Kashmir: cri de coeur

http://www.opendemocracy.net/seema-kazi/kashmir-cri-de-coeur

By Seema Kazi (16 July 2010)

8 January: Inayat Khan (16 years) shot dead by CRPF, Srinagar.

22 January: Manzoor Ahmed Sofi (23 years), shot dead by the CRPF, Parahaspora (Pattan).

31 January: Wamiq Farooq (13 years) shot dead by JK police, Srinagar.

31 January: Zahid Farooq (16 years) shot dead by Border Security Force, Srinagar.

13 April: Zubair Ahmad Bhat (17 years) drowned to death by CRPF, Sopore.

11 June: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo (17 years) attacked and killed by JK police, Srinagar.

19 June: Rafique Ahmad Bangroo (24 years) beaten to death by CRPF, Srinagar.

20 June: Javed Ahmed Malla (22 years) shot dead by CRPF, Srinagar.

27 June: Shakeel Ahmad Ganai (17 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.

27 June: Firdous Ahmad Kakroo (16 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.

27 June: Bilal Ahmed Wani (21 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.

28 June: Tauqir Ahmed Rather (9 years) killed by CRPF, Sopore.

28 June: Tajamul Bashir (17 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.

29 June: Ishtiaq Ahmed Khanday (15 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.

29 June: Imtiaz Ahmed Itoo (17 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.

29 June: Shujat ul Islam (16 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.

India’s war in Kashmir has, of late, acquired a particularly deadly edge. During the past six months, a disproportionately large number of teenagers and young men have been shot dead on the streets by the police or CRPF. It is far from clear as to whether all those who died were actually throwing stones. Be that as it may, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his administration have deemed stone-throwing a criminal offence punishable with death or a lifetime in prison. Having ‘legalised’ the repression of dissent, Abdullah, Home Minister Chidambaram, and Home Secretary GK Pillai hold the separatists and ‘anti-national’ forces responsible for the present crisis in Kashmir.

There cannot be a greater folly than to attribute the deep and overflowing reservoir of collective anger and outrage against a twenty-year-old occupation to the Machiavellian powers of a fragmented and fairly discredited separatist conglomerate. In no state, least of all in one that claims to be democratic, can the act of stone-throwing or public protest legitimise a shoot-to-kill policy. As democratic channels for dissent in Kashmir remain blocked, and the institutions meant for the protection of civilians (military and paramilitary) or the enforcement of the rule of law (police) deprive citizens of the right to life, stones, slogans and mass protest are all what the Kashmiris have to oppose and resist a shameful and scandalous state of affairs.

To represent Kashmiri public outrage as a ‘separatist’, ‘anti-national’ conspiracy is an exercise in self-delusion and deceit; it also betrays a profound disrespect for Kashmiri public opinion. Separatist leaders may or may not support stone-pelting but to suggest that all the boys and young men shot dead were part of a grand separatist ploy is, at best, a patently tendentious claim. However unpleasant stone-throwing may be for soldiers or the keepers of law and order, it is, quite simply Kashmiri resistance against a relentless counter-offensive characterised by violence, dispossession and death.

Ever since the eruption of mass rebellion in Kashmir in 1989-90, New Delhi has lacked the moral courage to publicly acknowledge, much less redress Kashmiri grievance. The domestic political consensus on Kashmir has consequently centred on the denial of local Kashmiri grievance and a concerted focus on Kashmir’s external (Pakistan) dimension commonly referred to as ‘cross-border terrorism’. Global, especially Western fears regarding Islamist terror, Pakistan’s own dubious and destructive role in Kashmir, together with the tragedy of 26/11 allowed India to escape local democratic accountability within Kashmir. It has been relatively easy to claim that if at all there is a Kashmir problem, Pakistan and its terror machine are to blame. India’s self-created domestic crisis in Kashmir (that Pakistan subsequently exploited) has been consistently understated or overlooked.

As a result of this political and intellectual dishonesty, the opinion and subjective experience of Kashmiri Muslims is ignored. India could mobilise over 500,000 soldiers to safeguard Kashmir’s territorial frontiers yet betray a cruel and callous disregard for the security, rights or dignity of the people within it. For two long decades, the use of coercive, frequently lethal force, resort to arbitrary detention, custodial death, fake encounters, rape and sexual abuse, extrajudicial killing, torture, and bouts of undeclared curfew has been the standard state response to accumulating Kashmiri grievance. The 2008 assembly elections are India’s answer to awkward questions regarding democracy in Kashmir.

