I  am not a  fascist  only when
I pull the trigger   and kill;
I am a fascist when first I think
My work is  God’s own will.
 
I am not a fascist only when
I  break  the common law;
I am a fascist when first I think
I  make the common law.
 
I am not a  fascist only when
I set up to harangue;
I  am a  fascist  when first I think
What need has the other of tongue.
 
I am not a fascist only when
I  tear up like the vulture;
I am a fascist  when first I think
My culture alone is Culture.
 
I am not a fascist only when
I decimate all other kind;
I  am a fascist when  first I think
It is purity I have in mind.
 

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Image Courtesy: PTI

Some five or so years ago, I had the privilege of giving a talk on “Marxism and Literature” at Kashmir University—an extraordinarily open-minded centre of learning.
 
In the interactions that followed, a young teacher expressed the view that not a leaf stirs without God’s will. My response to that was that were this to be admitted, we would need to further admit that everything that had been happening in Kashmir was also an expression of God’s will. In which case it would be wrong to attribute the goings-on to any agency.
 
Although a rather amused flutter went down the hall, the young teacher, nor anybody else in the audience, had a riposte that would extend the speculation.
 
I recall this episode as an aid to understanding the context of Aastha (belief) that informs the Ram Mandir issue.
 
Hindutva activists tell us that it is their belief that Lord Ram was born at the very exact spot where the demolished mosque once stood.
 
This is one order of belief.
 
The question that asks itself on another plane of thought is do they also believe that having been an avatar of the God Vishnu, Lord Ram is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?
 
Should the answer to that be in the affirmative, is it not to be concluded that Lord Ram is fully cognizant of what has been happening with regard to the temple issue and that all those who follow and worship him must then wait for his will to be done? Think how often in our everyday conversations we say to each other “Ram Jaane” when the import of events escapes us.
 
Should we, on the other hand rather demur on the question of our faith in Divine Will, be it in the matter of Kashmir or the Ram Temple, we may not refuse the aspersion that we are in fact operating in the arena of a politically-driven human will. What the Ram bhakt must ask herself is which of his two beliefs is primary—that Lord Ram was born at the exact site of the demolished mosque, or that Lord Ram is all-knowing and that it is His will that prevails.
 
This conundrum of being divided between divine will and human will, as suggested at the outset, of course, afflicts the followers of all faiths. Among Christians, for example, the prayer reads “thy will be done” but not too many actually wait for that to happen.
 
As I think back to my grooming in Kashmir between the forties and the early sixties, I recall many instances of wayside sadhus and fakirs unquestioningly living their faith in the divine will. They could be seen dealing with all aspects of nature and all human subjects without discrimination as proof of their living submission to an undiscriminating divine will. No wonder they were such superb human beings who, in the memorable formulation of John Keats, poured balm on the world than vex it. They did not seem like men and women of religion at all, but lodestars of a spirituality that gave  Kashmir—and indeed the rest of the subcontinent—the character we often laud without much conviction.
 
There are those of us who are unable to subscribe to the notion of a divine will, believing that “men make their own history.” And therefore, the likes of us operate fully in a world which we think is driven by contending human and social interests. But those who claim to be driven by Aastha, often appear to be riding two contradictory horses, trotting, ambling or galloping as per political convenience.
 
There is the rub.
 
Often those who pontificate most vigorously about the desirability of selfless action without thought to the fruits of action seem most contentiously, indeed often violently, to be after the fruit rather than the selflessness. Were that not so, for example, there never could be a profit-driven market-economy.
 

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Think how democratic  voices have been routinely lambasted whenever a critical  opinion , however well- founded, has been expressed with respect to the conduct of the security forces in Kashmir.  The least sympathy expressed  with  a hounded and humiliated  Kashmiri, including  traumatized teenagers risking opposition to  strong-arm measures and gratuitous civilian killings  has quickly been dubbed as “anti-national” activity  engaged in by “urban naxals” to weaken the state.  However justified their resentment, protesting Kashmiris have been characterized as enemy mobs out to give a bad name to  the security forces.  Any  reference to possible causes for the  unrest has likewise been rubbished as a ploy to find excuses for  doing dirt on the forces heroically committed to  shore up the land.  And every tactic employed by the forces applauded as  above and beyond  faulting. The ultimate  act against  the  honour of the state has been seen to be the  standing upto jawans or policemen committing excesses, even as armed violence  committed by militants  Is justly  condemned.
So we may be excused if we have thus far assumed that the utmost test of our loyalty to the nation rests in how we look at our security forces. Wrong.

Switch to the recent violence in Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh and a different  order of priority  emerges. 

On a day when local Muslims were holding an Ijtima(a  Tablighi gathering), some carcasses, instantly  promulgated as those of   cows, were  found in an open field nearby.

Before you knew, a mob  of hundreds gathered on the spot, accused some Muslims of the heinous act, and lodged a  First Information Report.   

Just when the  local police were intending to bury the carcasses, some leaders of the mob belonging to  organizations affiliated to the Hindu rightwing prevented this from happening , and set about vandalizing whatever came in their  path.

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Dar Yasin/Associated Press 
 
For donkey’s years, a plethora of ‘think tanks’ and sundry Kashmir watchers have tried to figure out why the state of Jammu & Kashmir is in turmoil. Alas to little effect.
 
