Whither Kashmiriyat?

Kashmir Divided

Biswajit Roy

Two books on Kashmir and one can understand how Kashmir defies solution. One is young and acclaimed journalist Rahul Pandita's book—Our Moon has Blood Clots / The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (Random House, India). Pandita and his family were part of the exodus. The other book is also a personal account of Kashmiri woman activist and Hurriyat Conference leader Anjum Zamarud Habib—Prisoner no. 100; an account of my nights and days in an Indian prison (Zubban, Delhi).

Pandita is a prolific writer who has honed his skills in dovetailing personal and shared memories, oral testimonies and archival materials seamlessly. His understanding of the congruity of impersonal time and timelessness of human traumas, incongruity of our fractured geography and politics and our longing for the return to the roots strikes chords with those who have gone through the Partition or tried to understand it beyond the narratives of the twin nation-states.

He candidly recorded not only his loss of innocence, but also that of all the children of the divided land who have internalized the division today and became part of the subsequent mitosis of 'us' and 'them' willingly or unwillingly.

As a teenager refugee whose family was forced to leave Srinagar and join the massive exodus of his community from the heaven-on-earth since 1990, Rahul recollects the orgy of violence against the minority Hindus orchestrated by the Azadi-turned Jihadi militants.

It was the 'second exodus' as he recounted the first one through the narratives of his maternal uncle and others of older generation who had suffered in the hand of Pakistan-sponsored tribal invaders in 1947.
Grotesque killings of young and old, massacres of families, rapes and forced conversion, house-burnings and grabbing—all instruments of ethno-religious killings were used in both the pogroms to drive out the Pandits and Sikhs who had lived in the valley across the POK and IOK for centuries.

But there were crucial differences between the two. The first one resulted in mainly internal displacement within Kashmir valley—from Muzzafarabad, Baramulla, Sopore, Anantnag to mainly Srinagar and its outlying districts. The second one led to huge forced migration from all over Indian Kashmir to Jammu and then to Delhi and rest of India. In the first instance, National Conference leaders and supporters sheltered the terrorized minority, lost lives in opposing the tribal invaders while local Muslim population did not join the orgy.

Unlike the first one, local Muslims, both gun-toting militants and their civilian cohorts without any noteworthy opposition from neighborhood majority or political parties, perpetuated the second religious cleansing. The second coming was more prolonged, massive and devastating that was aimed at severing the umbilical cords of the religious minority from the valley once for all. Consequently, it later created a Pandit diaspora from 'Jammu to Johannesburg'.

He also debunks the widespread belief that the communal harmony in the valley was suddenly lost only when militants started ruling the roost after abduction of Mufti Md Syeed's younger daughter in 1989. Instead, he puts back the clock for regression to the eighties when he was child. His account of growing communal divide in the schools and larger society since his childhood in early eighties, is telling.

His Muslim classmates tore apart picture of Swaraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning or jeered who had joined in singing national anthem even as a school ritual. These were not acts of harmless childish pranks but aimed at hurting the students from minority community and draw the dividing line. The warmth of childhood intimacy and innocence was lost when his bosom friend, a Muslim boy, did the same. Even the milkman's daily harmless teasing of the Pandit kids on the community's lack of muscle power smacked of wars—both of willows and weapons.

In fact, international cricket matches became the major occasions to vent the valley's majority community's growing anti-Indian feelings and vocal support to Pakistan. They booed Indian cricket team in a match with Australia, the first and last in Kashmir. It shocked Pandita, a cricket enthusiast child who had gone to watch the match with a family elder. Thus, loyalty to the post-partition twin nation-states, their national cricket teams and religious identities became coterminous for both the communities.

For child Pandita and his Hindu family, support to India both in wars and warlike cricket matches, respect for Indian national anthem came naturally. They reacted to the Muslim Kashmiri's hatred against India as Indians and not as fellow Kashmiris. Maybe that's why they did not try to understand why the neighborly visits on Shivratri and Eid to each other’s homes waned and how the fragile social fabric was snapped irreparably.

