Posts
“We want Reaction. India needs Leaders NOT buffoons”
This morning I received the following sms from a friend:
“I dnt want 2 light a candle 2 bury my remembrance 4 those who hv died. My heart’s full of anger, resentment, pain n revenge. I see no reasn 2 celebrte. I see no reasn 2 hoist my national flag outside Taj hotel.
10 terrorists had d power 2 make d entire nation go crazy for 60hrs.
V must fight back. If d govrnmnt cnt save us, let d army rule this country. The subtle speeches of Manmohan Singh & Pratibha Patil fail 2 extinguish my anger.
For d 1st time in my life I dnt feel proud 2 b an Indian, a country which is unsafe, volatile n corrupt.
We want Reaction. India needs Leaders NOT buffoons.
Its time 2 Wakeup. For Gods sake, don’t delete this msg. Pls, forward this msg to yr entire contact list in yr mobile. Pls..lets do it in d hope of getting a better life for our children!! Pls. frwd.”
The message was so long that when I did as advised; I found that it actually consisted of six sms limits. I did not ponder about it and dutifully forwarded it to all my contacts, minus the ones I knew would also have received it from the same friend. After having sent the message I read it one more time, and it was then that the inanity and absurdity of the whole message struck me. To be fair, I am sure my friend would not be the originator of this sms - like me he too would have got it from a friend - and like me he too would have forwarded it to the contact list in his mobile.
The sms brings home the painful fact that we as a nation are perhaps the most casual and thoughtless in our response to critical situations. The terror attack on Mumbai was the latest in a sequence of violent and brutal acts of aggression on the people of this soil, dating back to millennia before Christ and long before the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The response, as always, has been the same – confused, abbreviated, and insufficient.
We Indians have perfected the art of self-deception. We continue to project to the world an image of the most peace-loving nation on earth, and we have perhaps the largest number of monuments symbolizing peace. We are adept at coining slogans and singing paeans in honour of those who lay down their lives in one conflict after another. Our politicians and diplomats are forever declaiming that India is the prateek of shanti, condescendingly looking down upon the other nations and lecturing them on how to conduct themselves. We send our armed forces to patrol the strife-torn parts of the globe, especially in Africa, and the Middle East, and proudly claim to advance the cause of peace and democracy in these “unfortunate” trouble-spots. But we are the only nation who shamelessly calls a military adventure a “peace-keeping” expedition. The mandarins of New Delhi did not pause to think even for a second when they named the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka the IPKF, Indian Peace Keeping Force, paradoxically juxtaposing the words Peace and Force in the same phrase. It is this hypocrisy and double-speak that characterizes our response to any situation.
India is perhaps the most violent nation on earth. So what if we do not have the same lax gun laws as the US? We do not need guns to inflict violence. We have a huge arsenal of other weapons that we do not hesitate to use on the less fortunate and weaker sections of our society. The newspapers and TV channels every day are full of acts of violence we keep perpetrating against one another. As a nation we are perpetually on a short fuse, and the merest suggestion from a “leader” is enough to send us into paroxysms of violent explosions. Obviously, we do not have the time or the inclination to look for enemies outside. We are too busy looking for enemies within, expending all our energy in bringing down potential rivals in our spheres of activity. This violence did not begin with the Partition. It was always there, bred into the system by a divisive and demeaning caste structure. The largely unrecorded and unnoticed violence perpetrated by the upper castes on the dalits and the adivasis is no less than what the white Europeans did to the natives of America, Africa, and Australasia. And, whereas in most of the colonized world affirmative action has taken firm and definite roots, in India it has not even begun. The system of reservations has been specially designed by the erstwhile exploiters to keep the majority in perpetual thrall while opening the circle selectively to include a few from these castes who have uplifted themselves economically through fraud and chicanery. One does not have to name such people; they are well-known in social and political circles.
Adding fuel to this explosive mixture is our media; especially the visual one. Our TV channels have made perhaps the most Faustian bargain with the Devil. The race for TRP ratings and getting “exclusive” scoops has sent all ethical considerations overboard. Nothing is sacrosanct. To get an exclusive “sound byte” TV channels and their reporters are ready to stoop to any level of sensational crassness and crudity. Some are not even above “manufacturing” news. For them the siege of Mumbai was a godsend. For sixty hours they had the air waves to themselves and without even batting an eyelid or stopping for breath, these reporters and their senior editors were, all at the same time, giving their “exclusive” versions of the unfolding drama. Their insensitivity was also captured live on camera when they tried to ask stupid and inane questions of the released hostages. The men in charge of the security forces had all the time in the world to give their versions of the ongoing battle, and one could see how eager they were to be on the tube. It mattered little that unarmed hostages were being slaughtered within the besieged buildings! The cameras were not recording those events. It was not necessary for them to be where their men were fighting a dangerous and determined enemy.
The continuous cycle of violence against the poor and the dispossessed is the greatest condemnation of India as an independent nation state. This violence need not be only physical. The government and its various arms have grown into a hydra-headed monster destroying all mechanisms of equitability, accountability, and fair-play from public life. The judicial system is so clogged and arcane that it serves only the rich and the powerful. In our country the poor have no voice, and whenever some politician tries to represent them, it soon appears that he or she has a totally different agenda – the agenda of self-promotion. The growing extent of the so-called red corridor is not accidental, nor externally inspired, as some of our leaders would like us to believe. India is fast heading towards disintegration and anarchy, and our intellectuals and the educated classes have not even begun to appreciate the extent of the problem. They still believe that abbreviated sms’s will do the magic and make the terrorists and the naxalites disappear.
No wonder that our enemies from across the borders are capable of striking targets in our country at will! We can keep on demanding that we change our politicians and administrators, but we forget that the person we most need to change is us. Until we bring down the barriers of “exclusivity” that our class and caste conscious society has erected, we have no chance of success. Unless we begin to appreciate that all citizens have equal rights and do not try to jump the queue through connections and money-power, we will remain in perpetual threat of the dispossessed taking resort to violence. And while we are busy suppressing our domestic rebellions, our neighbours will continue to strike at us making us weak and ineffectual.
India needs enlightened citizens as much as it needs leaders who are not “buffoons”. Once the citizens change themselves, the “buffoons” will automatically disappear. Till then, I am afraid, we will continue to watch the three-ring circus that is going on at this time.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Alice Albinia's "EMPIRES OF THE INDUS"
I have just completed my journey from the Indus Delta to Senge Khabab with one of the most determined and energetic guides in history. The miracle is that this entire journey took just three days. I traveled by boat, jeep, bus, SUV, military transport, and every other means of locomotion available in these areas. I have walked the paths in the woods, hills and mountains that were traversed once by conquerors like Alexander of Macedon, Kanishka, the Kushan Emperor, Mahmud of Ghazni, Babar, the founder of the Great Mughal Empire, and in the footprints of explorers, monks, and historians. All this was made possible by a young girl, not even 30, who came to this area from England, the last in a long line of rulers who coveted this land and waged war to possess it by hook or by crook.
I am referring to Alice Albinia’s “Empires of the Indus”, a completely fascinating book, written in the most engaging manner by the young explorer/writer. Reading the book is like watching a BBC documentary on TV. I am reminded of the brilliant work done by Michael Wood in his documentaries on Alexander and Shakespeare, and more recently in “The Story of India”. The book is much more than a travelogue. It is a work of great scholarship, combining the disciplines of archaeology, social anthropology, historiography, philology, and literary writing. It is the result of painstaking research and dogged determination to travel through perhaps the most dangerous terrain on this earth. That she did it at a time when the entire area is awash with militant activity, inhabited almost entirely by Muslims who find themselves caught in an ideological war with the West; where almost every man and child is adept at the use of firearms; and where a single woman, traveling alone, is to be despised for her transgression; evokes not only admiration for her courage, but also a certain amount of awe. Nowhere in the book does she refer to any unpleasant experience that she must have encountered during her travels, and the impression one gets is of almost “a walk in the park”. It is quite right for her to keep such personal experiences out of the scope of the book as that would have taken the focus away from the real heroine of her tale – the river Indus.
She must have learnt to speak and understand Urdu/Hindi in very quick time, although I am not sure if she has learnt to read the scripts also. The book is a labour of love, and the sincerity of the author is apparent in every page and word. One can also feel her pain at the ecological destruction that the damming of the rivers and the various irrigation projects has done to whole cultures and civilizations that had thrived in this region. The artificially engineered boundaries of sub-continental India, expeditiously done by the British in 1947, divided much more than just its people. The Partition was a cataclysmic event destroying whole communities, and damaging people’s psyches irreparably. The birth of Pakistan, midwifed by the British, has failed in its objective to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian sub-continent even though it became home for less than one-third. Pakistan’s crisis of identity has led it to deny its pre-Islamic past and to rewrite history to suit its narrow sectarian interests.
Where I have an issue with the author is in her perception that the people of India were disconcerted and dismayed at the loss of what she calls the “heartland of Rig Veda” to Pakistan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am an Indian, born in a Kashmiri Pandit family, now living a retired life in the Nilgiris in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and I have never encountered this kind of thinking at any time during my days as a student or later. The tragedy of Partition is not lamented for the loss of territory but for the loss of the idea that was India. But whereas we in India have been trying to forget the past and to plod along with all our deficiencies, our neighbours have kept the wounds open through their stated policy of “thousand cuts”. Therefore, to say that “It was thus an acute disappointment to many Indians when the Indus valley cities were lost to Pakistan at Partition, and the search for equally ancient cities on the banks of the ‘Saraswati’ in India began almost immediately” cannot be substantiated by any data. The Indus valley civilization is still considered as a part of Indian history, even though the excavated settlements and cities may now lie in Pakistan. In India we have not denied our Islamic past and history has not been officially rewritten to exclude the Muslim rulers from its pages. I understand that in Pakistani text books there is no mention of Asoka, and that Akbar is not considered a great emperor because he tried to create a syncretic religion, Din-e-Elahi, that is anathema to Sunni Islam.