But now we know! There is no Hindu King there anymore. Coming, as this insight does, from the near-Hindu King of India’s largest state, this must give us pause to review all our mistaken assessments of the imbroglio.
 
You may well ask, why that aforesaid largest state is itself in not such good shape, despite its good fortune in having a near-Hindu King, or why the national realm at large should be so fraught with contentions, notwithstanding the rule by a Hindu Hriday Samrat. However idle and motivated those queries might be, the answer is not far to seek: put simply, there are still residues of western-style, Nehruvian democracy prevalent; whose systems of checks, balances, due processes, and other debilitating libertarian apparatuses continue to thwart the pristine and wholesome reach of Hindu monarchy. Wretchedly also, petty things like the price of petrol, lack of jobs, insignificant fatalities among national sewers, mass rapes in shelter homes, gratuitously suicidal farmers, collapsed small enterprises, Institutions that brazenly insist on being autonomous, and such like, insist on hogging media spaces to the detriment of the larger national interest. Nor are targeted social contentions yet quite adequate to exterminating these and other obstacles to the untrammelled royalty whose unchallenged edicts alone can bring peace and prosperity to India, that is Bharat, although not for want of trying hard.
 
The larger problem of course is that which dear Donald Trump, doyen of kingly nationalists, never fails to flag tweet after tweet, byte after byte; till such time as certain wrong types of the human species persist in proliferating and making injurious claims to legitimacy, nation after nation, aided and abetted by permissive Constitutionalaties, no Christian or Hindu monarch may have full control of a future of monochromatic purity. What perplexes the royal imagination bolstered by godliness is the question as to why God should have thought it fit to give us “God’s own variety of creatures” rather than just one undifferentiated type wherein there would be one mind and no argument. Clearly, God must be made to answer to this lapse; how, only Trump and Yogi Adityanath may further enlighten us.
 
Meanwhile, having underscored the roots of the Kashmir problem, all nationalists’ heads must be put together to find a way to reinstall the Hindu monarchy.
 
For a start, statewide, even country-wide, prayers, jagrans, kirtans may be initiated on state expense to persuade devis and devtas to intervene in the matter.
 
More things are wrought by prayer than by politics, especially of the pernicious democratic variety.
 
Professor Badri Raina taught English literature at Delhi University for four decades. He has several collections of poems, essays and translations to his credit. He is the author of books like ‘Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth’, ‘The Underside of Things: India and the World’, ‘Kashmir: A Noble Tryst in Tatters,’ and more.
 

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How many times have we heard from all and sundry, including the courts, that the real administrative head of the truncated State of the National Capital is not the elected government but the appointed Lieutenant Governor?
 
Well then, where is he, as governance in Delhi comes to a dead halt?
 
Such is the anti-democratic hubris of the merely appointed functionary that he will not step out of his well-furnished comfort zone to accost the elected chief minister and some of his cabinet colleagues who have been in a sit-in protest in his outer office for days, demanding  that he exercise his constitutional powers to  bring the lordly bureaucracy back to work in  line with their service rules and obligations.
 
An atmosphere has been created over the last few years which requires that only one elected man in the country must be obeyed, and all others made subordinate to rule by bureaucratic fiat. At a time when a crony idea is afloat that even the duly selected higher bureaucrats must yield place to lateral entrants—an idea that these duly selected bureaucrats are now opposing, even as they dub the Delhi Chief Minister as a perpetually protesting man—the Republic confronts a systemic danger that everyone had best wake up to, namely, the ongoing project to relegate politics at all levels and institute governance by diktat and, collaterally, by vigilante main force.
 
In this context, Mr. Kejriwal must be thanked for keeping alive the practice of informed political mobilisation in circumstances in which every two-bit greenhorn of a television anchor rattles off contempt for politics and democratic processes of legitimation and accountability.
 
The support that the elected Head of the Delhi government has drawn from a slew of other elected chief ministers and political parties is not just incidental; it is clearly a sign that these elected functionaries realize only too well the nature of the historical moment—one in which the reinstatement of mass-based and mass-endorsed political activity must be restored to is primacy if Indian democracy is not to dwindle finally into mere proforma elections every five years. It is heartening that even an ex-bureaucrat, now member of a political party in alliance with the NDA has seen fit to openly reprimand the pampered and protected bureaucratic lot who have now brought Delhi governance to its knees.
 
Clearly, the Indian National Congress does not see the matter yet quite in this light. The question it needs to ask itself is the following: will its prospects of returning to power in Delhi, come the next Assembly elections, be diminished or enhanced by the record it is now setting itself—of having remained in self-regarding isolation while a plethora of opposition parties are battling the coercive moment, I dare say, that even when looked at from this narrow perspective, the people of Delhi are far less likely to reward the Congress for its  current stand—one that aligns it, like it or not, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—and more likely to stand by the Aam Aadmi Party for having given a principled fight to forces that seem inimical to a number of welfare schemes that the current elected government wishes to implement in full. One would, of course, hope that the Congress will bring itself to see the larger issue involved in the current imbroglio and teach itself to subordinate its contempt for the Kejriwal brand of politics to a more democratic vision.
 
The Capital crisis is no small or localised matter; it involves considerations that, one way or another, will not but prove deeply consequential in the years to come.
 
Note:
The news comes that the Chief Minister has lifted his dharna from the Lieutenant Governor’s outer room, but no meeting between the two has taken place. Consequently, no material dent has been made in the prevailing governmental crisis and the structural issues underlying it.
 