But like any other oppressed people in the world, the Kashmiri Muslims have not been cowed down by force; nor have they ceased protesting India’s democratic deficit in Kashmir. Indeed, it is precisely during these moments that India’s feeble and tenuous claims to democracy and normalcy in Kashmir are forcefully exposed. The stones cast by a young, radicalised generation of Kashmiri boys today symbolise the unequal battle between truth and power in Kashmir. The truth is that the youth who throw stones and the masses of people who march with them raising ‘anti-national’ slogans wish to be rid of Indian hegemony in their contested homeland. They want the security forces withdrawn; those languishing in jails released; the extraordinary powers vested in the military curbed; public accountability for the disappeared; prosecution for those responsible for crimes against citizens; a chance to determine their own political future; a life of freedom and dignity. In short, the truth is that the Kashmiri Muslims vehemently reject their existing relationship with the Indian state.

What is India – the de-facto ‘power’ in Kashmir – doing about this truth? Precious little. Bereft of imagination or morality, the Indian state focuses on the symptom of the malaise: by maligning and thereby de-legitimising Kashmiri public opinion as ‘anti-national, it seeks to legitimise its own authoritarian counter-offensive (curfew, arbitrary detention, a ban on sms and mobile services, restrictions on journalists and the media, restrictions on public mobility, a ban on public gatherings, etc.) that passes for governance and democracy in Kashmir. The possession of superior force and enforced curfew, it is hoped, shall eventually quieten things down. That shall indeed happen, as has happened for the past twenty years: curfew restrictions shall be relaxed, schools shall re-open, people shall go to work, tourists shall throng Dal Lake, and there will be traffic on the roads.

Yet, as ‘power’ well knows, the latent, festering truth of injustice and anger underpinning Kashmir’s deceptive veneer of ‘normality’ can erupt any time with terrifying intensity - with blood on the streets and swarms of stone-throwing and slogan-shouting crowds. As tragic and grievous as the loss of Kashmir’s young men is India’s refusal to concede the truth. Cornered and defensive, lacking the courage and conscience expected of a mature and self-confident democracy, India has no option other than digging in and playing for time. Sadly, neither time nor history is on India’s side. No people have ever surrendered to the untruth of the abuse of power. No state has ever erased a people’s history, memory or quest for justice.

Pushing the Kashmiri to the wall, again

http://kafila.org/2010/07/29/pushing-the-kashmiri-to-the-wall-again/

By Shivam Vij

[An edited, shorter version of this article by me appeared last week in The Friday Times,Lahore.]

In the first week of June, I sat at a shopfront with a group of shopkeepers of Kalarus, a small town in Kupwara district in north Kashmir. In 1999, they collected money and bought land for a martyrs’ graveyard, one of many such in Kashmir. Whenever the Indian army killed militants trying to infiltrate from Pakistan to the Indian side of the Line of Control, they would hand over the bodies to the Kupwara police, who would give it to these people to bury after the autopsy.

“Look up at the mountain peak,” said one of them, “It is snow clad all twelve months. It is the LoC, 70 kms from here. Do you think anyone would cross that wearing the traditional Kashmiri Khan dress?” And yet, most of the hundred odd bodies in the graveyard had come wearing clothes unfit for snow. And, most of them had so many bullet marks on the face that they were unidentifiable.

This May, however, three bodies came whose faces were not mutilated, only one of them had a bullet mark on the face. They got mug-shots taken and gave them to Kashmiri Uzma, an Urdu daily. Some distance away in Handwara their families saw the photos and went to the police station. These were their missing sons; they had been taken to the LoC to work as porters for the army. This case is by no means an aberration, just that it came to light so conclusively it could not be denied by the authorities.

The ‘encounter’ had taken place at Machhil on the LoC on April 29, bodies exhumed after protests on May 30. This is only one of many encounters at Machhil in 2010, and many more have taken place elsewhere. India had maintained over the past few years that infiltration and militancy were down to record levels as Pakistan had turned off its support to the militant groups. What has changed in 2010? India and Pakistan are talking peace despite 26/11 being just a year old, and there is no change in the prevailing internal situation in Pakistan. This can’t surely be the time when Pakistan will re-open its support for the Kashmir insurgents?

What has changed is that the decline of militancy gave people the space to breath and reflect, and they refused to accept the Indian version that after the defeat of militancy all was over, and that we were now in a post-conflict situation. For the third consecutive summer now, therefore, the people of Indian-administered Kashmir have been taking to the streets, demanding azadi and pelting stones on soldiers and policemen they see as “occupying forces”. This is taking place despite that fact that Pakistan’s hold on even the separatists is at its lowest ebb and India has managed to win over and/or discredit various factions of the Hurriyat Conference. In such a scenario, there has been increasing pressure on Delhi to, at the very least, demilitarise in response to the decline in militancy.