The search for settlements along the banks of the Saraswati is but natural. If great civilizations have grown on the banks of great rivers, there is no reason to believe that one could not have evolved on the banks of the Saraswati. There is no cause for reasoning that this search is due to some kind of disappointment at the loss of the Indus Valley cities. In fact they are not lost, as they are the heritage of the world, and it is incumbent upon Pakistan and the rest of the world to ensure that they are preserved and protected. Unfortunately, Pakistan and the Muslim world has been most remiss in their discharge of this responsibility, as evidenced by the destruction of Bamiyan; and the seventh century CE Maitreya Buddha in Swat, Pakistan, that had been photographed by Ms. Albinia herself. It is true that Indians, as a people, do not have a great sense of history, and they do not value antiquities as the people in Europe do. That is the reason why it is the British who have done almost all the archaeological work in the sub-continent, uncovered its glorious past, and even deciphered the ancient scripts and texts. But that is no reason to deride L.K. Advani, the Home Minister of India in the 1990s, for not being aware of the Tibetan name of the river Indus. I am sure that if Gordon Brown is asked to give the Celtic names of the rivers of England he will also be equally embarrassed. The author has clearly demonstrated her prejudices against the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), whom she condemns as a Hindu fundamentalist outfit, almost on par with the Taliban or the Muslim fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan. Having lived in India when the BJP was the dominant member of the ruling alliance at the centre, she has obviously been influenced by some of the members of the “pseudo-secular” brigade whose vote-bank politics has destroyed the secular fabric of this nation and given rise to pressure groups bent upon splitting the country into further fragments that can only be represented by a forest of acronyms like the casteist SC, ST, BC, OBC, BSP etc., and the regional DMK, TDP, PMK, MDMK, AGP, etc. etc. To suggest that the annual cultural function known as “Sindhu Darshan” inaugurated by the BJP is an attempt “to purify the river with the waters of the Brahmaputra and Ganga before it flows into Muslim Pakistan”, is mischievous, to say the least. L. K. Advani is a Sindhi, and I am sure the sight of this mighty river almost at its source must have been an exhilarating and humbling experience. It is natural to find oneself in awe of the might of Creation, and a sense of piety can overwhelm an individual’s consciousness. For a Sindhi, deriving his roots from the soil nurtured by this great river, the experience would be beyond our comprehension. To start a festival in honour of this experience is not necessarily to “compensate for poor geography”, but to recognize the importance of this mighty force of nature in the lives and history of the people of India. It is very disappointing when a work of great scholarship and purpose degenerates into a propaganda vehicle. To write that the Sindhu Darshan is a “mission of the extremist Hindu groups with which Advani is affiliated to reclaim ‘western India’ from Pakistan; and so, in the Home Minsiter’s hands, the Indus – which the rest of India had largely forgotten – became ‘a symbol of nationalism and national integration, evocative of the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers during the Kargil War and the loss of life and land at Partition”, may be fit for a propaganda leaflet, but certainly not for a work aspiring to be a dispassionate, unbiased story of the journey of a river. Michael Wood’s “Story of India” is an excellent example of this dispassionate, unbiased reporting, and perhaps the author could benefit by emulating his style.
The reason for Pakistan’s unabated hostility towards India lies in its quest for balance. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget giving the army a privileged, and unduly powerful, political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. Perhaps, like Pakistan, the author too was on a quest for balance. A hostile attitude towards a political party that inflicted the defeat on the Pakistanis in the misguided Kargil War, would go down well with the reading public in that country, thereby boosting the sales of the book.
Whatever may be her reasons, one cannot deny the fact that the book is highly entertaining and informative. The narrative style is natural and not laboured. The language is simple and close to the earth. The writer’s emotional involvement with her subject seeps through the pages and the characters she encounters during her journey are all painted with a humanistic brush. In the final analysis, Empires of the Indus is a highly readable book which could be prescribed as a text book in the syllabuses of Indian and Pakistani schools.
I am referring to Alice Albinia’s “Empires of the Indus”, a completely fascinating book, written in the most engaging manner by the young explorer/writer. Reading the book is like watching a BBC documentary on TV. I am reminded of the brilliant work done by Michael Wood in his documentaries on Alexander and Shakespeare, and more recently in “The Story of India”. The book is much more than a travelogue. It is a work of great scholarship, combining the disciplines of archaeology, social anthropology, historiography, philology, and literary writing. It is the result of painstaking research and dogged determination to travel through perhaps the most dangerous terrain on this earth. That she did it at a time when the entire area is awash with militant activity, inhabited almost entirely by Muslims who find themselves caught in an ideological war with the West; where almost every man and child is adept at the use of firearms; and where a single woman, traveling alone, is to be despised for her transgression; evokes not only admiration for her courage, but also a certain amount of awe. Nowhere in the book does she refer to any unpleasant experience that she must have encountered during her travels, and the impression one gets is of almost “a walk in the park”. It is quite right for her to keep such personal experiences out of the scope of the book as that would have taken the focus away from the real heroine of her tale – the river Indus.
She must have learnt to speak and understand Urdu/Hindi in very quick time, although I am not sure if she has learnt to read the scripts also. The book is a labour of love, and the sincerity of the author is apparent in every page and word. One can also feel her pain at the ecological destruction that the damming of the rivers and the various irrigation projects has done to whole cultures and civilizations that had thrived in this region. The artificially engineered boundaries of sub-continental India, expeditiously done by the British in 1947, divided much more than just its people. The Partition was a cataclysmic event destroying whole communities, and damaging people’s psyches irreparably. The birth of Pakistan, midwifed by the British, has failed in its objective to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian sub-continent even though it became home for less than one-third. Pakistan’s crisis of identity has led it to deny its pre-Islamic past and to rewrite history to suit its narrow sectarian interests.
Where I have an issue with the author is in her perception that the people of India were disconcerted and dismayed at the loss of what she calls the “heartland of Rig Veda” to Pakistan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am an Indian, born in a Kashmiri Pandit family, now living a retired life in the Nilgiris in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and I have never encountered this kind of thinking at any time during my days as a student or later. The tragedy of Partition is not lamented for the loss of territory but for the loss of the idea that was India. But whereas we in India have been trying to forget the past and to plod along with all our deficiencies, our neighbours have kept the wounds open through their stated policy of “thousand cuts”. Therefore, to say that “It was thus an acute disappointment to many Indians when the Indus valley cities were lost to Pakistan at Partition, and the search for equally ancient cities on the banks of the ‘Saraswati’ in India began almost immediately” cannot be substantiated by any data. The Indus valley civilization is still considered as a part of Indian history, even though the excavated settlements and cities may now lie in Pakistan. In India we have not denied our Islamic past and history has not been officially rewritten to exclude the Muslim rulers from its pages. I understand that in Pakistani text books there is no mention of Asoka, and that Akbar is not considered a great emperor because he tried to create a syncretic religion, Din-e-Elahi, that is anathema to Sunni Islam.
The search for settlements along the banks of the Saraswati is but natural. If great civilizations have grown on the banks of great rivers, there is no reason to believe that one could not have evolved on the banks of the Saraswati. There is no cause for reasoning that this search is due to some kind of disappointment at the loss of the Indus Valley cities. In fact they are not lost, as they are the heritage of the world, and it is incumbent upon Pakistan and the rest of the world to ensure that they are preserved and protected. Unfortunately, Pakistan and the Muslim world has been most remiss in their discharge of this responsibility, as evidenced by the destruction of Bamiyan; and the seventh century CE Maitreya Buddha in Swat, Pakistan, that had been photographed by Ms. Albinia herself. It is true that Indians, as a people, do not have a great sense of history, and they do not value antiquities as the people in Europe do. That is the reason why it is the British who have done almost all the archaeological work in the sub-continent, uncovered its glorious past, and even deciphered the ancient scripts and texts. But that is no reason to deride L.K. Advani, the Home Minister of India in the 1990s, for not being aware of the Tibetan name of the river Indus. I am sure that if Gordon Brown is asked to give the Celtic names of the rivers of England he will also be equally embarrassed. The author has clearly demonstrated her prejudices against the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), whom she condemns as a Hindu fundamentalist outfit, almost on par with the Taliban or the Muslim fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan. Having lived in India when the BJP was the dominant member of the ruling alliance at the centre, she has obviously been influenced by some of the members of the “pseudo-secular” brigade whose vote-bank politics has destroyed the secular fabric of this nation and given rise to pressure groups bent upon splitting the country into further fragments that can only be represented by a forest of acronyms like the casteist SC, ST, BC, OBC, BSP etc., and the regional DMK, TDP, PMK, MDMK, AGP, etc. etc. To suggest that the annual cultural function known as “Sindhu Darshan” inaugurated by the BJP is an attempt “to purify the river with the waters of the Brahmaputra and Ganga before it flows into Muslim Pakistan”, is mischievous, to say the least. L. K. Advani is a Sindhi, and I am sure the sight of this mighty river almost at its source must have been an exhilarating and humbling experience. It is natural to find oneself in awe of the might of Creation, and a sense of piety can overwhelm an individual’s consciousness. For a Sindhi, deriving his roots from the soil nurtured by this great river, the experience would be beyond our comprehension. To start a festival in honour of this experience is not necessarily to “compensate for poor geography”, but to recognize the importance of this mighty force of nature in the lives and history of the people of India. It is very disappointing when a work of great scholarship and purpose degenerates into a propaganda vehicle. To write that the Sindhu Darshan is a “mission of the extremist Hindu groups with which Advani is affiliated to reclaim ‘western India’ from Pakistan; and so, in the Home Minsiter’s hands, the Indus – which the rest of India had largely forgotten – became ‘a symbol of nationalism and national integration, evocative of the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers during the Kargil War and the loss of life and land at Partition”, may be fit for a propaganda leaflet, but certainly not for a work aspiring to be a dispassionate, unbiased story of the journey of a river. Michael Wood’s “Story of India” is an excellent example of this dispassionate, unbiased reporting, and perhaps the author could benefit by emulating his style.
The reason for Pakistan’s unabated hostility towards India lies in its quest for balance. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget giving the army a privileged, and unduly powerful, political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. Perhaps, like Pakistan, the author too was on a quest for balance. A hostile attitude towards a political party that inflicted the defeat on the Pakistanis in the misguided Kargil War, would go down well with the reading public in that country, thereby boosting the sales of the book.
Whatever may be her reasons, one cannot deny the fact that the book is highly entertaining and informative. The narrative style is natural and not laboured. The language is simple and close to the earth. The writer’s emotional involvement with her subject seeps through the pages and the characters she encounters during her journey are all painted with a humanistic brush. In the final analysis, Empires of the Indus is a highly readable book which could be prescribed as a text book in the syllabuses of Indian and Pakistani schools.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
MY KASHMIR: CONFLICT AND THE PROSPECTS OF ENDURING PEACE
MY KASHMIR:
CONFLICT AND THE PROSPECTS OF ENDURING PEACE
BY
WAJAHAT HABIBULLAH
“They make a desolation and call it peace.”
--Agha Shahid Ali in
“Country without a Post Office”
Perhaps the most qualified among the commentators on the issue of Kashmir, Wajahat Habibullah has drawn upon his extraordinary career as an IAS Officer, serving in various administrative positions in the state of Jammu & Kashmir; and put together an account that tries to unravel the intricate web of the ethnic, religious, political, economic, and territorial issues that have made Kashmir into an “island the size of a grave.”