Pandits, Rahul says, thought of the surviving the surging wave of communal passion of the majority by simply lying low as they did earlier. But neither his teenage memory nor his grown-up professional interest reminds any effort to bridge up with sane elements among the valley Muslims when their fanatic fringe joined hand with ISI-sponsored Afghan Jihadists and succeeded in converting the majority to their cause. Also, there was no mention of New Delhi's puppeteer politics since the seventies and replacement of tenuous democracy with virtual army rule in the valley that largely facilitated the conversion.

Perhaps this explains why Pandita despite his pangs over the loss of home, his love for Kashmir's natural beauty, its language and food as well as his longing to go back to roots—did not mention the killing of Kashmiriyat, the seemingly ultimate victim. In fact, one does not find the word or the very idea of it in his culling of memories and histories. The idea of a composite Kashmiri identity anchored in shared linguistic-cultural traditions of Lal Ded, Nund Rishi and other Muslim Sufis and Hindu mystics have been promoted by some sections in both the communities during and after the Partition years before hatred and mistrust spread like cancers.

Earlier, we were asked to believe that Kashmiriyat was one of the pillars of Nehruvian secular Indian nationalism vis-a-vis Jinnah's two nations theory and Hindutva of the RSS as well as Sheikh Abduallh's assertion of Kashmiri autonomy vis-a-vis rest of India. True, the initial romancing of Indian and Kashmiri nationalism, personalized by the Sher-e-Kashmir and migrant Pandit prime minister of India suffered huge heart-breaks shortly.

The realpolitik bargaining between Delhi and Srinagar became ugly with Indira Gandhi at the helm of Dilli durbar. Still, one remembers the first batch of young Azadi-seekers like Yasin Malik, unlike the hard-nut pro-Pakistanis like SAS Gilani, speaking in terms of composite Kshmiriyat in mid 2000s.

Was there a time when moon has no blood clots in Kashmir unlike today? Was composite Kshmiriyat a myth altogether? Was it a baseless political construction by post-Partition secularists and nationalists of both Kashmiri and Indian hues, a mere fiction created by romantic historiography? If not, what were the social-political dynamics as well as the geo-political trajectory of pre-partition coexistence to post-partition tolerance prior to post-eighties tension and subsequent hostilities? How and when Kshmiriyat became a shibboleth?

Pandita must have been aware of these real or constructed traditions. He does not seek the replies. He neither dismisses the idea of common Kashmiri identity as something fake and false nor offers any requiem for it. In fact, Rahul the journalist chose not to go beyond Rahul the refugee.

He decided to see the slide from bad to ugly from his family and community perspective only. True, larger aspects of the 'Kashmir problem' have been discussed and debated for long while the impacts of vicious politics of hatred on individual or community lives were hardly recorded. But an insider's view of the connection between the social and political, their uneasy convergences earlier and their subsequent disjunctions as well would have given us a better understanding of the changing templates in contemporary Kashmir.

Nevertheless, Rahul's remembrance of family friends, neighbors from the other side was not stereotyped. He did not try to make a balance between good Muslims and bad Muslims. Instead, he portrayed some poignant pictures of human relations, some of which survived the vicissitudes of social-political turmoil.

One such image is the memory of young Latif Lone, the connoisseur of Md Rafi turned Azadi-activist who escorted Rahul's mother to safety during a day of violence. Later Latif was killed by the army without any frills of fake encounters that normally comes with it. The elderly Panditine refugee wept for the dead 'Latifa' sitting in her dingy room in faraway Delhi where she constantly remembered her 22-room home back in Srinagar. Another image is of the warmth between the journalist Rahul and valley's elderly cabby Ali Mohammed, the 'quintessential Kashmiri'.

But his effort to reach out to Irshad, the bosom friend of his cousin and childhood 'hero' Ravi who was killed by Jihadi militants failed. The botany professor in Kashmir University did not turn up. Nevertheless, Rahul left a letter for him wishing him 'all good luck' while promising that he would 'return permanently' when 'there will come a time'.

The last words, he said, he did not write in his letter but 'that I say to him in my head'. These were not the bellicose words of a dispossessed reclaiming his lost. He had already visited his childhood home and suffered the pains of permanent loss of what he felt his only home, worthy of the name. He met its elderly Muslim occupiers but did not speak of getting it back.