The Indian Army is not only not in favour of repealing or amending the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that gives it impunity in all its actions in Kashmir and the north-eastern states, but has also on record stated its objections to be called back to the barracks. This supports widespread allegations in Kashmir that Indian forces have vested interests in Kashmir; earning monetary rewards and medals for killing innocent people and passing them off as militants is only one of them.

As Kashmir was protesting the Machhil fake encounter, a young boy, Tufail Ahmed Matoo, 17, was killed in Srinagar by the local police. They fired at him from such a close range that he died with a half-inch hole in his skull. He was returning from tuition, and even though the local police were chasing stone-pelters, the precision with which he was killed cannot be a mistake.

Why was Tufail Ahmed Mattoo killed? It may just be police frustration, but conspiracy theorists in Kashmir say it could be a way of diverting attention from Machhil.

Far from offering regret and ordering enquiries into Mattoo’s killing, the state government pretended as though all was fine. Stone-pelters had to be dealt with and such mistakes would take place. That’s when a vicious cycle of protest-death-protest started. In 18 days 11 civilians died, mostly minor boys, one of them 9 years old.

Kashmir’s summer of discontent has to be seen in the context of the post-militancy situation. As India was claiming victory in Kashmir, the people rose in revolt in 2008. 62 innocent protestors were killed. There were protests all summer in 2009 against a double rape and murder case in Shopian, committed allegedly by either the local police or Indian forces. 32 (check) protestors were killed. In Shopian I met one of the members of the local committee asking for justice. They said they did not want to link this to azadi, they wanted justice under Indian laws. But when justice was denied, everybody said the only solution was azadi.

By this summer India has come down very hard on stone-pelters, arresting and killing countless. Protests have been responded to with bullets, curfew, banning media, even arresting those active on the internet. Delhi has made it clear it is not serious about engaging the separatist leadership, even though it has been pretending to be pen to dialogue since 2003. As a result, angry youth are not even in the control of the Hurriyat leaders.

It is clear that Delhi is not going to make any concessions to the people of Kashmir. The troops that Kashmiris see as a problem are for Delhi the solution. The Kashmiri common man feels frustrated to hear about Indo-Pak talks as though the Kashmiri people don’t matter. Not all of the infiltration encounters this summer have been fake, and there are rumours of more Kashmiris trying to cross the LoC into Pakistan. Delhi is pushing people to pick up the gun again, and perhaps it prefers that to non-violent protests for azadi that attract international attention.

Delhi, it seems, prefers to deal with an insurgency. Crushing non-violent protests makes India seem bad even before its own people, and that’s why the disinformation campaign through the Delhi media.

Another round of militancy in Kashmir, however, would mean that India will be able to portray itself as a victim of terrorism, especially if Pakistan re-opens the militant tap to Kashmir after Obama exits the Afghan theatre. It will be easier for India to crush another armed struggle as it is much better prepared to do so now that it was in 1989. Sadly, all signals are that Kashmir is headed for another bloody decade.

Children of the tehreek

http://www.himalmag.com/Children-of-the-tehreek_nw4646.html?sms_ss=facebook

By Sanjay Kak

When columns of the Indian Army drove through Srinagar on 7 July, rifles pointed out at the city, it was meant as a show of force; to tell its ‘mutinous’ population – and those watching elsewhere – just who was really in charge. Disconcertingly for the Indian government, it has had the opposite effect. Alarm bells have been sounding off: the situation in Kashmir is again explosive; the lid looks ready to blow off.

Although the army has for years virtually controlled rural Kashmir, images of grim-faced soldiers on a ‘flag-march’ in Srinagar carried a different symbolism. For Srinagar has been the exception – the showpiece of ‘normalcy’, of a possible return to the bosom of India’s accommodating heart. Typically, the well-publicised entry of the soldiers was followed by a flurry of obtuse clarifications: the army was not taking over Srinagar; this was not a flag-march, only a ‘movement of a convoy’; yes, it was a flag-march, but only in the city’s ‘periphery’. The contradictions seemed to stem from a reluctance to deal with the elephant in the room: after more than 15 years, the army had once again been called out to stem civil unrest in Srinagar.

When the Indian Army was deployed in Kashmir during the 1990s, the rebellion seemed to be fast spinning out of India’s control. Twenty years later, what has changed? There is now a massive investment in a ‘security grid’, built with more than 500,000 security personnel and shored up by a formidable intelligence network, said to involve some 100,000 people. The armed militancy, too, has officially been contained. Meanwhile, the exercise of ‘free and fair’ elections has been carried out to persuade the world that democracy has indeed returned to Kashmir. (Elections certainly delivered the young and telegenic Omar Abdullah as Chief Minister; but about democracy, Kashmiris will be less sanguine. They will recognise it the day the military columns and camps are gone from the valley.)