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Image: Facebook/RSSOrg

In current parlance, here is my  “takeaway” on  Pranab Mukerjee’s so tantalizing  visit to the RSS Headquarters in Nagpur:

First, why was he invited?  However Mohan ji Bhagwat may have underplayed the occurrence as a rather routine and innocent one, the invbite was clearly loaded with political purpose.

That India is now run by an RSS-led Bharatiya Janata Party is all very well, but inviting a former President of the Republic to RSS’s organizational den is quite another matter.

One thing is for sure: as Bhagwat cannily said in a speech intended to forestall  the ch ief address of the evening, there was no intention to learn new things from the sagacious Mr,Mukerjee.  Dialogue may have been lauded but it was always going to be a dialogue of the deaf, Leopards donot change their spots because someone of great  pharmaceutical knowledge brings  them a new brand of soap.

The event, let us not fool ourselves, was smartly intended to enhance the political acceptability of the  Sangh.  After all, Mr, Mukerjee did end up endorsing the late Hedgewar as a great son of India.  Coming from a former President—an office that  watches s over the Constitutional  uprightness of the realm—this was a coup. That Mr.Mukerjee, in deference to the office he had held lastly, did not insist on the national tricolor to be unfourled or the national anthem to be sung must be counted as further acquiescence  to a body of thought that accepted the tricolor some two years after Independence as a  tactical necessity inorder that the ban on it could be lifted in 1949. 

A second purpose that the RSS could well have had in mind  is to cause disruption among thinking Congress men and women with respect to the propriety or otherwise of Mr,Mukerjee making such a visit—underthe present conditions, a most useful thing to do from the point of view of the Sangh. Although the Congress has come to quickly clear the ground on this, post Mr,Mukerjee’s speech at Nagpur, the RSS  can claim to h ave had some success in causing a flutter among Congess men and women.  Indeed, Mr, Mukerjee’s own daughter felt obliged to publicly underscore her father’s naivete in the matter, and the ways in which the Sangh propaganda machinery would not but use his visit, in fair and foul  manner; th ink that already there is a video doing the  rounds which shows Mr,Mukerjee with a black RSS cap on his
head.

A third purpose might have been to undercut Rahul  Gandhi as he prepares to s how up at a Bhiwandi court to  answer charges of defamation against the RSS on June 12.

So why did Mr,Mukerjee accept theinvitation, given that he is no RSS man, although, interestingly, in his speech of all the foreign interventions and incursions he counted he cited only Muslims as “invaders.”

There can be no  doubt  that the thought of telling off  the Sangh view of  nationalism, identity, culture, patriotism in a speech delivered in their den must  have  seemed an act of great political enhancement,  This need not be denied,  But it would grossly  underrating Mr,Mukerjees’s  acumen  to think that he went there hoping he would teach the RSS a lesson they would actually learn,  Just as  Bhagwat ji explicitly did not think that Mr,Mukerjee would be converted to the Sangh cause once he was  welcomed at Nagpur.

In this context, Mr,Mukerjee’s sense of occasion must be lauded: after all as clips from his speech will continue to be aired, he will continue to be praised  for having articulated a critique that others, including Rahul Gandhi, are upbraided for voicing in and out. It must  be  conceded that in this Mr,Mukerjee understood how he could bear the weight of the office he had held before Shri Kovind took over to put on record a view of  pluralist nationalism and composite culture that had informed and driven the Freedom Movement,  That h is articulation here was ringing and unambiguous must go to his great credit and hopefully to the aid of many struggling to push back revanchist and communal alternatives.  In recalling western nationalisms after t he Westphalia Treaty of 1648 which came  to be based on univocal axes  of religion, language, race, Mr. Mukerjee did well obliquely to suggest that after all the nationalism that t he RSS espouses is more western in character than indigenous.  A monumental irony there.  Whereas the national movement built by multifaceted Indian  leaderships was uniquely inclusive,  pluralist, assimilatve and therefore, had secularism as the soul and  article of faith.  For this, one must be thankful to Mr. Mukerjee.

Where will this event lead, if anywhere?   To put the matter baldly, can Mr. Mukerjee hope that as a result of his ringing articulation of the Nehruvian view of our modern history the Indian National Congress might call upon him to be the face of the new opposition which is now in themaking.  After all, the post of the Republic’s chief executive is one he has always thought his deserving.

The anwser must be that this is highly unlikely,  fresh enthusiastic Congress cadres may not be expected to give up easily on Rahul Gandhi.

But that still leaves scope, in Mr.Mukerjee’s likely considerations, that a  “third Front “of secular formations may indeed call  upon  him to take the lead to give Mr.Modi a  Presidential-type of contest, come 2019.   This cannot be ruled out,.  Should such a thing eventuate, the Congress would indeed be put to considerable difficulty  in working out its options—a circumstance that may thus altogether go to favour the possibility of a Modi come back.

For now, the RSS may not gloat too much at the visit, given that Mr.Mukerjee very squarely poured cold water on its ideological world-view.  However astute Bhagwat ji’s  formulations were, inevitably  the notion of a Hindu Rashtra remained  central  to its projection.  And only the very gullible would argue that this view will see a secular and pluralist transformation as  a result of Mr,Mukerjee’s intervention.  The Sangh has never till now repudiated the notion of a Savarkarite citizenship of India, or Shri Golwalkers’ stipulations on being Muslim in India.  Till such repudiation happens, in all likelihood never, the Sangh,,however it pitches for supremacy, will remain the “other”  of mainstream Republican thought.

