhan, Banihal) regions.

Jammu is also Kashmir!
Poonch-based Muslim United Welfare Forum has loudly expressed these aspirations. “We demand that Rajouri, Poonch and Doda should be merged with Kashmir because these areas are similar to it (Kashmir) culturally, religiously and geographically,” the Forum spokesman said in a statement on August 5.
The statement carried a subtle caveat as well. “Before the Muslims are asked to leave form Bishnah, Bhatandi and Jammu, let those refugees leave Poonch who have occupied the Muslim properties since 1947.”
Earlier, Muslim veterans of Poonch, Rajouri and Doda convened an all-party session in Rajouri on August 4 in which Muslims from all sects and social strata participated. The session, according to a news report in Urdu daily Kashmir Uzma, concluded on the consensus that people of these regions would forge a “political accession” with Kashmir Valley and would extend active support to Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom.
Then there were reports of skirmishes between Hindu rioters and Sikh citizens in Poonch. On August 4 a group of rightwing Hindu activists stormed a locality in central Poonch and pulled down the life-size portraits of some Sikh soldiers who had participated in India’s 1971 war to slice Bangladesh off Pakistan. Local newsgathering agency News Today reported on August 5 that the Hindu activists demolished Brigadier Preetam Singh’s statue by the Hindu rioters. This evoked reaction from Sikh residents who later clashed with the rioters. From Indian point of view, Sikh reaction should have been appreciated because it was manifestation of respect for a war hero who had laid down his life while ‘punishing’ Pakistan in Bangladesh. But in contrast the reports from Jammu suggest the worst degree of state’s culpability in the crimes the rioters are perpetrating against the minorities, both Muslims as well as Sikhs.

Litany of Woes
On July 1 when the controversial order about the transfer of 99 acres of land to SASB near Baltal was revoked by G N Azad’s minority cabinet, Jammu began to simmer. The rightwing BJP and its allies termed it Governor N N Vohra’s ‘surrender’ before ‘Islamists’. But the significant aspect of Jammu’s reaction to this ‘surrender’ is that there was no spontaneous reaction in winter capital, although the BJP activists would stage intermittent demonstrations under a coalition of political and religious groups Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti (AYSM).
On July 23, three weeks after government revoked the order, Kuldeep Kumar, a 33-year-old shopkeeper from Talab Tuloo showed up in a gathering the AYSM had sponsored at Parade ground. Kumar, who according to Jammu’s leading daily Excelsior had allegedly consumed some poisonous substance at home before reaching the venue, was badly under debt. He had reportedly raised a loan to set up his business and was upset over his inability to liquidate the loan money in view of the mounting interests. He is right now projected as the ‘first martyr’ of Jammu’s ‘Jihad’ against J&K Muslims.
The government has already ordered an inquiry into the incident. But the investigators would be hard-pressed to probe the death without the mandatory autopsy report. In fact, the Police despite hard efforts could not conduct the autopsy on Kumar’s body as the ferocious agitators had snatched the body.
As against the standing facts, Kumar’s death was mischievously reported as a “protestor’s suicide during agitation” and the Police received constant brickbats for ‘mishandling’ the issue. Several Police officials including a senior officer were transferred. Emboldened, the sponsors went out to whip up passions across Jammu’s Hindu heartland setting a chain reaction in Bishna (Kuldeep’s native Town), Kathua, Akhnoor, Udhampur and other areas. The rioters grew so much used to defy the curve and army deployment that the JKLF leader Muhammad Yasin Malik termed the curfew as a “friendly match” between the army and the rioters.
While the rioters put the entire region upside down and vandalized public property, the authorities appeared to have given enough leeway to the rioters after the Kumar’s death. The administration marked its first ‘action’ against the rioting only on July 26 when some Sangh leaders and office bearers of the Samiti were arrested and later released. While the agitation was visibly spawning into a vengeful racist campaign against Muslims and reports of harassment of Muslims, as also burning down of Gujjar dwellings in Samba, R S Pura and Marh, were pouring in, the administration wasted another four days and opened a dialogue with the sponsors of the agitation only on July 30 . The talks proved futile, the crisis deepened.
The BJP ideologues including Uma Bharti, Ratimbara Sadhwi and Swami Dinesh Bharti (Swami Dinesh openly called for Muslim massacres) had reached Jammu to boost the rioters’ ‘morale’. In an incident, reported widely in Jammu press, a mob chased away the Police contingent that had held a Samiti leader Chandra Prakash Ganga under house arrest at his residence near Sarore and got him released. The violent mobs tried to force their entry into Raj Bhawan but could not breach the Iron Gate. The mob stormed the Police headquarters and torched a police lorry. By now the closure of Lakhanpur entry point had been enforced and a complete economic blockade was in place, leaving the Valley in the lurch. The rioters not only chased the officers and cops of Jammu and Kashmir Police but also, at times, attempted to snatch the weapons from the Inspector rank officials.
On August 1, when according to IGP Jammu, the army had taken over the most sensitive Samba Town to prevent mob violence, frenzied fanatics set ablaze almost entire government infrastructure including the Dak Banglow and Tehsil office. The army somehow saved the deputy commissioner’s office. During a protest rally at Samba, the rioters held hostage the deputy commissioner Sourabh Baghat. An Excelsior report said on August 1 that Baghat was rescued by Army. The situation was more like a total anarchy and the army had to take full control of DC office and other vital installations. It was during this frenzy, which was marked by prolonged clashes between Police, CRPF, Army and the rightwing activists, that two persons who were amongst the rioters were hit by bullets and died on spot. The Police maintained that their death was actually the outcome of an inter-gang rivalry. But the administration removed the local SSP Vijay Kumar and asked SSP Prabhat Singh to take charge. However Mr Singh again fell in the trap of rioters on August 4 when fearing that the mob would lynch his cops he ordered fire in self defense. The firing killed two rioters and injured eight others. Police would have certainly expected a mob backlash but it is yet to be explained how two Gujjar cops of JKP were hacked to death in Jhorian village of Akhnoor.
Ideology overtakes constitution
You need not be a rocket scientist to compare the administrative response to public anger in Jammu and Srinagar. Can any protestor dare to look at Raj Bhawan in Srinagar? Is it possible to defy curfew in Kashmir even if only CRPF troops dot the streets? How many ‘suspects’ would be arrested if a police officer or deputy commissioner is held hostage? Can a Kashmiri mob however furious lynch two cops amidst army’s flag March and curfew orders?
The death of the 19-year-old Asif Me’raj of Maisuma is an unambiguous answer to these questions. This poor dropout, who was working with a local car dealer, Highland Automobiles, was killed when JKP cops fired a volley of tear-smoke canisters toward a group of protestors, who were demonstrating against the harassment of Muslims at Maisuma.
Asif is actually the eighth death ever since the protests broke out in Kashmir on June 23 (the strike and protests lasted only 9 days). Earlier six persons died during Police action while a girl of Maisuma, already ailing from Bronchial infection, died of suffocation after the Police barraged the area with dozens of smoke shells.
Calculate the costs
In the colonial times even the brute monarchs would detest the discrimination between the subjects. The state response to public fury in Kashmir as well as in Jammu has been ideological rather than constitutional. In Kashmir an unwritten policy appears to infuse among troopers and cops a sense of being deployed in ‘enemy territory’ while in Jammu the same policy gives them a feeling that they are in a ‘friendly territory’, which has to be used against the ‘enemies’. At both places, the constitution is put to shame. If it is not really happy with the concept of Muslim Kashmir, New Delhi should calculate the costs of anarchy that usually follows the defiling of constitution. feedback on riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com

Will foxes cry together?