Yet July was haunted by echoes of the early years of the tehreek, the movement for self-determination. As a brutally imposed lockdown curfew entered its fourth day, there was no safe passage past the paramilitary checkpoints – not for ambulances, not for journalists. For those four days, Srinagar’s newspapers were not published; local cable channels were restricted to just 10 minutes a day, and still had to make time for official views. SMS services remained blocked the entire month; in some troubled towns, cell-phone services were completely discontinued. But Srinagar still reverberated with slogans every night, amplified from neighbourhood mosques: ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ (What do we want? Freedom!) and ‘Go back, India! Go back!’

War of perception
The real barometer of the panic in the Indian establishment, though, was not the army’s flag march. It was the frantic speed (and dismal quality) of the attempts to obscure the crisis. In place of politics, it was once again left to disinformation to staunch the haemorrhage. At first, the Home Ministry began with the improbable charge that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba was organising and funding stone-throwing on the streets of Srinagar. This was a rather tame accusation for a militant group whose real signature is the ferocity of its attacks, as displayed clearly in the Mumbai strikes of November 2008. The only people who appeared to swallow this line were the loyal television anchors on the ‘national’ media; but with no real evidence to go on, even they let the mess quietly slide off the table.

Evidence arrived soon enough, when the Home Ministry made available a taped phone conversation between two men described as ‘hardliner’ separatists. As the audio crackled and hissed, television channels provided translations: ‘There must be some more deaths’; ‘10-15 people must be martyred’; ‘You are getting money but not doing enough’. Despite the comic-book directness, it sounded like serious business. In the context of such ‘evidence’, mainstream television channels began parachuting their star power into Srinagar, and the empty, silent city became the backdrop against which they could stage their own spectacle.

The CNN-IBN correspondent, happily embedded inside an army truck as it made its way through Srinagar, was extolling the impact of the flag march (even as an official was busy denying that there had been any such thing). NDTV provided its usual high-wire balancing act, with Barkha Dutt dredging up the ‘pain on both sides’. The grief of the mourning father of 17-year-old Tufail Mattoo, killed when his skull was taken apart by a teargas shell, was weighed against a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) commandant ruing the damage to his truck’s bulletproof windscreen. But such expedient journalism paled before far more damaging hubris. While these ‘national’ reporters had the run of curfew-bound Srinagar, they omitted to mention that their Srinagar-based colleagues – local, national and even international journalists – had been locked in their homes and offices for three days.

While the spin generated by New Delhi probably has an impact on the middle-class viewer of the mainstream Indian media, it has little effect on people in Kashmir. On the ground, they continue to make sense of their own reality. The inability, or refusal, to comprehend this has become endemic to all arms of the Indian state. An exaggerated, even fluid, notion of reality takes its place, in which perception is everything. This was underlined forcefully in June when the chiefs of the army, navy and air force announced the new ‘Doctrine on Military Psychological Operations’, a policy document that aims to create a ‘conducive environment’ for the armed forces operating in ‘sub-conventional’ operations such as Kashmir and the Northeast. The doctrine reportedly provides guidelines for ‘activities related to perception management’. Manipulating the output of a few dozen newspapers and television channels is certainly hard work, but nothing compared with the much harder task of understanding – perhaps even accommodating – the aspirations of Kashmiris.

Out of touch
The intensity of the crisis did help in one way, though: it forced some candour out of the familiar faces of Kashmiri politics. (These are the visible ones, called up in times of crisis to represent Kashmir on television. The invisible ones were, as usual, already in detention.) Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) admitted on television that mainstream (or pro-India) political parties have lost all credibility, and now have no role to play in stemming the anger in the streets. When asked why politicians were not taking out ‘peace marches’, former separatist and now ‘mainstream’ leader Sajjad Lone bluntly said that all of them ran the risk of being lynched by the people. Meanwhile, all the oxygen was taken up by discussion of the survival of Omar Abdullah’s government, something that mattered little to protestors.

Amidst the baying chorus of TV panellists outraged by the gall of ‘stone-pelters’, many have forgotten that in 1991 it was precisely such public demonstrations – and civilian casualties at the hands of the CRPF – that finally triggered a full-fledged armed militancy. In recent weeks, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s language has shown how out of touch he is, joining the talk of ‘miscreants’ with his comments about ‘frayed tempers’ and waiting for ‘tempers to cool down’. Across the board, this disconnect with the structures of electoral politics helped to put the elections of two years ago in some perspective.