It will be interesting to see, nonetheless, how influential media houses play out the event of Mr.Mukerjee’s visit.  This for the reason that  the obscene centralization of wealth now in India—a Corporate dream always—will not but continue to push Corporate media owners to tilt in favour of an equally  centralized political dispensation in which democraticprocesses and idealisms about equity and welfare are relegated to lip service at  husting  times.

It is tempting to stipulate that none of these tactical pushes and pulls may come  to be any great account in the next General Elections; one has the gut feeling that  a wave of anger now in  evidence across  the length and breadth of the country may reduce electoral minutae to irrelevance. 

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Gauri Lankesh, State, and Civil Society
 

To state the obvious first,  in any democratic country, the “media” is never a monolith.  Its spread and diversity is inevitably informed and propelled by diverse perceptions about what the State ought to be doing, and  how civil society, of which t he media is perhaps the most influential part, ought to formulate opinion conducive to the desired objectives of  State policy.

I therefore speak of Gauri Lankesh both as a public intellectual and an icon for a section of t he media.

Gauri Lankesh’s murder thus betokens an attempted  triple-assasination, namely of an inconvenient individual, civil society icon, and theorist of an alternate State.

After the quite  epochal determination by a nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India that the privacy  of the citizen constitutes a Fundamental right, deriving from Article 21 which enshrines the Right to Life with Dignity, sections of India’s civil society which includes the present writer  began to feel encouraged to envisage a day w hen our Legislature at the  centre might venture to put India’s political democracy on the same irreversible footing as that of the United States of America by  giving the country our own  Absolute First Amendment Right,   with the present “reasonable  restrictions”  restricted, in turn, exclusively to cases where incitement to violence or actual violence is proved.  One cannot but think that the murder of Lankesh has also been an expression of the animus felt by  sections of civil society at the rebuke handed out by the Supreme Court  to governmental efforts at doing the opposite of what t he American First Amendment does—make the State loom menacingly large over the citizen.

Yet, the anguished churning that has followed in the wake of the cowardly physical extermination of Gauri Lankesh may well become occasion precisely to further India’s Constitutional democracy towards a First Amendment of our own.  Here is the crude irony:  there is no dearth of admirers among India’s chattering classes of what media outlets such as CNN and NBC  have been doing to the Trump Presidency.  But the very same subjects would be up-in-arms at the thought that our own Media should have similar freedom to take on the powers-that-be. The vulgar chagrin with which they denounce such a  course is of course most offensively, even menacingly, apparent in the content of so much  anti-social “social media.”  That the Prime Minister of India follows some of these braves seems a matter of no concern.

Gauri’s watershed assassination comes at a particularly dark period in the history of Indian democracy—a time when the political arm of the State seems to close in on freedoms of every sort in order to obviate threats from the ground to the unprecedented centralization of  economic power.  What might have been a fringe among Indians until some years ago, seeking to concertedly homogenize the polity into one undifferentiated obliging and obedient mass of “nationalists” is today “mainstream” and in close embrace with the agencies of t he State.  There is no end of the chagrin felt by this “mainstream” at the spokes often put by the judiciary into this project of leveling citizens into sloganeering automatons, but the judiciary for now is there and may not be eliminated.  Clearly, however, icons from the media world who think like the judiciary on issues of Rights may be.  And the government at the highest level may refrain from tweeting a single word of condemnation, indicating the reluctance of the State to thwart the “nationalist” intent and exertions of “right-thinking” people among the populace. 

It remains to be seen whether or not the accreted habits of democratic living and of allegiance to a Constitutonal political and legal regime  among India’s voters at large will in the days to come join the fight against a sectarian-authoritarian bent in the dispensation that now operates the procedures of the State and of the  murderous crop of vigilantes who have mushroomed, not unaccountably, to aid that bent.

Most significantly, those sections of the media who are today, say so or not, aligned not-too-subtly with these authoritarian forces will  need to reflect beyond the meaty interests of their corporate owners. For t hem, especially, the murder of Gauri Lankesh ought to be decisive indication of what powers they are serving. Ambedkar’s resonant caution comes tomind: whereas a bakhti cult  is understandable in religious life, in politics this can be a recipe for t he ultimate collapse of an accountable State.  Something that Nehru understood all too well, as he took every occasion to remind the media, including cartoonists, never to spare him since he could have the proclivities of a dictator.

Now, as a brave Member of Parliament of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Nana Patole  has publicly stated (The Indian Express, 2 September), “Modi does not like being asked questions.”  Those who killed Gauri Lankesh belong precisely to this frame of mind—do not ask questions.  Only shower praise, even if wholly unwarranted.

Has Gauri Lankesh, in her martyrdom propelled India to rethink and rebuild democracy?
 
 
 

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It is now or never in Kashmir

“Kashmir may be conquered by the force of spiritual merit but not by the force of soldiers.” – Kalhana Pandit

So total has been the loss of hegemony of Kashmir’s elected representatives, in government and in the legislature, over the last two months, and so desperately brutal the recourse to coercive subjugation of fearless young anger on the streets of the valley, that if ever there was a time to say resistance to authority (sic) deserves to be rewarded with what it seeks, it is now. If the prospect, that is, of the secession of the valley – since other parts of the state of Jammu and Kashmir desire, contrarily, not secession but more complete integration with the union of India – were not fraught with incalculable negative consequences not just for India and Pakistan but for the inhabitants of the valley itself. 