2008-08-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

Common man in Valley streets may soon ask Omar and Mahbooba that if they can overcome their allergies toward each other in the interest of New Delhi why they cannot do the same to safeguard the Kashmiris’ interest

Riyaz Masroor
“Shaal shaal byuon byuon, tungi vizi kuniey”, is a popular Kashmiri adage implying that the foxes may live separately but when it comes to keep the hunters at bay they come together for that explosive cry which deters a poacher or a predator.
Despite their ‘joint support’ to the Dr Manmohan Singh-led UPA government during the parliamentary vote in New Delhi on July 22, it is difficult to compare Omar Abdullah and Mahbooba Mufti, the young guardians of Kashmir’s two pro-India political parties, National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party, with a fox or a vixen (a female fox).
The difficulty has no moral but a terminological reason. We cannot do so because usually the politicians who are bold, fairly conscious of self-esteem and assertive while protecting their constituencies besides being little wily or Machiavellian are equated with a fox.
The dicey connotation of comparing politicians with a fox not withstanding, both Omar and Mahbooba wore stripes of the same animal when they walked past their bitter rivalries and rallied behind the Congress, which had been troubled by BJP, BSP and the Left. The gossip lounges in Srinagar condemned both for sharing the same cause and forging ‘unity’ when it came to safeguard their source of power in Delhi.
I overheard an elderly observer stating the aforementioned Kahsmiri proverb to make his point about the priorities of our ‘leaders’ vis-à-vis Srinagar and New Delhi. Omar and Mahbooba, out of a stiff competition to please Mr Singh and the super boss, Sonia Gandhi, may have staged an artificial show of political harmony but by sharing a common goal in the Lok Sabha Omar and Mahbooba have tickled the ideological depths of their respective support base.
Masses may not pick up the finer points in this paradoxical unanimity yet this virtual reality has screamed into the ears of conscious sections here that Kashmiri politicians keep even a moral trait, of forging unity over similar goals, reserved to serve Delhi’s interests rather than the interests of the people who they claim to represent. After all if ‘political cubs’ of the same Kashmiri stock could forget their animosity in the interest of the Indian Union isn’t it sheer expediency that in Kashmir they remain locked in a perpetual conflict with each other. Going by the present NC-PDP engagement, this love-hate relationship seems all about serving Delhi’s interests in Srinagar , Delhi’s interests in Delhi, and if situation demands, compromising Kashmir’s interests in both Srinagar as well as in Delhi.
The future consequences of this overdependence on New Delhi may not be entirely lost on Omar or Mahbooba. They must be aware that after sharing a common cause favoring Dr Singh’s government they will have to encounter some uncomfortable questions when back home. At a time when the political personality is no longer considered a passport to popularity in Kashmir and it is the political standpoint that matters the most, both leaders may have to make a tough choice ahead of next elections.
There are apparently two choices. One is to compete with each other in the appeasement of bosses in Delhi and try to grab the throne under Delhi’s backing. Second is to shift the fountainhead of power from Delhi to Srinagar so that if in future either of them happens to rule Kashmir they don’t need to prostrate before the kingmakers at the cost of their local constituency. But the second choice may not come through without a cost. Shifting the fountainhead of power from Delhi to Srinagar would require NC and PDP to solemnize the unity, which they compulsively displayed in Lok Sabha, and that may irk New Delhi to the extent of going for yet another alternative. But that would, atleast, de-stigmatize both National Conference and PDP. Are they ready to bear the costs?
It does not take much to understand that the PDP feeds on some portion of the ideological diet NC had voluntarily abandoned. But the fact is that PDP has so loudly articulated this ideology that the NC despite a weighty past at its back has been spending more energy in putting down PDP claims than propounding its own ideas.
Simple common sense suggests if two crazy teens fight for a single jacket and pull it from opposite directions it will be no body’s win. The garment will be torn apart and both will end up with an unusable portion. Same holds true for the supposedly nationalist pro-Kashmir ideology; both NC and PDP are pulling it from opposite directions and in doing so they are hugely depending on dispensations in New Delhi. Remember how they accused each other of plagiarism regarding their respective political manifestos.
It is anybody’s guess that as two regional competitors NC and PDP will remain engaged in a war of attrition with no gain for people. In contrast if both choose to emerge as an integrated political entity , engage with New Delhi on their own terms and shift the powerhouse to Srinagar, they can at least spare the ‘jacket’ to cover Kashmiris from further bruises, the bruises inflicted on them in past by betrayal and doubletalk.
Omar and Mahbooba need not be told that Kashmir and Kashmiris are both endangered for a variety of reasons; they need not be told that they are not in a normal political process where politicians willy-nilly pursue their careers in power; they need not be told that their families don’t enjoy popular sanctity and are remembered with extreme disdain; but they surely need to be told the bitterer truth that people may accept them as Kashmiri pleaders in New Delhi but will never accept them as New Delhi’s advocates in Kashmir.
Common man in Valley streets may soon ask Omar and Mahbooba that if they can overcome their allergies toward each other in the interest of New Delhi why they cannot do the same to safeguard the Kashmiris’ interest. If Omar and Mahbooba have really staked their political future on Kashmiri soil rather than in bureaucratic corridors of New Delhi their ideological merger may not be a fantasy, Kashmir history can witness this accident because the history is replete with accidents.