In 2007, I finished a documentary film on Kashmir, which had tried to pull back from the quagmire of everyday events to understand the inchoate ‘sentiment’ for azadi. Quite by coincidence, the film arrived at the very moment that the constructed ‘normalcy’ of Kashmir was about ready to be shown off: tourists were flowing in, more than 400,000 people had taken part in the pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine, and elections were being discussed. Screenings of the documentary in India were often met with raised eyebrows, with people incredulous that such sentiments could survive the weight of the cast-iron security grid – and, of course, the passage of 20 years. Yet things can change in a day, and so they did.

In early summer 2008, isolated protests broke out over the acquisition of land for the Amarnath Shrine Board. This eventually turned into the most formidable upsurge of the past decade, with peaceful demonstrations of up to 20,000 people at a time. The cascading protests carried on for several months before being curbed, but not before more than 60 people lost their lives to the bullets of the security forces. In the summer of 2009, Shopian district was shaken by the rape and murder of two young women; once again, mostly peaceful protests paralysed the valley, and Shopian town was shut down for an unprecedented 47 days. The cycle of street violence in 2010 too began several months ago, with the uncovering of the Machil killings, where soldiers of the Indian Army (including a colonel and a major) were charged with the murder of three civilians, presenting them as militants for the reward money (see accompanying story by Dilnaz Boga). Protests led to the killing of protesters, which has led to more protests, and more killings.

New front
What do Kashmiris want? Most of all, even before azadi, they want justice. As they watched the Indian Army columns moving through Srinagar last month, Kashmiris would have been reminded that the protests this summer started with the Army in the killing fields of Machil. But like the Shopian incident, Machil too has begun to be edged off the burner, and forgotten, as have the hundreds of such killings that civil-society groups have painstakingly tried to resurrect. So, just as elections cannot be confused with democracy in Kashmir, an elected government is no substitute for a working justice system. Meanwhile, the prolonged use of the Public Safety Act, and the dangerous license of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, is slowly wearing thin for the young. This July, as the numbing news of young Kashmiris being shot in street protests started pouring in, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, told the press that ‘the baton of the freedom struggle has now been passed on to the next generation’. He could have added that, over twenty years, the baton might also have moved from the armed militancy and the ‘separatists’, straight onto the street.

As the taped phone conversation provided by the Home Ministry was being celebrated on TV, in only a few hours a more accurate translation of what was actually an innocuous conversation was burning through the Internet. This phone ‘evidence’ evaporated under the heat of scrutiny, its effects felt even in Delhi newsrooms. Such a speedy deconstruction of a suspect claim is only the latest in the deeply political use of the Internet by young Kashmiris. These are children of the tehreek, born and brought up in the turmoil of the last two decades. They have not, and probably will not, become armed mujahideen. But thousands are out on the streets, throwing stones, occasionally drawing blood, often taking hits, but in any case successfully paralysing the increasingly bewildered security forces. What armed militant could achieve more?

So will the Internet be the next threat for the Home Ministry? Will they accuse the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen of supporting the Facebook chatter about the ‘intifada’ in Kashmir? And after that? Already, young Kashmiris on social-networking sites are reporting phone calls from belligerent police officers, threatening them with serious charges including ‘waging war against the state’. Reports said that Qazi Rashid, the young mirwaiz of south Kashmir, has been accused of ‘instigating violence and justifying stone-pelting’ – through Facebook.

-- Sanjay Kak is a documentary filmmaker based in Delhi. His latest documentary, Jashn-e-Azadi (2007), is about Kashmir.

Kashmir Comes to Jantar Mantar

http://kafila.org/2010/08/08/kashmir-comes-to-jantar-mantar/

By Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Last evening I went to Jantar Mantar after many years. It is a road I pass often, looking at the sad and melancholic little protests that line the kerb, whispering to an indifferent Capital the million mutinies of our banana plantation republic.

Last evening was different. There were perhaps four to five hundred people, many, but not all Kashmiri, men and women, who had gathered to protest against the wanton destruction of life in the Kashmir valley by the security apparatus of the Indian state in the last few weeks and months. 45 civilian deaths in 8 weeks signals a state losing its head. Especially when the deaths occur when the police and paramilitaries fire live bullets on unarmed or stone pelting mobs. When stones, or unarmed bodies are met with ammunition, you know that the state has no respect whatsoever for bare life. That this should happen in a state that calls itself a democracy should make all of us who are its citizens reflect on how hollow ‘democracy’ feels to the mother or friend of a young boy or girl who is felled by a ‘democratic’ bullet.

Protests in Delhi often have a routine, scripted quality. But this one was different. Professor S.A.R Geelani was level headed and dignified, as he spoke to the assembled, visibly upset young men and women, introduced each speaker in turn and appealed to people to stay calm, and not get provoked.