To that I shall return. 

Just the other day the home minister of India made two significant averments in Parliament. One, that the union recognises that the accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir was a “unique one”; and two, that apart from all else, the republic and its successive governments had failed to keep promises made to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

 Since the time for pussyfooting about Kashmir is conclusively at an end, it would help to flesh out these two averments beyond the minister’s en passant mention.

 A unique accession

It will be recalled that the two conditions agreed upon as the signposts for India’s pre-independence princely states, as determinants of whether they would accede to India or to Pakistan were the religion of the majority within the states and the contiguity of the states to either dominion. 

In this context, the three states of Hyderabad, Junagadh and Jammu and Kashmir offered interesting paradigms. Where the first two had Muslim rulers but majority Hindu populations, Jammu and Kashmir had a Dogra-Hindu ruler but a majority Muslim population. Of the three, Jammu and Kashmir, being also contiguous to Pakistan, had the clearest case for accession to Pakistan. 

But the ruler of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, desired accession to neither of the two new countries and wished to remain independent. Having succeeded in signing what was called a “Standstill Agreement” with Pakistan, it was his hope to do the same with India. Except that the fates intervened in the shape of a precipitate invasion of the state he ruled by tribal warriors from the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, with that state’s active support and involvement, in late October 1947.

With next to no means of his own to meet, let alone defeat the invasion, he found himself constrained to appeal to India for military help and thus sought accession to the Indian dominion. In a letter dated October 26, 1947 addressed to the then governor general of India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the maharaja wrote:

“The mass infiltration of tribesmen drawn from distant areas of the North-West Frontier… cannot possibly be done without the knowledge of the provincial government of the North-West Frontier Province and the government of Pakistan. In spite of repeated requests made by my government, no attempt has been made to check these raiders or stop them from coming into my state… I have no option but to ask for help from the Indian dominion. Naturally they cannot send the help asked for by me without my state acceding to the dominion of India. I have accordingly decided to do so and I attach the Instrument of Accession for acceptance by your government.”  

This much from a Hindu ruler who was reluctant to join even a Hindu-majority India but for the fact that circumstances had forced such a decision upon him. And yet, even on acceding, the Instrument of Accession that he signed stated that the accession in no way bound him to “acceptance of any future Constitution of India” (Clause 7) and that “Nothing in this instrument affects the continuance of my sovereignty in and over this state” (Clause 8). Stipulations that to this day continue to colour the fraught history of tensions between the union and the state.

As a result, Article 306A was adopted in the Draft Constitution and in course of time became the much-talked-about Article 370 in the final Constitution of India. Most significantly, the “special status” thus accorded to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, backed by the then home minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (who said to the Constituent Assembly that “in view of the special problems with which the government of Jammu and Kashmir is faced, we have made a special provision for the constitutional relationship of the state with the union”), was accepted without demur also by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet who was later to become the most vociferous and disruptive voice of the Hindu right wing. We will come back to this later. 

But the best part of the “uniqueness” lay elsewhere, namely in the heroically principled declaration of allegiance to a prospectively secular and democratic Hindu-majority India by a Muslim Kashmiri leader of a Muslim-majority state, Sheikh Abdullah. 

Internally, within the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, a popular movement for the overthrow of the maharaja’s rule had been underway for two decades before 1947, precipitated by the events of July 1931 when some 21 popular resisters were gunned down by the maharaja’s police force in front of a courthouse. The incident marked a watershed in the state’s political affairs and led to the formation of the “Muslim Conference” which came to be led by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, a postgraduate from the Aligarh Muslim University who was denied a teaching post in the state by the maharaja’s regime at a time when the number of educated Kashmiri Muslims could be counted on one’s fingertips. 

Within mainland India, although the Muslim League had come a cropper in the 1936 elections to the provincial assemblies (held under the Government of India Act of 1935), between that loss and 1946 the party under Mohammad Ali Jinnah made huge strides among Muslims in the states of Punjab and Bengal. It was during this time that Jinnah was to make fervent arguments to Abdullah urging that the Kashmir Muslim Conference join forces with Jinnah’s League and support the Pakistan resolution which the League had passed in 1940. 

By then Sheikh Abdullah was undisputedly the tallest leader of the valley and indeed the entire state. Remarkably however, despite the Kashmiri maharaja’s decidedly anti-Muslim regime, and though Abdullah had himself forged the “Muslim Conference”, and despite the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state, he came to reject the two-nation communal thesis of the Muslim League and instead declared his preference for the secular-democratic struggle that the Indian National Congress under Gandhi and Nehru had been waging against colonial rule as he converted the “Muslim Conference” into the “National Conference” in 1938. This was done some nine years before the partition of India and the tribal invasion of Kashmir. 

‘What the Muslim intelligentsia in Kashmir is trying to look for is a definite and concrete stake in India’ – Sheikh Abdullah

In these years Abdullah repeatedly gave voice to his convictions. Arguing that the matter of accession could not be left to the whims and fancies of rulers but must reflect the voice of the people, he gave public expression to the popular Kashmiri view in a speech at a historic rally (some three weeks before the tribal invasion) on October 4, 1947:

 “We shall not believe in the two-nation theory which has spread so much poison [referring to the communal killings that had been underway in the Punjab and in Bengal]. Kashmir showed the light at this juncture [Gandhi was famously to say that the only light he saw amidst the darkness of communal killings was in Kashmir where not a single incident took place]. When brother kills brother in the whole of Hindustan, Kashmir raised its voice for Hindu-Muslim unity. I can assure the Hindu and Sikh minorities that as long as I am alive, their life and honour will be quite safe.”

