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.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Will Abdullahs, Muftis bite Hurriyat’s bait?
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Two tales of two cities
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
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
Friday, August 1, 2008
Will foxes cry together?
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)
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
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!
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
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)
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
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
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
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)
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
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)
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)
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