Maybe he was aware of the fact that it would be impossible in view of the situation in valley. Nonetheless, his yearning for return to his roots will be shared by many in the post-Partition generations in either side of the divided Bengal and Punjab who found them in the same situation after 1947.

This explains why Rahul the kid, thanks to his father's timely intervention, did not end in the Saffron trap of the Khaki sorts-black cap brigade who tried to catch him young at the refugee camps in Jammu offering him training to avenge his community's sufferings. Also, he deflates the notion of a homogeneous Hindu identity in Jammu and the plains of the north India to contest the Muslim brotherhood in the valley.

The refugee kid in Jammu recalled how the Hindu house-owners fleeced the Pandits while rented dingy rooms at exorbitant price. The local Hindu sympathy for the uprooted petered out after initial show of solidarity and Pandits were subjected to public taunts. Politicians of all hues and babus left the refugees to rot in their tents and later in a ramshackle township 12 km away from Jammu city. One of the Pandit survivors of militant-run massacres later told Rahul how his relatives tried to snatch away the ex-gratia that he had received from the government.

Rahul the journalist continues to highlight the plights of ghettoized Pandit refugees in Jammu and elsewhere. But he also takes up assignments in Kashmir valley to report violation of human rights by armed forces. "I have lost my home, not humanity," he says. Being a fellow journalist, it reassures that all hopes are not lost in the madness of sectarian violence.

Anjum's narrative is an account of a violated and traumatized Kashmiri woman. She is one of the daughters of Kashmir whose social-political trajectory is representative of many youths in her generation who chose to be pro-independence Azadi activists despite being the go-getters in the mainstream life.
Coming from an educated middle class family with government connection from Anantnag, she was the recipient of the title of'all round best student' besides being a 'NCC commander and badminton champion' and the president of the student body in her college days in the eighties.

Beginning her activism by taking up dowry and other social ills that women face, she got baptized in politics and Azadi movement when the turbulence rocked the valley. She launched Muslim Khawateen Markaz (MKM), a women's organization along with few others and joined All Party Hurriyat Conference, a forum of pro-separatist parties and individuals. However, the explosion of'pro-Azadi sentiments in the wake of hanging of Maqbul Bhat and state atrocities subsumed women's issues in Kashmiri society as she told me at the sidelines of a convention on political prisoners organized by the Coordination of Democratic Rights Organizations in Kolkata recently.

Anjum says she is still not comfortable with the 'male-dominated politics and society' in the troubled valley and criticised the Hurriyat leaders for denying women 'a political space for women' within the separatist movement. She also opposed anti-women fatwas by mullahs and muftis. Earlier, she even wrote to the Prime minister Manmohon Singh requesting him to 'include women in the dialogue process' in 2006 when in his first term Singh had raised her generation's 'hope for peaceful solution of the Kashmir problem' based on the 'principles of justice, equality, freedom and dignity'.

At 52, the pro-Azadi activist who also insists on women's freedom appeared to represent the multi-layered, if not conflicting identities and aspirations of a generation in the valley who grew up on the shifting sand of inclusive 'Kashmiriyat' based on Sufi traditions, Hindu-Muslim syncretic culture and urbane cosmopolitanism at one hand and religious nationalism anchored in pro-Pakistani sentiments and orthodox Islamic dictates on the other.

But for official India, she is a still a terror suspect even after she had spent almost five years from February 2003 to December 2007 in Delhi's Tihar jail as an undertrial in a case under now defunct Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). The Delhi high court released her following her petition challenging her conviction by the POTA court that had 'awarded her five years jail term while exonerating her from the terrorist act'.
Still waiting for justice after being released on bail since last six years, she is compelled to travel frequently to Delhi all the way from Srinagar to attend court in connection with another case that was lodged against her during her imprisonment.

"Every time I visit Delhi, I feel the trepidation of being put behind the bars again under another false case. God knows how long this nightmare will continue," she told me.

If not uprooted permanently like Rahul Pandita, her account of five years long ordeals in dreaded Tihar will haunt any 'mainlander' unless one sees the world through the prism of Indian nation-state. In her memories of daily nightmares in the dungeon of our democracy, Kashmir often creeps in as an exile's longings to return to her beloved homeland.

