Get them by their balls, hearts and minds will follow.” That lucidly sinister thought, emblazoned on the outer wall of a police station in the Valley, was read by many after a photo was published some months ago in a local English newsmagazine in Kashmir. But it didn’t really surprise anyone. The denizens of that blighted land are all too aware of how that piece of police-graffiti isn’t a case of the local SHO displaying his familiarity with Yes Minister, but a rather graphically symbolic expression of what the actual situation is, what state policy itself seems to be. Of course, that actual situation is at variance with talk of ‘normalcy’ and ‘peace’ having ‘returned’.
And even liberal India – aware of what exactly is wrong in Kashmir – is mostly content in pointing to lines during panchayat elections or the tourists currently thronging the Valley as ‘proof’ of that normalcy returning. The sleight of hand here isn’t just pretending voters’ lines or tourists mean peace and democracies are in order in the state. It is the deliberate denial of a deeper political reality. As if all the troubled history from 1947 has been wiped clean because there are (so far) no widespread protests this year, as if all the bloodshed and suppression of the last 22 years has been forgotten. As if the basic , underlying desire for justice , rights and the resolution of afestering issue has vanished.
The official position continues to be that a political resolution is needed, that a dialogue must be envisaged. But on the ground, in Kashmir, what exists is an attempt at the suppression, nay, criminalisation of that political reality. An enforcement of the absurd formulation that no problem exists anymore, and that those who speak of one are marginal, misguided, or just instigators of some sort. An enforcement of silence is labelled peace. A suppression of dissent is called democracy.
The absence of manifest violence is called normalcy. As if the many vagaries of living under a police state don’t govern the daily lives of ordinary Kashmiris. “Kashmir is like a cotton-bale fire – you can pour water over it, but it keeps smouldering inside,” said a young government employee in Shopian, the town which witnessed a massive agitation over the alleged rape and murder of two young girls in 2009. (‘ Proceedings’ on the case have resulted, incredible as it may sound, in cases against members of the local committee formed to protest the incident – the official position maintains the girls drowned in waters probably 6-12 inches deep).
When this writer toured the town, among other places, a few months ago, it became clear what was happening, and what continues to happen: protestors, dissenters against official narratives, or just voices against the status quo, have been driven underground . People can’t speak their minds openly, freely. Such is the level of surveillance and control, the perception (often not wrong) of ‘informers’ everywhere , that even street corner discussions often occur only between ‘trusted’ people.
After last year’s intense protests, which clearly shook the state, the latter was clearly jittery about a repeat performance. By any means necessary, it wanted to stymie even the thought of that happening again – the Arab uprisings, as senior officials admitted, adding to the jitteriness. Thus, it was a winter of a brutal clampdown – which still continues. The police’s own figures say 5,000 plus youngsters were arrested, with thousands more ‘under watch’, while a few hundred were slapped with the draconian PSA. FIRs continue to exist against a great many to be invoked at the first sign of protests. Nocturnal raids, arrests , warnings, for even people using Facebook politically, pressure on families of youngsters who went underground – these were the tactics.
Not that even youngster’s part of last year’s stonethrowing protests actually wanted a repeat. “Why would we want to die?” said some of them, meeting whom in Srinagar felt something like acloak-and-dagger process. But everywhere there is the refrain that while nothing is planned, one spark, one incident, can ignite things again. Under the surface, Kashmir continues to seethe. And it is such an intense anger that can again rupture the apparent normality on the surface. Yet, factually, no one actually wants an agitation again, at least this year. Now, the larger attempt by the state is to create a class of people whose interests will dovetail with its own – through patronage , various inducements and sometimes plain coercion.
Yet, that only posits the abnormal state of affairs. To counter things, for example, the police has initiated ‘outreach projects’, recruitment drives and the like. On many fronts, it seems as if the police have taken over functions of the government – an outreach meeting, for instance, may well include civilians bringing forth a municipal problem, say, a blocked drain, with a police official promising ‘action’ ! On another front, apart from the habitual invoking of ‘a communal agenda is at work’ , an attempt is on to fracture the narrative on Kashmir , a post-modernism style ‘problematising’ of the narrative and the core issue – simply put, it consists of the ‘many people want many different things’ line.
But vast sections of Kashmiris remain aware of what is going on, though part of the pervasive sense of powerlessness afflicting the population. The ‘bad guys’ have eternally been recast in Kashmir. Now it is the protestors, and, it seems, all dissenters. That is part of the wider problem. A dialogue, serious and meaningful, is promised, yet never materialises. “A dialogue,” said FW de Klerk, former South African President and partner-in-peace of the ANC, on a trip to India sometime ago, “means you don’t decide who sits across the table.” Unless that becomes the operating principle, the abnormal will be called peace in Kashmir. And the situation is such that the Valley will rage again, if not now, then later. (Courtesy: Economic Times)
