Kashmir: The Case for Freedom
Indian civil society assumes that an autonomous or separate Kashmir would take the form of an Islamist state and would therefore be a threat to India’s democracy. The assumption that a Muslim-majority state in Kashmir would be ruled by Islamist extremists in support of global terror reflects the racism of Hindu-dominated India. Indians of Hindu descent too easily overlook that India’s own democracy is infused with Hindu cultural dominance. Indian civil society, in line with the inflamed Islamophobia that influences the polities of the West, assumes that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Indian society must rethink its characterization of Kashmiris as prevalently Jamaati—the Arabic word for ‘assembly’, but used by India to imply an Islamist or fundamentalist group.
The logic that predominantly Muslim Kashmir must either stay with secular India or join Muslim-dominated Pakistan is a function of India’s and Pakistan’s internal ideological needs and identity politics. Neither nation speaks to the foremost aspiration of Kashmiris. Neither acknowledges the histories of feudal and colonial betrayal, in which Kashmir’s inclusion was sought in assembling India and Pakistan as nation-states. India all too easily forgets its own history under British rule, and the declaration of its freedom fighters that the oppressor does not have the privilege of judging when a people are ‘deserving’ of freedom.
Kashmir is a Muslim-majority space. The population of India-held Kashmir was recorded at approximately 6,900,000 people in 2008, and approximately 95 per cent of them are Muslim. Kashmir’s future as a democratic, inclusive and pro-secular space is linked to what happens within India and Pakistan. Kashmiris who desire a different future must assess the difficult alliances yet to be built among Kashmir, Jammu (a Hindu nationalist stronghold), and Ladakh (with its Buddhist majority), and among Muslims and Hindu Pandits, Dogra Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, indigenous groups, and others.
Then there is the question of what lies ahead between Indian-held Kashmir and Pakistan-held Kashmir. Minority groups such as Kashmiri Pandits must resist the attempts of Hindu nationalists and state institutions to use the Pandit community to create opposition between Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, a tactic intended to further religionize the issue and govern through communalization.
Where is the international community on the issue of Kashmir? In recent history, Palestine, Ireland, Tibet and Kashmir have shared common features. In Tibet, between 1949 and 1979, 1.2 million people died and 320,000 were made refugees. In Ireland from 1969 to 2010, 3,710 died. For Israel, the occupation of Palestine has resulted in 10,271 dead (1987–January 2011), with 4.8 million refugees registered with the United Nations (1947–June 2010). In Kashmir, 70,000 are dead and over 8,000 have been disappeared. More than 250,000 have been displaced (1989–2010), including minority Kashmiri Pandits of Hindu descent.31 Between 209 and 765 Kashmiri Pandits have been killed.32
Confronting India’s political and human rights violations in Kashmir has not been a priority for powerful nations, and the international human rights community has been reluctant to approach the issue of Kashmir and take meaningful action.
At a September 2010 meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, India focused on terrorism and national security and called for the expansion of the United Nations Security Council, with the objective of its own inclusion. India reiterated that Kashmir is ‘an integral part of India’ and identified the region as the ‘target of Pakistan-sponsored militancy and terrorism’.
Unreflective support of India by the global North reduces state-sponsored injustice and violence in Kashmir to the status of collateral damage, justified as necessary to combat Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. This conflation of Kashmir with Pakistan stifles debate and condones atrocities. When British prime minister David Cameron visited India in July 2010, he was asked to refrain from bringing up the ‘K word’. US president Barack Obama’s visit to New Delhi in November 2010 was laden with prohibitions, the mention of India’s rule in Kashmir and its larger human rights record among them. Right-wing Hindu advocacy groups have also been successful in securing the silence of many politicians on Capitol Hill on the issue of Kashmir. The Kashmiri diaspora, its exiled and new and old immigrant communities, remains ideologically and politically fragmented.
A culture of grief hangs like a shroud over Kashmir. The sounds of war haunt whole mohallas (neighbourhoods). Abandoned buildings and deserted public squares, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, armed personnel and counter-insurgents mark Kashmiri lives.
In the course of our work, Parvez Imroz and I have been taken into custody and detained for questioning. An explosive device was thrown at Imroz’s home in 2008, targeting his family. That year, a First Information Report charged Zahir-Ud-Din, editor of the Etalaat English daily, and me with acting to incite crimes against the state, following his publication of an article I wrote on mass graves. Khurram Parvez has been threatened, and he is constantly monitored. My mother, living alone in Kolkata, has been questioned by intelligence officers. I am stopped at immigration each time I enter or leave India.33
It is 1 November 2010, and my life partner, Richard Shapiro, a Jewish-American academic whose scholarly focus is not South Asia but Continental philosophy and anti-racist work, has been refused entry into India without reason or due process, presumably to target the Tribunal’s work. I call Kashmir from Delhi International Airport, undecided whether I should stay or leave. Khurram Parvez tells me, ‘Your coming here [Kashmir] today is necessary. If you do not come, this move to separate you from Richard will also become a move to further isolate Kashmiris.’34 I proceed from the international terminal in Delhi to board the flight to Srinagar. The estrangements inflicted through nation-building on the subcontinent are palpable to me on this day, my own experience an eerie reminder of the state’s reach into domestic life.
