E-Paper
Not quite there yet
There is a disturbing similarity between Kashmir and Iraq. If American spokesmen and journalists seem to be living in two different Iraqs, their Indian counterparts are doing the same, writes Prem Shankar Jha.
Last month something momentous happened in Kashmir, and not a single national newspaper even noticed it. In four assembly bye-elections, more than 70 per cent of the electorate cast its vote. The turnout in three constituencies in the Valley was over 69 per cent.
Three is a small number. But this cannot discount the significance of the event. The last time residents of the Valley turned out in such large numbers to vote was 1983, when the turnout was 71 per cent. The only other time was 1977 when it was 72 per cent. Those elections were demonstrably free and were won by Sheikh Abdullah and by his son Farooq, in the shadow of his father’s death. Does this mean that the alienation of large sections, which kept the turnout in the Valley low at 28 per cent in 2002, has finally ended?
This is the view gaining ground within the State apparatus in Kashmir. There is also a barely concealed impatience with the Hurriyat. Not only did Hurriyat leaders not attend the first Kashmir roundtable in Delhi, but after virtually promising the Prime Minister to attend the second roundtable in Srinagar, they backed out, giving lame excuses. The bye-election results suggest they have missed the bus.
There is one fly in this ointment. If Kashmiris no longer feel alienated from India, why do they so readily believe every rumour, every interpretation of events, that portrays India as a brutal occupying power?
Kashmir’s reaction to the tragic drowning of a group of schoolchildren in Wullar lake at Watlab on May 30, is a case in point. Within hours every Kashmiri believed it had been engineered by the army (a generic word for the security forces). Boating, I was told, is not allowed on Wullar lake, especially in the afternoon. But the navy took 45 children out on a boat meant for eight! In one version the two boatmen were drunk and tried to molest one or more of the girls, and the ensuing struggle overturned the boat. A second version had it that an army motorboat had raced dangerously close by. Its wake set off a panic and caused the boat to overturn. When the boat overturned, the two navy men swam ashore leaving the children to drown, ignoring their friends’ tearful entreaties. It was local fishermen who saved over half of them, and the others perished.
When the bereaved families and other residents of Handwara went to the lake the next day to pull out the remaining bodies, the army/ navy would not let them, and instead opened fire. Two young students were killed but the army claimed that they were militants and had fired first, wounding a soldier. This lame but only too familiar excuse was the proverbial last straw and sent the whole of Kashmir into a hartal on the day I arrived.
Only a few of those I met were prepared to admit that it may have been a well-intentioned gesture that went wrong. But even they did not remember that the army, and later the navy, had been giving boat rides to schoolchildren and pilgrims to a nearby shrine, twice a month in the summer for 16 years, without incident. No one gave credence to the navy’s statement that the boat was designed to carry not eight but 16 adults, and was not therefore so heavily overloaded; and that the mishap occurred on the second ride barely 30 metres from the shore because a lot of students and one teacher jumped onboard at the last minute.
Nor did Greater Kashmir, the largest-selling English daily, report that the firing took place on the second crowd to invade the army camp and navy station. Relatives had already stormed the camp when they heard the news the previous evening; they had beaten up navy personnel and burnt the remaining boats, without retaliation by the security forces. The mob that came the second day had been stoked into a different kind of anger by the rumours. A senior army officer candidly admitted that the army had fired to keep the mob away, more or less in self-defence. But it blotted its copybook by claiming the presence of militants -- a story that even the Kashmir police did not buy.
Watlab is only one illustration of the Kashmiri mindset. Nearly every journalist I met, including three who were at the Congress party’s memorial meeting for Rajiv Gandhi, swore that the fidayeen who got into the meeting and opened fire only fired in the air, and only to prove how easily they could infiltrate such meetings! When I asked who killed the five people and severely injured the Inspector General of Police, I was told with absolute certainty that it was the BSF’s wild return fire.
Similarly, every last Kashmiri is convinced that the three attacks on tourists in May, which sent a thousand buses back to the plains, were the work of Himachali travel agents threatened by the rise of tourism in the Valley. My observation, that the hotels in Shimla were chockfull, was lost on them.
If no one believes a word you say, and believes the worst about you at every opportunity, how can you think he has reconciled with you, let alone consider him a friend? Every member of the security apparatus and the administration complains endlessly about the way they are portrayed in the local media and by the rumour mills. But they refuse stubbornly to draw the obvious conclusion -- that alienation is alive. There is a disturbing similarity between Kashmir and Iraq. If American spokesmen and journalists seem to be living in two different Iraqs, their Indian counterparts are doing the same.
The Indian-State’s tendency to live in a make-believe world where normality has returned to Kashmir prevents it from seeing how its actions are perceived by Kashmiris. Thus Kashmiris see the curtailment of their freedoms each time Sonia Gandhi or the Prime Minister descend on Kashmir as a forceful reminder of their ‘real’ status -- subjects of the Indian imperium.
It does not see that the Hurriyat’s mistake was not to stay away from the second roundtable but to make a commitment that it would attend. For had it sat at the same table as parties that accepted union with India, it would have been accused of betraying the ‘90,000 who had died’. This would have left the entire ‘nationalist’ field for Syed Ali Shah Geelani to plough.
So how does one explain the 69 per cent vote? One explanation is ‘hope’. The border is softening, and Kashmiris believe that the process is irreversible. The other is the effect of three years of rule by Mufti Sayeed’s PDP. Although Mufti failed to accomplish several of the goals he had set himself, he succeeded in making Kashmiris feel they were in control of their fate for the first time since 1984. His successor, although well-intentioned, has no feel for Kashmir. His decision to hold a function in Rajiv Gandhi’s memory left Kashmiris in no doubt that their new Chief Minister’s ambitions lay in Delhi and not in Srinagar. There is thus a new sensitivity to what the government and the security forces do and don’t do. The conviction is growing that the new Chief Minister, at Delhi’s behest, is exacerbating communal differences in Kashmir and between the Valley and other parts of the state in order to reduce the importance of the Sunni-Sufi elements in the Valley -- another fear with parallels to Iraq. Slowly, ever so slowly, therefore, the clock has begun to run backwards.
