A particularly disturbing slogan heard in the Kashmir Valley, where its young school-goers and old patriarchs, angry women and restive youth are courageously defying Indian rule, is enough to put off any sensitive sympathiser. Bhooka nanga Hindustan; Jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Starving and tattered India we reject; Pakistan - land of our dreams - we embrace.)
This slogan conveys acute political bankruptcy in a region which has lived with naked military repression for more than 20 years. Im sure any Pakistani with a sense of justice would also be uncomfortable with the warped mindset the slogan betrays.
That Kashmir is reeling under Indian occupation is not a secret. That Pakistan has played a questionable role there is also well known. Yet, for Kashmiris to see their struggle as part of the many battles being waged by the poorest of the poor against the Indian states multi-pronged injustices against its own people, would not compromise or be a contradiction in Kashmirs struggle for self-determination. The simple question for Kashmiris to ask themselves is, isnt the same state that has killed 60 young Kashmiris in three months, also responsible for tens of thousands of suicides by indebted farmers in India? Does Sharmila Irom, who is fighting to repeal the law that gives unbridled powers to security forces in her Manipur state have no relevance for the same struggle in Kashmir?
The tribespeople of Chhatisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal are fighting for their fundamental rights. One of their demands is that they not be evicted from their homes to accommodate corporate land grab. Is this not what Kashmiri Pandits suffered at the hands of the Indian state as well as non-state actors in their homeland without any redress from successive Indian governments that claim to represent them?
Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have often cajoled dissident groups, including the banned Maoists, to come for talks within the constitutional framework. Why cant the affected groups simultaneously expose the insincerity of the Indian state? To take just one example, the preamble of the Indian constitution describes the nation as a socialist and secular republic.
Socialism is thus the law of the land. Which Indian government, including the one led by Chidambaram-Singh duo, has come anywhere close to keeping the promise of socialism? Just the opposite. Both have callously opened the country to the depredations of private capital.
I met a Kashmiri separatist a few days after the Babri masjid was razed in Ayodhya. He happened to be the only senior enough leader to be still dodging the police in Srinagar. The rest were in jail. He told me he didnt care for the plight of Indian Muslims in the wake of the Ayodhya outrage. They have never helped the Kashmiris, so why should we bother with them?
The explanation for his aloofness was ironical. How can we forget the senior Indian minister telling journalists during the Agra summit that if Kashmir was to be given to Pakistan on the basis of religious claims, should not the Indian Muslims then be packed off in special trains to Pakistan? Kashmiris and Indian Muslims may see themselves as separate entities with separate causes. But their detractors will always see them as one headache. Check this out with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who knows Indian Muslims as children of Mian Musharraf.
I put the question to some Kashmiri intellectuals in Delhi recently. I asked them how was it that a movement with international ramifications and wide support among a number of Muslim states could be so self-absorbed that it didnt have a policy much less a worldview about other peoples sufferings. Kashmiris did speak up once for the Palestinians, but now it seems they do not have the energy for even that. On the other hand, there is no dearth of seemingly unrelated groups that lend them moral support. A recent rally in Canada of Sikhs and Kashmiri activists, who protested against Indias brutality in the Valley, could be a case in point. A few weeks ago an obscure Tamil group in India issued a statement in support of Kashmiris. Do the Kashmiris want to know who the members of the Tamil group are?
There is something about this that reminds me of an interaction I once had with Gen Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad. He had just returned from a visit to Colombo where his government was giving military and political support to the government against Tamil rebels. I said how was the Tamil struggle any different from the Kashmiri movement since both stemmed from the denial of the right to self-determination. Gen Musharraf said he didnt want to comment on another countrys internal matter. So he too chose the injustice, which suited him most.
Vidya Subrahmaniam of The Hindu has done an interesting comparison of three major pogroms in India, each fighting its own battle without getting involved with the sorrows of each other.
The Orissa violence, in which Hindu-Adivasis targeted Dalit Christians, was undoubtedly smaller in scale compared to Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 1984. Despite
variations, the three pogroms could have been written, produced and directed by a single satanic mind, judging by the astonishing similarity in the detail and sequence of events and the stunning brutality of the crimes committed, says Subrahmaniam.
In his November 2002 foreword to the report of the Concerned Citizens Tribunal, which collected 2,094 oral and written testimonies from Gujarats victim-survivors as well as human rights groups, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer said: The gravamen of this pogrom-like operation was that the administration reversed its constitutional role, and by omission and commission, engineered the loot, ravishment and murder which was methodically perpetrated through planned process
Eight years later, as Subrahmaniam notes, the jury at the Kandhamal Tribunal had similar words to say: The jury records its shock and deep concern for the heinous and brutal manner in which the members of the Christian community were killed, dismembered, sexually assaulted and tortured
There was rampant and systematic looting and destruction of houses and places of worship and means of livelihood
The jury is further convinced that the communal violence in Kandhamal was the consequence of a subversion of constitutional governance in which state agents were complicit.
When, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhis 1984 assassination, thousands of Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi, the commonly-held view was that it was an aberration brought about by an extraordinary situation. Comparisons were made with the 1947 Partition riots but few could have known at that time that the clinically planned and executed anti-Sikh pogrom would serve as a model for two more episodes of mass aggression against minorities, The Hindu analysis said.
India has spawned a coalition of injustices. For those in the Kashmiri resistance to show solidarity with those fighting the same bloated, militarised state that they are, will not compromise their goal. It would only deepen their vision and sharpen their ideas of what kind of azadi they are fighting for.
