by NYLA ALI KHAN
Amidst rumors of cow killing in Udhampur district of Jammu, truck driver Zahid Rasool Bhat was killed as a result of a patrol-bomb attack on his truck. People carry coffin of Zahid Rasool for the final funeral. PHOTO/Hilal Shah/News World India
MLA from Jammu and Kashmir, Abdul Rashid Sheikh’s face was blackened by Hindu militants. “When contacted by The Indian Express, Hindu Sena national president Vishnu Gupta claimed responsibility for the attack and said Rashid was a “Muslim terrorist” and any person who insulted gau mata (cow mother) would have to face the consequences.” Photo/Text/The Indian Express
The very sad death of Zahid Rasool Bhat from Bijbehara, Kashmir, one of the truckers attacked by a mob in Udhampur, in the wake of the beef ban in Jammu and Kashmir, who alleged that Zahid was involved in cow smuggling, made me realize that a paragraph which I had written in 2010 still rings true:
“The breezes of Kashmir, which once had the power to heal every trauma, now cause searing wounds. The throes of pain, palpable in every withering flower and trembling leaf, can lacerate the most hardened person. The ripe pomegranate trees that once bespoke a cornucopia now seem laden with an unbearable burden. The liturgies in mosques, temples and churches that once provided spiritual ecstasy are now jarring cacophonies. The comforting solitude that one could thrive on in various spots of the Valley now seems like a psychosis-inducing solitariness. What happened to the Valley that provided inspiration to poets, saints and writers? Where is the beauteous land in which even a dull-witted writer could find her/his muse? Where are the majestic chinars, the fragrant pine trees and the luxuriant weeping willows that provided harbor to those buffeted by the fates? The mesmerizing Mughal gardens in the Valley with their refreshing springs and breathtaking waterfalls bemoan the state of the riven land, the polluted streams and the devastated people.”
In the wake of the RSS’s reprehensible attempt to stoke the flames of communal hatred and sectarianism in secular and democratic India and the judgment of the Lucknow branch of the Allahabad high court regarding the Ram Janmabhoomi site, made a couple of years ago, our memories of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation of 1989 are refreshed. A disused sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid, was demolished by Hindu supporters of the Saffron movement who hoped to construct a temple, the Ram Janmabhoomi, on that site. Hindu-Muslim riots swept Northern India in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. In the case of the majority Hindus, the militant Hinduism that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement incited challenged the basic principle that the nation was founded on: democracy. Community was evoked in order to create nostalgia for a fabricated past that was meticulously contrived. The progressive attempts of left-wing activists were challenged by the construction of a mythic history asserting national tradition in a classically fascist form. In this nationalist project, one of the forms that the nullification of past and present histories takes is the subjection of religious minorities to a centralized and authoritarian state.
Some of the current problems in J & K can be traced to the surging Saffron wave in India. From the 1970s onward, the effective generation in the Kashmir Valley came to be the new educated middle class which was witness to the tremendous work of their predecessors toward communal amity traceable to hundreds of years of collective zeitgeist, but found themselves victims of unemployment and a decrepit infrastructure. They were witnesses to the rising Saffron wave in India. They were witnesses to an All India Party struggling to capture power at the centre and foregrounding in their election manifesto their aim of demolishing a mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. The Brahmins of Kashmir, popularly called Kashmiri Pandits, getting central government jobs in a ratio out of proportion to their demographic percentage, compounded this feeling.
From the 1970s onward Islam became resurgent at the international level. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, the “secular” government of the Shah of Iran was ousted and he fled the country in disgrace and ignominy. Political unrest in the Soviet Union generated a demand for independence by its Central Asian republics of Kazakhastan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikistan, which resisted even offers of a federal or confederate connection with the erstwhile Soviet Union, resulting in their independence in 1991 and the formation of a Commonwealth of independent states comprising different racial, linguistic, ethnic groups of people. The ultimate surrender by withdrawal of the massive forces of the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1989 after having been an occupation force in that country for ten years with enormous fire power instilled in the youth of Kashmir a feeling that no military might can keep a resistant people tethered to another by sheer force.
For more than sixty years the Kashmir conflict has remained like a long pending case in a court of law between the two nuclear giants in the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan. The Kashmir imbroglio has worsened partly out of disillusionment that was generated by perceiving the hollowness of Indian secularism, partly out of the ignominy that Kashmiris felt in being tied to a government and a polity that is getting increasingly religionized. The insurgency in Kashmir grew into a low intensity warfare made lethal by the firepower of India, accompanied by killings, assassinations, plunder, pillage, rapes, taking of hostages, counterinsurgencies, and ambushes. The backcloth has remained the same for the past twenty years, which is a recipe for disaster.
The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that annihilates the myth of secularism in India. National integrity and sovereignty cannot be maintained by blackening the faces of political opponents. Politics in South Asia has been caricaturized by the RSS, which is wreaking havoc on the political fabric of India.
One might disagree with the politics of Er Abdur Rasid, an elected member of the State Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir, but the culpable attempt to humiliate him by blackening his face in the capital of India, by right-wing activists should lead us to seriously reconsider the relationship between state and civil society. Who is running the country? A democratically and legitimately elected government, or vigilante groups?
As a poignant reminder to the student of Indian history and subcontinental politics, I would like to point out that Jawaharlal Nehru observed in the Constituent Assembly of India that the greatest danger to India will not be from Muslim communalism but from Hindutva which could potentially become expansionist and communally belligerent.
Notes
(1) I find it pertinent to point out that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s recognition of the political and socioeconomic dominance of Kashmiri Pandits and his arduous attempts to pull Kashmiri Muslims out of the morass of illiteracy and servility were misinterpreted as his communal and divisive politics.
(2) The only bond between these diverse people was a thin veneer of Islam interpreted differently by these newly created nation-states.
(3) I wish to acknowledge that the late P. N. Duda, legal luminary and prolific writer made available to me the manuscript of his Causative History of Kashmir with permission to use it extensively. I owe some of my conceptualization of the communalization of Indian politics and its impact on the Kashmir imbroglio to his work.
(Nyla Ali Khan is a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, and member of Scholars Strategy Network. She is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. She is editor of the Oxford Islamic Studies’ special issue on Jammu and Kashmir. She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com)