10 September 2010 By Shuddhabrata Sengupta Two days ago, I noticed a video
posted by somebody on my facebook page. It was yet
another video from Kashmir. It was tagged ‘brothers
please watch, sisters please do not watch’. In later
incarnations of the video, posted repeatedly on
Facebook sites, Youtube channels and on blogs. it was
tagged ‘Indian Security Forces Kashmiri Youth to Walk
Naked on Road’ or ‘Kashmir – India’s Abu Gharib
(sic)’. The video was available on Youtube
on the night of 8th/9th September, 2010,
before being taken down.
Notwithstanding the misspelling of Abu Gharaib in
these tags, there was something compellingly accurate
in the designation. What I saw, and what i have seen
unfold subsequently as a response by the Indian state
to the circulation of this video, makes Abu Gharaib
look like child’s play. Welcome to the virtual, viral,
televisual reality of the nightmare of Kashmir. For the
past several weeks, I have been watching, and
forwarding, several videos uploaded on to Youtube and
facebook from Kashmir. Every video that I have seen
contains evidence of the brutality of the Indian
state’s footprint on the Kashmir valley, and of the
steadfast yet resilient courage of its people, and of
the innovative use they have been making of the
internet to bear witness to their oppression. See
for instance – Innocent Man being Beaten in Kashmir. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA5s3tqG8CM I have
seen paramilitary and police personnel open fire on
unarmed or stone pelting crowds, mercilessly beat up
young people and children, attack doctors, patients
and nurses in hospitals, smash windows of homes, steal
chickens and livestock and hurl the most vulgar
invectives at ordinary people. I have watched the
armed might of the Indian state retreat in the face of
the moral courage of the opposition it encounters on
the streets of Kashmir. It doesn’t take much to find
these videos. Run a search with ‘Kashmir, Stone
Pelting. indian Occupation’ on Youtube. Of follow the
links and uploads on the growing cluster of Facebook
pages from and about Kashmir. But
nothing prepared me for what I saw when I clicked on
the video that said ‘brothers watch, sisters don’t
watch’. I am a person who works with moving images. I
think about moving images, about video. I watch all
kinds of things. Not all of which are prettly, or
edifying. But the sheer extent of humiliation that was
visible in this video was not something that I was
prepared to see, not even from Kashmir. The
video, not more than three minutes long, is a piece of
uncut, unedited footage, in all probability (judging
from the quality and resolution of the image) taken
from a cell phone. It shows four young Kashmiri men,
walking, across what appears to be freshly harvested
fields (so it could be October-November, or,
March-April) egged along by what appear to be
paramilitary personnel and some policemen. Some of the
security personnel wear khaki, some others wear olive
green fatigues. One wears the black bandanna of a
commando. Others wear helmets and caps. Some have
bullet proof vests. The four young men they are
‘escorting’ are naked. They hold their clothes in
their hands. From what one can make out in the video,
their faces, reveal their acute shame, distress and
embarassment. The paramilitaries and policemen taunt
them as they walk. The main voice is that of a person
who seems to be holding the device that is capturing
the image. We hear him speak in perfectly legible
colloquial Hindi. “Move,
Move, Move, Keep moving, sisterfuckers.” “Raise
your hands, I’ll hit you otherwise.” “Your
shoes are very good. Sisterfucker, (then we hear
another, more muffled voice say what seems to be –
“why are your shoes so dirty”) “Fold
your clothes, collect them, hold up the clothes” (so
that the genitals are not covered.) “The
sisterfuckers have been making us run after them since
the morning.” “The
police station is where we need to take them.” The
video does not appear to have been taken in the recent
weeks. The fields have been harvested. It has to be
either autumn or spring. But it has not been taken
that long ago either. It has to be from after
cellphones were allowed to be used in Kashmir, and
after cellphones capable of shooting video became
cheap, and popular, which places the incident, and
it’s recording, roughly within the last two to three
years. In some of the official and media responses
that are beginning to trickle in, this business of
‘the video is not recent’ is getting some milage. As
if somehow, the reality that the video portrays needs
to be distanced from the current meltdown in Kashmir.