(Feedback at riyaz.masroor@yahoo.com)

Inventing a cause in Jammu

2008-08-01T04:34:00.000-07:00

If the BJP’s central leadership and Kashmir’s Tehreek-e-Hurriyat refuse to become part in the invention of a cause in Jammu, the inventors better call it a day, writes Riyaz Masroor
The ongoing agitation in Jammu, which supposedly started against the revocation of a controversial government order regarding the land transfer to Shri Amarnath Shrine Board but later assumed anti-Muslim overtones, has only reinforced two principles of History. First, it is possible to invent a cause and second that an invented cause, however loudly clamored, is always the wrong cause.
In late seventies Pakistan chanced to invent a cause in Afghanistan and espoused it with full blown Islamist rhetoric. Only three decades after this invention, the cause boomeranged with Afghanistan turning to a strategic threat rather than a strategic depth. It was a wrong cause.
Similarly, India invented a cause on its Eastern flanks and sliced Pakistan’s Western arm to create Bangladesh. In Bangladesh India should have earned an iconic image for liberating the region but, to the contrary, the tiny and famished country has become a keg of conspiracies against Indian state. Why? Because creating Bangladesh was a wrong cause.
During the same seventies, Nixon administration in USA, in order to destroy the perceived ‘safe haven’ of Vietcong guerrillas who were fighting US occupation in Vietnam, invented a cause in Cambodia. It claimed to promote democracy by bombing out Cambodia. Consequently the US lost grip over both Vietnam and Cambodia and the cause failed because the invented causes are doomed to fail.
There could be a chain of examples. See how the cause that the west invented to create Israel post world war II has not only failed but is now threatening a civilizational clash. Lately Israel wanted to invent a cause of nuclear disarmament in Iran but it boomeranged and evoked reaction in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq because the cause was artificial.
By the same principle India’s new cause in Pakistan’s western frontier which it is trying to invent through Afghanistan is also proving counterproductive. Leaf through any ordinary history textbook and you will come to know that the invented causes have always entailed deadly consequences for the inventors.
Back to Jammu: Then who is trying to invent a false cause in Kashmir’s summer capital? Answer to this question is not as relevant as the fact that whoever is espousing this cause is bound to suffer humiliating failure because, as the principle of history goes, invented causes never come to fruition.
The above explanation about the organic relationship between the failure and the invented causes should not be entirely lost on Professor Nirmal Singh, a sober academic and the BJP’s not-so-controversial man in Jammu.
It appears as if some power brokers in Jammu’s pro-BJP camp have been prompted by the motivated theories that since an alive and visible cause has won Kashmiris major share in power and pelf, so they also need a ‘festering’ cause to enjoy ‘more than Kashmiris’. The way a pure fight against an administrative order lapsed into an anti-Muslim and anti-Kashmir campaign, is enough to prove that the same thinking has prompted Jammu to invent a counter-cause against Kahsmir. What should be the result of a clash between an invented and a real cause is a foregone conclusion.
In fact, the failure of this ineffectual cause has already become visible like the tip of an iceberg. BJP’s central leadership seems to have awakened to the costs of inventing causes and has, contrary to the past practice at such occasions, responded to the gruesome blasts in Ahmedabad and Bangalore in a rather pure political way. BJP Chief Rajnath Singh may have liked to stretch the land transfer row to India’s Hindu heartland and ride a wave of hatred but the party’s key leader and former minister Sushma Swaraj has, of late, blamed Congress for the blasts in Indian metros.
Blame game is pure politics; the significant shift is that BJP does not look interested in any hate-Muslim wave in Jammu. It may be a conscious decision given the chances of BJP’s comeback in New Delhi. The party may not like to make its future decision-making difficult by appearing the inventor of a counter-cause against the dominant cause, which is the resolution of Kahsmir issue through dialogue.
And see the other extreme. Syed Ali Geelani who is abominably termed the ‘rabid Islamist’ in Delhi and Mumbai-based newspapers, in his response to Jammu situation has steered clear of any ‘Islamism’.
“This is sheer vote-bank politics,” Geelani told a press conference on July 29. It’s more surprising to see a ‘rabid Islamist’ calling for calm and urging Jammu Muslims to restrain during the communal tension in the city.
Despite an overcharged campaign against Muslims in Jammu, in which even Jammu and Kashmir Police was dubbed “Hurriyat Police” and CRPF spared of stone pelting, Geelani’s responsible and matured approach has defeated the designs to make the Kashmiri Muslims a fuse in the ‘bomb’ that was aimed to blast the culture of pleasant coexistence in Jammu and Kashmir. If the BJP’s central leadership and Kashmir’s Tehreek-e-Hurriyat refuse to become part in the invention of a cause in Jammu, the inventors better call it a day. After all you need a strong wind to blow a devastating fire; Kashmiri Muslims have appreciably refused to play ‘wind’.
On the other hand, the ‘Jammu cause’ is so grievously alienating the mainstream groups, NC and PDP, that they would be happier to propel the cause of a ‘Muslim Kashmir’ across the flows of Chenab river and the ranges of Pir Panjal, and in Kargil. PDP and NC have a sizeable presence in Jammu’s Muslim lands; burning the effigies of Mufti Syed and Omar Abdullah, and hounding out Syed Ali Geelani and Yasin Malik from Jammu is like inviting a real cause to outperform the artificial cause.
Kashmir’s Muslim politicians on both sides of the ideological divide may not have as much wherewithal to take up a Muslim cause across Jammu but Ashok Khajuria’s wrong cause of economic blockade has enough gravel to nudge them. So, the Jammu agitation will add to History’s testified principles, mentioned in the beginning; it will also show how an invented cause boosts a right but feeble cause. Best of luck Mr Khajuria!

Our Delicious Ironies

2008-08-01T04:32:00.001-07:00

Both NC and PDP miscalculated public mood on July 13, but Omar Abdullah’s bravado points to his dependence on non-electoral route, argues Riyaz Masroor

