02 September 2010By Zahid Rafiq
I have always
avoided physical fights. In college, even though I was
part of some gang, my friends always criticised me for
being weak. They said I couldn’t even beat people they
had already cornered. I wasn’t weak. It was just that
before the crucial moment when one is drawn into a
fight, I’d realise the futility of it. I hate the word
pacifist, but I am one. There must be better ways than
violence — negotiations or debates, perhaps — to
resolve conflicts, I thought.
But today, if I
weren’t a journalist and if writing was not an act of
defiance, I know I’d be throwing stones in the streets
of Srinagar, just like my friends.
EVER SINCE I
remember, I have been bearing witness to the
repression and massacres in Kashmir. Everything has
seemed grey forever but in the past two months,
Kashmir looks like a black-and-white postcard. The
world, it seems, has conspired into silence, almost
with a finger on its lips. It is on the altar of that
finger and closed lips that pacifism is sacrificed
every day. It is from this silence that all violence
begins.
With every phone
call from home announcing heartbreak, I could feel
violence build up inside me, stone by stone. I was in
Delhi when my mother called to say the vegetable
seller near our house had been shot. When I left home
for Delhi, he was the last person from my
neighbourhood I’d seen. We had exchanged smiles and
shook hands. I felt a murderous rage.
My younger
brother told me on the phone the CRPF had gone berserk
outside, smashing windows and looking to thrash anyone
who could even walk.
A Kashmiri
friend working for a Delhi think-tank that focuses on
Kashmir — what they like to call a Track-II
organisation — called me one evening. Between his
sobs, I figured he had seen the picture of
nine-year-old Sameer Ahmad, who had been beaten to
death by the CRPF in Batamaloo. There were
flagellation marks all over his body; his half-chewed
toffee still in his mouth. I was supposed to calm my
friend down, but we took turns to console each other.
He said he was going back to Kashmir the next morning.
“Here, they are all lying, and they believe their own
lies,” he said.
In India, there
is a myth, largely perpetrated by conformist sections
of the media, that the army and CRPF protect Kashmiris.
No Kashmiri feels protected by the army and CRPF.
People in India call them security forces and believe
they save Kashmiris from terrorists but it is from
them that Kashmiris want to be saved. Kashmiris want
these occupying forces off their land. The only
feelings Kashmiris have for them are of fear, hatred
and revenge.
In the past two
months, 55 unarmed civilians have been killed in
Kashmir in police and CRPF firing. Most of them have
been boys who were either throwing stones or playing
in their neighbourhoods. I was in Kashmir when the
unrest started to build and every funeral I went to, I
saw how angry Kashmiris were. In Gangbugh, I saw
thousands defying curfew to attend the funeral of a
17-year-old boy. While his two friends said on camera
that they had seen him being picked up by the police,
the latter claimed he had drowned. But the dead boy
had been a good swimmer and his autopsy showed two
blunt injuries on his head.
In an interview
on NDTV a day later, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah
remarked, “If his life had been so important, why
didn’t the other two boys pull him out.” It was a
really insensitive thing to say but this is also
Omar’s worldview. For him, Kashmiris are just
ungrateful agents ready to die for PDP’s money and at
ISI’s bidding. Omar got this view from the life he
spent in mainland India, which means most of his 40
years. As for the Muftis, who walk a line so thin in
Kashmir politics, it is hard to tell when they are
separatists and when Indian nationalists. All they
want is power. They want the Centre to dethrone Omar
and install Mehbooba instead.
An almost opaque
membrane divides the Abdullahs and Kashmiris. While
the gun barrel stares at Kashmiris at all times, it
rests, as Omar put it nicely about himself during the
same interview, against the shoulders of the Abdullahs.
In Kashmir, people say that the Abdullahs and Muftis
will never understand why ‘suicidal’ Kashmiris defy
curfew and throw stones because none of their own lie
buried under the 70,000 tombstones Kashmir has
acquired in the past two decades. I now understand why
an old relative of ours, who was a die-hard NC
supporter earlier, felt personally betrayed by the
Abdullahs. He would keep repeating almost every day
that Sher-e- Kashmir (Sheikh Abdullah) had stood up to
free Kashmiris from the tyrannical rule of the Dogra
Maharajas but created a more bitter legacy in its
place.
I saw a picture
of an old man clinging to the dead body of his young
son near Hazuri Bagh in Srinagar. Half-a-dozen
policemen tried to drag him away from the dead body.
He didn’t want to let go. His shirt was smeared with
blood, his white beard stained a little red. The
longer I looked at the picture, the louder it sounded.