From first being posted to J&K in 1969 as the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of a District, and until his retirement in 2005, he served in various positions of administrative authority in almost all the districts of the state. Between1990 and 1993 as the Divisional Commissioner of the nine districts of Kashmir, he almost got killed in a militant attack during the siege of the Hazratbal shrine. His is a classic view of the insider, being privy to the interactions between the Indian government, the state government, and the local politicians. “My Kashmir” is the outpouring of a sensitive mind anguished by a wanton culture of violence and destruction.
Tracing the origins of the conflict from almost as far back as 1846 when the Dogras bought the territory from the British, Habibullah takes us through the history of the state from being a Paradise on Earth to becoming a veritable Hell. How the Islam of sufi syncretism, that so easily absorbed the essences of Buddhism and Saivite Hinduism, transformed into its present exclusivist form, leading to the mass migration of the Kashmiri Pandits whose numbers dwindled from 1,25,000 to a mere 7,000 in the valley? How the Indian government exacerbated the problem because of the exigencies of national politics rather than the wishes of the Kashmiri people? How the lack of trust between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir gave Pakistan an opportunity to fish in the troubled waters and keep the fires of militancy raging?
Kashmiris themselves are unable to define what they mean by azadi., but generally they mean political and territorial independence. But an independent state of about five-and-a-half million people occupying 8,500 sq. miles of mostly mountainous territory, located in one of the world’s most volatile regions, amid rival nuclear powers, is hardly likely to be left free.
With acute perspicacity, Habibullah states that for Pakistan Kashmir may be the core issue. “But the explanation of Pakistan’s unabated hostility lies elsewhere. It is characterized by Pakistan’s quest for balance with India since 1947. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget giving the army a privileged, and unduly powerful, political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. It lies in the quest for a distinct identity of a state that aspired on its creation, to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian subcontinent even though it became home for fewer than one-third. This tension was exacerbated by continuing Indian perceptions of Pakistan as a breakaway part of greater India.”
However, even though Pakistan today may have reluctantly come to the conclusion that a plebiscite in Kashmir may not result in the Kashmiris opting to accede to Pakistan, yet there cannot be a resolution to the problem without bringing Pakistan into the picture. Whereas Pakistan considers Kashmir as the unfinished work of partition, India sees it as the vindication of its own concept of secular nationhood. Any settlement should, therefore, be placed in the “context of national pride for both nations, so no substantial compromise on territory can or should be expected.”
Habibullah believes that for enduring peace to return to the troubled valley, “terrorism in the state must cease, and Pakistan’s commitment to it must precede any further move. If terrorism were to persist, the Indian army had to maintain its presence in full force. Cessation of cross-border terrorist activity would need to be reciprocated by withdrawal of security forces from residential townships in the state”. According to him, the ingredients for the exercise of real freedom are present in the existing framework of India, as India’s constitutional and institutional machinery has evolved to allow freedom. “Freedom can be achieved while retaining the territorial integrity of both India and Pakistan, with the present boundaries becoming soft borders.” “India must concede to the people of Jammu & Kashmir the liberty that is the right of every Indian citizen.” Enduring peace will come through democratic processes, making the affected people feel that they are in charge of their own lives’. Decentralization, free and fair elections allowing all elements to participate, self-government down to the village level, and respect for the dignity of the Kashmiri people, are central to the resolution of the problem.
Habibullah even sees a role for the US in the resolution of the conflict. According to him Kashmiris have historically viewed the US as an honest broker, despite 9/11 and Iraq. This image the US could do well to cultivate by exerting pressure on Pakistan to dismantle the terrorist structure on its side of the Line of control, and to restrain the ISI from providing support to the separatist and militant outfits in Kashmir.
Finally, he echoes the anguish of a young Kashmiri, Usmaan Rahim Ahmed, who wrote on April 30, 2004: “My conviction is that all of us in generation next, in our own humble ways, must hope, pray, and search and work so that, from these mountains of ashes in Kashmir, a phoenix will rise, not phantoms!”
CONFLICT AND THE PROSPECTS OF ENDURING PEACE
BY
WAJAHAT HABIBULLAH
“They make a desolation and call it peace.”
--Agha Shahid Ali in
“Country without a Post Office”
Perhaps the most qualified among the commentators on the issue of Kashmir, Wajahat Habibullah has drawn upon his extraordinary career as an IAS Officer, serving in various administrative positions in the state of Jammu & Kashmir; and put together an account that tries to unravel the intricate web of the ethnic, religious, political, economic, and territorial issues that have made Kashmir into an “island the size of a grave.”
From first being posted to J&K in 1969 as the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of a District, and until his retirement in 2005, he served in various positions of administrative authority in almost all the districts of the state. Between1990 and 1993 as the Divisional Commissioner of the nine districts of Kashmir, he almost got killed in a militant attack during the siege of the Hazratbal shrine. His is a classic view of the insider, being privy to the interactions between the Indian government, the state government, and the local politicians. “My Kashmir” is the outpouring of a sensitive mind anguished by a wanton culture of violence and destruction.
Tracing the origins of the conflict from almost as far back as 1846 when the Dogras bought the territory from the British, Habibullah takes us through the history of the state from being a Paradise on Earth to becoming a veritable Hell. How the Islam of sufi syncretism, that so easily absorbed the essences of Buddhism and Saivite Hinduism, transformed into its present exclusivist form, leading to the mass migration of the Kashmiri Pandits whose numbers dwindled from 1,25,000 to a mere 7,000 in the valley? How the Indian government exacerbated the problem because of the exigencies of national politics rather than the wishes of the Kashmiri people? How the lack of trust between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir gave Pakistan an opportunity to fish in the troubled waters and keep the fires of militancy raging?
Kashmiris themselves are unable to define what they mean by azadi., but generally they mean political and territorial independence. But an independent state of about five-and-a-half million people occupying 8,500 sq. miles of mostly mountainous territory, located in one of the world’s most volatile regions, amid rival nuclear powers, is hardly likely to be left free.
With acute perspicacity, Habibullah states that for Pakistan Kashmir may be the core issue. “But the explanation of Pakistan’s unabated hostility lies elsewhere. It is characterized by Pakistan’s quest for balance with India since 1947. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget giving the army a privileged, and unduly powerful, political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. It lies in the quest for a distinct identity of a state that aspired on its creation, to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian subcontinent even though it became home for fewer than one-third. This tension was exacerbated by continuing Indian perceptions of Pakistan as a breakaway part of greater India.”
However, even though Pakistan today may have reluctantly come to the conclusion that a plebiscite in Kashmir may not result in the Kashmiris opting to accede to Pakistan, yet there cannot be a resolution to the problem without bringing Pakistan into the picture. Whereas Pakistan considers Kashmir as the unfinished work of partition, India sees it as the vindication of its own concept of secular nationhood. Any settlement should, therefore, be placed in the “context of national pride for both nations, so no substantial compromise on territory can or should be expected.”
Habibullah believes that for enduring peace to return to the troubled valley, “terrorism in the state must cease, and Pakistan’s commitment to it must precede any further move. If terrorism were to persist, the Indian army had to maintain its presence in full force. Cessation of cross-border terrorist activity would need to be reciprocated by withdrawal of security forces from residential townships in the state”. According to him, the ingredients for the exercise of real freedom are present in the existing framework of India, as India’s constitutional and institutional machinery has evolved to allow freedom. “Freedom can be achieved while retaining the territorial integrity of both India and Pakistan, with the present boundaries becoming soft borders.” “India must concede to the people of Jammu & Kashmir the liberty that is the right of every Indian citizen.” Enduring peace will come through democratic processes, making the affected people feel that they are in charge of their own lives’. Decentralization, free and fair elections allowing all elements to participate, self-government down to the village level, and respect for the dignity of the Kashmiri people, are central to the resolution of the problem.
Habibullah even sees a role for the US in the resolution of the conflict. According to him Kashmiris have historically viewed the US as an honest broker, despite 9/11 and Iraq. This image the US could do well to cultivate by exerting pressure on Pakistan to dismantle the terrorist structure on its side of the Line of control, and to restrain the ISI from providing support to the separatist and militant outfits in Kashmir.
Finally, he echoes the anguish of a young Kashmiri, Usmaan Rahim Ahmed, who wrote on April 30, 2004: “My conviction is that all of us in generation next, in our own humble ways, must hope, pray, and search and work so that, from these mountains of ashes in Kashmir, a phoenix will rise, not phantoms!”
PSYWAR AND THE FUTURE OF KASHMIR
The list of the 20 signatories to the open statement on the captioned subject carried by The New Indian Express in its edition of September 19, 2008 reads like a who’s who of people who in their various capacities as senior government officials, diplomats, top brass of the Indian armed forces, Intelligence and security agencies’ chiefs, responsible members of the press, and leaders of industry, could have exercised their combined and considerable influence in resolving what has become an intractable problem—the conflict in Kashmir. But the fact remains that even sixty years after the “unquestionable” accession of Kashmir to India we are still fighting a secessionist insurgency in the state, overtly and covertly supported by a hostile neighbour.
It is very well to quote the authority of the Constitution, and to reassert “national will” and “state power”. But when a whole population of a section of a state is demanding freedom, and waging war to attain it, we cannot take shelter behind considerations of “a nation aspiring to become a major player in global power dynamics”. To state that “there is no basis on which any change in the political status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir could be considered” without providing an alternative solution to end insurgency and bring peace to this troubled valley is to escape responsibility while sounding patriotic. Just saying and repeatedly asserting “as proud and patriotic Indians who strongly believe that the unity and secular democratic fabric of our republic must be preserved at all costs” and calling upon “the Government of India to make it unequivocally clear at the highest level that under no circumstances will the government and people of India countenance any compromise with the integrity of the nation” has not made the problem disappear. Such statements look nice in print and sound very lofty. But they alone are not enough to make the affected people to suspend and terminate their protests and return to a peaceful way of existence. From such a formidable galaxy of minds and experience one would have expected at least a half-solution to the problem, but what we have is nothing but a repetition of pious declarations, clichés, and platitudinous exhortations.
Extraordinary situations require extraordinary solutions. And there is no denying the fact that the situation in Kashmir is extraordinary. The insurgency since 1989 has wreaked havoc on the social, cultural, ethnic and religious fabric of not only Jammu & Kashmir, but on the entire nation. What the Kashmiri Pandits have faced is nothing short of ethnic cleansing, and from being an integral part of the valley, have today been reduced to becoming refugees in their own country, living in abysmal conditions in shanties spread over the city of Jammu and its suburbs. Even there they are just tolerated, as their presence has put pressure on the economic resources of the province, leading to escalation in the prices of land and other commodities. The Pandits are also competing for jobs with the people of Jammu, and such situations can only exacerbate conflict. There were about 1,25,000 Pandits in the valley before the insurrection. Today, I believe there are a mere 7,000 left, perhaps because they have nowhere else to go, living in mortal fear, existing practically from day to day. Their lives can be snuffed out by any or all of the militant groups operating in the valley without a second thought. The Kashmiri Pandits today are practically on the verge of extinction as the ‘aspiring major player in global power dynamics” has no time for them. They are an expendable community as they do not constitute enough numbers to qualify as a vote bank.