Meaning of the phrase “delicious irony”, which I had recently used in a political commentary, was lost on one of my readers who in his email response disapprovingly ruled: “By the way ironies can’t be ‘delicious’.” But the linguistic pundits say ironies become delicious when an event or an act takes place quite contrary to a set pattern, or when a hypocritical action is too manifest to be camouflaged. Some theorists even deduce a different connotation: “disgusting hypocrisy”.
Here is more telling testimony: When in 2006 the Arab media leader, Al Jazeera disclosed that it would draw talent from the western world to compete CNN and BBC in the English television journalism, India’s most respected newspaper, The Hindu, carried a detailed report in its weekly supplement. The report carried the same phrase, delicious irony, as the standalone title.
The above explanation was deemed necessary not to rebut what my worthy reader had pointed out but for fear of again getting misheard in the following lines in which I will point to some latest ironies which took a delicious twist.
The anger that filled the streets of Kashmir during a nine-day Battle for Land against the May 26 cabinet order, which gave proprietary rights of around 100 acres of land near Baltal to the Hindu Shrine, might have subdued but the aura it has set in will take longer to die down. But the local rivals of a badly hit pro-India political camp, National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party went whole hog on July 13, observed as martyrs’ day by both pro-India and secessionist forces, by showing up at the martyrs’ graveyard in Khawajabazar near the heartland of secessionism, Nowhatta, only to prick a wound that was halfway to healing.
No sooner had the PDP Chief Mahbooba Mufti reached the shrine premises where the martyrs’ of July 13 massacre lay at rest than the locals raised alarm over her entry and pelted stones. Local cable TV aired the footage in which Mahbooba frenetically recited the Quranic verses, which the Kashmiri Muslims usually recite when an earthquake strikes. Pleading calm, she shouted in what seemed a fit of fear; fear of getting lynched by the frenzied mob; fear of getting humiliated and the fear of having her political career in tatters. When the stones rained relentlessly she left the place leaving even her sandals behind. She, perhaps, rightly recited a particular verse because it was no less than a tremor, a political tremor that humbled a gritty politician.
Her retreat was a symbolic admission of defeat and perhaps an honest acknowledgement that in Kashmir she and her party were yet to be accepted as a ‘soft separatist force’ let alone the chance of taking them as heirs of the martyrs. She must be grieved as her claim that “PDP transformed the political discourse in Kahsmir” has so humiliatingly deflated.
As if the Act 2 of a preconceived play, Omar Abdullah led a procession toward the martyrs’ graveyard and winked at his supporters to retaliate the stone pelting from the locals. NC supporters were yelling at the pro-freedom activists and paying back with stones and brickbats. Taken together with the replay of Kashmir-versus-Kashmir, Omar Abdullah’s inflammatory speech on the occasion leaves no doubt who choreographed the game.
“Those who talk about the election boycott have been favored by the previous BJP regime in center when L K Advani sanctioned money for their medical expenses.” On this a bevy of angry protesters tried to stone the stage wherefrom Omar was speaking. “Look,” Omar responded from behind a thick wall of security guards, “they have understood whom I am referring to.” Such a provocative tenor could have stemmed from either his lack of understanding or a prescription from New Delhi.
Unlike PDP that did not seem in a rush to undo nine-day Battle for Land, National Conference rushed to outsmart PDP by launching its poll campaign from martyrs’ graveyard. But the NC Chief miscalculated on two counts. First, it was a time when the smoke of the recent uprising was yet to disperse and both PDP and NC were seen as party to the land transfer decision with their varied degrees of culpability. And second, Omar plunged in the middle of a separatist heartland and dared the restive masses.
Then why Omar chose an inopportune timing for such bravado? Because every act the mainstream politicians stage here is not necessarily aimed at the local audience. Omar knows better whom did he want to show that he was the only one who could change the terms of debate vis-à-vis Kashmir movement. At a time when the recent achievement, however sketchy it may look, had emboldened the masses and they have grown conscious to the benefits of a non violent resistance, Omar’s incitement looked out of sync. Not because he should not have criticized the separatists but because he knows fully well which way the wind blows if one wants to assume power through real people’s power. His anti-Hurriyat stand is, therefore, the anti-thesis of elections in which you need votes not the glib rhetoric.
There are some hazy hints why Omar sought to revert from his pro-movement posturing when returned from Pakistan in 2006. One among them is this: A predated interview of India’s wily hand on Kashmir, Amarjeet Singh Dulat, was recently circulated in press in which he has sweepingly predicted Omar Abdullah to be the next CM of J&K.
Dulat is not an ordinary political commentator or a journalist. He has held important positions in both Intelligence Bureau (Special Director Kashmir) and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). He is currently member in the India’s National Security Advisory Board and is often consulted on security affairs especially Kashmir. If he has publicly tipped Omar Abdullah to be the next ‘Maharaja of Kashmir’ it cannot be brushed off as a routine guesswork by top bureaucrats in the country.
Mr Dulat’s ‘revelation’ has raised some important questions. Was Dulat’s tip aimed to prod Omar toward something PDP was considered unfit for? Was the clash on July 13 a warm up exercise of a bigger project New Delhi wants National Conference to execute ahead of polls? Did Omar fritter away the chances, if any, of a comeback by once again openly doing New Delhi’s bidding? Such questions cannot be farfetched in the backdrop of NC’s latest somersault.
Only time will tell whether this ‘revelation’ was aimed at rejuvenating PDP’s sagging credibility or an unwitting admission that Delhi was preparing to install the third generation Abdullahs as its new bet in Kashmir. That is why, perhaps, Omar Abdullah on July 15 threatened to pay in the same coin if his party was attacked again in future. This may not as much scare the separatists as it would relieve the PDP that is in a shambles.
As for PDP’s role in the recent land transfer deal, it is yet to come clean on certain counts. When the popular reaction against the land transfer was blowing into such an uprising that could have stirred the international opinion PDP bailed out New Delhi by pulling out of the coalition and shifting the debate to a constitutional crisis.
It is not yet clear whether New Delhi has promised PDP anything in lieu of this service in which it creatively localized the nine-day agitation averting the global reaction the issue could have evoked otherwise. But Omar’s gesture speaks louder than PDP’s whispering with 10-Janpath (Sonia Gandhi’s official residence in New Delhi). If PDP prevented the issue from spilling over, NC is doing the spadework to refurbish New Delhi’s image in Kashmir at a time when the alienation is peaking.
Omar who on his return from Pakistan said every security picket in Kashmir is a torture cell has taken on both Geelani and Mirwaiz. His friends privately boast that Omar had more guts than his father to speak truth to the power. But over these years, it seems, his ego has jockeyed with greed and greed has won out. Ego would have earned a space in Kashmir’s beleaguered society; greed would fetch him the power.
But by promising New Deli to change the terms of debate in Kashmir he has undertaken a difficult task. He still has a cue from the ungracefully seen off governor S K Sinha who has recorded his confession about the popular sentiment in Kashmir. “New Delhi must realise that we have been able to control militancy in Kashmir but the mindset behind the separatist movement is intact,” Sinha told Business Standard in a recent interview.
We have had back-to-back ironies ever since 1947 but the irony displayed by NC and PDP is unquestionably ‘delicious’. Objection to the usage of “delicious irony” is respected but overruled!
(riyaz.masroor@yaoo.com)

Allow Meelad festival

2008-08-01T04:31:00.000-07:00

Riyaz Masroor argues that the state should not restrict the festivity as Aurangzeb is no more and Sheikh Abdullah is long dead.