I don’t think that there has been a public gathering of young people from Kashmir in such numbers in Delhi, and the occasion had a cathartic, almost therapeutic character, as if the acknowledgment of each others presence could also make it possible for many amongst those gathered to say what needed to be said, loud and clear, in public, what they had only kept as a secret in their hearts.

As a citizen of the Indian republic, I can only hang my head in shame at the venality of the state, and at how it openly sanctions the murder of Kashmiri men, women and children on the streets of the valley. Even a leading member of the Israeli military establishment (not known for their kindness towards occupied Palestinians) has recently admonished India’s hard-line militarist mandarins in Kashmir on the appalling conditions that they administer in Kashmir.

I stood in silence at the meeting. Listened to the slogans, the chanting, the statements, some made by friends like Sanjay Kak, others by people I do not know personally, but whose work and politics I have an interest in, even if I do not agree with, such as the poet and ex-political prisoner Varavara Rao. I met some old friends, talked quietly to strangers, and felt a momentary twinge of pride in Delhi, at least about the fact that so many of us were reclaiming a space on Jantar Mantar, for once to break the enormously deafening silence about Kashmir in a public and peaceful manner.

There were different kinds of slogans that were heard. Most resonant of all was the slogan that has now become the signature of all protests in Kashmir, ‘Hum Kya Chahtey – Azaadi’ (‘What do we want – Freedom’) which speaks to the wide spectrum of sometimes disparate political currents and opinions which is together only because of one common objective – rightful anger at the continued occupation of Kashmir by the armed might of the Indian state. Some slogans stressed the unity of all Kashmiris – be they Pandit, Muslim or Sikh. Occasionally, the air did reverberate with slogans that some might interpret as having a more secterian tinge – the ‘Nara e Taqbeer – Allah o Akbar’. But the vast majority of slogans had simply one motif – ‘Azaadi’. Sometimes spoken with joy, sometimes with anger, sometimes as a lament, sometimes with hope – with the vowels elongated to mean a myriad complexities that are rendered unspoken by the simplifying violence of the occupation.

Many speakers, including Professor Geelani, and men and women people from the crowd, repeatedly made appeals not to ‘communalize’ the issue, and the same people who said, ‘Allah o Akbar’ also immediately switched to slogans emphasizing Kashmir’s secular fabric, and called for Pandit-Muslim-Sikh unity in Kashmir.

I did not feel perturbed by the airing of the ‘Allah o Akbar’ slogan, as I am not when I hear people say ‘Vande Mataram’ or indeed, ‘Jai Shree Ram’. I am not a believer, and the fervent expression of belief on the part of those who do believe, neither enthuses, nor disturbs me. In each case, I am more interested in what lies behind the passion. And I believed that what lay behind the passion last evening, despite the anxiety on some of the faces in the crowd, was an appeal to the divine as the final arbiter of justice and peace in a deeply violent and unjust world. I can understand what motivates people to make that claim, even if I cannot make it myself, especially in a situation, where all appeals to mundane, worldly power, seem to have exhausted themselves. A situation where stones are met with bullets and grenades can make even the most sceptical of us lose faith in the grace of the mortals who rule, ultimately, only with the force of arms.

Perhaps, not airing such slogans would have been tactically more intelligent. But I did not get the sense that those who had gathered in Jantar Mantar last evening had come to score intelligent and sophisticated political points. They had come to express their anger and their sadness, they had come to cease, for a brief moment, to be the anonymous, anxious Kashmiri in Delhi who is always worried about being labelled a ‘terrorist’ by a prejudiced neighbour, a callous policeman or a random stranger. They had come to be themselves, to mourn, and to tell the world of their mourning. I can only feel grateful that they could gather the courage to do this. There is an urgency, as Sanjay Kak reminded the gathering for forging an intelligent politics in response to what is going on in Kashmir, and that politics must not rest only on the engine of pain and anger. I totally agree with this, at the same time, I also know, that without an occasion like what we witnessed yesterday, when Kashmiris can openly express their desire for liberation and their anguish in the heart of India, in the vocabulary and language that has sustained their struggles over the past decades, it will not happen. I remain hopeful that it will.

Some speakers, including Varavara Rao, Mohan Jha (from Delhi University, I hope I got his name right), Sanjay Kak, and a sikh gentleman from Amritsar whose name escapes me, spoke of the fact that there was a great deal of solidarity in India for the just demands of the Kashmiri people. The occasion did not, at any instance, degenerate into a vulgar clash of competing nationalisms.