The MKM and Hurriyat leader was arrested from a Delhi street in a POTA case on her way abroad on January 6 in 2003. She was accused of being a terror accomplice as a conduit between Pakistan embassy and Kashmiri militants. Since then, it was a Kafkaesque trial, both in courtrooms and inside the jail.

The notoriety of our criminal justice system is well known. With its eternally sluggish pace that mainly stems from the bureaucratic mindset of all of its components -judges, police, prosecutors, defense counsels, jailors and labyrinth of babus in every sub-sections—collectively deny justice in the name of rule of law. They compel the accused to die a thousands deaths in goals for years before they are convicted or released, or breath their last. But average Indians, except the moneybags, too suffer under this dehumanized system.
What Anjum and her likes suffered additionally was the tags of terrorists—gaddars (renegades), deshdrohi (anti-national), 'nation's enemy' and 'Pakistani agents' etc. It began with her first copters and interrogators at intelligence offices where both men and women officials called her 'terrorist' as well as all Kashmiris 'traitors'. Anjum later recalled an 'all-around hostility reserved for them (the Kashmiri prisoners); the judge, the jailmates and even the environment'. The last one was an allusion to Delhi's extreme weather in summer and winter.

In Tihar, jail officials barred others from speaking to her and she feared of being implicated in a case for initiating others in 'terror training'. Her tearful complaints against the highhandedness of mates, munshis, matrons; the hardened convicts co-opted in the ruling hierarchy in the jail; only evoked harsh response from most of the women officials as they threatened her with dire consequences if she did not admit having misbehaved with a superior.

Her cell was searched on the eve of Independence Day and Republic Day as though there was a hidden bomb. She was not allowed to join office work suitable to her educational training and her request for Urdu magazines with Quranic inscriptions were not entertained often which, she felt, stemmed from their 'religious prejudices'.

So pervasive is our nation-state's discourse on Indian nationalism (for that matter, of any nation-state) that even the most wretched and wronged of our society, in this case Anjum's fellow women jail mates, joined prison apparatchiks in hounding, abusing and attacking her or treating her as an untouchable. Though, she suspected that 'the ones who loudly showcased their supposed patriotism found it turning cold as it was not genuine sentiment but just a way to denigrate me'.

Being a Muslim, she became double hate-object for some others who denied her water from a common cooler claiming it would 'ruin their dharma'. There may be an element of racism when a 'habshi' woman, probably a black foreigner, attacked her physically when she refused to be identified as a Pakistani. They tried to segregate her from other Muslim inmates from north Indian plains and south but they sympathized with her and considered her as 'one of them'. After encountering hostile co-prisoners who used foul language against her and called her a 'terrorist', Anjum often felt that 'there may be only few in India and in Indian jails who did not hate us'.

However, this confinement inside confinement, seclusion within seclusion did not last long. The inmates irrespective of their religious faiths suffered daily degradations, humiliations and brutalities at the whims of prison hierarchy. Despite the sympathetic behaviour of a few prison officials who cared for the dignity and well-being of the inmates, the institutional mechanism for the redressal of inmates' grievances was a farce.
The prisoners were locked up during ritualistic visits by the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) team. The latter went home after enjoying hearty snacks offered by jail mandarins and served by few chosen inmates who kept mum. Prisoners did not dare to drop their complaints in the NHRC box in the jail compound fearing for their lives. Recalling the mandatory morning prayer in jail in tune with V Shantaram's 'Aye Malik Tere Bande Hum', Anjum remarked caustically: 'for me as a prisoner, it had multiple meanings'.

But the suppression was bound to ignite occasional rebellions involving the sufferers across the ethno-religious or language divide. One such occasion was the death of an Afghan girl, accused in drug trafficking who died because of negligence of jail authority. The rebellion continued for days before being quelled by massive police lathi-charge. The director general presiding over the nine jails in the gargantuan complex, officially known as the largest 'correctional home' in the land, came to meet the aggrieved women inmates only to call them 'beasts'. Six women including Anjum were booked as the ringleaders of the riot and sent to the court.

