But it was too late for those games; the damage had been done. It had been demonstrated in no uncertain terms to people in Kashmir that they lived on sufferance and that if they didn’t behave themselves they could be put under siege, starved, deprived of essential commodities and medical supplies. The real blockade became a psychological one. The last fragile link between India and Kashmir had all but snapped.
To expect matters to end there was, of course, absurd. Hadn’t anybody noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the Government of India tried so hard to silence in Kashmir massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed people came out to reclaim their cities, their streets and mohallas (neighbourhoods). They simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and by a remarkable display of raw courage.
Raised in a playground of army camps, check-points, and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a sound track, the younger generation suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all the dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For them, it was nothing short of an epiphany. In full flow, not even the fear of death seemed to hold them back. And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest, or second-largest, army in the world? What threat does it hold? Who knows this better than the people of India, who won their independence in the way that they did?
The circumstances in Kashmir being what they were, it was hard for the spin doctors to fall back on the same old, same old – to claim that it was all the doing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), or that people were being coerced by militants. Since the 1930s onwards, the question of who can claim the right to represent that elusive thing known as Kashmiri sentiment has been bitterly contested. Was it Sheikh Abdullah? The Muslim Conference? Who is it today? The mainstream political parties? The Hurriyat? The militants? But this time around, the people were in charge. There had been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory had been so sustained and widespread.
The mainstream political parties of Kashmir – the National Conference, the People’s Democratic Party – fêted by the Deep State and the Indian media, despite the pathetic voter turnout in election after election, appeared dutifully for debates in New Delhi’s TV studios but couldn’t muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. Through the worst years of oppression, the armed militants had been seen as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward. But in 2008, if they were around at all, they seemed to be content to take a back seat and let the people do the fighting for a change.
The separatist leaders who did appear to speak at the rallies have not been leaders so much as followers, guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people, energy that exploded on Kashmir’s streets. These leaders, such as they are, were being presented with a full-blown revolution. The only condition seemed to be that they do as the people said. If they said things that people did not wish to hear, they were gently persuaded to come out, publicly apologize, and correct their course. This applied to all of them, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who at one public rally proclaimed himself the movement’s only leader. It was a monumental political blunder that very nearly shattered the fragile new alliance between the various factions of the struggle. Within hours he retracted his statement. Like it or not, this is democracy. No democrat could pretend otherwise.
Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarmed around places that held terrible memories for them. They demolished bunkers, broke through cordons of concertina wire and stared straight down the barrels of the soldiers’ machine guns, saying what very few in India want to hear: ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ We Want Freedom. And, it has to be said, they shouted in equal numbers and with equal intensity, ‘Jeevey jeevey Pakistan!’ Long live Pakistan!
That sound reverberated through the valley like the drumbeat of steady rain on a tin roof, or like the roll of thunder before an electric storm. It was the plebiscite that was never held, the referendum that has been indefinitely postponed.
On 15 August, India’s Independence Day, the city of Srinagar shut down completely. The Bakshi stadium, where Governor N. N. Vohra hoisted the Indian flag, was empty except for a few officials. Hours later, Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of the city (where, in 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and mentor of the controversial ‘Hinduization’ of children’s history textbooks, had started a tradition of flag-hoisting by the Border Security Force), was taken over by thousands of people who hoisted the Pakistani flag and wished each other ‘Happy belated Independence Day’ (Pakistan celebrates Independence on 14 August) and ‘Happy Slavery Day’. Humour, obviously, has survived India’s many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.
On 16 August, more than 300,000 people marched to Pampore, to the village of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in cold blood five days earlier. He had been part of a massive march to the Line of Control demanding that since the Jammu road had been blocked, it was only logical that the Srinagar–Muzaffarabad highway be opened for goods and people, the way it used to be before Kashmir was partitioned.
On 18 August, an equal number gathered in Srinagar on the vast grounds of the TRC (Tourist Reception Centre, not the Truth and Reconciliation Committee), close to the United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), to submit a memorandum asking for three things: the end to Indian rule, the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, and an investigation into two decades of war crimes committed with almost complete impunity by the Indian army and police.