The conditions of everyday life in Kashmir reveal the web of violence in which its civil society is confined. Through summer heat and winter snow, across interminable stretches of concertina wire, broken window-panes, barricades, check-posts, and literal and figurative walls, the dust settles, only to rise again. The agony of loss. The desecration of life. Kashmir’s spiritual fatalities are staggering. The dead are not forgotten; remembrance and mourning are habitual practices of dissent.
‘We are not free. But we know freedom,’ KP tells me. ‘The movement is our freedom. Our dreams are our freedom. The Indian state cannot take that away. Our resistance will live.’35
1 Personal communication, January 2011. Name withheld for reasons of security.
2 Srinayar is the summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
3 Bebaak: The word means ‘Outspoken’ in Urdu. Real name withheld for reasons of security, and certain information omitted or left vague.
4 Parvez is part of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in India-administered Kashmir. His leg was severed by a landmine in 2004, while he was on a trip to monitor an election. This mine had been placed by militants. In 2009, Parvez participated in a campaign to secure a commitment from militants to abandon the use of mines. The Government of India is not a signatory to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.
5 Unless otherwise specified, ‘Kashmir’ refers to India-held Kashmir. India governs the largest fragment of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Ladakh, and a major portion of the Siachen glacier. Pakistan controls Azad Kashmir and northern areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. China controls Aksai Chin and the Shaksgam Valley.
6 Some Hindus (Brahmins, northern Indians) are deemed more ‘authentic’ than others, and their special privileges are institutionalized. Epic violence has been perpetrated by Hindu nationalists in recent times, against Muslims in Gujarat (2002) and Christians in Orissa (2007, 2008).
7 Influenced by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and the construction of the Jew as the internal enemy in the West, Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist leader, stated in 1923: ?
??Hindutva [Hinduness/Hindu supremacism] is not a word but a history . . . not only a Nation but also a race’. See V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva, New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003, pp. 84–85.
8 The All India Kashmir Committee was established to secure the rights and freedoms of Muslims in Kashmir.
9 Three wars have been fought over Kashmir, in 1947-8, 1965, and 1971 between India and Pakistan, and one in Kargil in 1999.
10 The argument for self-determination was recognized in the United Nations Resolutions of 1948; the promise of a plebiscite was made by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (to rethink the temporary accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India by the Hindu-descended maharaja, Hari Singh); and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution gives Kashmir the right to live under its own laws.
11 Racisms of state. See M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. D. Macey, New York: Picador, 2003.
12 This section is based on research which I undertook between June and November 2010, with follow-up in March 2011.
13 A case alleging that stone-throwing led to the death of Shafiq Ahmad Sheikh was registered in April 2010. Investigations conducted by journalists uncovered information that Sheikh’s murder and the registration of the case were linked to subterfuge.
14 Personal communication, via telephone, September 2010. Name withheld for reasons of security.
15 Amnesty International, ‘A “Lawless Law”: Detentions under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act’, London: Amnesty International Limited, 2011.
16 Figure is derived from government and journalistic sources, September 2011, and includes counter-terrorism and special forces.
17 See kashmirprocess.org for more on the Tribunal.
18 Both names have particular histories. Presently, in Kashmiri politicized discourse, local communities often identify Anantnag as Islamabad.
19 Taken from A. P. Chatterji, P. Imroz et al., Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-Administered Kashmir, A Preliminary Report, Srinagar: International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir, 2009, 18.
20 Figure derived from government and journalistic sources, October 2009.
21 Human Rights Watch, ‘Everyone Lives in Fear’: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006, 65–6.
22 T. Ali, ‘Not Crushed, Merely Ignored’, London Review of Books, 22 July 2010.
23 Track II Diplomacy: Informal diplomacy, in which non-state actors engage in conflict resolution or confidence-building measures, often understood as a containment tactic.
24 The disputed 740-kilometre Line of Control (also cease-fire line, which includes the 550-kilometre Indian Kashmir border) established at the end of the First Kashmir War (1947–8) between India and Pakistan.
25 This section is based on research I undertook between September and October 2010.
26 These were jettisoned following the terror attacks in Mumbai of 26–29 November 2008.
27 Human Rights Watch, ‘“With Friends Like These”: Human Rights Violations in Azad Kashmir’, New York: Human Rights Watch, vol. 18, no. 12(C), 2006.
28 The All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of over 20 groups and parties, including the Aawami Action Committee, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and People’s Democratic Front.
