Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, “I was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all … I mean just being kicked out of their homes ’n’ stuff like that? And you know, my brother’s such a jerk, he said they’re the ones who are holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?”
The trouble is, I could. I can.
The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating each other. They’re probably not progressive enough.
That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan (another Bollywood superstar, heartthrob of millions) on TV, appearing in a commercial for the Times of India’s “India Poised” campaign. The TV anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the “constraining ghosts of the past.” To choose optimism over pessimism.
“There are two Indias in this country,” Amitabh Bachchan said, in his famous baritone:
One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.
One India says, “Give me a chance and I’ll prove myself.” The Other India says, “Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you’ll have a chance.”
One India lives in the optimism of our hearts. The Other India lurks in the skepticism of our minds. One India wants, the Other India hopes.
One India leads, the Other India follows.
These conversions are on the rise. With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming over to this side. And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic new India is emerging.
And finally:
Now in our sixtieth year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to the edge of time’s great precipice. And One India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head, is looking down at the bottom of the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at the sky and saying, “It’s time to fly.”39
Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare. It tells us that the rich don’t have a choice (There Is No Alternative) but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don’t, it’s because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they’re choosing to be poor. It’s their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the “Constraining Ghost of the Past.” They’re already ghosts. “Within an ongoing counterfeit universe,” Robert J. Lifton says, “genocide becomes easy, almost natural.”40
The so-called poor have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world’s not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: “There Is No Alternative.”
They have watched the great Gandhian people’s movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes, and counter–hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Hereros, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they’re already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.
People who have taken to arms have done it with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalize the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality, and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalized dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly. Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India’s democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government’s control. (At last count it was supposed to be 25 percent.)41 The battle stinks of death. It’s by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the Army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the foot soldiers don’t know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe.) Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well … anything is better than annihilation.
The prime minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the “single largest threat” to internal security.42 There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.
Here’s a typical newspaper column. Nothing out of the ordinary. “Stamp Out Naxals,” it is called:
This government is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to “choke” Naxal infrastructure and “cripple” their activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the “virus.” It signaled a realization that the focus on tackling Naxalism must be through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.43
“Choke.” “Cripple.” “Virus.” “Infested.” “Eliminate.” “Stamp out.” Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air.
And people believe that faced with extermination they have the right to fight back. By any means necessary.
Perhaps they’ve been listening to the grasshoppers.
This article was delivered as a lecture in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos. It appeared in Outlook, February 4, 2008, and the International Socialist Review, Issue 58, March–April 2008.
AZADI
For the past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarized zone in the world.
After eighteen years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a nonviolent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage.1 This one is nourished by peoples’ memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed; thousands have been “disappeared”; and hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated.2 That kind of rage, once it finds utterance cannot easily be tamed, rebottled, and sent back to where it came from.
For all these years the Indian state, known among the knowing as the “deep state,” has done everything it can to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchase—and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It has used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail, and rigged elections to subdue what democrats would call “the will of the people.” But now the deep state has tripped on its own hubris and bought into its own publicity, as deep states eventually tend to do. It made the mistake of believing that domination was victory, that the “normalcy” it had enforced through the barrel of a gun was indeed normal, and that the people’s sullen silence was acquiescence.
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on the people’s behalf, informed us that “Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace.” What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Meanwhile Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has brainwashed most Indians into believing that
all of Kashmir’s sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace alone they yearned for, but freedom, too. Over the last two months the carefully confected picture of an innocent people trapped between “two guns,” both equally hated, has (pardon the pun) been shot to hell.
A sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of nearly one hundred acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas) suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of petrol.3 Until 1989 the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about twenty thousand people who traveled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamic militant uprising in the valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindutva in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By 2008 more than five hundred thousand pilgrims visited the Amarnath cave, in large groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses. To many people in the valley, this dramatic increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state.4 Rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-style settlements and change the demography of the valley. Days of massive protest forced the valley to shut down completely. Within hours the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young stone-pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early nineties. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal, and police firing, while the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind of communal excess, the five hundred thousand Amarnath pilgrims completed their pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they had been shown by local people.5
Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer.6 But by then the land transfer had become a nonissue, and the protests had spiraled out of control.