Both Rahul Pandita and Anjum Jamarud Habib have revealed terrible truths but only half-truths. Without necessarily being dismissive of the other community's heartrending tales, both are largely oblivious to the treacheries and hypocrisies of the grand narratives of Indian and Kashmiri nationalism respectively which they imbibed naturally as being the members of Kashmiri Hindu (Pandit) and Muslim community.

If read separately and uncritically, both of their accounts can evoke strongly polarizing emotions as well as fragmented understanding of Kashmir's history and identity formations in the recent past and their corollary political positions. But it will be wrong to dismiss both as false histories, propaganda or mere blame game. Each account has earned its authenticity through individual and collective experiences.

For those who do not belong to either communities or share their horrors and pains existentially, may not be able to fathom the depth of their sense of betrayal and brutalization, legitimacy of their anger and anguish. Their accounts will find resonance in the minds of many who have gone through the agonies of the Partition of Indian subcontinent.

However, the fact that neither writer has dealt on Kashmiriyat or mourned the moribund, if not dead, idea of a composite Kashmiri identity, underscores their alienation from each other and acceptance of religion-based differences as something fundamental, though they have not espoused the latter consciously. That's why it provokes this writer wonder whether the idea of Kashmiriyat is a mere myth, wishful secular fiction only?

If not, both the writers and their genre should not resurrect the memory of pains and sufferings alone but of those days when the humwatans shared and stood by each other. They should also tell us whether they see the possibility of the return of the phoenix from the ashes of communal madness of the nineties in the valley.

Hindu and Muslim Bengalis and Punjabis were never close to the idea of such composite identity before the Partition. Though, there were always some marginal social-political strands, both middle class and subaltern, which tried to sail against the tide of communal passions.

The birth of Bangladesh saw the rebirth of the idea of composite Bengali nationalism in both parts of undivided Bengal, not necessarily accompanied by the dream of a political union under an independent nation-state as it was conceived by few Bengali leaders of Congress and Muslim League, chiefly, Sarat Chandra Bose and Abul Hashim.

Both Nehru and Jinnah dismissed such dream before the Partition as an anathema to their respective grand narratives of secular Indian nationalism and religion-based Pakistani nationalism respectively. Neither did it find popular support in communally charged situation then nor after in both parts of original Bengal. The Bangladeshi nationalism, despite its dilemmas between Bengali and Islamic identities, or to be precise; over the primacy of one of the two has gone through many trials and tribulations since the country's independence.

Nevertheless, unlike their brethren in West Bengal, believers in language and culture-based composite Bengali nationalism have fought their ideo-political as well as the street battles with the forces of sectarian religious nationalism and fundamentalism. The vicissitudes of political opportunisms of Awami League-BNP and intermittent military rulers notwithstanding, the idea of pluralistic Bengali identity did not die. The ongoing Shahbag movement against Jamaati and other collaborators with Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation war has proved it beyond doubts.

Though Pakistani rulers hope for and their Indian counterparts fear a Bangladesh parallel in Kashmir, is there a possibility of something differently analogous in the most contested region of the subcontinent?

Both Pandita and Anjum compel us to face the problematic of exercising the right to self-determination of ethno-religious minority in a nation-state, particularly, at the fringe of its territory. It becomes vicious in the context of demand for similar rights of the regional minority where national minority is a majority. An overwhelming majority of Indian political parties oppose the postcolonial nation-state's strong unitary practices and demand the extension of federal principles. But they suffer no qualms in joining the clamor for crashing movements, which are demanding maximum autonomy (like National Conference demand for pre-1953 status of Kashmir), Plebiscite (some Hurriyat leaders) and right to secession (as demanded by the militants) at the country's borders. They ignore these demands (while making clandestine or electoral alliances with these separatist forces) despite the fact that these demands have been germinating since the colonial period and gained popular support among their constituencies in post-independence periods.

On the other hand, there is also a small section of the civil society, mostly supporters of the radical Left, which tend to champion one community's right to self-determination ignoring the rights of the regional minorities like Pandits and Ladakhis. They hardly care for the complexities of the ground reality and the enormous social cost of the simplistic solutions. Time and again, truth has stared us in the face making it clear that the sacrifice of one community's aspirations at the cost of others is ahistorical, immoral and a clear recipe for disaster.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 51, June 30 -Jul 6, 2013

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