Kashmir repression rewards Hindu far right
- Log in to post comments
By the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation
August 18, 2008 -- The communally and politically motivated May 26 decision of the Congress Party-People's Democratic Party (PDP) government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to transfer forest land [in Muslim-majority Kashmir] to the Hindu Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) [for use as a pilgrimage site near a sacred Hindu cave] is having costly repercussions, with the added danger that it may emerge as a communal [flashpoint] nationally.
The land transfer, taken in the context of irresponsible official remarks recommending changes in the demography and “culture” of the region as a “solution” to the Kashmir “problem”, was like a spark to the tinderbox of pent-up resentment in the Kashmir Valley. Lives were lost when police opened fire on protesters; the PDP tried to distance itself from its ministers’ decision in favour of the land transfer by pulling out of the government; and the government on July 1 was belatedly forced to roll back the land transfer decision.
[The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir amalgamates the Hindu-majority Jammu region with the Indian-controlled section of the majority-Muslim Kashmir Valley. Kashmir is divided by the India-Pakistan border. There is a strong desire among Kashmiris for reunification, with some nationalist demanding independence for Kashmir while other forces call for unification with Pakistan.]
The Bharatiya Janata Partry (BJP) and Sangh Parivar's declaration to mobilise Hindus “nationally” against the revocation of the land transfer stoked the resentment in Jammu: resentment that stemmed from accumulated anger against the systematic neglect of the region's aspirations but has been given a communal colouration by the Hindu chauvinist, far-right RSS-BJP. [The Sangh Parivar is the ``movement'' of reactionary Hindu organisations allied to and organised by the Hindu-chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).]
The Congress government also contributed to communalisation of the issue, with statements that the protests against the land transfer had been funded by Islamic countries. The resulting flare-up has continued for weeks; Jammu has witnessed communal violence against its Muslim residents; curfews have been imposed in four of the eight districts of Jammu; Srinagar has been under siege; the Kashmir Valley has been blockaded, requiring army deployment to ensure the supply of essential commodities.
With fruit growers hit by the blockade, protests escalated again in the valley, and were met again with police fire on August 11-13 which claimed six lives, including that of Abdul Aziz, a senior leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a coalition of pro-independence and pro-Pakistan parties. The unrest in the Kashmir Valley escalated; further firing by police and paramilitary on Aziz’s angry supporters claimed 12 more lives all over the valley; and an indefinite curfew has been imposed throughout the valley for the first time since 1990.
The BJP’s top leadership is continuing to fan the communal flames over the episode, projecting the revocation of the land transfer as an injustice to the Amarnath Yatra pilgrims. The facts fly in the face of such propaganda. The use of the aforesaid land for hospitality for the yatris was never opposed in Kashmir; in fact Muslim local residents had unfailingly provided all sorts of services and assistance to them year after year. The High Court order of 2005 directing the state government to erect temporary structures to provide for the yatris during the two-month pilgrimage period was never opposed by anyone; only the move to transfer the land from the aegis of the government to that of the Shrine Board, implying that the Shrine Board could then erect permanent structures on the land and prevent local residents from using the land when the pilgrimage was not on.
Further cause for concern was that the huge unregulated inflow of tens of thousands of pilgrims was endangering the fragile local ecosystem; while there is a limit set to the number of pilgrims to Gangotri or Gomukh, there is none for Amarnath.
Another crucial factor was that the pilgrimage itself had been projected by the Indian and state governments as a ``patriotic'' enterprise -– this officially sponsored identification of a Hindu pilgrimage with ``patriotism'' was fraught with communal overtones and set the stage for deep suspicions of any handover of resources to the Shrine Board.