The cascading effect of the insurgency and the proxy war in Kashmir on the rest of India has not been fully comprehended by the signatories. That Pakistan has taken advantage of the disaffection in Kashmir and utilized it to further its own agenda of weakening the unity of the Indian state cannot be denied. Wajahat Habibullah, perhaps the most qualified commentator on Kashmir, says in his book, “My Kashmir, Conflict and the Prospect of enduring Peace” that for Pakistan Kashmir may be the core issue, but “the explanation of Pakistan’s unabated hostility lies elsewhere. It is characterized by Pakistan’s quest for balance with India since 1947. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget, giving the army a privileged – and, unduly powerful – political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. It lies in the quest for a distinct identity of a state that aspired, on its creation, to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian subcontinent even though it became home for fewer than one-third”.
The idea of letting the valley separate is not something of recent origin. Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in “India After Gandhi” writes, “Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.”
Pakistan has been pushing militant Jihadis of different nationalities like Sudan, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc., to wage low intensity war in Kashmir and to train militant outfits across India. The increase in acts of violence against soft targets across the country is calculated to destroy the communal and social harmony in the country. And we have to admit that Pakistan has been more than reasonably successful in its nefarious designs. If it had not been for some covert and overt pressure from the USA after 9/11, the situation could have been much worse.
Today, the state of Jammu and Kashmir cannot be compared with any other state within the Indian union. Its three provinces are as dramatically distinct from one another as Tamil Nadu is from Haryana, or Bengal is from Gujarat. The people of Jammu are predominantly of a Punjabi culture. Even the Muslims of the Jammu province come from Rajput stock, speak a Punjabi dialect, and hold the valley Kashmiri Muslims in contempt, The Pandits and the Muslims of the valley originate from the same ethnic stock, speak the same language, which is a variant of Dardic, and have almost similar dietary habits. The Ladakhis are more akin to Tibetans, almost identical in diet and attire. The Jammu province is predominantly Hindu; Ladakh is almost equally Buddhist and Muslim, while the Kashmir valley is almost cent percent Muslim. It is unfortunate that the militants had to target a hapless, hopeless minority, who could not, and did not, pose any threat to Muslim majoritarianism in the state. The Pandits were anyway being forced by discriminatory methods to leave the state and to look for educational and employment opportunities in the rest of the country and abroad. The objective of cleansing the valley of the “non-believers” could have been achieved without violence. But Pakistan was in a hurry and it found willing allies in the disaffected youth of the valley. Being preoccupied with the exigencies of national politics, rather than with the wishes of the people of Kashmir, the Indian governments failed to develop a workable long range policy for Kashmir. Corruption and nepotism among the political leaders of Kashmir, and the Indian government’s complicity in letting such conditions persist led to a quick alienation of the youth. It is the state’s misfortune that apart from Sheikh Abdullah, no political leader has emerged who would be acceptable to all the people. At the time of partition, the Sheikh had a choice: join Pakistan, a Muslim nation but under Punjabi leadership, or join a secular nation where Kashmiris would be free to live as they chose. Sheikh Abdullah chose the second option, and to his credit, never deviated from this stand. The Indian government, in a series of blunders while dealing with Kashmir, made its first great blunder when it dismissed Sheikh Abdullah’s government and arrested him in 1953. From then onwards it has been a continuous pattern in political and administrative insincerity in dealing with Kashmir. Elections routinely rigged, corrupt and unpopular leaders installed through financially engineered defections, convinced the people that New Delhi would only allow supplicants to rule. The reactive rather than proactive response to challenges led to trigger-happy decisions, resulting in such monumental tragedies as the unprovoked firing on the funeral procession of Mirwaiz Moulavi Farooq in May 1990, causing the death of 27 mourners; the firing on a crowd of civilians in Bijbehara following the siege at Hazratbal, and countless violations of human rights in the valley. Escalating violence inevitably leads to escalating human rights abuse, both by the militants and by the security forces.
Keeping this reality of the situation on the ground in mind, and holding the cause of peace as more important than some misplaced sense of power and superiority, does one recommend a solution that takes into account the aspirations and yearnings of the people of Kashmir. The continuous violence and disturbance has led to such confusion that Kashmiris themselves are unable to define what they mean by azadi. But a politically independent, but powerless state, situated in one of the world’s most volatile regions, flanked by rival nuclear powers, has no hope that it will be left in peace.
To believe that if the valley separates because it is Muslim dominated will have its own repercussions in the rest of the country, is not a valid argument. Geographically, apart from Kashmir, these Muslims are not a majority in any of the states contiguous with Pakistan. Further, as the honourable signatories have averred: “the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims, who constitute over 15 per cent of the population, has absolutely no sympathy for the partisan few who still fan a tired idea called secession”. In fact if the Kashmir valley is allowed to separate it will take the wind out of the sails of the Islamists, and will leave Pakistan with no excuse to further its nefarious designs in India. The move will release the vast military apparatus tied down in the valley that can be deployed for better security in the rest of the country. It will also save the national exchequer vast amounts of money literally going down the drain in the valley. Internationally too the country will gain as the allegations of human rights violations, true or imaginary, will cease and India will be able to occupy its rightful place in the comity of nations. Pakistan, on the other hand, could also benefit, as it will have no more reason to maintain a huge military establishment, thereby reducing the role of the armed forces in its governance. The country may eventually grow out of its medievalist mind-set and achieve some kind of democracy. A less hostile, democratic neighbour can only be good for India and the subcontinent.
It is very well to quote the authority of the Constitution, and to reassert “national will” and “state power”. But when a whole population of a section of a state is demanding freedom, and waging war to attain it, we cannot take shelter behind considerations of “a nation aspiring to become a major player in global power dynamics”. To state that “there is no basis on which any change in the political status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir could be considered” without providing an alternative solution to end insurgency and bring peace to this troubled valley is to escape responsibility while sounding patriotic. Just saying and repeatedly asserting “as proud and patriotic Indians who strongly believe that the unity and secular democratic fabric of our republic must be preserved at all costs” and calling upon “the Government of India to make it unequivocally clear at the highest level that under no circumstances will the government and people of India countenance any compromise with the integrity of the nation” has not made the problem disappear. Such statements look nice in print and sound very lofty. But they alone are not enough to make the affected people to suspend and terminate their protests and return to a peaceful way of existence. From such a formidable galaxy of minds and experience one would have expected at least a half-solution to the problem, but what we have is nothing but a repetition of pious declarations, clichés, and platitudinous exhortations.
Extraordinary situations require extraordinary solutions. And there is no denying the fact that the situation in Kashmir is extraordinary. The insurgency since 1989 has wreaked havoc on the social, cultural, ethnic and religious fabric of not only Jammu & Kashmir, but on the entire nation. What the Kashmiri Pandits have faced is nothing short of ethnic cleansing, and from being an integral part of the valley, have today been reduced to becoming refugees in their own country, living in abysmal conditions in shanties spread over the city of Jammu and its suburbs. Even there they are just tolerated, as their presence has put pressure on the economic resources of the province, leading to escalation in the prices of land and other commodities. The Pandits are also competing for jobs with the people of Jammu, and such situations can only exacerbate conflict. There were about 1,25,000 Pandits in the valley before the insurrection. Today, I believe there are a mere 7,000 left, perhaps because they have nowhere else to go, living in mortal fear, existing practically from day to day. Their lives can be snuffed out by any or all of the militant groups operating in the valley without a second thought. The Kashmiri Pandits today are practically on the verge of extinction as the ‘aspiring major player in global power dynamics” has no time for them. They are an expendable community as they do not constitute enough numbers to qualify as a vote bank.
The cascading effect of the insurgency and the proxy war in Kashmir on the rest of India has not been fully comprehended by the signatories. That Pakistan has taken advantage of the disaffection in Kashmir and utilized it to further its own agenda of weakening the unity of the Indian state cannot be denied. Wajahat Habibullah, perhaps the most qualified commentator on Kashmir, says in his book, “My Kashmir, Conflict and the Prospect of enduring Peace” that for Pakistan Kashmir may be the core issue, but “the explanation of Pakistan’s unabated hostility lies elsewhere. It is characterized by Pakistan’s quest for balance with India since 1947. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget, giving the army a privileged – and, unduly powerful – political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. It lies in the quest for a distinct identity of a state that aspired, on its creation, to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian subcontinent even though it became home for fewer than one-third”.
The idea of letting the valley separate is not something of recent origin. Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in “India After Gandhi” writes, “Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.”
Pakistan has been pushing militant Jihadis of different nationalities like Sudan, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc., to wage low intensity war in Kashmir and to train militant outfits across India. The increase in acts of violence against soft targets across the country is calculated to destroy the communal and social harmony in the country. And we have to admit that Pakistan has been more than reasonably successful in its nefarious designs. If it had not been for some covert and overt pressure from the USA after 9/11, the situation could have been much worse.
Today, the state of Jammu and Kashmir cannot be compared with any other state within the Indian union. Its three provinces are as dramatically distinct from one another as Tamil Nadu is from Haryana, or Bengal is from Gujarat. The people of Jammu are predominantly of a Punjabi culture. Even the Muslims of the Jammu province come from Rajput stock, speak a Punjabi dialect, and hold the valley Kashmiri Muslims in contempt, The Pandits and the Muslims of the valley originate from the same ethnic stock, speak the same language, which is a variant of Dardic, and have almost similar dietary habits. The Ladakhis are more akin to Tibetans, almost identical in diet and attire. The Jammu province is predominantly Hindu; Ladakh is almost equally Buddhist and Muslim, while the Kashmir valley is almost cent percent Muslim. It is unfortunate that the militants had to target a hapless, hopeless minority, who could not, and did not, pose any threat to Muslim majoritarianism in the state. The Pandits were anyway being forced by discriminatory methods to leave the state and to look for educational and employment opportunities in the rest of the country and abroad. The objective of cleansing the valley of the “non-believers” could have been achieved without violence. But Pakistan was in a hurry and it found willing allies in the disaffected youth of the valley. Being preoccupied with the exigencies of national politics, rather than with the wishes of the people of Kashmir, the Indian governments failed to develop a workable long range policy for Kashmir. Corruption and nepotism among the political leaders of Kashmir, and the Indian government’s complicity in letting such conditions persist led to a quick alienation of the youth. It is the state’s misfortune that apart from Sheikh Abdullah, no political leader has emerged who would be acceptable to all the people. At the time of partition, the Sheikh had a choice: join Pakistan, a Muslim nation but under Punjabi leadership, or join a secular nation where Kashmiris would be free to live as they chose. Sheikh Abdullah chose the second option, and to his credit, never deviated from this stand. The Indian government, in a series of blunders while dealing with Kashmir, made its first great blunder when it dismissed Sheikh Abdullah’s government and arrested him in 1953. From then onwards it has been a continuous pattern in political and administrative insincerity in dealing with Kashmir. Elections routinely rigged, corrupt and unpopular leaders installed through financially engineered defections, convinced the people that New Delhi would only allow supplicants to rule. The reactive rather than proactive response to challenges led to trigger-happy decisions, resulting in such monumental tragedies as the unprovoked firing on the funeral procession of Mirwaiz Moulavi Farooq in May 1990, causing the death of 27 mourners; the firing on a crowd of civilians in Bijbehara following the siege at Hazratbal, and countless violations of human rights in the valley. Escalating violence inevitably leads to escalating human rights abuse, both by the militants and by the security forces.