Following the maharaja’s proclamation of March 5, 1948 announcing the formation of a popular interim government, Sheikh Abdullah took over as prime minister of the state. The very next day he told a press conference:

“We have decided to work with and die for India… We made our decision not in October last but in 1944 when we resisted the advances of Mr Jinnah. Our refusal was categorical. Ever since, the National Conference has attempted to keep the state clear of the pernicious two-nation theory while fighting the world’s worst autocracy” (The Statesman, March 7, 1948).

On December 3, he spoke at a function held by the Gandhi Memorial College in Jammu: “Kashmiris would rather die following the footsteps of Gandhiji than accept the two-nation theory. We want to link the destiny of Kashmir with India because we feel that the ideal before India and Kashmir is one and the same.” 

These ideals – secularism, democracy, an end to feudal land lordship – were the basis for the adoption of the “provisional accession of the state to India” by the National Conference in the month of October 1948. 

The betrayal

Although the accession and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which conferred a “special status” on Jammu and Kashmir had, as stated above, received approval from both Patel and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a new situation was to develop as the Abdullah government launched its ‘New Kashmir’ manifesto which was founded – among other extraordinarily progressive pronouncements, equal status of women in education and employment being but one – on the promise of giving land to those who tilled it. 

Thus disregarding Clause 6 of the Instrument of Accession (“Nothing in this instrument shall empower the dominion legislature to make any law for this state authorising the compulsory acquisition of land for any purpose” and should land be thus needed, “I will at their request acquire the land”), Abdullah declared a maximum land ceiling of 22.75 acres, set up a land reform committee and set about distributing surplus land thus acquired to those who were the actual tillers of the soil. Abdullah was to rub home the point that such land reforms would never have been possible in a feudal Pakistan. 

This was trouble royal. 

Most of the land was then in the possession of Hindu Dogras and most of the tillers were Muslim Kashmiris. 

Thus it came to be that the material loss of land holdings was sought to be converted into a communal question through the opposition now to Article 370 by a newly organised forum called the Praja Parishad which came to be led by the very Mookerjee who had been a willing party to the adoption of the article as a member of the union cabinet.

 According to the provisions granting “special status” to Jammu and Kashmir, the state was to have its own Constitution for which it would form its own Constituent Assembly. When elections to the Constituent Assembly took place in 1951, candidates picked by Abdullah’s National Conference won all 75 seats. The assembly met on October 31, 1951. In his address to the assembly on November 5, Abdullah outlined the major items on its agenda: 

• To frame a Constitution for the governance of Jammu and Kashmir; 
• To decide on the fate of the royal dynasty; 
• To decide whether any compensation should be paid to those who had lost their land through the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act; 
• To “declare its reasoned conclusion regarding accession”. 

Abdullah noted: “The real character of a state is revealed in its Constitution. The Indian Constitution has set before the country the goal of a secular democracy based upon justice, freedom and equality for all without distinction. This is the bedrock of modern democracy. This should meet the argument that the Muslims of Kashmir cannot have security in India where the large majority of the population are Hindus. Any unnatural cleavage between religious groups is the legacy of imperialism… The Indian Constitution has amply and finally repudiated the concept of a religious state which is a throwback to medievalism… The national movement in our state naturally gravitates towards these principles of secular democracy.”

Security forces in Kashmir: Bloodthirst unquenched

And, of Pakistan, he said:

“The most powerful argument which can be advanced in her favour is that Pakistan is a Muslim state and, a big majority of our people being Muslims, the state must accede to Pakistan. This claim of being a Muslim state is, of course, only a camouflage. It is a screen to dupe the common man so that he may not see clearly that Pakistan is a feudal state in which a clique is trying by these methods to maintain itself in power… Right-thinking men would point out that Pakistan is not an organic unity of all the Muslims in this subcontinent. It has, on the contrary, caused the dispersion of the Indian Muslims for whose benefit it was claimed to have been created [a prescient observation that is said to have been earlier voiced by Maulana Azad in an interview given to the Urdu magazine Chattan in 1946, a year before partition].” 

Abdullah considered the third option of independence (Kashmir as an “Eastern Switzerland”) and concluded as follows: 

“I would like to remind you that from August 15 (the day of Indian independence) to October 22, 1947 (when the tribal invasion began) our state was independent and the result was that our weakness was exploited by the neighbour with invasion. What is the guarantee that in future too we may not be victims of a singular aggression?” 

All this notwithstanding, the Hindu right-wing assault also began to gather force as it launched the Jan Sangh (precursor of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP) in 1951 – the year that the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly was established. The newly formed Jan Sangh was headed by none other than Syama Prasad Mookerjee with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh lending its leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani in support. 