Assuming that is the case, the implications of what
the video shows become even more disturbing. It proves
that a systematic humiliation of the Kashmiri
population is part of the standard operating procedure
of the security establishment of the Indian state in
Kashmir.This is neither anything new, nor associated
with the current wave of unrest. It has been in
operation for several years now. The
banal violence of the scene is in some ways far more
distressing than the images gun battles and blood on
the streets that we have become accustomed to
harvesting from the past few months in Kashmir. At
least in the pitched street battles, we see,
adversaries, albeit unequal adversaries, policemen,
paramilitaries, soldiers one one side and the angry
tide of stone pelters on the other. Here,
there are no adversaries. Prisoners are not in a
position to be adversarial when they are surrounded by
heavily armed men in uniform. What we see instead are
unarmed captives, people who are in no position to
threaten or endanger the security forces. That such
people should be made to undergo a humiliation such as
this is proof of the extent to which the forces of the
Indian state in Kashmir have become bruatlized by the
experience of serving in Kashmir. They
(the men in uniform) do not need to strip people naked
and make them walk in public. There is something
utterly, lethally gratuitous in their action. There is
nothing that says that arrested or detained citizens
should be marched to police stations without their
clothes on, in public view. No imperative of self
defence, defence of the realm, public safety and
security, or the Indian constitution requires them to
visit this indignity on the four young people in their
charge. Nowehere is it indicated that one can behave
like this even with convicted criminals, captured
terrorists or undertrials.That they choose to act as
they do only indicates that the laughing, taunting men
in uniform see the four young men, and by extension,
any Kashmiri that they can lay their hands on, as
sub-human beings, as animals. By doing this, they only
expose the extent to which they have allowed the state
to turn them (the men in uniform) into racist,
colonizing brutes. The
primary voice on the video betrays a calculated, cold,
cynical disregard for human dignity. You can recognize
that mocking tone, even if you do not understand the
language, the moment you hear it. The paramilitaries
are walking casually, one wears a commando’s black
bandanna, others wear fatigues, some carry sticks,
others carry guns. They walk at leisure, without any
urgency, as if – parading captives naked through open
fields, was a perfectly normal, routine thing to be
doing in Kashmir. (which suggests, horrifyingly, that
it is indeed a perfectly normal, routine thing to be
doing). We have all heard (from ex prisoners, human
rights activists and lawyers) that sexual humiliation
of young men is a routine practice during
interrogations in Kashmir. That men are asked to
simulate sodomy on each other, and that they are
photographed in the course of doing so, and that these
images are held out as means of blackmail and
intimidation. Contemporary definitions of torture have
expanded to include non-invasive and psychological
terror methods, foremost amongst whom is sexual
humiliation. The sobriety of rural Kashmiri society is
not geared to deal with the spectacle of the
humiliation of naked young men being made to march out
in the open. Such an act is bound to leave deep scars
in the consciousness of whomsoever it has been
perpetrated on and whosoever was unfortunate enough to
have observed it. It is designed to do so. Why do
coerced nakedness and humiliation make such a
perfectly repulsive pair? Perhaps because we think of
being naked only with our selves, or with someone whom
we can be intimate with, or who is able to care for
us. Children can be naked to their parents, lovers can
be naked to each other. A patient can be naked to his
or her doctor. Or, one can choose, lucidly, joyously,
to be naked, (the insane do not ‘choose’ to be naked,
they simply ‘are’ naked) even in public, in moments of
total abandon, when all inhibitions can be thrown away
in a free act of the will. In the woods, in a river,
by the sea, on stage. In any instance, being naked,
somehow suggests a condition of freedom, or care, or
intimacy. Something we freely enter into and govern
for ourselves. It is this condition of intimacy and
care that is twisted and turned inside out when
nakedness is coerced. Coerced nakedness takes place in
contexts that are the very opposite of intimacy and
care. It invariably takes place in contexts that are
cold, violent, brutally impersonal but horrifyingly
intimate. This is a kind of nakedness that lays bare
the darkest secrets of power. That it really doesn’t
care about the humanity of the person in its clutches.
In its transparency, what it makes most naked, is
power itself. It is no wonder therefore, that this
video will now stand alongside the images of naked
Jewish prisoners being made to line up in Nazi
concentration camps, and the disturbing legacy of the
now, all too familiar images from Abu Gharaib. That
the uniformed representatives of the Indian state
should choose to wear the nakedness of their violence
with such pride and aplomb says something shocking and
profound about the sheer immorality of India’s ongoing
military occupation of the Kashmir valley. After this,
it is not necessary to give even a shred of
consideration to the frayed patchwork of arguments
that constitutes the indian state’s line on Kashmir.