Outside the perimter of this protest, stood another – a small group of people associated with organizations that claim to represent the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora, who were ‘protesting’ against the protest. I recognized a face in this crowd, I follow his self-righteous online outpourings quite regularly. Some of the speakers, including Mr. Geelani, alluded to them, saying that they shared in their pain, and even invited them to come and address the gathering. They however, remained aloof. Holding their placards, with their claim to monopoly of the pain and anguish of Kashmir. Ther stirred to life, when Sanjay Kak, spoke, heckling him, in a now familiar and churlish manner. I felt sad to see them, because they could make claim to suffering only as a means to divide people, not bring people together in solidarity.

Just before I left, a young woman who had recently come to Delhi to study, spoke eloquently about what it means to have lost a childhood in Kashmir, to have seen brothers and friends shot. I do not know who she is, and I could not catch her name, perhaps it was ‘Arshi’, but I wished I could apologize to her personally, because I know that her childhood has been robbed by people speaking in the name of the state that claims my fealty.

The occupation of Kashmir by India and Pakistan is an immoral and evil fact of our times. The sooner it ends, the better will it be for all of us in South Asia. True ‘Azaadi’ in Kashmir, for all its inhabitants, and for all those who have been displaced by more than twenty years of violence, can only help us all, in Delhi, and elsewhere, to breathe more freely.

The last option : A stone in her hand

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/The-last-option-A-stone-in-her-hand/articleshow/6272689.cms
By Sanjay Kak

On a summer morning this July in Srinagar, teargas from the troubled streets of Batmaloo began to roll into the first-floor home of Fancy Jan. The 24-year-old went to draw the curtains to screen the room from the acrid smoke, her mother told a reporter later, then turned away from the window, and said: "Mummy, maey aaw heartas fire (my heart's taken fire, mummy)". Then she dropped dead, a bullet in her chest, the casual target of an anonymous soldier's rifle. Fancy Jan was not a 'stone-pelter'. She was a bystander, like many of the 50 people killed in last two months. She is not the first woman to be shot by the security forces in 20 years of the troubles. But her random death, almost incomprehensible in the presumed safety of her family's modest home, coincides with a vigorous unsettling of the way women have been represented in this conflict.

Until the other day, Kashmiri women were little more than a convenient set of clichés, shown as perpetual bystanders in houses that overlook the streets of protest. When seen outside of that protected zone, they were cast as victims, wailing mourners, keening at the endless funeral processions. For an occasional frisson there is the daunting image of the severely veiled Asiya Andarabi, chief of the Dukhtaran-e-millat, a women's group whose high media visibility seems inversely proportional to the modest numbers who adhere to their militant Islamic sisterhood. In black from head to toe, Andarabi always makes for good television, her arms and hands concealed in immaculate gloves, only her eyes showing through a slit. For the Indian media her persona insinuates the dark penumbra of Kashmiri protest, signalling the threat of 'hardline' Islam, a ready metaphor for 'what-awaits-Kashmir-if...'

But now an unfamiliar new photograph of the Kashmiri woman has begun to take its place on newspaper front pages. She's dressed in ordinary salwar-kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow. Her head is casually covered with a dupatta and she seems unconcerned about being recognized. She is often middle aged, and could even be middle-class. And she is carrying a stone. A weapon directed at the security forces.Last week, in a vastly under-reported story, a massive crowd stopped two Indian Air Force vehicles on the highway near Srinagar. At the forefront were hundreds of women. The airmen and their families were asked to dismount, and move to the safety of a nearby building. Then the buses were torched. This is not a rare incident: women are everywhere in these troubled times in Kashmir, and not in the places traditionally assigned to them. They are collecting stones and throwing them, and assisting the young men in the front ranks of the protestors to disguise themselves, even helping them escape when the situation gets tough.

The government's narrative of 'miscreants', of anomie and drug-fuelled teenagers working as Rs 200 mercenaries for the Lashkar-e-Toiba, has, meanwhile, started to appear faintly ridiculous. A more reasonable explanation is being proffered to us now: it's anger, we are told, the people of Kashmir are angry at the recent killings, and that's why the women are being drawn in. That is true, but only partially. For this is no ordinary anger, but an old, bottled-up rage, gathered over so many years that it has settled, and turned rock hard. That accumulated fury is the stone in her hand. To not understand this, to fail to reach its source — or fathom its depth — is to be doomed to not understand the character of Kashmir's troubles.

Two events will provide useful bookends for this exercise. In February 1991, there was an assault on Kunan Poshpura village in north Kashmir, where a unit of the Indian Army were accused of raping somewhere between 23 and a hundred women. And then, a troubled 18 years later, the June 2009 rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, south Kashmir. In the case of Kunan Poshpura, bypassing a judicial enquiry, the government called in the Press Council of India to whitewash the incident, allowing its inadequate and ill equipped two-member team to summarily conclude that the charges against the army were "a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathizers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad". The travesty of the investigations into last year's Shopian incident involved innumerable bungled procedures, and threw up many glaring contradictions, till the government of India roped in the CBI to put a lid on it. They promptly concluded that it was a case of death by drowning. (In a stream with less than a foot of water) The case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations.