I couldn’t imagine what it must be for a father who is
being forcibly stopped from hugging his dead son and
grieving. Can Omar’s appeal stop the old father from
defying curfew and joining the ‘mob’? What would Omar
have done had he been in the old man’s place — as a
father, as a Chief Minister? Would he have torn the
city down? I imagined Srinagar burning.
And then I
thought of all the fathers, brothers, uncles, friends
and neighbours I’d seen in Kashmir trying to wake up
their loved dead ones and I felt they were doing too
little by throwing stones, burning police stations and
Special Operations Group camps.
Kashmir is too
long, too tragic and too bloody a story to be called a
lawand- order problem. If only the boys orphaned by
the armed forces in Kashmir were to pick up stones,
you would have 60,000 stone-pelters on the streets. If
those widowed by the armed forces joined, there would
be 30,000 women stoning every bunker, every camp and
every soldier.
When a boy in
Kashmir walks towards an armed soldier with a stone in
his hand, he is aware of the difference in power. His
best shot could give the soldier a bump or a few
stitches, if he is able to get past the leg guards,
the bulletproof vest and the helmet. But the soldier —
and the boy knows this well — with his gun or teargas
shell, can leave him dead or seriously wounded.
The very act of
choosing a stone as his weapon, the boy believes, puts
him on higher moral ground. His aim is not to kill the
soldier, but to make a point that something is
seriously wrong. This is why not even a single soldier
or policeman has been killed in the stone-pelting in
the past two years, even though we have seen plenty of
images of a lone soldier being captured by five stone-pelters.
Kashmiris have
been waiting for India and the world to listen to them
for too long but it was as if no one understood their
language. It was as if Kashmir realised that it must
talk in a primitive language known to all humans. In
the past two months, they have been talking in the
language of stones.
The mothers, to
whom Omar appealed to keep their children indoors,
have come out on the streets pelting stones
themselves. When I saw the images of stone-pelting on
television last month with the captions saying the LeT
was inciting trouble through paid agents, I saw some
familiar faces in the ‘paid mob’ from my neighbourhood.
I saw two sisters pelting stones. I knew them; their
brother had been picked up by the BSF in 2005 and one
of them had chased the BSF jeep barefoot. Ten days
later, the brother was found dumped on a nearby
street; his skin burnt, his body crushed by heavy
rollers and wires inserted into his penis. He was
never the same again. I saw a middle-aged woman whose
husband had gone missing in 1995, I saw a mother whose
son had been killed by the armed forces. Each one of
them had a story to tell from the past 20 years and
they were finally saying it through stones. Their
stones hardly reach the soldiers but that is not
important. It is the act of throwing, not of hitting,
which they makes them come out of their homes.
Women have been
the silent sufferers in this conflict. Rapes and
molestations that are a part of military psychological
operations, have been under-reported. But the women
know it, and so do the Médecins Sans Frontières
counsellors and many psychiatrists. For them, the act
of pelting stones is cathartic. With every stone they
throw, they lessen the weight of the mountain that
their hearts have become.
A few weeks ago,
my five-year-old cousin, Athar, ventured out of his
gate in Batamaloo and the soldiers ran towards him
shouting, ‘Hum mar dalenge’ (We will kill you). He
rushed inside, struck dumb. My aunt begged him to talk
but only after 10 long minutes was he able to tell her
what the soldiers had shouted at him. My aunt, a
commerce graduate, wiping her tears in anger, perched
him on her shoulders and took him out in a profreedom
procession near their house. They both shouted
proazadi slogans to let out their fear, and it worked.
It was the first time for both of them. My aunt now
writes, ‘Go India, Go Back’ on all the rupee notes
that she handles and my cousin scribbles it on walls —
the only English sentence he can spell. It is because
of children like these that Srinagar, a city of rolled
down shutters, empty roads, dusty walls and barred
doors, is painted with pro-freedom graffiti all over.
THE
MOVEMENT in Kashmir has moved away from the
shadow of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kashmir has made a
transition from guns to slogans and took to stones
only when protests were forcibly stopped by the State.
In 2008, there were lakhs who marched on the streets
in Kashmir and made human chains so that no one could
touch the bunkers and soldiers. This year, the State
successfully stopped Kashmiris from marching
non-violently and it is clear that the first order
handed down to the armed forces has been to shoot to
disperse. Under no circumstances, did the armed forces
allow people to assemble this year. They even fired on
mourners dozens of times making them stone-pelters.
In Kashmir right
now, it will be hard for militancy to find hospitable
homes and willing hands. Kashmiris want to settle
their dispute with India without guns. I feel most
frustrated when Kashmiris are dubbed paid agents of
Pakistan and PDP workers. It is the NC, and not the
PDP, which has won all the seats in Srinagar, which
the government says is the hub of stone-pelting.