The deep-seated sense of neglect in Jammu and alienation in Kashmir have not been addressed by successive governments and political forces. Instead communal polarisation is being sharpened by political forces who are trying to project the alienation of the Jammu residents as having a Hindu and therefore ``nationalist'' character (protests being organised with the tricolor in hand) while the alienation of the people of Kashmir is being portrayed as ``Muslim'', ``anti-national'' and specifically, ``Pakistani''. The BJP’s all-out communal build-up has received fodder from the opportunism of the Congress Party and the PDP.
The Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, despite Omar Abdullah’s brave declarations of secularism in parliament, has done its share to promote the BJP’s communal agenda in the state. All in all, the political forces in the state seem set to push the situation dangerously towards the trifurcation of the state on communal lines -– an agenda openly avowed by the BJP in the past and proposed by various think tanks of the United States of America like the Kashmir Study Group.
The spate of indiscriminate shootings by police and paramilitary forces on protesters in Kashmir smacks of the Indian state's habitual repressive and callous chauvinism. The solution to the present impasse could be sought in upholding the High Court Order of 2005 which had stipulated that “The land to be allotted by the Board would be only for the purposes of user and would remain limited for the duration of yatra. The Board shall also identify the sites to be allotted for the purpose of langar, erection of detachable/prefabricated huts and toilets, etc, that would not be permanent in nature and are liable to be removed after the period of yatra is over.”
But politically motivated forces are eager to block such a solution, seeking to reap a communal harvest from the situation towards the next elections. Even if such a solution is eventually reached, the sores left by the entire episode on the polity in Jammu and Kashmir are not likely to heal easily. The Congress-led Jammu and Kashmir state government and the United Progressive Alliance coalition government at the centre are squarely to blame for having handed the BJP a communally potent agenda on a platter, in the process doing far-reaching harm to the sensitive region of Jammu and Kashmir.
From ML Update, CPI (ML) Weekly News Magazine, vol. 11 no. 33, August 12-18, 2008.
For
the past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of
Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have
shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of
half-a-million heavily-armed soldiers in the most densely militarised
zone in the world. | ||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||
Indian
State, known amongst the knowing as the Deep State, has done everything
it can to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit,
interpret, intimidate, purchase—and simply snuff out the voice of the
Kashmiri people. It has used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it),
disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of
collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged
elections to subdue what democrats would call "the will of the people".
But now the Deep State, as Deep States eventually tend to, has tripped
on its own hubris and bought into its own publicity. It made the
mistake of believing that domination was victory, that the 'normalcy'
it had enforced through the barrel of a gun was indeed normal, and that
the people's sullen silence was acquiescence.
People's movement: Protesters march towards the UN office in Srinagar
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking
on people's behalf, informed us that "Kashmiris are tired of violence
and want peace". What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was
never clarified. Bollywood's cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films
has brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir's
sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen,
it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in
Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace they
yearned for, but freedom too. Over the last two months, the carefully
confected picture of an innocent people trapped between 'two guns',
both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.
A
sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of 100
acres of state forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages
the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas)
suddenly became the equivalent of tossing a lit match into a barrel of
petrol. Until 1989, the Amarnath pilgrimage used to attract about
20,000 people who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about
two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamic militant uprising in the
Valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindutva in the Indian
plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By
2008, more than 5,00,000 pilgrims visited the Amarnath cave in large
groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses. To
many people in the Valley, this dramatic increase in numbers was seen
as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly
Hindu-fundamentalist Indian State. Rightly or wrongly, the land
transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an
apprehension that it was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build
Israeli-style settlements, and change the demography of the Valley.
Days
of massive protest forced the Valley to shut down completely. Within
hours, the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young
stone-pelters took to the streets and faced armed police who fired
straight at them, killing several. For people as well as the
government, it resurrected memories of the uprising in the early '90s.
Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal and police firing, while the
Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind
of communal excess, the 5,00,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed their
pilgrimage, not just unhurt, but touched by the hospitality they had
been shown by local people. Eventually, taken completely by surprise at the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer. | ||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||
But it was too late for those games, the
damage had been done. It had been demonstrated in no uncertain terms to
people in Kashmir that they lived on sufferance, and that if they
didn't behave themselves they could be put under siege, starved,
deprived of essential commodities and medical supplies. The real
blockade became a psychological one. The last fragile link between
India and Kashmir was all but snapped.