The day before the rally the Deep State was hard at work. A senior journalist friend called me to say that late in the afternoon the home secretary had called a high-level meeting in New Delhi. Also present were the defence secretary and the intelligence chiefs. The purpose of the meeting, he said, was to brief the editors of TV news channels that the government had reason to believe that the insurrection was being managed by a small splinter cell of the ISI and to request that the news channels keep this piece of exclusive, highly secret intelligence in mind while covering (or preferably not covering?) the news from Kashmir. Unfortunately for the Deep State, things had gone so far that the TV stations, had they obeyed those instructions, would have run the risk of looking ridiculous. Thankfully, the revolution would, after all, be televised.
On the night of 17 August, the police sealed the city. Streets were barricaded; thousands of armed police manned the barriers. The roads leading into Srinagar were blocked. For the first time in eighteen years, the police had to plead with Hurriyat leaders to address the rally at the TRC grounds instead of marching right up to the UNMOGIP office, which is on Gupkar Road, Srinagar’s Green Zone, where for years the Indian establishment has barricaded itself in style and splendour.
On the morning of the 18th, people began pouring into Srinagar from villages and towns across the valley. In trucks, Tempos, jeeps, buses, and on foot. Once again, barriers were broken and people reclaimed their city. The police were faced with the choice of either stepping aside or executing a massacre. They stepped aside. Not a single bullet was fired.
The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air. Everyone had a banner: houseboat owners, traders, students, lawyers, doctors. One said, ‘We are all prisoners, set us free.’ Another said, ‘Democracy without freedom is Demon-crazy.’ Demon Crazy. That was a good one. Perhaps he was referring to the twisted logic of a country that needed to commit communal carnage in order to bolster its secular credentials. Or the insanity that permits the world’s largest democracy to administer the world’s largest military occupation and continue to call itself a democracy.
There was a green flag on every lamp-post, every roof, every bus stop, and on the
tops of chinar trees. A big one fluttered outside the All India Radio building. Road signs to Hazratbal, Batmaloo, Sopore were painted over. Rawalpindi, they said. Or simply, Pakistan.
It would be a mistake to assume that the public expression of affection for Pakistan automatically translates into a desire to accede to Pakistan. Some of it has to do with gratitude for the support – cynical or otherwise – for what Kashmiris see as a freedom struggle and the Indian state sees as a terrorist campaign. It also has to do with mischief. With saying and doing what galls India, the enemy, most of all. (It’s easy to scoff at the idea of a ‘freedom struggle’ that wishes to distance itself from a country that is supposed to be a democracy and align itself with another that has been ruled, for the most part, by military dictators. A country whose army committed genocide in what is now Bangladesh. A country that is even now being torn apart by its own ethnic war. These are important questions, but right now, perhaps it’s more useful to wonder what the so-called democracy did in Kashmir to make people hate it so.)
Everywhere there were Pakistani flags, everywhere the cry Pakistan se rishta kya? La ilaha illallah. What is our bond with Pakistan? There is no god but Allah. Azadi ka matlab kya? La ilaha illallah. What does freedom mean? There is no god but Allah.
For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hard – if not impossible – to understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said, ‘What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?’ Her reply silenced me.
Standing on the grounds of the TRC, surrounded by a sea of green flags, I found it impossible to doubt or ignore the deeply Islamic nature of the uprising taking place around me, and equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jihad. For Kashmiris, it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties and confusions that freedom, struggles have. This one cannot by any means call itself pristine, and it will always be stigmatized by, and will some day, I hope, have to account for – among other things – the brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire community from the Kashmir Valley.
As the crowd continued to swell, I listened carefully to the slogans, because rhetoric often clarifies things and holds the key to all kinds of understanding. I’d heard many of them already, a few years before, at a militant’s funeral. A new one, obviously coined after the blockade, was Kashmir ki mandi! Rawalpindi! (It doesn’t lend itself to translation, but it means: Kashmir’s marketplace? Rawalpindi!) Another was Khooni lakir tod do, aar paar jod do (Break down the blood-soaked Line of Control; let Kashmir be united again). There were plenty of insults and humiliation for India: Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do (O oppressors, O wicked ones, get out of our Kashmir). Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai! (The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours!).
The slogan that cut through me like a knife and clean broke my heart was this one: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan (Naked, starving India, more precious than life itself—Pakistan). Why was it so galling, so painful to listen to this? I tried to work it out and settled on three reasons. First, because we all know that the first part of the slogan is the embarrassing and unadorned truth about India, the emerging superpower. Second, because all Indians who are not nanga or bhookha are – and have been – complicit in complex and historical ways in the cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal.
And third, because it was painful to listen to people who have suffered so much themselves mock others who suffer in different ways, but no less intensely, under the same oppressor. In that slogan I saw the seeds of how easily victims can become perpetrators.