Much like the earliest times when the big towns and cities were central to the public life for being sacred or religious, Kashmir and its urban centers have all along been wearing mystical aura.
Eid-e-Meelad – birthday of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) – that is celebrated across the Muslim lands is also an annual reinforcement of Kashmir’s, especially of the Srinagar city’s, spiritual essence.
Shrines of Muslim saints dotting the lengths and breadths of Kashmir are actually the hallmark of our cultural ethos spread over seven centuries. The remains of ancient Buddhist and medieval Hindu period, and of course the Shiv Temples of Kashmiri pandits, adorn this ethos on the frills to make Kashmir a more liberal and tolerant civilization than Gandhi’s India or Jinah’s Pakistan.
Central to this rich heritage has been the most venerated Hazratbal Shrine popularly known as Asar-e-Sharief or Dargah Sharief.
A little peep into history points to an interesting yet significant aspect of Muslim renaissance in Kashmir. The scholars fond of Mughal bashing would come to know that the building which is the most revered shrine today was actually built as Ishrat Mahal (Pleasure House) by Sadiq Khan, subedar of Shah Jahan in 1623. When Shah Jahan came to Kashmir in 1634, he decreed that the Ishrat Mahal be converted to a house of prayer.
Not only this, the Moi-e-Muqadas (the sacred strand of the Prophet’s hair) is also largely believed to have reached Kashmir during the rule of Aurangzeb in 1699.
Over two and a half centuries later Sheikh Abdullah –a Kashmiri Muslim ruler who had grabbed power by readjusting his own convictions in 1947 but lost it to New Delhi’s disease of getting second thoughts on Kashmir – rode on a charged wave, which was created by the mysterious theft of Moi-e-Muqadas, to dethrone his enemy number one : Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad. Few years after the Moi-e-Muqadas was dramatically recovered Sheikh launched a popular movement to rebuild the shrine along the lines of the Masjid-e-Nabvi (Mosque of the Prophet (SAW) in Medina, the promised Arab City where Muhammad (SAW) founded the Islamic state.
Earlier the design resembled the Central Asian religious architecture with a tinge of Buddhist monasteries. Sheikh was, perhaps, trying to reach out to the majority sentiment hence his eagerness to replicate Masjid-e-Nabvi rather than rehashing the existing style.
It took him a decade to accomplish the project and the new shrine complex was dedicated to people at the height of a political transition in entire South Asian region including New Delhi and Islamabad. While the erstwhile USSR was attempting a toehold in Afghanistan Iran was bursting with revolution; India had an uneasy brush with dictatorship under Indira Gandhi that had catapulted the rightists to the center stage and Pakistan was trying to reconcile the slicing of its eastern wing that had become Bangladesh.
Sheikh had been consolidating his popularity through the pulpits of the Hazratbal shrine until he bounced back to power with a reduced title – he was deposed as the Prime Minister of autonomous J&K and reinstated as the Chief Minister.
By the time Kashmiris would realize that Sheikh was concerned with power not the soul they had to be overwhelmed by yet another upheaval. Armed resistance started off in 1989, little over a decade after Sheikh traded his autonomy for power with New Delhi. Had Sheikh had even an inkling of statesmanship he would never accept a curtailed role.
When the armed young men of the hay days of our revolution attempted to replace the erstwhile unrivalled ‘pope’, Sheikh, they too did pull crowds but the magic proved short lived. The shrine was soon in flames, desecrated by the soldiers in 1993 and the purported freedom fighters in 1996.
The love and admiration for Prophet Muhammad (SAW) among Kashmiri population is so much endemic that they have not allowed these bitter memories to kill their enthusiasm, which they frequently display on occasions like Shab-e-Me’araaj or Eid-e-Meelad. They have been swarming around the splendid minarets of this sacred shrine.
For past several years, on this auspicious occasion the state government bans Meelad processions sparking protests and police action against the civilians. This is not just a blind negation to the popular culture, which had been acknowledged by even Mughal aggressors, but also the bad advertisement of government’s claims of being guided by secular ideals.
Mughals have ruled India longer than British; they have conquered India with scarcer resources than British. If this inherent Indian complex has crept into the minds of those handling J&K, it is unfortunate.
People in Kahsmir neither remember Aurangzeb nor Sheikh Abdullah; if something is indelibly etched in their hearts and minds it is the reverence and admiration for the beloved Prophet Muhammad (SAW).
It seems that out of their prejudice toward Aurangzeb handlers of Kashmir policy have been winking at the J&K government to regulate and restrict the Meelad festivity. If it is so, it is really strange. They must understand that even in the neocolonialism it is the market and not the ideology that sustains an occupation. They must also be acutely conscious of the fact that masses are not sharp enough to discern that New Delhi or its mouthpieces in Srinagar have some ideological problem with Aurangzeb. And there are always vested interests that leave no chance to exploit the sentiments. Remember there is no B N Mulik around to douse the fires.
The government would do well by restoring the festive glory of Hazratbal Shrine. If there is no problem in subjecting the state’s precious resources at disposal for Amaranth Yatra there should be no inhibition in promoting Meelad festival, which should last longer to serve as a spiritual therapy for the bruised populace.

Feedback the author on rmasroor@gmail.com

Farewell to Army

2008-08-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

If military was mandated to restore law and order in Kashmir it is time that New Delhi started a decent withdrawal from J&K because 60 years are enough to achieve that objective, observes Riyaz Masroor
I believe that the (Jammu and Kashmir) State has been forcibly occupied by the Indian Military against the will of the people. This is brutal aggression and, therefore extremely intolerable and highly dangerous. At present only Muslims appear to be aggrieved at the highhandedness of the Indian government. But in the long run this state of affairs, if it unfortunately continues, will harm the Hindus, probably more than Muslims.
A truer son of the soil late Pandit Prem Nath Bazaz made this compelling assertion way back in 1951 (Azad Kashmir: A Democratic Socialist Conception pp 14).
By then Security Council of UNO had admitted and subsequently passed many a resolution confining the Indian Army’s mandate in Kashmir to the restoration of “law and order”. Also, the first Premier of free India Jawaharlal Lal Nehru whom Professor Stanley Wolpert blames for “errors in diplomatic judgment” because of his obsession with Kashmir, had on many occasions clarified that the Army would leave J&K once the “law and order” was restored.
After over six decades, while enjoying a roaring growth rate closer to 9 percent, although threatened by the rising inflation, India is yet to announce that it has accomplished the mission of restoring “law and order” in Jammu and Kashmir. From an offensive that began with 100 Air Force planes and few thousand soldiers in October 1947, India’s current troop strength in Kashmir has reached over half a million. Defense strategists in New Delhi may argue that the country faced a radical National Security challenge post 1989 but the fact remains what Indian Army was doing here for 42 years.
This backdrop would help a greater deal to understand the nuances of the latest catchword among politicians – Demilitarization. Without going into the definition of demilitarization in the contemporary politico-military context of Kashmir conflict, the attempt here is to find out who needs J&K’s demilitarization the most; the violence-hit people of this landlocked region or New Delhi? Casual answer may be both yet the circumstances suggest that India needs it much more than Kashmiris who are suffering due to a painful sense of being trapped in a “war zone”.
When the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh tried to dispel the notion that the Indian Army was “not an army of occupation” and that the reduction of troops in J&K would take place only if “terrorist acts ceased” (Greater Kashmir March 3, 2006) he in fact reflected Nehru who had written the same thing to diplomats especially British Prime Minister Atlee sixty years ago. Both the assertions differ in terminology. Nehru in the said correspondence (Shameful Flight: The last years of British Empire in India by Professor Stanley Wolpert) had said that the army would leave only when “law and order” was restored and Dr Singh believes it would happen only when “terrorist acts” ceased.
The resistance that started in 1947 against Indian rule was subdued in a matter of months, but Nehru could not keep his promise of calling back the troops after the “order” was restored. And sixty years after, especially when the armed movement appears waning, New Delhi is still shying away from initiating a withdrawal even as the violence levels, by repeated official admissions, have almost reached the zero.
Since the Congress is confronting a political attrition due to steep rise of Mayawati and BJP, it finds itself in a prickly dilemma about Kashmir problem, which most believe is largely its own making. At a time when the Muslim vote is fast swinging to BJP and BSP, the Congress can posthumously keep Nehru’s promise of withdrawing military from Kahsmir because the bare minimum standard of withdrawal has been almost achieved.
There were no newspaper commentaries in Indian press when Nehru died without justifying the military hold over J&K even as the “law and order” was restored in his own lifetime. But 2008 is not 1964. Can the sharper teenage population of India be fed on TV soups for ever? They are moving out, meeting people and hearing a different story of Kahsmir from others, although they should have heard it at home. Indian Journalist Goutam Nowlakha is becoming part of an International Tribunal on Kahsmir and leading Supreme Court lawyer Mihir Desai is openly supporting demilitarization. An enlightened woman from Bengal, Angana Chatterji, who teaches in US, is unequivocally pointing to the “war crimes” perpetrated in Kashmir by the actors of the conflict. It seems that the entire media induced perception about Kahsmir in India’s conscious populace is changing.
If it is true that Kashmir’s 20-year armed movement has been neutralized it’s pretty difficult to predict winners or losers in this defeat. What if the present lot of Indian leadership including Gujral, Advani Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh also fail to keep the promise of withdrawing troops after restoring “order”? What if the India’s emancipated young intellectuals return from foreign universities and hold Dr Manmohan Singh or his successors witness to an uncomfortable fact: One of the world’s best army could not restore “order” in J&K for 60 years.
Mihir Desai, an upright lawyer from India (not Pakistan) questioned the presence of over five lakh armed forces in Kashmir when he spoke at the launch of a Peoples Tribunal on Human Rights in Srinagar on April 5, 2008. Pointing to occasional reinforcements in India’s disturbed states, Mihir said, “In Chattishgarh (militancy infested state bordering Bihar) 2500 CRPF men are fighting five to six thousand Maoist and Naxal guerrillas. Officials in Kashmir put the number of militants in hundreds yet there are half a million troops present in the state. This means that the troops are here to subjugate the entire population.”
If New Delhi is right now ignoring the demands of troop withdrawal from J&K it can be viewed in two different frames. Either it is an open admission of failure to restore peace – Nehru died with the same burden of failure –or Mihir Desai’s assertion that Indian forces are actually to subjugate Kashmiri population is the real agenda, which is couched in “law and order” package. Isn’t it time to dispel the notions which could earn a bad name for the growing India?
Mihir’s point may or may not be debatable yet he has, in fact, raised an interesting question by doubting the mandate of Indian armed forces present in Kahsmir for past six decades.