Keeping this reality of the situation on the ground in mind, and holding the cause of peace as more important than some misplaced sense of power and superiority, does one recommend a solution that takes into account the aspirations and yearnings of the people of Kashmir. The continuous violence and disturbance has led to such confusion that Kashmiris themselves are unable to define what they mean by azadi. But a politically independent, but powerless state, situated in one of the world’s most volatile regions, flanked by rival nuclear powers, has no hope that it will be left in peace.
To believe that if the valley separates because it is Muslim dominated will have its own repercussions in the rest of the country, is not a valid argument. Geographically, apart from Kashmir, these Muslims are not a majority in any of the states contiguous with Pakistan. Further, as the honourable signatories have averred: “the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims, who constitute over 15 per cent of the population, has absolutely no sympathy for the partisan few who still fan a tired idea called secession”. In fact if the Kashmir valley is allowed to separate it will take the wind out of the sails of the Islamists, and will leave Pakistan with no excuse to further its nefarious designs in India. The move will release the vast military apparatus tied down in the valley that can be deployed for better security in the rest of the country. It will also save the national exchequer vast amounts of money literally going down the drain in the valley. Internationally too the country will gain as the allegations of human rights violations, true or imaginary, will cease and India will be able to occupy its rightful place in the comity of nations. Pakistan, on the other hand, could also benefit, as it will have no more reason to maintain a huge military establishment, thereby reducing the role of the armed forces in its governance. The country may eventually grow out of its medievalist mind-set and achieve some kind of democracy. A less hostile, democratic neighbour can only be good for India and the subcontinent.
Friday, September 12, 2008
KANDHAMAL
KANDHAMAL, THE CONTINUING STORY OF
EXPLOITATION AND DISPOSSESSION
I have to confess that like most of the urban, educated, English-language-speaking elite I was not aware of the existence of this small and backward district of Orissa, a state generally associated with starvation and famine. The outbreak of violence and the resultant deaths of several poor people, therefore, did not seem as something out of the ordinary, for such incidents are happening every other day in some part of India. Nor did the temporary spotlight turned upon the area by the print and television media appear to be different. The secular media, of course, went to town about the clash between Hindus and Christians, declaiming that the Hindu mobs had unleashed its fury on the hapless Christians of the district, without sufficient cause. The political parties jumped upon the bandwagon, seeing an opportunity for destabilizing the incumbent state government. All this, by itself, does not make one sit up, as violence seems to have become a way of everyday life. Our sensibilities have become inured to these daily occurrences, and we hardly take note of them. Therefore, when Kandhamal erupted, it did not evoke a different response.
Gurumurthy’s article in The New Indian Express of Sept. 11 again did not have anything unusual to tell. The activities of evangelical missionaries in the backward districts of India; the huge global funds available to them for the “harvest of souls” etc.; the declining numerical gap between Hindus and Christians in these areas; are all known facts. What really came as a surprise was his statement that the Kandhas, the traditional, tribal rulers of the area, chose to remain true to their faith and refused to convert, rejecting the allurements and blandishments held out to them by the missionaries. The Kandhas are aboriginal tribals, and in spite of reservations offered to the tribals by a patronizing state, they have been systematically marginalized and driven from their traditional lands. Their continuous exploitation and dispossession has made the tribals easy fodder for the missionaries, ever on the lookout for ways to increase the number of true believers in the “only true faith”.
Why the Kandhas resisted the onslaught of nearly 360 evangelical outfits is perhaps a subject for a different study? What, however, is obvious is that India has miserably failed in its attempt to lift its “naked, hungry mass” out of abject poverty, deprivation, and degradation, even sixty years after independence from British rule. Fifty years after independence, in 1997, the government estimates reveal that the number of people who are below the absolute poverty level is equal to 35 crore; which was the total population of the country in 1947. Why has this condition endured in the country despite its rapid economic growth, despite the IT revolution, the “commanding heights” of a planned economy with a commitment to socialism? Why the “levels of hunger, illiteracy, excess mortality and other indicators of deprivation are today far higher in India than in China, the Philippines or Indonesia”. The young Siddharth Dube first asked this question in his brilliantly researched and evocatively written “Words Like Freedom”, published in 1998. And he proceeded to find the answer through “the memoirs of an impoverished Indian family”. The following two passages are drawn from his book which outlines in detail the reasons for the continuance of this cycle of intense deprivation and poverty.
Before the British rule, there was very little idea of private ownership of land. Usually, land would be shared between the cultivators and tillers who would enjoy hereditary rights, and the zamindars, whose role was to collect revenue from the peasants. They did not have the absolute right to dispossess the peasants, and so long as the farmer paid his dues and taxes he could not be evicted from the land. The British changed all that as they wanted to deal with one individual from an area who would be elevated to the position of ‘proprietor’ of the land and who would pay the taxes and dues to the treasury. By this mechanism all the cultivated land was transferred to the zamindars. Additionally the “British soon made them the owners of inhabited sites, fallow and barren land, groves and orchards, water sources, river crossings, markets and roads”. These landlords or zamindars became the “linchpin of the colonial order”. By elevating the zamindar’s position and making him the absolute ruler of all those subservient to him, the British ensured the upper-caste domination of society, as most of the zamindars were upper-caste Hindus, and some powerfully placed Muslims. Conversely, the lower castes, the tribals, and the petty peasants were condemned to permanent impoverishment and severe discrimination.
The peasant revolt of 1919 in the Awadh was the first rebellion against this system of exploitation by the entrenched colonial administration, but after three years of intense struggle in which reportedly one lakh peasants participated, the movement failed. It failed because the Congress refused to provide it the required leadership and support. Gandhi and Nehru both let the peasants down by asking them to “abort their struggle”. The Congress drew its ranks from the upper castes and was dominated by the landed elite. The zamindars and the landed capitalists were the financiers of the Congress party, and Gandhi would not support a movement that threatened this class. In fact Gandhi even betrayed his Harijans for whom Babasaheb Ambedkar was trying to obtain special electoral representation as a minority in the early 1930s (something that had been granted to the Muslims in 1906). Both Nehru and Gandhi were “adamantly opposed to allowing either reserved seats or separate electorates for the untouchables”. By going on a ‘fast unto death’, Gandhi forced Ambedkar to withdraw his demand for separate electorates, who wrote: “Mr. Gandhi, the friend of the Untouchables, preferred to fast unto death rather than consent to them and although he yielded he is not reconciled to the justice underlying these demands.”
Similarly, the aboriginal inhabitants of this land, the Adivasis were also “completely left out of the picture.” One of these Adivasis was a Munda from Chotanagpur (today’s Jharkhand). Jaipal Singh was a brilliant young man, sent by the missionaries to study in England, at Oxford, with the hope that on his return he would preach the Gospel, and increase the fold of His Lord. Jaipal Singh was also a brilliant hockey player. He captained the Indian team that won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1928. In 1938 he founded the Adibasi Mahasabha and made the first demand for a separate state of Jharkhand. In the Constituent Assembly he was the most articulate representative of the tribals of India. It is worth recalling his speech on 19th December 1946, when he spoke on the Objectives Resolution:
“I am not expected to understand the legal intricacies of the Resolution. But my common sense tells me that every one of us should march in that road to freedom and fight together. Sir, if there is any group of Indian people that has been shabbily treated it is my people. They have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6,000 years. The history of the Indus Valley civilization, a child of which I am, shows quite clearly that it is the newcomers – most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned – it is the newcomers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastness….The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation and dispossession by the non-aboriginals of India punctuated by rebellion and disorder.”
He further went on to say, “And yet I take Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru at his word. I take you all at your word that now we are going to start a new chapter, a new chapter of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected.”
Jaipal Singh was a unique individual, at once deeply proud of his aboriginal roots, while completely committed to the Indian union unlike the radical tribal leaders of the North East.
His spirited affirmation of faith in the members of the Constituent Assembly did result in some partial amends being made by the inclusion of some 400 tribal communities in a “Scheduled Tribes” list, which would give its members reserved seats in the legislatures and government jobs.
However, like Nehru’s Independence Day speech, this pledge also remains unredeemed in “full measure”. The unwillingness of successive governments at the centre and in the states to institute substantive land reforms, in order to protect their primary backers, who are the landed and the capitalist elite in the case of the Congress and the BJP; and the creamy layer of the scheduled and middle castes who support the Samajwadi and the Bahujan Samaj parties, is at the centre of this failure. In the skewed development model that the country has adopted from 1985, there is no room for the “naked, hungry mass”. It is as if this vast number has dropped from the radars of the planners’ screens, and as if they have been eliminated from view by the pushing of a button.
I am afraid, we will witness many more Kandhamals, not because the evangelists are busy gathering their ‘harvest of souls’, but because the model of our governance and development does not allow the poor and the marginalized to participate in the country’s growth. To conclude in Siddharth Dube’s words: “poverty might indeed worsen despite accelerated economic growth. This is a possibility if the Indian government further reduces public spending, particularly on agriculture, infrastructure and the social sectors. The risks to the poor will be even greater if the government further loosens land ceiling laws, as is being demanded by the rural rich and the many votaries of economic liberalization.”
“To enable the poor to participate and benefit from economic growth, the Indian government would need to undertake widespread land reform, promote good healthcare and schools, foster gender equity, and encourage local democracy. It has not done so for fifty years. The reasons for the tragic inaction remain unchanged. In the future, as in the half-century past and in centuries earlier, India is destined to remain the land of hunger, want and suffering.”
