The 11 issues that haunt the soul of Jammu & Kashmir

The need for reasoned thinking

When sentiments run high, thinking takes a back seat. Both India and the Kashmiri people have a tradition of scholarly and meditative thinking. They must allow their spiritual traditions and learning become the mediating role between sentiments and thinking, feeling and reasoning.

After all, a nonviolent, non-partisan reevaluation of accumulated experiences is capable of righting a wronged trajectory.

A few decades are but a speck in the life of a people, a society and a culture. But tracks do change when people are culturally de-memorised, disconnected and discontinued; when the memory of suffering, pain or of otherness dominate, forcing people’s sentiments and feelings to overpower reasoned thinking.

But their view on the future gets restricted within a closed period of such time. Such a period has been 2016-2017, which brought Kashmir to the radical threshold.

India would do well to remember that it has a responsibility to look at Kashmir from the angle of humaneness, Insaniyat. Kashmiri ‘resistance’ leaders also have a grave responsibility to their people - not in terms of creating chaos, but in terms of creating order and discipline. They too are equally implicated in any humane approach. Only then can the rest - Jamhooriyat and Kashmiryat - be followed, one making room for the other.

11 issues

As of today, the 11 issues that haunt the soul of Jammu & Kashmir are:

1. The silent pain of not less than three thousand half-widows (wives of “disappeared” persons); thousands of widows and mothers and the killing of 112 youth by the security forces during the 2010 summer protests which settled in the collective consciousness.

They asked for answer, got a denial, followed by continuous arrests and detention of youth and children under Public Safety Act. Added to that is now the suffering of the unprecedented havoc of pellet wounds and blindings.

2. The torturous exodus of Pandits from the Valley caused the destruction of its secular, plural character. It transformed Kashmir into a monolithic Islamic society. Kashmir’s unique spiritual journey finds its path blocked by the massive injustice to Kashmiri Pandits, their uprooting and continuous suffering.

Though badly wounded, a proper approach to healing can perhaps prove that Kashmir’s spiritual and socio-religious resources have not yet dried up. One must add to this the suffering caused by rejection, ignominy and injustice to which the other ‘refugees’ from Mirpur and the later displaced people from across the border have been continuously subjected to like state-less people from no-man’s land.

3. The mindset of the youth-post 1990 generation: They’ve had no other childhood memory and experience other than that of brutalisation, torture, disappearances, killings, indignities and dishonour of their own family, or of their neighbour’s brothers, mothers, fathers, sisters, husbands, sons. These have been perpetrated at the hands of militants, foreign terrorists or by the ‘cordon and search’ operations by the security forces. These circumstances forced many to take to the gun.

An entire generation’s experience of brutalisation and dehumanisation poses a grave challenge to the continuity and growth of culture of a society. Of the youth, 70%, including women, are estimated to be consuming drugs. Society’s self-awareness, self-image and self-identity are threatened. The young thus go astray and are easily destroyed or exploited. The media creates hype over a few ‘toppers’ and that helps hide the truth. If a second, post 2008-2016 generation grows up with deep scares, that will truly be disastrous.

4. A post-1990 rise of militancy and violence blocked the transfer of the inheritance of a most unique culture of syncretism to this generation, the children of conflict.

It is a disinherited generation struggling to look beyond the recent history in order to have fuller understanding of their identity for building their future. Their social relations, attitudes and vision are severely influenced by their dark experiences, though there are umpteen examples of the ever present innate goodness, love, mutual trust and care that the elder generation has experienced across communities.

The youth talk of Hindu-Muslim harmonious and happy co-living not with reference to ‘older times’, ‘history’, ‘good old days’ or ‘in the days of our forefathers’; but with reference to their parents who are part of their present, their own life. To some it may be a past, but it is certainly not passé. Treated as cannon fodder or as the hunted, this disoriented traumatised mass of youth who provide recruits to violent militancy need to be treated with trust, love and care.

5. Thus, Kashmiri society is in a state of a breakdown. The state of breakdown of a society is not necessarily symbolised by or coextensive with violence and suffering; one can recover from that.