It took hours for Mirwaiz Umer Farooq (the chairman of Hurriyat) and Syed Ali Shah Geelani to wade through the thronging crowds and make it onto the podium. When they arrived, they were borne aloft on the shoulders of young men, over the surging crowd. The roar of greeting was deafening. Mirwaiz Umer spoke first. He repeated the demand that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Disturbed Areas Act and Public Safety Act – under which thousands have been killed, jailed, and tortured – be revoked. He called for the release of political prisoners, for the Srinagar–Muzaffarabad road to be opened for the free movement of goods and people, and for the demilitarization of the Kashmir Valley.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani began his address with a recitation from the Quran. He then said what he has said before, on hundreds of occasions. The only way for the struggle to succeed, he said, was to turn to the Quran for guidance. He said that Islam would guide the struggle and that it was a complete social and moral code that would govern the people of a free Kashmir. He said that Pakistan had been created as the home of Islam, and that that goal should never be subverted. He said that just as Pakistan belonged to Kashmir, Kashmir belonged to Pakistan. He said that minority communities would have full rights and their places of worship would be safe. Each point he made was applauded.
Oddly enough, the apparent doctrinal clarity of what he said made everything a little unclear. I wondered how the somewhat disparate views of the various factions in the freedom struggle would resolve themselves – the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s vision of an independent state, Geelani’s desire to merge with Pakistan, and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq balanced precariously between them.
An old man with a red eye standing next to me said, ‘Kashmir was one country. Half was taken by India, the other half by Pakistan. Both by force. We want freedom.’ I wondered if, in the new dispensation, the old man would get a hearing. I wondered what he would think of the trucks that roared down the highways in the plains of India, owned and driven by men who knew nothing of history, or of Kashmir, but still had slogans on their tail-gates that said, ‘Doodh maango to kheer denge; Kashmir maango to cheer denge’ (Ask for milk, you’ll get cream; ask for Kashmir, we’ll tear you open).
Briefly, I had another thought. I imagined myself standing in the heart of a Rashtriya Swayasevak Sangh or Vishva Hindu Parishad rally being addressed by L. K. Advani (then president of the BJP). Replace the word Islam with the word Hindutva, replace the word Pakistan with Hindustan, replace the sea of green flags with saffron ones, and we would have the BJP’s nightmare vision of an ideal India.
Is that what we should accept as our future? Monolithic religious states handing down a complete social and moral code, ‘a complete way of life’? Millions of us in India reject the Hindutva project. Our rejection springs from love, from passion, from a kind of idealism, from having an enormous emotional stake in the society in which we live. What our neighbours do, how they choose to handle their affairs, does not diminish but strengthens our argument.
Arguments that spring from love are also fraught with danger. It is for the people of Kashmir to agree or disagree with the Islamic project (which is as much contested, in equally complex ways, by Muslims all over the world as Hindutva is contested by Hindus). It is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision for what kind of society they are fighting for. It is time to offer people something more than martyrs, slogans, and vague generalizations. Those who wish to turn to the Quran for guidance will no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Quran does not make a place? Do the Hindus of Jammu and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits now living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for sixty-three years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the ‘complete social and moral code’? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi
Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed continue? History offers many models for Kashmir’s thinkers and intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan?
In liberation struggles, few things are more important than dreams. A lazy utopia and a flawed sense of justice will have consequences that do not bear thinking about. This is not the time for intellectual sloth or a reluctance to assess a situation clearly and honestly. It could be argued that the prevarication of Maharaja Hari Singh in 1947 has been Kashmir’s great modern tragedy, one that eventually led to unthinkable bloodshed and the prolonged bondage of people who were very nearly free.
In 2008, the spectre of partition quickly reared its head. Hindutva networks were alive with rumours about Hindus in the valley being attacked and forced to flee. In response, phone calls from Jammu reported that an armed Hindu militia was threatening a massacre and that Muslims from the two Hindu majority districts were preparing to flee. (Memories of the bloodbath that ensued and claimed the lives of more than a million people when India and Pakistan were partitioned have come flooding back. That nightmare will haunt all of us forever.)
There is absolutely no reason to believe that history will repeat itself. Not unless it is made to. Not unless people actively work to create such a cataclysm.
However, none of these fears of what the future holds can justify the continued military occupation of a nation and a people. No more than the old colonial argument about how the natives were not ready for freedom justified the colonial project.