EXPLOITATION AND DISPOSSESSION
I have to confess that like most of the urban, educated, English-language-speaking elite I was not aware of the existence of this small and backward district of Orissa, a state generally associated with starvation and famine. The outbreak of violence and the resultant deaths of several poor people, therefore, did not seem as something out of the ordinary, for such incidents are happening every other day in some part of India. Nor did the temporary spotlight turned upon the area by the print and television media appear to be different. The secular media, of course, went to town about the clash between Hindus and Christians, declaiming that the Hindu mobs had unleashed its fury on the hapless Christians of the district, without sufficient cause. The political parties jumped upon the bandwagon, seeing an opportunity for destabilizing the incumbent state government. All this, by itself, does not make one sit up, as violence seems to have become a way of everyday life. Our sensibilities have become inured to these daily occurrences, and we hardly take note of them. Therefore, when Kandhamal erupted, it did not evoke a different response.
Gurumurthy’s article in The New Indian Express of Sept. 11 again did not have anything unusual to tell. The activities of evangelical missionaries in the backward districts of India; the huge global funds available to them for the “harvest of souls” etc.; the declining numerical gap between Hindus and Christians in these areas; are all known facts. What really came as a surprise was his statement that the Kandhas, the traditional, tribal rulers of the area, chose to remain true to their faith and refused to convert, rejecting the allurements and blandishments held out to them by the missionaries. The Kandhas are aboriginal tribals, and in spite of reservations offered to the tribals by a patronizing state, they have been systematically marginalized and driven from their traditional lands. Their continuous exploitation and dispossession has made the tribals easy fodder for the missionaries, ever on the lookout for ways to increase the number of true believers in the “only true faith”.
Why the Kandhas resisted the onslaught of nearly 360 evangelical outfits is perhaps a subject for a different study? What, however, is obvious is that India has miserably failed in its attempt to lift its “naked, hungry mass” out of abject poverty, deprivation, and degradation, even sixty years after independence from British rule. Fifty years after independence, in 1997, the government estimates reveal that the number of people who are below the absolute poverty level is equal to 35 crore; which was the total population of the country in 1947. Why has this condition endured in the country despite its rapid economic growth, despite the IT revolution, the “commanding heights” of a planned economy with a commitment to socialism? Why the “levels of hunger, illiteracy, excess mortality and other indicators of deprivation are today far higher in India than in China, the Philippines or Indonesia”. The young Siddharth Dube first asked this question in his brilliantly researched and evocatively written “Words Like Freedom”, published in 1998. And he proceeded to find the answer through “the memoirs of an impoverished Indian family”. The following two passages are drawn from his book which outlines in detail the reasons for the continuance of this cycle of intense deprivation and poverty.
Before the British rule, there was very little idea of private ownership of land. Usually, land would be shared between the cultivators and tillers who would enjoy hereditary rights, and the zamindars, whose role was to collect revenue from the peasants. They did not have the absolute right to dispossess the peasants, and so long as the farmer paid his dues and taxes he could not be evicted from the land. The British changed all that as they wanted to deal with one individual from an area who would be elevated to the position of ‘proprietor’ of the land and who would pay the taxes and dues to the treasury. By this mechanism all the cultivated land was transferred to the zamindars. Additionally the “British soon made them the owners of inhabited sites, fallow and barren land, groves and orchards, water sources, river crossings, markets and roads”. These landlords or zamindars became the “linchpin of the colonial order”. By elevating the zamindar’s position and making him the absolute ruler of all those subservient to him, the British ensured the upper-caste domination of society, as most of the zamindars were upper-caste Hindus, and some powerfully placed Muslims. Conversely, the lower castes, the tribals, and the petty peasants were condemned to permanent impoverishment and severe discrimination.
The peasant revolt of 1919 in the Awadh was the first rebellion against this system of exploitation by the entrenched colonial administration, but after three years of intense struggle in which reportedly one lakh peasants participated, the movement failed. It failed because the Congress refused to provide it the required leadership and support. Gandhi and Nehru both let the peasants down by asking them to “abort their struggle”. The Congress drew its ranks from the upper castes and was dominated by the landed elite. The zamindars and the landed capitalists were the financiers of the Congress party, and Gandhi would not support a movement that threatened this class. In fact Gandhi even betrayed his Harijans for whom Babasaheb Ambedkar was trying to obtain special electoral representation as a minority in the early 1930s (something that had been granted to the Muslims in 1906). Both Nehru and Gandhi were “adamantly opposed to allowing either reserved seats or separate electorates for the untouchables”. By going on a ‘fast unto death’, Gandhi forced Ambedkar to withdraw his demand for separate electorates, who wrote: “Mr. Gandhi, the friend of the Untouchables, preferred to fast unto death rather than consent to them and although he yielded he is not reconciled to the justice underlying these demands.”
Similarly, the aboriginal inhabitants of this land, the Adivasis were also “completely left out of the picture.” One of these Adivasis was a Munda from Chotanagpur (today’s Jharkhand). Jaipal Singh was a brilliant young man, sent by the missionaries to study in England, at Oxford, with the hope that on his return he would preach the Gospel, and increase the fold of His Lord. Jaipal Singh was also a brilliant hockey player. He captained the Indian team that won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1928. In 1938 he founded the Adibasi Mahasabha and made the first demand for a separate state of Jharkhand. In the Constituent Assembly he was the most articulate representative of the tribals of India. It is worth recalling his speech on 19th December 1946, when he spoke on the Objectives Resolution:
“I am not expected to understand the legal intricacies of the Resolution. But my common sense tells me that every one of us should march in that road to freedom and fight together. Sir, if there is any group of Indian people that has been shabbily treated it is my people. They have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6,000 years. The history of the Indus Valley civilization, a child of which I am, shows quite clearly that it is the newcomers – most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned – it is the newcomers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastness….The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation and dispossession by the non-aboriginals of India punctuated by rebellion and disorder.”
He further went on to say, “And yet I take Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru at his word. I take you all at your word that now we are going to start a new chapter, a new chapter of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected.”
Jaipal Singh was a unique individual, at once deeply proud of his aboriginal roots, while completely committed to the Indian union unlike the radical tribal leaders of the North East.
His spirited affirmation of faith in the members of the Constituent Assembly did result in some partial amends being made by the inclusion of some 400 tribal communities in a “Scheduled Tribes” list, which would give its members reserved seats in the legislatures and government jobs.
However, like Nehru’s Independence Day speech, this pledge also remains unredeemed in “full measure”. The unwillingness of successive governments at the centre and in the states to institute substantive land reforms, in order to protect their primary backers, who are the landed and the capitalist elite in the case of the Congress and the BJP; and the creamy layer of the scheduled and middle castes who support the Samajwadi and the Bahujan Samaj parties, is at the centre of this failure. In the skewed development model that the country has adopted from 1985, there is no room for the “naked, hungry mass”. It is as if this vast number has dropped from the radars of the planners’ screens, and as if they have been eliminated from view by the pushing of a button.
I am afraid, we will witness many more Kandhamals, not because the evangelists are busy gathering their ‘harvest of souls’, but because the model of our governance and development does not allow the poor and the marginalized to participate in the country’s growth. To conclude in Siddharth Dube’s words: “poverty might indeed worsen despite accelerated economic growth. This is a possibility if the Indian government further reduces public spending, particularly on agriculture, infrastructure and the social sectors. The risks to the poor will be even greater if the government further loosens land ceiling laws, as is being demanded by the rural rich and the many votaries of economic liberalization.”
“To enable the poor to participate and benefit from economic growth, the Indian government would need to undertake widespread land reform, promote good healthcare and schools, foster gender equity, and encourage local democracy. It has not done so for fifty years. The reasons for the tragic inaction remain unchanged. In the future, as in the half-century past and in centuries earlier, India is destined to remain the land of hunger, want and suffering.”
Thursday, August 21, 2008
SEA OF POPPIES
SEA OF POPPIES
By
Amitav Ghosh
If The Glass Palace was a scathing expose of the British Empire, and its destructive influence on whole cultures, societies, and nationalities; the Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, gets under the skin of Empire to lay bare its greedy, stinking, rotten heart. However, the empire could not have lasted as long as it did without the active collaboration of willing partners from within the colonized people, who, for a few pieces of silver, were willing to mortgage their consciences, and the future of whole generations.
Taking advantage of the Mughals’ lack of knowledge, or even interest in seafaring, the British quickly established military superiority through their navies by establishing control over the vast coastline of India. Their control over the Indian Ocean provided the British with the means to generate riches beyond their wildest dreams. The plunder of royal treasuries, temples, and mosques, alone could not have contributed an unending, continuous stream of wealth to Empire. It needed something more to keep itself perpetually in power and pelf. And this treasure was found in two commodities; opium, and manpower. Both were renewable and therefore, inexhaustible. The British Empire was built upon the poppy that the Indian farmer was forced to plant in place of the normal food crops, and when the same farmer was reduced by this practice to absolute poverty and penury, he was drafted as an indentured labourer to work in the Empire’s sugar plantations in distant islands across the globe. The indentured labourer, or ‘girmitiya’ was nothing but a slave called by another name.
This is the historical background from which Amitav Ghosh has drawn a fascinating tale of heroic proportions. None of his characters is heroic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the cast consists of people drawn from the lowest dregs of society; illiterate and dispossessed peasants, chamars, decadent and bankrupt zamindars, convicts, East Asian sailors called lascars, the lower constabulary, minor accountants, and etc. Even the sahibs and their mems are cruel, conniving upstarts, revelling in their power over the wretched natives whom they have exploited through trickery and treachery.
But such is Ghosh’s mastery that he has written a story of epic dimensions; an Odyssey, truly Homeric in its vision, that by the time you come to the last page, the inmates of the Ibis’s dabusa, are no less heroic than the characters of Homer’s tale. Ghosh’s narrative style is leisurely; he lets the story pause when he wants to introduce his reader to some technical details, explaining the process of drawing sap from the poppies; manufacturing and packing of opium for transportation to distant lands; structure and construction of sailing ships of the early 19th century; and etc. The schooner Ibis is described in such complete detail that the reader can almost draw a sketch of the vessel. Like the Sundarbans in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Ibis is a major character in the story and not just a prop to dress up the stage for the human drama. However, these pauses, without being descriptive, enrich our understanding of the tapestry that Ghosh is weaving.
The other aspect of the novel is the language that Ghosh has used. Or perhaps, the correct word is “languages”. This is truly a “polyglot” novel, in which every character speaks in his/her native dialect, the girmitiyas in their Bhojpuri; the lascars in a tongue unidentifiable with any one language; the merchant ship officers in a corrupted indo-anglian dialect; the sahibs and mems of Calcutta in Anglo-Hindoostani, and the lone American freedman in his peculiar dialect of the waterfronts. It is a measure of Ghosh’s painstaking research and scholarship that his use of these diverse tongues does not get mixed up and each character speaks in the language of his/her origin. It is also ironic that the only person who speaks in proper English is the dispossessed zamindar/convicted forgerer Neel Rattan Halder. Sea of Poppies can be compared to that great American novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where too the protagonists are the dispossessed, forced to travel far from their roots for survival; the oppressors are the capitalists who use brute power, and a captive legal machinery to subjugate the ordinary folk; and the struggle between these two attains epic proportions. There is the folk tongue of Ma and her family from Oklahoma; and a different language spoken by the other characters. Perhaps there is no more devastating commentary on the injustice and inequity of the capitalist system than the act of Ma who asks her own daughter, Rose-of-Sharon, who has just lost her newborn child, to breastfeed a starving, unknown, adult male to save his life.