(The article first appeared in Rising Kashmir)

From Silk Factory to SRTC

2008-08-01T04:19:00.000-07:00

Chief Ministers are no different from Maharajas of yesteryears; when it comes to kill aspirations only guns and bamboos replace the lances and batons, Riyaz Masroor revisits the workers’ agitation of 1924
More than eight decades have elapsed since the power-sodden Maharaja Pratap Singh ordered a military raid into the Silk Factory where the unpaid workers had been protesting for long. In the spring of 1924 nearly five thousand workers in the state-owned silk factory demanded a pay hike and the dismissal of a clerk who had been running a protection racket, exploiting the poor employees.
The management agreed to a small increase, but arrested the leaders of the protest. The workers then came out on strike. It was for the first time that Kashmiri workers had burst into a rebellion against the state. The power-drunk Maharaja Pratap Singh chose to kill rather than address the aspirations. Troops were sent in to subdue the resistance against exploitation and nonpayment of dues. The workers were badly beaten, suspected ringleaders were sacked on the spot and the main organizer of the protest was arrested and tortured to death.
Eighty four years is a long span of time. We may have remembered and forgotten a number of developments through this period yet we have remained witness to the evolution of governance in the war-torn Europe and the decolonized Asia. Rulers in Kashmir have tended to relate themselves to the tides of changes coming from the East and the West.
But, when the Jammu and Kashmir Police cracked whip on the unpaid workers of the State Road Transport Corporation (SRTC) and beat not only them but also their family members it appeared as if the clock in Kashmir had got stuck in 1924.
Just a thin line distinguishes the imagery of brute force employed by the state against the unerring SRTC workers and the memories of Silk Factory raid. Maharaja’s troops rode on the war horses and pounced with lances and spears on the poor workers while the JKP cops charging against the SRTC workers were laced with modern weaponry. Newspapers carried the scenes depicting the male cops scuffling with wives, sisters and daughters of the affected employees.
Ironically the political elite have long been referring to the brute Maharja regime in order to derive legitimacy for their model of ‘popular rule’. But the treatment our agitating employees often receive in response to their demands is a telling rejoinder to the claims of our politicians.
They claim that no problem can be solved by use of force or violence yet they promptly order ‘violence’ against the poor workers agitating for their rights. We have seen cops chasing the activists protesting the tax hike during Farooq Abdullah’s rule; Mufti’s three-year regime witnessed teachers being assaulted and humiliated as they demanded an end to pay anomalies; and we are witnessing the worst part of state’s inefficiency to address the problem of a transport corporation comprising just five thousand employees.
Experts would certainly come out with their take on the government’s inability to fix the problem yet the attitude the state has been assuming against the working class in the state is too retrograde to term the newer dispensations as somewhat different from the Maharajas of the past.
If some purported Kashmir experts resist the tendency of overstretching the Kashmir conflict back to Mughal era they would certainly understand how greatly the suppression of Silk Factory agitation by the Maharaja has influenced the resistance movement in Kashmir. The government too must not forget that the Silk Factory agitation had spawned a homegrown nationalism, of which Sheikh Abdullah would later become an advocate as well as an adversary. More importantly the famous 1931 movement in which the state forces perpetrated massacres in almost all parts of Kahsmir started just seven years after Silk Factory raid.
The government may argue that 2008 is not 1924 yet it has to substantiate it by the ways through which it addresses the problem. After all the conscious citizenry including Saidudin Shawl and others were pursuing degrees in Punjab and Lahore when the aspirations were being booted down in the Silk Factory. When they returned home they grew restless to mobilize people against the injustice.
They wrote to British Viceroy Lord Reading, perhaps the first Kashmiri memorandum to Western powers, protesting repression and seeking intervention. “So far we have patiently borne the state's indifference towards our grievances and our claims and its high-handedness towards our rights, but patience has its limit and resignation its end,” reads the memorandum.
When the Viceroy forwarded the petition to the Maharaja he promptly deported Saidudin Shawl under charges of sedition.
Exactly after 84 years the state, currently run by those who believe the Maharaja was a despot and the Britain a colonizer, appears no different than the Maharaja who muffled the Silk Factory workers and later deported Shawl. Thrashing teachers, engineers and doctors; beating SRTC workers and slapping the brute laws upon them are an obvious continuity to a despotic mindset, which we are given to believe was long buried.
If the state has been immune to the ideological transformation how can anybody argue that peoples aspirations have died down and cannot revert back to rebellion. This was evident recently when a group of SRTC employees alleged that the government was protracting the policy over the issue just to shift focus from the human rights violations.
The ruling congress leaders should feel guilty because their favorite leader and first woman Prime Minister of India, late Indhira Gandhi had wished that “the clock should not be turned back”.
If the smoldering anguish among the working class of Kahsmir ever turned to yet another rebellion the future historian will have to choose only one conclusion: Either the clock was mismanaged or it was terribly wrong.