29 A kanal is equivalent to 510 square metres.
30 See www.kashmirprocess.org.
31 Human Rights Watch, ‘India’s Secret Army in Kashmir: New Patterns of Abuse Emerge in the Conflict’, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996; and M. Kolodner, ‘Violence as Policy in the Occupations of Palestine, Kashmir, and Northern Ireland’, Master’s thesis, Amherst College, 1996.
32 M. Jaleel, ‘209 Kashmiri Pandits Killed Since 1989, Say J-K Cops in First Report’, Indian Express, 4 May 2008.
33 I am a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States.
34 Personal communication, November 2010. We share gratitude for the solidarity we have received from various international institutions and collectives, and from segments of Indian civil society, public officials, and the press.
35 Personal communication, September 2010.
Arundhati Roy
Seditious Nehru
Public statement, 27 October 2010
My reaction to today’s court order directing the Delhi Police to file an FIR [First Information Report] against me for waging war against the state: Perhaps they should posthumously file a charge against Jawaharlal Nehru, too. Here’s what he said about Kashmir:
27 October 1947
In a telegram to the prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, the Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said, ‘I should like to make it clear that the question of aiding Kashmir in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India. Our view, which we have repeatedly made public, is that the question of accession in any disputed territory or state must be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people, and we adhere to this view.’ (Telegram No. 402, Primin-2227, dated 27 October 1947, to PM of Pakistan, repeating telegram addressed to PM of UK)
31 October 1947
In another telegram to the PM of Pakistan, Pandit Nehru said, ‘Kashmir’s accession to India was accepted by us at the request of the Maharaja’s government and the most numerously representative popular organization in the state, which is predominantly Muslim. Even then it was accepted on condition that as soon as law and order had been restored, the people of Kashmir would decide the question of accession. It is open to them to accede to either Dominion then.’ (Telegram No. 255, dated 31 October 1947)
2 November 1947
In his broadcast to the nation over All India Radio on 2 November 1947, Pandit Nehru said, ‘We are anxious not to finalize anything in a moment of crisis and without the fullest opportunity to be given to the people of Kashmir to have their say. It is for them ultimately to decide. And let me make it clear that it has been our policy that where there is a dispute about the accession of a state to either Dominion, the accession must be made by the people of that state. It is in accordance with this policy that we have added a proviso to the Instrument of Accession of Kashmir.’
3 November 1947
In another broadcast to the nation, on 3 November 1947, Pandit Nehru said, ‘We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not and cannot back out of it.’
21 November 1947
In his letter No. 368 Primin, dated 21 November 1947, addressed to the PM of Pakistan, Pandit Nehru said, ‘I have repeatedly stated that as soon as peace and order have been established, Kashmir should decide on accession by plebiscite or referendum under international auspices such as those of United Nations’.
25 November 1947
In a statement in the Indian Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1947, Pandit Nehru said, ‘In order to establish our bona fides, we have suggested that when the people are given the chance to decide their future, this should be done under the supervision of an impartial tribunal such as the United Nations Organization. The issue in Kashmir is whether violence and naked force should decide the future or the will of the people.’
5 March 1948
In a statement in the Indian Constituent Assembly on 5 March 1948, Pandit Nehru said, ‘Even at the moment of accession, we went out of our way to make a unilateral declaration that we would abide by the will of the people of Kashmir as declared in a plebiscite or referendum. We insisted further that the Government of Kashmir must immediately become a popular government. We have adhered to that position throughout and we are prepared to have a plebiscite with every protection of fair voting and to abide by the decision of the people of Kashmir.’
16 January 1951
In his press conference in London on 16 January 1951, as reported by the daily Statesman on 18 Januar
y 1951, Pandit Nehru stated, ‘India has repeatedly offered to work with the United Nations’ reasonable safeguards to enable the people of Kashmir to express their will, and is always ready to do so. We have always, right from the beginning, accepted the idea of the Kashmir people deciding their fate by referendum or plebiscite. In fact, this was our proposal long before the United Nations came into the picture. Ultimately the final decision of the settlement, which must come, has first of all to be made basically by the people of Kashmir, and secondly as between Pakistan and India directly. Of course it must be remembered that we (India and Pakistan) have reached a great deal of agreement already. What I mean is that many basic features have been thrashed out. We all agreed that it is the people of Kashmir who must decide for themselves about their future externally or internally. It is an obvious fact that even without our agreement no country is going to hold on to Kashmir against the will of the Kashmiris.’
6 July 1951
In his report to the All Indian Congress Committee on 6 July 1951, as published in the Statesman, New Delhi, on 9 July 1951, Pandit Nehru said, ‘Kashmir has been wrongly looked upon as a prize for India or Pakistan. People seem to forget that Kashmir is not a commodity for sale or to be bartered. It has an individual existence and its people must be the final arbiters of their future. It is here today that a struggle is bearing fruit, not in the battlefield but in the minds of men’.
11 September 1951