Daily DAWN
Sept 3, 2008
NATIONS are usually proud of their celebrities. But sometimes these celebrities can be a pain in the neck, if they are a little too outspoken, especially at an awkward time.
Arundhati Roy, the petite Booker Prize winner (author of The God of Small Things) has been exactly that, at least to some Indians.
She has uttered the dreaded K-word, just when Kashmir has been aflame.
“After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true,” she writes in a cover story for Outlook, one of India’s most read and respected news magazines.
“For all these years, the Indian 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’.”
Strong stuff. Also a tribute to the extent of press freedom in India. Not many developing countries, even those with a free media, would allow such sentiments to be expressed on a sensitive subject.
Roy continues, “It was always clear that in their darkest moments, it was not peace that (the people of Kashmir) yearned for, but freedom too,” and then concludes in words of great eloquence that will resonate for a long time to come: “At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force? India needs azaadi from Kashmir just as much — if not more — than Kashmir needs azaadi from India.”
Basically, Roy was elaborating on the idea of India as formulated by the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: a democratic federal republic where all have the right to dissent. Her implication was that this idea of India should be big enough to also take in the right of people to peacefully disassociate themselves from the republic.
The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) immediately condemned her, virtually calling her words treasonable.
The Congress said nothing, though a former Congress prime minister had once said that everything on the status of Kashmir was negotiable, except ‘azaadi’.
Roy’s writing must be viewed in the context of an unprecedented three-month-long mass agitation in Kashmir — which continues at the time of writing — that has taken several lives.
At core of the demonstrations is a relatively minor issue, the handing over of some land at the Hindu pilgrimage centre of Amarnath. Yet, the unrest has spread from the Muslim-dominant Valley of Kashmir to the Hindu-majority Jammu region.Underlying it, however, is something much bigger, the alienation of the Muslims of Kashmir, where a secessionist movement has been going on for almost two decades and which has taken the lives of some 30,000 militants, military personnel and civilians.Human rights abuses have certainly taken place — on both sides. And Pakistan, despite its official denials, undoubtedly helped to arm and train the militants, at least until a few years ago. Whether this was done by the shadowy intelligence agencies acting on their own, is neither here nor there. Sept 11 and American pressure on Gen Musharraf changed all that.Be that as it may, the reality is that pro-Pakistani slogans have now been raised in the Valley and the Pakistan flag flown, in defiance of the Indian army, not by the militants, but the general populace. Make no mistake, this is a mass upsurge.
That disturbs most Indians. You can use the gun against terrorists but what do you do when virtually all sections of society are demonstrating peacefully?Though Kashmiris were never really ‘pro-Indian’, even in the days of the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah, they were not ‘pro-Pakistan’ either. Islamabad learnt this to its cost in the 1965 and 1971 wars, when it expected Kashmiris to rise up in revolt. They didn’t.
In any case, it was a paradox for Pakistan to say that there should be a plebiscite in Kashmir, as had been promised by Nehru, and that Kashmiris should have the right to self-determination when that very right was denied to Pakistanis under military rule. But Pakistan now has a democratically elected government. So, the picture has changed.When Pakistan broke up and Bangladesh was formed, one thing had stuck in this writer’s mind. In the 1960s there had also been a secessionist movement in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. In fact, the Tamil secessionist demands were more extreme than those made by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. But in India, the secessionists were voted to power and became moderates.
In Pakistan, there was a crackdown on Sheikh Mujib and his party. And we know what followed.Some people also liken what is happening in Kashmir to what happened with the Sikhs in Punjab. However, that is a false analogy. In Punjab in the 1980s, when Sikh militancy was at its height — and this writer was based there then — the vast majority of Sikhs, though alienated and unhappy over the army assault on the Golden Temple and the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, were by no means votaries of an independent ‘Khalistan’. At most, perhaps 10 to 15 per cent were ‘Khalistanis’.
In the Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, the people overwhelmingly want azaadi, so fed up are they with army repression.Nevertheless, how far can one expect any Indian government to go in meeting Kashmiri demands — and listening to Arundhati Roy’s plea? Sadly, not very far. Although Kashmir is a case apart, given the controversy that shrouded its political status when the British withdrew from the subcontinent, the government in New Delhi has over the years whittled down its special status and treats it like any other part of the country.
So, Ms Roy, though many of us admire your boldness and the sentiments underlying your eloquence, the reality is that no Indian government would risk its political future by making Kashmir azaad. That government would fall. What it can do — and what it must do — is to restore to Kashmiris their lost dignity and their sense of well-being. The call for azaadi will then melt away. Ask the Tamilians.
The writer is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express.
singh.84@hotmail.com