Feedback the author on rmasroor@gmail.com
(First appeared in Srinagar-based Rising Kashmir)

OBJECTIVITY FAVORS IDEOLOGIES NOT TRUTH

2008-04-08T01:12:00.000-07:00

Following is the text of the paper Riyaz Masroor presented in the GK Foundation’s daylong seminar on The Role of Intelligentsia vis-à-vis Kashmir on September 9
Objectivity is conventionally understood as the art of writing balanced news. That plainly means balancing truth with untruth. Yet there is a tiny but vibrant minority of intellectuals who describe the objectivity as a ‘colonial discourse’ through which the ruling elites spread lies and some truths that favor their interests.
Let’s believe for a moment that the media is a democratic institution. That way it is located between the spheres of the state and the civil society. Generally the media adopts a demeanor that makes it appear on the side of civil society. This impression has been so much hammered into public opinion that the readers, viewers or listeners largely believe that the media supports the civil society and serves its interests.
The question whether the media serves the interests of the civil society or the state or both or neither is a tricky one. To reach to some reasonable conclusion let’s have a recap of the media scene here.
We have close to twenty offset English as well as Urdu newspapers hitting the stands daily and some of them weekly. There is a sound if not strong presence of international media through its correspondents here. We have New Delhi controlled electronic media such as Radio Kashmir and Door Darshan Kendra. Of late we see several cable services venturing into news coverage. There are half a dozen news agencies, which circulate news events through email and SMS.
Barring a few exceptions none of the newspapers have their correspondents stationed in peripheries. It might be partly because the independent news media is yet to grow as an industry and partly because the Police and armed forces still remain the primary source of news and information.
The media access to interiors remains confined within the Barahmullah-Srinagar-Khanabal axis while the incidents are happening hundreds of miles away in Gurez, Karnah, wadwan Doda, interiors of Poonch, Rajouri and Ladakh.
Thanks to belated advent of cellular services in Kashmir, the reporters who are willing to bring facts and deliver truth find it easier to have an objective account rather than buying the state version.
If objectivity means being honest while disseminating the facts, many if not all, Kashmiri journalists have done that even at the risk of their lives. The state has ways to coerce but most of our honest reporters had been struggling to find their way. There have all along been the exceptions yet there are people who have suffered lot of pain while being objective.
Generally conflict reporting is more than a challenge. But I feel unable to explain how difficult it is to report your own conflict in which your own commitments and prejudices are rooted.
My senior colleague in BBC Altaf Hussain says, “One Hundred percent objectivity is impossible but that doesn’t mean we shun it. A Journalist willing to be objective while reporting his own conflict must have three traits: correct perspective, skill and character. Not necessarily that he always gets the other side but he should be honest to the dissemination of facts.”
While calibrating pressures the media has tried to strike the middle ground. It might also have tried to keep its pro-civil society image intact and that is where objectivity comes handy.
In places such as Kashmir, state always lacks legitimacy. It wants to be seen as an entity besides the advocates of resistance. So while we try to play objective without a proper perspective we end up accommodating the anti-civil society discourse next to the civil society demands, making it a heady mix of ideologies rather than an account of truth.
State has its own ideology about Kashmir. According to this ideology it is fighting a war against “terrorism” and wants public as well as intellectuals support it in restoring normalcy. There are non state forces who also espouse an ideology. Their ideology is fighting against the “Indian occupation” and seeking public as well as intellectual support to restore the “freedom of the people.”
There are many exceptions yet the Kashmiri journalists have dared to steer clear of this ideological clash. It is we who told the real story to the world when the latest phase of the turmoil broke out.
Religion has been a biggest challenger for a Muslim Kashmiri reporter while placing himself on an objective point in these clashing ideologies. While the separatist forces expect him to be on their side because of his faith, the state forces want him to prove his credentials by promoting the state ideology.
Robert Fisk is one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden - three times (all published by The Independent: December 6, 1993 July 10, 1996, and March 22, 1997).
During one of Fisk's interviews with Bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by Bin Laden to possibly recruit him. Bin Laden said, "Mr. Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim." Fisk replied, "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim ... I am a journalist".

So, the objective journalist requires to side with truth rather than ideology. How far it is possible in the given situation remains debatable.
A little thinking over the local media scenario would explain why the death of a beast in Tral consumes prime time of Indian TV Channels and Khundroo incident doesn’t get even a scroll space? We can easily understand why a small religious festival grabs headlines and the death of 33 children in Wular tragedy gets confused. No surprises, therefore, why the crime of sexual exploitation becomes a media movement and vanishes within seven weeks.
I would not sweepingly term the objectivity a myth. But in the prevalent practices of controlling dissent it is a fragmented rather than a whole entity. When we believe that we cannot be absolutely objective in reporting conflict the challenge to paint the real picture is not as much on a reporter’s shoulder as it is upon the intellectuals.
It is they who have to decide their political and moral location. Here we often witness the opposite of it. We see reporters straying to the commentator’s domain and intellectuals overlooking the ground reality and hiding behind their own personal narratives and travelogues.
The last century’s Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci tells us how the intellectuals, social groups and other institutions end up serving the cause of the state. He defined the State as coercion combined with hegemony and according to Gramsci hegemony is political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or consensus as distinguished from armed force.
According to Gramsci a ruling class forms and maintains its hegemony in civil society, i.e. by creating cultural and political consensus through unions, political parties, schools, media, the church, and other voluntary associations where hegemony is exercised by a ruling class over allied classes and social groups.
The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh said during Ram Nath Goinka award function in 2006: "I also believe that the journalism of courage is not just about giving voice to those who are willing to shout , but it is about giving voice to the voiceless and to those who choose to be silent. Objectivity does not imply neutrality. It implies respect for truth and facts, and a willingness to take positions, howsoever contrarian or contentious.”
When the Prime Minister of India insists on taking sides for truth you need not to be Einstein to deduce the message. When the PM wants to take sides, it certainly implies that he seeks intellectual support in fighting terror and restoring normalcy. Similar pointed sermons have been coming from the non state camp as well.
Can we expect ‘objectivity’ in newspaper columns when the state or non state forces acknowledge the ‘contribution’ of our writers by way of conferring awards?
Noted writer, theorist and political commentator Eqbal Ahmad says that Creativity suffers when intellectuals and artists seek proximity to power. He reminds us of Medieval Muslim civil society, which was unequivocally classified.
Wrote Eqbal Ahamad: “Muslims in that era saw poets as belonging to two categories: The Sha'ir-ul-Khilafa, poet of power, lived in the capital - darul-khilafa, enjoyed the Caliph's favors or those of his courtiers and viziers, and basked self-importantly in the privileges of patronage. Artistically he tended to slide backwards becoming adept only in the passing skills of hijv and qasida.
The shai'r-ul-imamah, poet who led, lived in the provinces often in modest circumstances, close to the heartbeat of society, and spoke truth to power. They are the ones we know still.
The contrast was drawn again in the previous century by Gramsci.
He distinguished the state and civil society as distinct entities. He draws three fundamental conclusions:
i) When civil society (which includes professional, literary and artistic institutions and associations) conforms uncritically or is coerced by the state into silence, totalitarianism prevails.
ii) When civil society enjoys a lively network of institutions and associations, and these maintain critical links with state institutions, then democracy prevails.
iii) When state and society are structurally and culturally antagonistic to each other, then conditions of civil war and anarchy obtain, and the society evades either fate only when its intelligentsia forges and popularizes a program for reform or revolution.
In all three situations the choices artists and intellectuals make affect not only their own but their society's destiny.
Author is a Srinagar-based BBC journalist . He can be reached at rmasroor@gmail.com

