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https://liberationbase.wordpress.com
Kashmir and the Imagination of the Hindu Rashtra Concerned Citizens’ Collective
The Indian government under the Bharatiya Janata Party treats
Kashmiri Muslims as Erewhonian criminals, aggressively turning their
longstanding struggle and their pain of living in a conflicted state
into terrorism and ‘crime’, while also repeatedly pathologising Kashmiri
Muslims as terrorists. This is reflected in the violence unleashed by
the Indian army on the common, dissenting people of Kashmir, mutilating
their bodies, their faces with pellets to counter the tension that
erupted in the wake of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s killing
in July 2016.
In December 2016, a team comprising well-known documentary
filmmaker Tapan Bose, activist Harsh Mander, professor Dinesh Mohan,
journalist Pamela Philipose, and independent researcher Navsharan Singh
called the Concerned Citizens’ Collective travelled to Kashmir to assess
the impact of the violence on the common and innocent people of the
state. They brought out their findings in a book titled Blood, Censored: When Kashmiris Become the ‘Enemy’, published by Yoda Press in July 2018.
In the following essay, republished here with permission, the
authors explain how the Indian Army, by openly filming and photographing
the way they torture the Kashmiri ‘suspects’, in addition to the actual
physical torture they inflict on them with the full sanction of the
Indian state, has resulted in a violent visual culture that grants them
greater and stronger impunity.
It is impossible to comprehend the policy of New Delhi with regard
to Kashmir without recognising that for people on both sides of the
ideological divide in India, Kashmir has a supreme symbolic importance
well beyond just the land and its people. What makes Kashmir supremely
significant for both is that it is the only Muslim majority state in
India. All other Muslim majority regions in undivided India (except
Hyderabad which was subdued) joined the union of Pakistan. Kashmir,
through a historical default, remained with India.
For secular Indians, Kashmir is a test-case for a country that
declares in its constitution that the nation belongs equally to people
of every faith. By that tenet, the fact that Kashmir has an
overwhelmingly Muslim population is irrelevant to the claims that
Pakistan lays on Kashmir, on the grounds that the majority of its people
are Muslim; because Pakistan is a country whose central organising
principle is religion while for India it is not. The problem is of
course the gaping chasm between the principle and practice of India’s
constitutional secularism. If the majority of Muslims in Kashmir are not
convinced that India in practice assures them the dignity and
protection of equal citizenship, then the moral claims on their hearts
and minds of India’s secular constitutional break down. They also
shatter if the Hindu (and Sikh Buddhists) minorities do not feel safe
and equal in Kashmir. The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the valley
in the 1990s, and the lack of any effective political and social
initiative from the Muslim residents of Kashmir to either prevent their
flight, or to ensure that they can return safely today and live in mixed
settlements with their Muslim neighbours as in the past, further
enfeebles the secular premise for Kashmir to remain a part of India.
But the greatest weakness for those who believe that Kashmir’s
continuation in India is the ultimate litmus test of the success and
authenticity of its secular credentials is that if the majority of
Kashmiri Muslims demonstrably do not want to continue to throw their lot
with India’s destiny, then no secular democratic principle is endorsed
by holding them to India by decades of military suppression.
For the Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, precisely the fact
that Kashmir is a Muslim majority state makes it suspect in its loyalty
to the Indian nation. In the eyes of the RSS, in the orthodoxy of the
Sangh, the Muslim is the ‘enemy within’. The taming and domestication of
Kashmir has therefore always been high on the RSS agenda for India as a
Hindu Rashtra, the flying of India’s flag in Lal Bagh central square in
Srinagar. (The irony is that the RSS has long refused to fly in Indian
tricolour in its headquarters in Nagpur; it flies instead of a saffron
flag). The annulment of Article 370 of India’s constitution, which
guarantees a special status to Kashmir, is one of the triumvirate of
paramount demands of the RSS. The other two are the construction of a
Ram Temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and a uniform
civil code (again aimed to revoke the rights of Muslim men to have more
than one wife or to divorce their spouse at will).
Therefore, in the present era of triumphalism in the Hindutva camp,
with Prime Minister Modi’s repeated impressive successes in the
hustings, the suppression of any kind of popular or militant Kashmiri
assertion is politically fundamental to the advance of the Hindu
Rashtra. It is for this reason that the domestication of Kashmir is seen
to be imperative not just for the integrity of the Indian nation, but
for the triumph of Hindu nationalism.
Unlike in the erstwhile UPA administration, which also subscribed
to a militarist approach to Kashmir but at the same time kept open other
avenues of dialogue and development, the present administration is
happy for the Kashmiri to see the Indian state mainly in the form of a
menacing and unrelenting gun-toting Indian soldier.
The Guardian asks, ‘How did India get here? How is it all
right for a constitutionally democratic and secular, modern nation to
blind scores of civilians in a region it controls? Not an authoritarian
state, not a crackpot dictatorship, not a rogue nation or warlord
outside of legal and ethical commitments to international statuses, but a
democratic country, a member of the comity of nations. How are India’s
leaders, thinkers and its thundering televised custodians of public and
private morality, all untroubled by the sight of a child whose heart has been penetrated by metal pellets?