As stated earlier, stung by the redistribution of land holdings, the Hindu right wing sought to make the terms of the accession the issue and, defying the democratic-federal principles enshrined both in the Constitution of India and in their reflection in the trust reposed therein by Abdullah, it announced a programme ostensibly aimed at strengthening national unity. At its first session the Jan Sangh called for: 

• An education system based on “Bharatiya culture” (read Hinduism); 
• The use of Hindi in schools (in the knowledge that other than Kashmiri, Urdu was the language predominantly used by educated Kashmiri Muslims. Indeed from about the first decade of the 20th century, the wholly artificial cleavage between Hindi and Urdu had begun to be deployed by communalists on either side to press their claims to “true” national allegiance);
• The denial of any special privileges to minorities;
• Full integration of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian union.

On the other side, in letters exchanged over a period of time between Abdullah and Nehru, an agreement between the state and the union was taking shape. This contract, which came to be called the Delhi Agreement 1952, stated: 

• Commitment to Article 370; 
• That the state legislature would be empowered to confer special rights on “state subjects” (a right that had been won through the anti-maharaja struggles of 1927 and 1932 – a form of privilege restricted to permanent residents of the state in property ownership and jobs); 
• That Kashmir would have its own flag although subordinate to the union tricolour; 
• That the sadar-e-riyasat (later, the governor of the state) would be elected by the state assembly but would take office with the concurrence of the president of India; 
• That the Supreme Court of India would “for the time being” only have appellate jurisdiction in Jammu and Kashmir; 
• That an internal emergency could only be applied with the concurrence of the state legislature. 

The Hindu right wing’s riposte to this took the form of a slogan around which the Jan Sangh sought to mount its attack on the terms of accession later that year:

“Ek desh mein do vidhan,

Nahin chalengein, nahin chalengein”

(We will not accept two Constitutions, two flags, two prime ministers in one and the same country).

This communalist right-wing putsch against the principles on which the state had agreed to accede to India began to find resonance within sections of the Congress party as well. Much to Nehru’s chagrin, his candidate for the first president of India, C. Rajagopalachari, was rejected in favour of Rajendra Prasad (who was soon to lock horns with Nehru on the Hindu Code Bill and go to the Somnath temple, once ravaged by Ghaznavi and other chieftains of old, to effect renovations at state expense – a move wholly in conflict with the secular foundations of the republic). 

When the Indian home minister speaks of keeping promises to the Kashmiris, these promises have a much wider ambit than the question merely of amending the vile Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act which allows even the lowest-ranking army man to shoot to kill without accountability

Other collateral tendencies also began to surface, such as bespoke scant regard on the part of the union of India for the federative principles. In his despondent letter to Maulana Azad dated July 16, 1953, Abdullah complained about the usurpations underway in contravention of the terms that had been agreed upon: 

“We the people of Kashmir regard the promises and assurances of the representatives of the government of India, such as Lord Mountbatten and Sardar Patel, as surety for the assistance rendered by us in securing the signatures of the maharaja of Kashmir on the Instrument of Accession which made it clear that the internal autonomy and sovereignty of the acceding states shall be maintained except in regard to three subjects which will be under the central government [namely Defence, Communications and External affairs].” 

And: “When the Constituent Assembly of India proceeded to frame the union Constitution, there arose before it the question of the state. Our representatives took part in the last sessions of the assembly and presented their point of view in the light of the basic principles on which the National Conference had supported the state’s accession to India. Our viewpoint drew appreciation and Article 370 of the Constitution came into being, determining our position under the new Constitution.” 

Abdullah pointed out that although it had been agreed that the “accession involves no financial obligations on the states”, such demands were being made and that “the changes effected on several occasions in the relationship between India and Kashmir greatly agitated the public opinion”. 

And on the other source of perceived menace: “A big party in India [the Jan Sangh] still forcefully demands merger of the state with India. In the state itself, the Praja Parishad is threatening to resort to direct action if the demand for the states’ complete merger with India is not conceded.” 

Abdullah’s anguish at what appeared to be gathering storms on two fronts – the subversion by the union of the terms of accession and a Hindu communalist putsch to undo Article 370 – found poignant expression in a speech he was meant to deliver to an Id gathering on August 21, 1953 (12 days after his government was dismissed and Abdullah was arrested and incarcerated). In it, he wrote: 

“[T]here is the suggestion that the accession should be finalised by a vote of the Constituent Assembly… It is the Muslims who have to decide accession with India and not the non-Muslims… The question is: must I not carry the support of the majority community with me? If I must then it becomes necessary that I should satisfy them to the same extent that a non-Muslim is satisfied that his future hopes and aspirations are safe in India. Unfortunately, apart from the disastrous effects which the pro-merger agitation in Jammu produced in Kashmir [the valley]… the Muslim middle class in Kashmir has been greatly perturbed to see that while the present relationship of the state with India has opened new opportunities for their Hindu and Sikh brothers to ameliorate their lot, they have been assigned the position of a frog in the well… What the Muslim intelligentsia in Kashmir is trying to look for is a definite and concrete stake in India” (emphasis added). 

As I mentioned earlier, the die had been cast and his great friend Nehru had him arrested on suspicion that he had been hobnobbing with the Americans to garner support for Jammu and Kashmir’s secession from the union and its declaration of independence. And though there may have been grounds for such a suspicion, no evidence has so far been forthcoming. 

But read Abdullah’s lament quoted above and hear it exactly echoed in Kashmir today, there is in it nothing more or different than what informs the frustrated Kashmiri youth who are at this minute agitating in the valley, willing to confront police bullets for their cause. 