Like Steinbeck, Amitav Ghosh has a truly universal vision of humanity, and it shines throughout his works. He discovers in Bhojpuri a language without equal among “all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, in the expression of the nuances of love, longing, and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.” In one of the most poignant passages Ghosh writes: “How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted to the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”
The British Empire, like all imperialist regimes before or after it, was an evil dispensation, a violation of basic human rights, devoid of any respect for other cultures, their religions, their myths, social structures. Empire came with pretence of bringing enlightenment, and Ghosh deliberately puts this awareness among the colonizers in the head of the weak, opium-addled, Captain Chillingworth who says, “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” The captain himself turns out to be just another pretender when he takes command of the Ibis, and is incapable of delivering justice to the wretched of his ship.
Amitav Ghosh has told us that he is planning to write a trilogy on this subject. Perhaps he had Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy in mind when he embarked upon his journey. But with five of his main characters adrift on the seas in a longboat, and quite a few still left on the schooner, I suspect, there is enough potential for a more ambitious number. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to the sequel.
Thank you, Amitav, for giving us this beautiful book, and reminding us of how dearly we have paid for our freedom from Empire. The tragedy is that we appear to be relapsing into the same trap of colonialism, where the new girmitiyas are the IT professionals, and the opium-addicts are not the Chinese but our own elite and the middle-classes. The East India Company has been replaced by the corporate multinationals, the gomustas by the bureaucrats, and the zamindars by the politicians. Once more I fear for my people!
By
Amitav Ghosh
If The Glass Palace was a scathing expose of the British Empire, and its destructive influence on whole cultures, societies, and nationalities; the Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, gets under the skin of Empire to lay bare its greedy, stinking, rotten heart. However, the empire could not have lasted as long as it did without the active collaboration of willing partners from within the colonized people, who, for a few pieces of silver, were willing to mortgage their consciences, and the future of whole generations.
Taking advantage of the Mughals’ lack of knowledge, or even interest in seafaring, the British quickly established military superiority through their navies by establishing control over the vast coastline of India. Their control over the Indian Ocean provided the British with the means to generate riches beyond their wildest dreams. The plunder of royal treasuries, temples, and mosques, alone could not have contributed an unending, continuous stream of wealth to Empire. It needed something more to keep itself perpetually in power and pelf. And this treasure was found in two commodities; opium, and manpower. Both were renewable and therefore, inexhaustible. The British Empire was built upon the poppy that the Indian farmer was forced to plant in place of the normal food crops, and when the same farmer was reduced by this practice to absolute poverty and penury, he was drafted as an indentured labourer to work in the Empire’s sugar plantations in distant islands across the globe. The indentured labourer, or ‘girmitiya’ was nothing but a slave called by another name.
This is the historical background from which Amitav Ghosh has drawn a fascinating tale of heroic proportions. None of his characters is heroic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the cast consists of people drawn from the lowest dregs of society; illiterate and dispossessed peasants, chamars, decadent and bankrupt zamindars, convicts, East Asian sailors called lascars, the lower constabulary, minor accountants, and etc. Even the sahibs and their mems are cruel, conniving upstarts, revelling in their power over the wretched natives whom they have exploited through trickery and treachery.
But such is Ghosh’s mastery that he has written a story of epic dimensions; an Odyssey, truly Homeric in its vision, that by the time you come to the last page, the inmates of the Ibis’s dabusa, are no less heroic than the characters of Homer’s tale. Ghosh’s narrative style is leisurely; he lets the story pause when he wants to introduce his reader to some technical details, explaining the process of drawing sap from the poppies; manufacturing and packing of opium for transportation to distant lands; structure and construction of sailing ships of the early 19th century; and etc. The schooner Ibis is described in such complete detail that the reader can almost draw a sketch of the vessel. Like the Sundarbans in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Ibis is a major character in the story and not just a prop to dress up the stage for the human drama. However, these pauses, without being descriptive, enrich our understanding of the tapestry that Ghosh is weaving.
The other aspect of the novel is the language that Ghosh has used. Or perhaps, the correct word is “languages”. This is truly a “polyglot” novel, in which every character speaks in his/her native dialect, the girmitiyas in their Bhojpuri; the lascars in a tongue unidentifiable with any one language; the merchant ship officers in a corrupted indo-anglian dialect; the sahibs and mems of Calcutta in Anglo-Hindoostani, and the lone American freedman in his peculiar dialect of the waterfronts. It is a measure of Ghosh’s painstaking research and scholarship that his use of these diverse tongues does not get mixed up and each character speaks in the language of his/her origin. It is also ironic that the only person who speaks in proper English is the dispossessed zamindar/convicted forgerer Neel Rattan Halder. Sea of Poppies can be compared to that great American novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where too the protagonists are the dispossessed, forced to travel far from their roots for survival; the oppressors are the capitalists who use brute power, and a captive legal machinery to subjugate the ordinary folk; and the struggle between these two attains epic proportions. There is the folk tongue of Ma and her family from Oklahoma; and a different language spoken by the other characters. Perhaps there is no more devastating commentary on the injustice and inequity of the capitalist system than the act of Ma who asks her own daughter, Rose-of-Sharon, who has just lost her newborn child, to breastfeed a starving, unknown, adult male to save his life.
Like Steinbeck, Amitav Ghosh has a truly universal vision of humanity, and it shines throughout his works. He discovers in Bhojpuri a language without equal among “all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, in the expression of the nuances of love, longing, and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.” In one of the most poignant passages Ghosh writes: “How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted to the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”
The British Empire, like all imperialist regimes before or after it, was an evil dispensation, a violation of basic human rights, devoid of any respect for other cultures, their religions, their myths, social structures. Empire came with pretence of bringing enlightenment, and Ghosh deliberately puts this awareness among the colonizers in the head of the weak, opium-addled, Captain Chillingworth who says, “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” The captain himself turns out to be just another pretender when he takes command of the Ibis, and is incapable of delivering justice to the wretched of his ship.
Amitav Ghosh has told us that he is planning to write a trilogy on this subject. Perhaps he had Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy in mind when he embarked upon his journey. But with five of his main characters adrift on the seas in a longboat, and quite a few still left on the schooner, I suspect, there is enough potential for a more ambitious number. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to the sequel.
Thank you, Amitav, for giving us this beautiful book, and reminding us of how dearly we have paid for our freedom from Empire. The tragedy is that we appear to be relapsing into the same trap of colonialism, where the new girmitiyas are the IT professionals, and the opium-addicts are not the Chinese but our own elite and the middle-classes. The East India Company has been replaced by the corporate multinationals, the gomustas by the bureaucrats, and the zamindars by the politicians. Once more I fear for my people!
ARUNDHATI ROY ON KASHMIR
Arundhati Roy’s recent statement on Kashmir, as quoted by The Times of India, that “India needs azadi from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India” has raised a storm in the electronic and print media across the country. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to make a statement like this in today’s circumstances, where India, on the one hand, is completely at the mercy of self-serving, vote-bank politicians, while its neighbour, Pakistan, is re-experimenting with democracy with a known set of politicians who are no different from their coevals here. At the time of writing, there are 337 comments on The Times of India website, and these are, predictably, divided on religious lines. While a majority of Hindu commentators have roundly trashed her statement as anti-national, and questioned her mental credibility, the Muslim commentators have come in support of her views. This fact, by itself, should vindicate her observations. However, it is time that the question of Kashmir is debated widely, and dispassionately, as it is in the interest of world peace that a lasting solution is found to this problem.
From the moment the two-nation theory was conceived, there should have been no doubt in the minds of rational people that it would be inconceivable to keep Muslim-majority areas within the Indian union, especially those contiguous with Pakistan. It is too late now to question the legitimacy of the Radcliffe Line, and the subsequent merger of the princely states with the Indian Union. But the question of Kashmir was never settled, even after three wars were fought by the two neighbours in 1948, 1965, and 1971. India had an opportunity in 1971 to force a permanent settlement down the throat of Bhutto in Simla, but Mrs. Indira Gandhi, gloating in the adulation of an hysterical nation, and completely charmed by the wily Pakistani, not only returned the POW’s, but also frittered away the fruits of the famous military victory. The defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh was not followed-up by hard political thinking, and instead of making the country a secure nation, we have ended up by creating a stronger enemy on our western borders, unfettered by the need to keep a rebellious province, 2000 kms away, in check; while ending up with a more than hostile neighbour on the eastern front. Mrs. Gandhi could have made Pakistan accept the LOC as the international border between India and Pakistan, and the Kashmir issue could have been settled permanently. Even Sheikh Mujib could have been offered the choice of joining his fledgling state with India, combining the two Bengals together, and making him the Chief Minister of the new state. In the afterglow of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon Pakistan, the Indian Prime Minister was in a unique position to make the Indian people accept these decisions. On the other side, the people of Pakistan would also have accepted our terms under pressure from the families of the 90000 POWs. The people of Kashmir, always ambivalent and dissembling, would have had no difficulty in accepting the situation, and would have settled down to a life of languid lassitude.
However, as the saying goes, it is no use crying over spilt milk. Mrs. Gandhi, as subsequent events revealed, did not possess the skills and temperament of a thinking politician. Her deep sense of insecurity led her into the clutches of flatterers, charlatans, and plain crooks, who manipulated her for their own personal benefits. Within four years she had lost control of the nation. Misguided by her son and the coterie around him, she declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and almost created the same conditions in India as had existed in Pakistan. The moral ground was totally lost! And with that was lost the opportunity of making India a strong nation, respected and feared by its neighbours and the world at large. Bhutto, in the West, was overthrown by one Zia, and hanged; while Mujib, in the East, was assassinated with his family, on the orders of another Zia.
With the army once more in power in Pakistan, it lost no time in renewing its demand for Kashmir, but this time it infiltrated the small separatist element in the valley, and under the guise of creating a global Islamic society, took over the agenda of this fringe. The Kashmiris fell easily into this trap, and from 1989 onwards have been totally under the influence of the Islamic Jehadis under the control of the ISI. In the last two decades the Islamists have managed to practically cleanse the valley of its non-Muslim residents, both through murder, and intimidation. The Pandits and the Sikhs, already marginalized since independence, were anyway relocating in other parts of India and abroad. Educational and employment opportunities were very limited, and these were grabbed by the Muslims. Investment in institutions in Jammu province was negligible, while all the money poured into the state by India went to feathering the nests of the politicians of the valley, and financing projects for the benefit of their constituents.