To expect matters to
end there was of course absurd. Hadn't anybody noticed that in Kashmir
even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity
inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To threaten them with mass
starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not
surprisingly, the voice that the Government of India has tried so hard
to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of
thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities,
their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily
armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable
display of raw courage.
Raised in a playground of army camps,
checkposts and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a
soundtrack, the young generation has suddenly discovered the power of
mass protest, and above all, the dignity of being able to straighten
their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For
them it is nothing short of an epiphany. They're in full flow, not even
the fear of death seems to hold them back.
And
once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second-largest
army in the world? What threat does it hold? Who should know that
better than the people of India who won their independence in the way
that they did? The circumstances in Kashmir being what they are, it is hard for the spin doctors to fall back on the same old same old; to claim that it's all the doing of Pakistan's ISI, or that people are being coerced by militants. Since the '30s onwards, the question of who can claim the right to represent that elusive thing known as "Kashmiri sentiment" has been bitterly contested. | ||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||
media
despite the pathetic voter turnout in election after election appear
dutifully for debates in New Delhi's TV studios, but can't muster the
courage to appear on the streets of Kashmir. The armed militants who,
through the worst years of repression, were seen as the only ones
carrying the torch of azadi forward, if they are around at all, seem to
be content to take a backseat and let people do the fighting for a
change. Everywhere in chains: But it's no barricade to freedom
The separatist leaders who do appear and speak at the rallies are not leaders so much as followers,
being guided by the phenomenal spontaneous energy of a caged, enraged
people that has exploded on Kashmir's streets. The leaders, such as
they are, have been presented with a full-blown revolution. The only
condition seems to be that they have to do as the people say. If they
say things that people do not wish to hear, they are gently persuaded
to come out, publicly apologise and correct their course. This applies
to all of them, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani who at a public rally
recently proclaimed himself the movement's only leader. It was a
monumental political blunder that very nearly shattered the fragile new
alliance between the various factions of the struggle. Within hours he
retracted his statement. Like it or not, this is democracy. No democrat
can pretend otherwise.
by
a small splinter cell of the ISI and to request the channels to keep
this piece of exclusive, highly secret intelligence in mind while
covering (or preferably not covering?) the news from Kashmir.
Unfortunately for the Deep State, things have gone so far that TV
channels, were they to obey those instructions, would run the risk of
looking ridiculous. Thankfully, it looks as though this revolution
will, after all, be televised.
For somebody like myself, who is not Muslim, that interpretation of freedom is hard—if not impossible—to understand. I asked a young woman whether freedom for Kashmir would not mean less freedom for her, as a woman. She shrugged and said, "What kind of freedom do we have now? The freedom to be raped by Indian soldiers?" Her reply silenced me. She's no terrorist: A woman pelts stones at policemen
Standing in the grounds of the TRC,
surrounded by a sea of green flags, it was impossible to doubt or
ignore the deeply Islamic nature of the uprising taking place around
me. It was equally impossible to label it a vicious, terrorist jehad.
For Kashmiris, it was a catharsis. A historical moment in a long and
complicated struggle for freedom with all the imperfections, cruelties
and confusions that freedom struggles have. This one cannot by any
means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and will
some day, I hope, have to account for—among other things—the brutal
killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising,
culminating in the exodus of almost the entire community from the
Kashmir Valley.