Earlier this year, during an interview, I asked Omar
whether he saw himself as a leader of Kashmiris or a
politician from Kashmir. He replied in great agitation
that he had been elected with 60 percent votes and
that says it all. Where does he think those votes are
now?
If the stone-pelters
and protesters continue to be killed as terrorists,
Kashmiris will be pushed to dig up their old guns. And
the Indian State, being the largest importer of arms
in the world and with its 7,00, 000 soldiers in
Kashmir, seems to like the prospect of another armed
rebellion that can be called a terrorist movement.
But, if this generation of Kashmiris, who approach an
AK-47 with a stone in hand, pick up the AK-47
themselves, it will be far worse than the 1990s.
Kashmir knows how an armed revolution can eat up its
own children but that won’t be enough to stop them.
Kashmir will be reduced to stones again but the
insulated glass palaces around them won’t be the same
either. It will be a war, which the pacifist inside me
says, must be avoided.
In Kashmir,
Islam came by word and Kashmiris accepted it in their
own unique way. My mother goes to shrines, so does my
girlfriend, and almost all the women I know. The
shrines are always full of people, even crowded than
the mosques. Sufi Islam has lived for over hundreds of
years here and if radical puritans defeat it one day,
it will be because of the State repression and the
status quo that India wants to maintain because it
makes Sufi Kashmiris look docile and tolerance a
weakness.
As for what
happened with the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, I was too
young to know about it and since then the story has
been twisted in many ways. I belong to the generation
of Kashmiri Muslims who have not seen Pandits but have
heard varied accounts of what had happened that year.
Whenever I try to make sense of it, the picture looks
hazy. It is almost like finding my way through teargas
in narrow lanes. I have heard about Kashmiri Pandits
in the nostalgia of my mother, uncles and discovered
them in old photo albums. In my family, it is taboo to
say anything against Pandits, even against right-wing
Pandit groups that are used to show that the political
movement in Kashmir is communal. I hope that the
Pandits return to their homeland soon and the new
generation, unlike ours, grows up to be friends again
and not strangers.
For me, the
defining image of Kashmir is a Henri Cartier- Bresson
photograph in which two Kashmiri women stand on the
hills of Koh-i-Maran with their hands outstretched in
prayer. One of them is dressed in an old Kashmiri
burqa, the kind that covers the eyes with a mesh and
the other is in a phiran (a loose, traditional
Kashmiri gown) without any trousers. They both stand
side by side, looking towards an open sky and huge
mountains, praying to an invisible God, unaware and
indifferent to differences between them. This conflict
has already pushed those women into obscurity. And if
unarmed protesters continue to be killed like this,
even the hills where the women could one day have come
together again would disappear. Kashmir, as we know of
it in our dreams and in our hopes, will be lost
forever.
FIVE
YEARS ago, I thought the longing for azadi
had died but it was just a quiet phase of transition
from guns to stones. From the plebiscite front in 1953
to Al Fatah in the early 1970s, from JKLF in 1989 to a
nine-year-old stone-pelter today, the sentiment for
azadi has somehow always endured in Kashmir.
India, a huge
economy and a growing power, has spent thousands of
crores to win the hearts and minds of Kashmiris. It
seems most of them are not buying and even if they are
accepting the money happily, they are not trading the
sentiment. Track I has mostly been off-track and Track
II has been busy tracking the wrong people in
five-star hotels. It just hasn’t worked.
For the Kashmir
issue to be solved, India needs to keep its money and
gun aside and talk to Kashmiris. There are two ways by
which New Delhi can approach Kashmir. To look at it as
a dispute and talk like equal partners with an aim to
solve it, or to call it a law-andorder problem and
continue to treat the symptoms rather than the
disease. The autonomy and self-rule documents given by
mainstream parties like NC and PDP, who talk within
the ambit of the Indian Constitution, have been
trashed by the Centre. People’s Conference leader
Sajad Lone laboured over ‘Achievable Nationhood’ for
two years and it was never discussed. As Hurriyat
chief Mirwaiz Umar said, by talking to New Delhi, they
risk their reputations and lives. India has to be a
little more honest about the talks and think of them
as more than photo-ops this time.
As for the
Indian soldiers, most of them are poor villagers from
the plains who end up living inside the lonely sand
bunkers in Kashmir. They face stones and then take the
lives of Kashmiri boys. Concertina wires surround
their own lives, and it manifests in their high
suicide rates and fratricidal killings in Kashmir. If
the Indian State treated them not merely as pawns of
nationalism but as dignified citizens, it could be
freedom for the soldiers too.
India can
neither shoot its way out of Kashmir nor can it buy
out the sentiment. And as for buying time, it has been
63 years already.
EsinIslam.Com
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