The methodology of terror, intimidation, and murder employed against the hapless Pandits and Sikhs of the valley, was totally unnecessary, as they were no threat to the complete political and economic domination of the Muslim majority. The ethnic cleansing can be compared to the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem, and can be understood only in Jihadi terms. M.J. Akbar, in his book “Blood Brothers” writes: ‘Muslims are peaceful only when powerless’… ‘Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace. Bunk! There are two kinds of verses in the Quran, those uttered in Mecca and those uttered in Medina. In Mecca the Prophet of Muslims was not in power, so in Mecca he said things like, your religion for you and mine for me. But in Medina he became a king. What happened then? His Allah suddenly began to send verses saying that all non-Muslims should be slaughtered in a jihad…’Kashmir emphatically confirms this mentality and it is futile to expect the Kashmiri Muslim to ever feel that he belongs to a nation where Hindus are in a majority. The Muslim will always be more loyal to Mecca and Medina than to his own land. This is something the secularists are unable to see, and they continue to propound the myth that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in his "India After Gandhi” writes, 'Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.
Coming back to Arundhati Roy’s statement on Kashmir, I am assuming that she would like freedom to and from the Muslim-majority valley of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The people of Jammu have never been equivocal in their preference and we can believe that they would never want to be a part of Pakistan. The Ladakhis, I am afraid, have never been asked, and if given a choice, they could go either way. Islam is as prevalent as Buddhism in their province. Roy, in her proposal, is probably suggesting that India should do what Philip Spratt had suggested in 1952, with the modification that the Jammu province remains with the Indian Union, and the valley is given its cherished ‘azadi’. A referendum could be held in Ladakh allowing its people to determine their future.
It is my contention that an ‘azad’ Kashmir would only be as ‘azad’ as the Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir is today. David Devadas, in his excellent book ‘In Search of a Future – The Story of Kashmir’, writes in the epilogue, ‘Kashmir has not, despite education and wealth, transcended its hateful contempt-ridden past. Religious, sectarian and ethnic antipathies continue’. ‘Over five centuries of frequent chaos, exploitation and repression, the trust that any society requires – the willingness to set aside religious, sectarian, caste, ethnic or even personal interests for the collective good – is in tatters. Civil society bustles, but mistrust, so often evinced as ambivalence, constantly lurks. Kashmiris have deeply imbibed a consciousness of the illegitimacy of the state, its institutions and officers. Kashmiris feel they are right to blame the Indian state for fraudulent elections and weak democracy but New Delhi’s machinations are only part of the story. Kashmiris are loath to examine the roles of their leaders, the effects of their history and the state of their society…The unfortunate fact is that personal ambitions are foremost in the minds of many of Kashmir’s leaders – but no more than among most of Kashmir’s people.’
At the slightest pretext the Kashmiris of the valley are ready to storm into the streets, raising anti-India slogans, waving Pakistani flags, and engaging the security forces in pitched street battles. How then can we claim them as an integral part of India? If the transfer of a mere 100 acres of uncultivable land for the use of providing temporary shelter to Hindu pilgrims once in a year can cause so much turmoil in the valley, then how can we justify the billions that are being poured into Kashmir year after year? Isn’t Arundhati Roy justified in demanding that we Indians should get ‘azadi’ from Kashmir? Why are we continuing to be slaves to an idea which never existed in the first place? For heaven’s sake let us get rid of this yoke for ever. Let us leave the Kashmiris of the valley to make their own future and say, “good riddance”. But before that let us relocate the remaining few non-Muslims to a more hospitable India; for it is certain that they will either be forced to convert to Islam or be put to the sword in an “Azad Kashmir”. Hell, as Sartre would have said, ‘is the other’.
From the moment the two-nation theory was conceived, there should have been no doubt in the minds of rational people that it would be inconceivable to keep Muslim-majority areas within the Indian union, especially those contiguous with Pakistan. It is too late now to question the legitimacy of the Radcliffe Line, and the subsequent merger of the princely states with the Indian Union. But the question of Kashmir was never settled, even after three wars were fought by the two neighbours in 1948, 1965, and 1971. India had an opportunity in 1971 to force a permanent settlement down the throat of Bhutto in Simla, but Mrs. Indira Gandhi, gloating in the adulation of an hysterical nation, and completely charmed by the wily Pakistani, not only returned the POW’s, but also frittered away the fruits of the famous military victory. The defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh was not followed-up by hard political thinking, and instead of making the country a secure nation, we have ended up by creating a stronger enemy on our western borders, unfettered by the need to keep a rebellious province, 2000 kms away, in check; while ending up with a more than hostile neighbour on the eastern front. Mrs. Gandhi could have made Pakistan accept the LOC as the international border between India and Pakistan, and the Kashmir issue could have been settled permanently. Even Sheikh Mujib could have been offered the choice of joining his fledgling state with India, combining the two Bengals together, and making him the Chief Minister of the new state. In the afterglow of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon Pakistan, the Indian Prime Minister was in a unique position to make the Indian people accept these decisions. On the other side, the people of Pakistan would also have accepted our terms under pressure from the families of the 90000 POWs. The people of Kashmir, always ambivalent and dissembling, would have had no difficulty in accepting the situation, and would have settled down to a life of languid lassitude.
However, as the saying goes, it is no use crying over spilt milk. Mrs. Gandhi, as subsequent events revealed, did not possess the skills and temperament of a thinking politician. Her deep sense of insecurity led her into the clutches of flatterers, charlatans, and plain crooks, who manipulated her for their own personal benefits. Within four years she had lost control of the nation. Misguided by her son and the coterie around him, she declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and almost created the same conditions in India as had existed in Pakistan. The moral ground was totally lost! And with that was lost the opportunity of making India a strong nation, respected and feared by its neighbours and the world at large. Bhutto, in the West, was overthrown by one Zia, and hanged; while Mujib, in the East, was assassinated with his family, on the orders of another Zia.
With the army once more in power in Pakistan, it lost no time in renewing its demand for Kashmir, but this time it infiltrated the small separatist element in the valley, and under the guise of creating a global Islamic society, took over the agenda of this fringe. The Kashmiris fell easily into this trap, and from 1989 onwards have been totally under the influence of the Islamic Jehadis under the control of the ISI. In the last two decades the Islamists have managed to practically cleanse the valley of its non-Muslim residents, both through murder, and intimidation. The Pandits and the Sikhs, already marginalized since independence, were anyway relocating in other parts of India and abroad. Educational and employment opportunities were very limited, and these were grabbed by the Muslims. Investment in institutions in Jammu province was negligible, while all the money poured into the state by India went to feathering the nests of the politicians of the valley, and financing projects for the benefit of their constituents.
The methodology of terror, intimidation, and murder employed against the hapless Pandits and Sikhs of the valley, was totally unnecessary, as they were no threat to the complete political and economic domination of the Muslim majority. The ethnic cleansing can be compared to the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem, and can be understood only in Jihadi terms. M.J. Akbar, in his book “Blood Brothers” writes: ‘Muslims are peaceful only when powerless’… ‘Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace. Bunk! There are two kinds of verses in the Quran, those uttered in Mecca and those uttered in Medina. In Mecca the Prophet of Muslims was not in power, so in Mecca he said things like, your religion for you and mine for me. But in Medina he became a king. What happened then? His Allah suddenly began to send verses saying that all non-Muslims should be slaughtered in a jihad…’Kashmir emphatically confirms this mentality and it is futile to expect the Kashmiri Muslim to ever feel that he belongs to a nation where Hindus are in a majority. The Muslim will always be more loyal to Mecca and Medina than to his own land. This is something the secularists are unable to see, and they continue to propound the myth that Kashmir is an integral part of India.
Philip Spratt, an English journalist, editing a Bangalore journal MysIndia, wrote in 1952 that India should abandon its claim over Kashmir, and allow Sheikh Abdullah to realize his dream of independence. Spratt wanted the Indian army to be withdrawn from J & K and all loans to the state written off. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’ Ramachandra Guha, in his "India After Gandhi” writes, 'Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through his nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side’.
Coming back to Arundhati Roy’s statement on Kashmir, I am assuming that she would like freedom to and from the Muslim-majority valley of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The people of Jammu have never been equivocal in their preference and we can believe that they would never want to be a part of Pakistan. The Ladakhis, I am afraid, have never been asked, and if given a choice, they could go either way. Islam is as prevalent as Buddhism in their province. Roy, in her proposal, is probably suggesting that India should do what Philip Spratt had suggested in 1952, with the modification that the Jammu province remains with the Indian Union, and the valley is given its cherished ‘azadi’. A referendum could be held in Ladakh allowing its people to determine their future.
It is my contention that an ‘azad’ Kashmir would only be as ‘azad’ as the Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir is today. David Devadas, in his excellent book ‘In Search of a Future – The Story of Kashmir’, writes in the epilogue, ‘Kashmir has not, despite education and wealth, transcended its hateful contempt-ridden past. Religious, sectarian and ethnic antipathies continue’. ‘Over five centuries of frequent chaos, exploitation and repression, the trust that any society requires – the willingness to set aside religious, sectarian, caste, ethnic or even personal interests for the collective good – is in tatters. Civil society bustles, but mistrust, so often evinced as ambivalence, constantly lurks. Kashmiris have deeply imbibed a consciousness of the illegitimacy of the state, its institutions and officers. Kashmiris feel they are right to blame the Indian state for fraudulent elections and weak democracy but New Delhi’s machinations are only part of the story. Kashmiris are loath to examine the roles of their leaders, the effects of their history and the state of their society…The unfortunate fact is that personal ambitions are foremost in the minds of many of Kashmir’s leaders – but no more than among most of Kashmir’s people.’
At the slightest pretext the Kashmiris of the valley are ready to storm into the streets, raising anti-India slogans, waving Pakistani flags, and engaging the security forces in pitched street battles. How then can we claim them as an integral part of India? If the transfer of a mere 100 acres of uncultivable land for the use of providing temporary shelter to Hindu pilgrims once in a year can cause so much turmoil in the valley, then how can we justify the billions that are being poured into Kashmir year after year? Isn’t Arundhati Roy justified in demanding that we Indians should get ‘azadi’ from Kashmir? Why are we continuing to be slaves to an idea which never existed in the first place? For heaven’s sake let us get rid of this yoke for ever. Let us leave the Kashmiris of the valley to make their own future and say, “good riddance”. But before that let us relocate the remaining few non-Muslims to a more hospitable India; for it is certain that they will either be forced to convert to Islam or be put to the sword in an “Azad Kashmir”. Hell, as Sartre would have said, ‘is the other’.
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