This is the kind of cruelty we expect from Assad’s Syria, not the
world’s largest democracy.’ The answer can only be—India got here
because of the triumph of majoritarian nationalism: its hubris, its
spectacular want of compassion.
***
The suppression of Kashmir is now a made-for-television spectacle,
designed to both whet and assuage bloodlust in the rising ranks of Hindu
nationalists, who see themselves as by definition the only authentic Indian nationalists.
The army records videos of its military operations and successes, not
just against Pakistan but also Kashmir, and hands these out to
television channels which obediently, uncritically and often with a
shared triumphalism relay these, portraying the unruly Kashmiri not just
as the disloyal ‘other’, but as the enemy. It is difficult to
recall an occasion in the past in which the army chief in India has
openly held out threats to a section of the country’s own civilians.
General Bipin Rawat does so belligerently, aware that he is openly
intimidating young citizens of his country and theirs. The army is a
highly disciplined force, and its serving officers would not speak to
and through the media unless they were authorised to do so. Again, we do
not recall junior officers of the armed forces defending strategies
such as the human shield aimed against Indian civilians in the way that
Major Gogoi did on prime-time national television. As Apoorvanand
observes, ‘That it did not shock us when Gogoi addressed the nation
through the media after being decorated is a disturbing sign. Before
him, and the current army chief, we do not remember any army officer
addressing a press conference, not even after the Pakistan Army’s
surrender in 1971, not after Operation Blue or the Kargil conflict. In
all these, the army was the main actor. But it refrained from being seen
as the director. It was always seen as following the civil authority.
The present government is invoking nationalism to legitimise itself. It
is trying to show it is the first government which backs the army. The
latter is obliging by making the government’s nationalist agenda its
own.’
Even more extraordinary is the release, presumably by Indian army
sources of videos, that record their harsh coercive and violent action
against protesting Kashmiris. Earlier we could have expected security
forces to restrain any such public celebration of their breaking of the
backs and spirits of unarmed civilians, because of service discipline,
for fear of criticism by liberal opinion within and outside the country,
and perhaps the sense that the violent repression of one’s citizens is
not something to publicly celebrate in a democracy. But no longer.
Instead, these videos are circulated as evidence of army valour, and of
decisive action against the unruly and disloyal Kashmiri. Mohamad Junaid
says that the ‘open-air theatre’ of violent repression was an essential
part of the strategy of the Indian security forces in the first phase
of militancy in the 1990s. During ‘crackdowns’ on Kashmiri urban
neighbourhoods and villages, the Indian military would pick Kashmiri men
and publicly beat and torture them. It was done in front of other
Kashmiris, who were forced to gather in open spaces and watch. This
served ‘as a warning but also as a psychological operation to break
people’s will.’
But he feels that the current ‘visual politics’ of the display of
army action on social media in Kashmir is different. First, he says, it
helps serve the political objective of satisfying hyper-nationalist
sentiment: ‘The military is matching in practice what the true
desh-bhakts are asking for in their blood-curdling discourse. The videos
are meant to bring the Indian nation out of the closet, and unabashedly
embrace the hard reality of Indian rule in Kashmir.’
The distribution of these videos, he says further, is also to
reassert a fragile masculinity against the deflation he feels has taken
place since Burhan Wani’s killing and then on election day on 9 April
2017. ‘The Indian military has become inadequate to the task of keeping
Kashmir subdued, or at least this is what it reads in its assessment of
the desperate nationalist mood in India. It has responded with febrile
displays of violence where it used to try to hide it. For long, only
images of mangled bodies of dead militants were publicly displayed to
assert Indian military’s masculinity. Now it is bodies of unarmed
Kashmiri civilians, beatings of youths and women, the humiliation of
children, and blasted houses in Kashmir.’
One can agree or disagree with Junaid’s harsh assessment, but the
question remains. Why should the army post celebratory videos of its
severe punitive action against civilians who are unarmed or armed at
best with stones, often very young, and sometimes women and girls?
Videos that establish that the way it treats citizens of the country is
in brazen violation of human rights, the law of the land, and
international law?
For retired army personnel, free from even the formality of army
discipline, this is of course open season. A number of them rally their
hyper-nationalist rage against the rebellious stone-pelting Kashmiri
youth in noisy television studios. An Indian Army veteran, Major Manoj
Arya, wrote an open letter to Burhan Wani. He describes him as
‘despicable’. ‘You could have been an engineer, a doctor, an
archaeologist or a software programmer but your fate drew you to the
seductive world of social media, with its instant celebrity hood and all
encompassing fame. You posted pictures on the internet with your
“brothers”, all you fine young Rambos holding assault rifles and radio
sets. It was right out of Hollywood… The day you started with your
social media blitzkrieg, you were a dead man. You encouraged young men
of Kashmir to kill Indian soldiers, all from behind the safety of your
Facebook account. Your female fan following was delirious. You were a
social media rage… I wish we had met… (before killing you). And your
parent’s son is dead. Dead from a 7.62mm full metal jacket round to the
head.’
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