In the absence of justice, the space between Kunan Poshpora and Shopian can only be filled with the stories of nearly 7,000 people gone missing, of the 60,000 killed, and the several-hundred-thousand injured and maimed and tortured and psychologically damaged. The men of this society took the brunt of this brutalization. What of the price paid by the women? It's when we begin to come to terms with their decades-long accretion of grief and sorrow, of fear and shame, that we will begin to understand the anger of that woman with the stone in her hand.

The current round of protests will probably die down soon. The mandarins of New Delhi will heave a sigh of relief, tell us that everything is normal, and turn their attentions to something else. But only their hubris could blind them from noticing what we have all seen this summer in Kashmir. This is not ordinary anger. It's an incandescent fury that effaces fear. That should worry those who seek to control Kashmir.

Sanjay Kak is the maker of 'Jashn-e-Azadi', a documentary about Kashmir

Voices of Dissent

By Mantasha Binti Rashid

What does a democracy mean if the people can not hold their representatives responsible? What does it mean when political dissent is silenced with bullets? What does it mean when the representatives of people by virtue of being people-elected go to any extent to retain power ?

It means that democracy is a sham, a cover up to the same old human desire of power wealth and prestige.
It was today that dissent echoed in the heart of the capital city ,Janta Mantar .People shouted anti-system slogans and demanded freedom. This protest was not any other protest in the protest street but one attended by hundreds of people, many of who had directly come from the valley of Kashmir including bussinesmen and students and others consisted of the Kashmiris in Delhi,from all walks of life.All had gathered in solidarity to express their grief and anger against the innocent killings in Kashmir.In over more than a month forty plus people have been killed in the valley of Kashmir by Indian security forces.These killings took place in the public protests ,one starting with the unearthing of the fake encounter in Kupwara .These incidents are not isolated incidents but need to be looked at all in a queue .A long queue which dates back very long in history and directly began with the partition of India in 1947 when Kashmir was divided too .A part occupied by Pakistan and the other by India and some even by China.

Tonight not just Kashmiris but Sikhs from Punjab ,People from North East ,Tamil Nadu and Maoist supporters are were united in Jantar Mantar against the state oppression and all showed solidarity with the former. All have been questioning the sovereignty of India in their respective states and include people who are faced with injustice ,state terrorism and a curb on their civil liberties and basic human rights. They all questioned state’s brutal ways of curbing and crushing dissent .The posters held by protestors displayed young civilians who have been killed in Kashmir. All in their teens,the youngest nine and the eldest 35!

It was a moment of hungry silence which begged to be fed on slogans, observed for the peace of innocent victims of violence. The slogans like “hum kya chahte aazadi” (we want freedom) echoed in the Cental Delhi .Loud enough to reach the deaf and power loathed ears of the people in authority .Media of the democratic country showed vicarious presence but the television sets showed nothing in the night The arguments on News channels in the evening, nowadays host debates discussing what is the anger of Kashmiris against? What do they want?
When they gathered to say it in their cameras ,they were not reported! I wonder if their cameras ad tapes fed on those voices like the bullets feed on the blood of same race, same people !

Now before the ink which should report this protest in newspapers tomorrow dries up by the fear of authority I thought It is better to pen it down .The timing of the protest was in synchronization with the breaks given to Kashmiris back home in the evening after days of curfew. Curfew which orders “shoot at sight ”.A term like Animal treatment to this treatment will upset the animal rights supporters who will feel insulted .After all they do not let animal,s like dogs, get killed!

This protest also requested the common Indian people to wake up to the killings in Kashmir being carried out by their elected government in Delhi and even damned the state government of Kashmir, the N.C lead coalition with Congress. Name hardly matters as the protestors shouted slogans calling them the stooges of central government. There were a few Kashmiri Pandits who made their presence felt but by standing against the group even after requesting to join the gathering as one people belonging to the soil of Kashmir but by not doing so they made their purpose of sabotaging the gathering very clear although many Kashmiri Pandits were a part of the Kashmiri gathering.

“Kashmir atanqwadi nahi” was one slogan which reverbrated in Jantar mantar along with Allah-hu-Akbar to which some protestors objected saying that it was not a communal but a political problem. Leaving a big question to be answered .If all those suffering are Muslims in Kashmir, can not they use religion to bind them, to come to a platform ,to be one? Is it that they have to be under fear of being called communal even if they scream that god is great in Arabic? Till society does not become secular, a secular state means nothing!