Window of opportunity: Spectators for the march to Srinagar
Oddly enough, the apparent doctrinal
clarity of what he said made everything a little unclear. I wondered
how the somewhat disparate views of the various factions in the freedom
struggle would resolve themselves—the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front's vision of an independent state, Geelani's desire to merge with
Pakistan and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq balanced precariously between them. Perhaps now that the threat of violence has
receded and there is some space in which to debate views and air ideas,
it is time for those who are part of the struggle to outline a vision
for what kind of society they are fighting for. Perhaps it is time to
offer people something more than martyrs, slogans and vague
generalisations. Those who wish to turn to the Quran for guidance will
no doubt find guidance there. But what of those who do not wish to do
that, or for whom the Quran does not make place? Do the Hindus of Jammu
and other minorities also have the right to self-determination? Will
the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of
them in terrible poverty, have the right to return? Will they be paid
reparations for the terrible losses they have suffered? Or will a free
Kashmir do to its minorities what India has done to Kashmiris for 61
years? What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers?
What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the
"complete social and moral code"? Will we be put to death as we are in
Saudi Arabia? Will the cycle of death, repression and bloodshed
continue? History offers many models for Kashmir's thinkers and
intellectuals and politicians to study. What will the Kashmir of their
dreams look like? Algeria? Iran? South Africa? Switzerland? Pakistan? |
Kashmir repression rewards Hindu far right
Nagesh Rao reports from India on the latest wave of repression in the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir.
August 14, 2008
AT LEAST 18 people were killed August 12 and13 by police and military bullets in the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir. Among them was a senior political leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), a coalition of various pro-independence and separatist, but also pro-Pakistani, organizations based in Kashmir.
The brutal attacks by security forces on Kashmiri activists have been extensively reported on, even by the mainstream media. On August 11, police and paramilitary forces opened fire on a nonviolent march by Kashmiris protesting the economic blockade of Kashmir by rioting Hindu mobs in Jammu. Five people, including Abdul Aziz, were killed, and according to The Hindu newspaper, some 230 more were injured, mostly by bullet wounds. The march to Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir was stopped by the Indian forces at the Line of Control (LoC) that serves as the de facto border between Indian- and Pakistani-controlled regions.
In an effort to snuff out any protests against the killing of Sheikh Aziz, a military curfew has been imposed on all of Indian-occupied Kashmir. In protests against these repressive measures, at least 13--and perhaps as many as 24--were killed August 12.
Kashmir is on fire--and the far-right Hindutva forces are cheering on.
At the tip of the current crisis sits a controversial land transfer deal involving a Hindu pilgrimage site in the middle of Muslim-majority Kashmir. According to an article [1] by Gautam Navlakha in the Economic and Political Weekly, the pilgrimage known as Amarnath yatra was, until recently, a little-known journey undertaken by small numbers of Shaivite (worshippers of Shiva) Hindus. As recently as 1989, only 12,000 pilgrims--in a country of nearly a billion Hindus--undertook the pilgrimage.
Earlier this year, in a move that could only be considered provocative and insensitive towards the Kashmiris, the state government decided to legitimize the demand for Hindu control of the Amarnath yatra by granting nearly 40 hectares (100 acres) of land around the Amarnath Cave to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB).
As Navlakha writes: "The origins of the conflagration in June in Kashmir on forest land allocation for construction of facilities for the Amarnath yatra lie in open state promotion of the pilgrimage. The yatra has caused considerable damage to the economy and ecology of the area. The high-handed actions of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board only aggravated the situation.”
The land transfer agreement was merely the latest in a series of land grabs by Hindu organizations led by the SASB. As Navlakha pointed out, "The SASB runs a virtually parallel administration and acts as a 'sovereign body' promoting Hindu interests, increasing the number of pilgrims from 12,000 in 1989 to over 400,000 in 2007 and extending the period of the pilgrimage from 15 days to two and half months."
Kashmiris rightly protested against this blatant act of state promotion of a specific religion in their state, as well as the damage to the ecology of the area. Soon after, the state's government, a coalition involving the Congress Party and the People's Democratic Party (PDP), collapsed. The PDP, a business-dominated Kashmiri party, joined the protests and withdrew from the government.