The breakdown is marked by loss of its creative spirit, its capacity to continue to grow, its grace, sophistication, elegance, ‘its élan vital’, in the words of Arnold J Toynbee. Will they allow a period of violence, suffering and trauma to solidify strife and get stereotyped and institutionalised into a partisan political process that would intervene in their growth so that the inherited treasure will not be transmitted to the next generations?

Disinherited generations lose their identity, dignity, and creativity and cultural resources for rebuilding future. Should the very process, the journey defined through generations a society’s destiny in eternity be allowed to be interrupted and disoriented from its trajectory by circumstances created by or during one or two generations?

Freedom, in traditional and transcendental religions like Islam and Hinduism, is first and foremost, liberation of the path of eternal destiny from the grip of the fate, the created circumstances.

If Kashmiris were to ask: where do you locate your élan vital, what would be the answer? The pain of disinheritance, discontinuity and consequent breakage of society is symbolised in both: silence over the question and the seeking of its answer.

6. Fear and insecurity from multiple sources and repression of voice of conscience dominates the civic life. Democratic life available to the rest of India, even in other parts of the same sate, is not available to Kashmiris in the Valley.

Participation in elections, 5 or 55%, is a misleading indictor when the burden of fear from AFSPA and PSA and other overriding powers to the police and security forces severely restricts freedom. Kashmir’s own non-state political forces are the worst when it comes to free expression of views and opinion, besides being unanswerable to any within the reach of the people, unlike the govt forces. Unless there is freedom within, what sort of freedom from without can any people ever achieve?

7. Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh have multiple ethnic identities. Though in many cases, ethnic identity dominates religious identity, there is an implicit conflict of political assertion between the ethnic and the religious identities. As a result, back-bone ethnic groups like Bakarwal, Gujars, Pahadis are sidelined and silenced in the politics of discourse. The overarching Kashmiri identity that Valley-Kashmiris uphold as a raison d’etre for azaadi is severely wounded; less by outsiders and more by insiders. It is a self-inflicted pain.

8. There is a communal divide in J&K, particularly in Jammu area. One region does not care for the other, and the social-communal divide is feared more than militancy because of the complex mix of politics of separatism, violence and ethnicity compounded by regional variants of the totally divergent politics of the Valley.

The Hindu-Muslim communal divide in the Jammu region provides both motivation and space for communal and religious radicalisation and the space for cross border infiltration and mischief. It has direct bearing on the regional divide between Jammu and the Kashmir Valley, which in turn impacts international politics over J&K and heightens regional tension and insecurity. Rather than unifying, the political process divides people across communal lines.

9. Radicalisation among the youth post 2008 was ideological rather than emotive, but post 2016, it is a mix of the both. The pellet gun transformed the fire into an inferno. Burhan Wani’s photos were uploaded and circulated on social media day-today, hour-to- hour, as were images of pellet gun victims. The very visuals - of lacerated body parts, mostly eyes - transformed the medium, a la Marshal McLuhan, ‘into a message’.

Pellet gun proved to be a weapon with more unimagined powers and unplanned consequences than it is said to be employed for. The open space for independent, reasoned thinking and internal critique necessary for exploring ways out of the menace of radicalisation-extremism-militancy-terrorism that had emerged within the radical sections including among some ideologues and leaders stands in suspension.

10. Related to the above is the looming fear of a pan-Islamic movement finding grooves in Kashmir. The 2016 youth-on-the-street attacking security forces is an autonomous, leaderless force, ready to be exploited, armed and recruited by Pakistan based masters of terror. One way to retrieve them is to give them a reason to reinvest their trust in the leadership within Kashmir.

11. The Kashmiri youth stand leaderless. Though top Hurriyat leaders have come together, the scene is more of “one movement, many flags”. This glaring gap reflects in absence of introspection, internal critique, and internal freedom of voice and opinion that guarantees self-correction.

Hence, at each juncture, there is an incremental rise only in irresponsible violence and power to those who rule by it; and increased frustration among the youth. At the level of governance in the state, the situation is no different. There is a strange similarity between the dissimilar.