And no, this is not an exception. The uniformed men in
the video do not behave as if they were performing
under ‘exceptional circumstances’. It looks like a
jolly outing. A stroll with a few trophies, as casual
as can be. At the
tail end of the three minute video. We hear a high
pitched keening voices, and then mocking echoes, and
laughter. The keening voice can be heard lamenting –
in Kashmiri – “Hata Khodayo” (something like ‘Oh God’
) several times. It is not possible to determine
whether these voices are of onlookers, (perhaps of
women and/or older men) or of the paramilitaries
themselves. What is impossible to dispute is that the
lamentations/mock lamentations are in Kashmiri,
proving conclusively, that the incident occured in the
Kashmir valley. All attempts at suggesting that the
video is ‘not from Kashmir’ fly against the face of
this fact. In any
case, we soon hear, in counterpoint to these
‘laments’, such as they are. We hear a set of mocking,
echoing responses that mirror the music and cadence of
the lamentations exactly as a chorus would echo a
soloist. The chorus is interrupted by cackling
laughter. It is as if the men in the uniform of Indian
security forces were not content with the mere
humiliation of bodies. That in fact, they needed to
pervert and mock the ways in which a people mourn
their indignities in order to extract the pleasure
that they felt entitled to in the course of this
grotesque incident. When even the lamentations of the
Kashmiri people are not safe because of the predatory
presence of the occupying force, then it is time for
the world to sit up and say that we have had enough of
the Indian state’s mayhem in Kashmir.
Characteristically, the video was pulled down, on both
Facebook and Youtube, repeatedly, in the course of
last evening, night and today. There was some
discussion on different Facebook pages about whether
this occurred due to the ‘nudity’ in the video. I too
was persuaded for a while that this might be the case.
But a quick search for nude content on Youtube showed
up a whole range of things from Naturist videos to
medical material that featured nudity. In fact there
is a whole discussion on ‘Non Sexual Nudity’ on
Youtube that indicates that it is not Youtube policy.
The Youtube ‘Terms’ webpage makes no mention of nudity
whatsoever. It is however Facebook policy to not have
nudity on facebook videos and photographs. Through
much of last night. A concerted online effort across
two facebook pages by a constellation of people who
did not know each other prior to this incident made
sure that the video was momentarily up on Youtube.
Notices went out across facebook walls to download the
video from the concerned Youtube site so that the
video could have a distributed, viral presence across
several hundreds, if not thousands of computers,. By
the morning of Thursday, the 9th of September, the
effort to ‘erase’ the video from public consciousness
had failed. News of
the video (and responses to it) made it to newspapers
like Greater Kashmir, websites such Aalaw-Kashmirc
alls.org and even the Indian Express. The Kashmir
based sites carried extensive reports, quoting the
shocked responses of the people who had seen the
videos. These included some responses from several
people who are non-Kashmiri Indian citizens. The reprt
on the Aalaw-Kashmircalls.org websites explicitly
quotes reactions on Facebook walls. ” The
video has sent shockwaves and stirred a debate among
the tens of thousands of users on Facebook. The video
shared by outraged Kashmiri youth with their online
friends and contacts has evoked sharp condemnation
from the Facebook users across the globe, including
India. Some of the users have even compared the abuse
of the alleged stone pelters by the forces with the
prisoners of infamous Abu Gharib jail in Iraq. “I am
daughter of an Indian army officer. I’m embarrassed
and shocked,” comments, Avleen Gill, a graduate from
Saint Bede’s college
“Kaptaan Singh, a resident of North India’s Punjab
state comments: “After looking at this video, I feel
ashamed to call myself Indian.” [See Greater Kashmir,
Aalaw Kashmir and the Indian Express.] By the afternoon of Thursday, 9th
September, the response of the state had changed. From
attempts at erasure, the state moved into a state of
denial, and characteristic intimidation. Union Home
Minister P Chidambaram questioned the authenticity of
the video on the grounds that the ‘people seen in it
have not spoken up’. Leading some to say that were a
mass grave of anonymous dead people to be discovered
in Kashmir (as happens from time to time) ,
Mr.Chidambaram, would doubt the authenticity of the
report on the grounds that the cadavers had not
identified themselves or spoken of the circumstances
of their deaths and burial. On the
other hand, a CRPF spokesman denied that such an
incident could have taken place, beacuse in his
opinion ‘it is difficult to keep even rapes secret in
Kashmir’ (which involves the interesting tacit
assumption that attempts are made, from time to time,