On July 1, the governor, under pressure, revoked the order transferring land to the SASB. As if on cue, Hindu activists in Jammu, the Hindu-majority province of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, began protesting. On July 7, the streets of Jammu exploded, ignited by the cadres of the Hindu right. As mobs rioted in the streets demanding the "restoration" of the land to the Hindus, some of the ideologues of the Hindu right took to the airwaves in the name of the "oppressed" and "neglected" Hindus of Jammu. Others proclaimed, in Orwellian fashion, that this was a "Hindu intifada."
Behind it all, however, was the organizational power of the forces of the Hindu extreme right, including the RSS, the Shiv Sena, the VHP and others. The Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP), has launched a three-day "nationwide agitation" to support the demands of the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti [2] (SASS), which is a front for the Hindu right.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DURING THE weeks of riots that followed in Jammu, the police had showed remarkable restraint, which stands in sharp contrast to their current murderous and trigger-happy approach to Kashmiri Muslims. Cops stood by while Hindu mobs wielding crude weapons laid siege to Kashmir, blockading the Jammu-Srinagar national highway and choking off the movement of goods into and out of the valley.
A letter of protest addressed to the United Nations [3] by prominent progressive scholars and academics from across the world rightly points out that about
Kashmiri activists responded to this economic blockade with various forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. Activists like Yasin Malik, chairman of the independence-seeking, secular-democratic Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), began an indefinite hunger strike. Others, led by Kashmiri businesses, the APHC, and the PDP called for a mass march across the Line of Control and to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The march took place on August 11, and it was then that security forces killed Sheikh Abdul Aziz and four others.
While Indian newspaper editorials on August 12 vilified the marchers as "extremists" and "separatists," TV news outlets were showing live video of police firing indiscriminately into groups of unarmed protestors at Aziz's funeral procession. Tens of thousands of men and women also protested across the Kashmir Valley against the imposition of a military curfew--the first Kashmir-wide curfew in 13 years. They too were fired upon.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE CRISIS is unfolding too rapidly for anyone to be able to predict its future direction. The Hindu right has begun to term this as a Jammu vs. Kashmir issue. The two regions, they claim, have disparate interests, and ought to be separated. At the same time, by demanding a Hindu takeover of the Amarnath yatra, the right wants to assert the (Hindu) Indian nation's sovereignty over Kashmir. The demand for bifurcation of the state is a calculated effort to stir up communalism, while the agitation over Amarnath is a carefully planned nationalist and chauvinist tactic.
The Hindu right, in other words, has lit a new communalist fire that it hopes to fan into a nationalist conflagration ahead of next year's general elections. The sheer numbers of protesters on the streets, both in Jammu and in Kashmir, indicate that the crisis will not be resolved any time soon. But the crisis does come at an opportune time for a newly resurgent Hindu fundamentalist right wing in India, as well as for the beleaguered Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who's clinging to power amid an effort to impeach him. Musharraf may well try to use the political crisis to try to escape his predicament.
Meanwhile, the main left-wing parties in India offer little by way of an alternative. An editorial [4] in the Communist Party of India-Marxist newspaper, People's Democracy, draws a simplistic equation between the Hindutva forces in Jammu and "extremist elements" in Kashmir. The editorial goes on to warn that "such a conflagration…undermines the unity and integrity of India" and puts its "national security" at risk.
The editorial makes no mention, of course, of the Kashmiris' right to determine their own future without any interference from the Indian state and military. The editorial calls for a "process of dialogue" with the SASS, the Hindu organization spearheading the Jammu protests, while the only mention of Kashmiri activists is the passing reference to "extremists." Small wonder that the left finds little traction in the Kashmir Valley, while the right succeeds in agitating on the streets of Jammu.
While the electoral left hedges its bets, it's critical that progressive activists in India extend and display their solidarity with the people of Kashmir--and stand up to the communalist ideologues who currently dominate the debate.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [5] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.