Zardari’s unripe mangoes

2008-04-08T01:03:00.000-07:00

PPP cochairman’s Kashmir talk is too loose to please India, writes Riyaz Masroor
Asif Ali Zardari is said to have wooed the charming Benazir, when he met her in London, with crates of mangoes from Fortnum & Mason, and marrons glacés. He knew the aristocratic Bhuttos would frown over his proposal because despite their vast estates in Sindh’s Nawabshah district Zardaris were seen as upstarts against the aristocratic Bhuttos.
Both married in 1987 and those crates of mangoes fetched $1.5 billion to Zardari as part of commission he would charge to contractors and business houses. He came to be known as Mr 10 percent and the sobriquet has indelibly stuck.
Both the famed diamond necklace in Switzerland and the Rockwood mansion outside London, according to a British newspaper, were linked to Zardari’s girlfriends. This and much more came his way by ‘investing’ few crates of mangoes; he knew he was betting on a long running horse.
Now that the ‘winning horse’ is dead and the death has propelled Zardari to the center stage, he is back with his ‘crate of mangoes’, this time offering them to India ; unabashedly in the blood-soaked package of Kashmir issue.
His reckless assertion that the Kashmir issue be shelved for posterity can draw weird comparisons, notwithstanding the clarification from his spokesman Farhatullah Babar.
It appears like a jolly child wanting a pretty bride to wait till he came of age and marry her. Or, it sounds like the prodigal husband of a princess, planning how he would spend the dowry, not knowing that the fief he thinks belonged to him was long forfeited. There are other quipping reactions saying that Zardari actually employed his idiotic streak to convey that his son Bilawal is the King-in-Waiting hence the idea of leaving the resolution of Kashmir issue upon the ‘energetic’ shoulders of the ‘new generation’.
Kashmiri politicians on either side of the political divide reacted to Zardari’s remark but with varied degree of caution and anger. While the National Conference patron Dr Farooq Abdullah hailed the ‘new concept’ the Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad promptly welcomed it. Separatists especially Syed Ali Geelani, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir A Shah and others termed it an insult to the sacrifices of Kashmiris as well as many Pakistanis who according to Geelani are still fighting to liberate Kashmir from the Indian occupation.
Mufti Muhammad Syed, patron of the ruling ally Peoples Democratic Party, displayed his trademark shrewdness when he, without even obliquely referring to Zardari’s statement, emphasized the need to resolve Kahsmir. However his ‘tamed’ rebel in PDP and Azad’s deputy, Muzaffar Hussain Baig had no qualms in endorsing the statement.
Founder of the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Toibah (The pious army), Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed accused Zardari of pleasing India and US.
But Sayeed’s reading seems blurred because Zardari need not rake up Kashmir to please Americans who brokered his electoral win.
If Zardari aspires to become Pakistani answer to Sonia Gandhi and call shots from behind, he is miscalculating his ‘mangoes’. He may share some parallels with Sonia; both have inherited the political fortunes of their spouses and both see their son as the future PM. But, while Sonia despite being an outsider managed to earn a place for herself in her party and may be also among people due to her refusal to becoming the Prime Minister, Benazir’s admirers and adversaries equally detest Zardari for corruption and sleaze.
Interestingly the Pakistan Peoples Party despite its proximity with India and US did not peddle Kashmir card during the poll campaign. Commonsense dictates that if PPP earned a mandate against Musharraf and ‘in favor of democracy’ it sounds morally incorrect to juggle Kashmir rather than the ‘restoration of democracy’.
Whatever principles the PPP professed post Zulfikar’s execution, it cannot so easily rub off the impression it has earned by the radical and hawkish stand over Kashmir. People are yet to forget Zulfikar’s passionate calls for a “1000-year Jihad against India”; his daughter Benazir would quite often reiterate this when in power. The Kashmiri anguish, therefore, is all the more understandable. More particularly because Kashmiris had been intensely emotional about the senior Bhutto as they saw in him the savior after he commissioned Pakistan’s nuclear program and threw up a rhetorical coinage of “Islamic Bomb”.
It was because of this perception that Bhutto’s execution in late seventies triggered a violent wave in Kashmir against General Zia and his supporters. Curiously, when Zia died in a mysterious air crash in 1988, Kashmir shut down in protest.
Many doubt if Zardari enjoys the hundred percent support from Pakistani army whose ex generals have recently pledged to take the Kashmir movement to its logical end and “eliminate the hurdles” coming in its way.
WHEN Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed as Pakistan's prime minister in 1977, his 24-year-old daughter, Benazir sounded optimistic about General Zia-ul-Haq and expected the coup leader to hold elections in a few months.
A British newspaper recalls Zulfikar’s response: “Don't be an idiot, Pinkie,” said her father, using the nickname inspired by her rosy complexion as an infant, “Armies do not take over power to relinquish it.”
Going by this paternal piece of advice, which Benazir must have shared with her husband, Zardari’s ‘offer’ to India seems more idiotic than Pinkie’s remark. And Indians are not so jumpy that they would celebrate Zardari’s offer because they know what it takes to realize the ideological goals after hitching to a coalition. We still remember how zealously the BJP, after getting lead in elections announced that it would rewrite the Indian constitution to integrate J&K and construct the Ram Temple at Babri Masjid. But the compulsions of a coalition saw their leaders praising Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the icon of secularism.
So Mr Zardari! If you aspire to become Mr 100 percent after Benazir’s death please hold back your crate of mangoes. You should remember the Indian season for the fruit begins from April. Sorry, the mangoes are unripe.

(The article appeared in Rising Kashmir on March 10,2008)