to keep rapes secret). A spokesperson of J & K police,
however, said that charges would be filed against
Facebook, Youtube and all those who have uploaded and
distributed the videos on the grounds of ‘maligning
the forces’ by distributing such objectionable
material. In the J & K police’s version, neither the
authenticity nor the veracity of the video is an
issue, what is offensive is the effort to circulate
the material in question, because the contents of the
video can ‘malign’ the forces. The varied wings of the
indian state have displayed the full spectrum of
ostrich like obduracy, from attempts at erasure to
incredulity to denial to attempts at intimidation, but
none of these efforts seem to be of any avail. It
needs to be noted, that so far, the Indian state’s
response to this scandal has been far short of the
expectations set by international precedents. The US
Army may not have come off with a shining reputation
from Abu Ghraib, but the US Government realized the
gravity of the situation and took action to punish at
least the primary perpetrators of the outrage (even if
those who dictated the policies that made the outrages
occur went scot-free). The recent incident of a former
Israeli conscript, a woman named Eden Aberjil who
posted photographs of herself posing with blindfolded
Palestininan prisoners attracted severe criticism
world wide, including within Israel. Several serving
Israeli women conscripts condemned Aberjil’s conduct
in public and even the Israeli Army, (not an
organization known for its sensitivity in human rights
matters) took a stern view of the matter. The
Huffington Post report on
the issue says - “These
are disgraceful photos,” said Capt. Barak Raz, an
Israeli military spokesman. “Aside from matters of
information security, we are talking about a serious
violation of our morals and our ethical code and
should this soldier be serving in active duty today, I
would imagine that no doubt she would be court-martialed
immediately,” he told Associated Press Television
News. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/
16/eden-abergil-facebook-pic_n_683816.html
Contrast these responses with the conduct of
responsible officers of the Government of India, from
the Union Home Minister downwards. If ever there were
to be an ‘object lesson’ in how not to handle a
situation like this – we will only have to turn to the
conduct of Chidambaram and his minions. As of
now, the video is up, on distributed servers, in
several locations and circulating, through emails, mms
messages, bluetooth transfers, blog posts and facebook
notices (not of the videos themselves any longer, but
of descriptions and commentary). There is no way that
the Indian state can any longer evade responsibility
for the venality of its actions, especially as they
are visible on this video. Even if
the state can set its house in order, speak in one
voice, persuade the lunatics who run the army in
Kashmir to see the pointlessness of making a fetish of
the AFSPA, and announce some kind of tepid ‘package’
by way of an insult to the people of Kashmir on the
occasion of Eid, then too, it will not succeed in
fooling either the people of Kashmir, or the world.
This one video, with the perfect timing of its
appearance, has succeeded in pulling the fig leaf off
the true character of the Indian state’s rule in
Kashmir as nothing else has. It has exposed how the
state acts, it has shown us that the state is
‘leaking’ information about its own misdeeds, and it
has proven that the resistance in Kashmir and about
Kashmir is getting increasingly sophisticated. If the
state wants to prevail, it can do so only by recourse
to massive armed force, or fraud and dissimulation at
a hitherto unimaginable scale. As of
tonight, the mainstream Indian media has not covered
this incident with the seriousness it deserves.
Neither television, nor print media have tried to look
beyond the state of denial that the home minister is
in, vis-a-vis, this scandal. If this were any other
civilized country, there would be immediate demands
for his resignation. If such demands do not gather
force, we will demonstrate how far we are as a nation
from being civilized. The conduct of the Indian
security forces in Kashmir threatens to make
barbarians of all Indians in the eyes of the world. I do
hope that even all those who consider themselves to be
genuinely patriotic Indians will be disgusted by what
the video reveals about Indian might in Kashmir. If
they hold their patriotism in the slightest regard,
then, they should realize that the continuing
occupation of Kashmir, which breeds perversities such
as this, is only a blot of shame on what they hold
dear as the fair name of their country and on their
patriotism. I hope that they will find it in
themselves to act with the honour that they take pride
in, and refuse any longer to be complicit, willingly
or unwillingly, in the nightmare that haunts the
waking and sleeping hours of the people of Kashmir
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