Massive protests against the revocation erupted in Jammu. There too the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian state. (For some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu–Srinagar highway, the only functional road link between Kashmir and India.7 The army was called out to clear the highway and allow safe passage of trucks between Jammu and Srinagar. But incidents of violence against Kashmiri truckers were being reported from as far away as Punjab, where there was no protection at all.8 As a result, Kashmiri truckers, fearing for their lives, refused to drive on the highway. Truckloads of perishable fresh fruit and valley produce began to rot. It became very obvious that the blockade had caused the situation to spin out of control. The government announced that the blockade had been cleared and that trucks were going through. Embedded sections of the Indian media, quoting the inevitable “intelligence” sources, began to refer to it as a “perceived” blockade and even suggest that there had never been one.9
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 was 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 (freedom)? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the government of India has tried so hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities, their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable display of raw courage.
Raised in a playground of army camps, checkpoints, and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a sound track, the younger generation has 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 is nothing short of an epiphany. They’re in full flow; not even the fear of death seems 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 should know that better than the people of India who won their independence in the way that they did?
The circumstances in Kashmir being what they are, it is hard for the spin doctors to fall back on the same old, same old, to claim that it’s all the doing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), or that people are being coerced by militants. Since the thirties 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?
This time, the people are on the streets to represent themselves. There have been mass rallies in the past, but none in recent memory that have been so sustained and widespread. The mainstream political parties of Kashmir—National Conference, Peoples Democratic Party—feted by the deep state and the Indian media despite the pathetic voter turnout in election after election, appear dutifully for debates in New Delhi’s TV studios but can’t muster the courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed militants who, through the worst years of repression were seen as the only ones carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at all, seem content to take a back seat and let people do the fighting for a change.
The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not leaders so much as followers, being guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged people that has exploded on Kashmir’s streets. The leaders, such as they are, have been presented with a full-blown revolution. The only condition seems to be that they have to do as the people say. If they say things that people do not wish to hear, they are gently persuaded to come out, publicly apologize and correct their course. This applies to all of them, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who at a public rally recently 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.10 Like it or not, this is democracy. No democrat can pretend otherwise.
Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm around places that hold terrible memories for them. They demolish bunkers, break through cordons of concertina wire, and stare straight down the barrels of soldiers’ machine guns, saying what very few in India want to hear: “Hum Kya Chahtey? Azadi!” (What do we want? Freedom!). And, it has to be said, in equal numbers and with equal intensity: “Jeevey Jeevey Pakistan” (Long live Pakistan).
That sound reverberates through the valley like the drumbeat of steady rain on a tin roof, like the roll of thunder during an electric storm. It’s the plebiscite that was never held, the referendum that has been indefinitely postponed.
On August 15, India’s Independence Day, the city of Srinagar shut down completely. The Bakshi stadium where the governor hoisted the flag was empty except for a few officials. Hours later, Lal Chowk, the nerve center of the city (where in 1992 Murli Manohar Joshi, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and mentor of the controversial “Hinduization” of children’s history textbooks, started a tradition of fl
ag-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 August 14) and “Happy Slavery Day.” Humor obviously has survived India’s many torture centers and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir.
On August 16, hundreds of thousands of people marched to Pampore, to the village of the Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, who was shot down in cold blood five days earlier.11 He was 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 August 18, hundreds of thousands also gathered in Srinagar in the huge TRC grounds (Tourist Reception Center, not the Truth and Reconciliation Committee) close to the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UN-MOGIP) 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.12
The day before the rally, the deep state was hard at work. A senior journalist friend called to say that late in the afternoon the home secretary had called a high-level meeting in New Delhi. Also present were the defense secretary and 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 the channels to 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 have gone so far that TV channels, were they to obey those instructions, would run the risk of looking ridiculous. Thankfully, it looks as though this revolution will, after all, be televised.
My Seditious Heart Page 46