It is another matter that long years later, in 1974, Abdullah signed an accord with Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, which stipulated among other things that: “Parliament will continue to have power to make laws relating to the prevention of activities directed towards disclaiming, questioning or disrupting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India or bringing about secession of a part of the territory of India from the union…” 

Thus when the Indian home minister speaks of keeping promises to the Kashmiris, these promises have a much wider ambit than the question merely of amending the vile Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act which allows even the lowest-ranking army man to shoot to kill without accountability. 

Throughout these turbulent years of conflict never once has any government of India sought to formulate schemes whereby talented Kashmiri Muslims, products of an educational explosion – all thanks to Abdullah’s New Kashmir programme – could be made to feel not just safe in the heartland but like valued assets in the ongoing narrative of national “development”. Not to mention the communal lens through which Kashmiri Muslims continue to be viewed by Indian society at large, an old malaise made dangerously trenchant in the era of “terrorism”. 

And paradoxically, the more that strong-arm methods and vicious prejudices fail to deliver the desired results, the more the state means to persist with them. And now that a glimmer of recognition appears to have dawned within policy establishments, the present-day incarnation of the old Praja Parishad and Jan Sangh are back to the same old perfidy, robbing the secular democratic sections within the Congress chiefly of any will or courage to disregard Hindu right-wing communalism and do right by Kashmir.

Azadi – Cry for freedom

Over the last two months some 51 teenage Kashmiris screaming for secession have been killed by police bullets in the valley. 

Let us for the moment ignore the legalities of the question (in respect of the Sheikh Abdullah/Indira Gandhi accord, for instance) and the hard reality that such secession will never be approved by any political establishment in India or any government of the day or be accepted by Indians at large. Let us assume for the moment that the parts of Jammu and Kashmir that do not want secession can be persuaded that the valley of Kashmir be granted independence and sovereignty and let us consider the possible consequences of such secession: 

• Following such a declaration, demands for azadi could gain legitimacy in other states, Manipur, Nagaland and Assam, to name a few, and would be hard to deny once a precedent has been set;
• A Hindu communalist backlash could possibly engulf India, rendering the lives of Indian Muslims vulnerable and leading to demands that India be declared a Hindu state, since the secession of the valley would have proved that the two-nation theory was correct after all; 
• Within Pakistan, first the Baloch and then the Sindhis might take heart and set themselves the objective of freedom from Punjabi ethnic dominance through secession; 
• Within the valley, a Bangladesh-like situation might well emerge, namely a struggle among those who will wish to retain a secular democratic state and those who might argue for an Islamic state. It is well to remember that of Bangladesh’s 40-odd years of independent nationhood, brought about under the leadership of the Awami League on secular principles, some 30 years were to see the communalists in power. It is only recently that the Supreme Court of Bangladesh has struck down the controversial fifth amendment to the Constitution and thereby reverted to disallowing any religion-based party formations. But this welcome move comes after much blood has been spilt. 

I have often been accused of exaggerating the Sufi-secular orientation of Kashmiri Muslims and of sentimentally misreading acts of personal and individual camaraderie and brotherhood displayed by Kashmir Muslims towards visiting Pandits as representative of the totality. I have once been kindly described as a “jihadi lapdog” (see Google). But all this notwithstanding, it remains a fact that at the time of the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1990, a strident campaign was in evidence as loudspeakers in mosques blared calls that the “Nizam-e-Mustafa” (Islamic statehood) was at hand, that the Pandits must hasten their exodus from the valley but take care to leave their women behind. You will also hear people speculate that one of the reasons why elements within the valley do not at bottom wish the Pandits to return home en masse is that they do not wish an Indian “fifth column” to be reinstated there; with them gone, the idea of an Islamic state is more closely approximated. Much as the Jews in Israel, for instance, who fear the return of Palestinian refugees into what was once their homeland. 

I must confess to having another sort of experience during recent visits to the valley, namely the chagrin with which any mention of “Kashmiriyat” (denoting the good old syncretic ways of Kashmiris) now tends to be received there. Indeed I recall being at a seminar at the university in Srinagar where a senior academic read a short “paper” titled ‘Kashmiriyat’ only to rubbish the concept – albeit without much substance. “Kashmiriyat” is now seen as something of a trick used to deny the fact that Kashmir is in essence Islamic, a notion that finds increasing expression in textbooks on history and culture as the pre-Islamic period (roughly up to the 14th century AD) is sought to be erased. 

Other disturbing trends appear to be surfacing as evidenced by an incident in Pulwama not so long ago when a Sikh Kashmiri was surrounded and asked to recite the Islamic Kalima, failing which some of his hair was cut off. It must be said however that the incident, uncharacteristic in the extreme, drew condemnation from all sections of the Kashmiri leadership. 

Thus while some residual Kashmiri Pandits who have never left the valley continue to be protected by their Muslim neighbours, and their weddings and funerals are organised with customary syncretic brotherhood, and although periodic visits by Pandits living in camps outside the valley to age-old Hindu shrines in the valley are greeted with warmth, after the near total evacuation of the Pandits, it would be wrong to aver that the impulse to forge a sovereign and independent valley into a theocratic state was no more than a baseless surmise. 

Be that as it may, what would the security logistics of the new state be, bordering as it does Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and, following its proposed secession, India as well? To return to what Sheikh Abdullah had said with regard to this option (of Kashmir as an “Eastern Switzerland”), how would the new state tackle these vulnerabilities? 

And can it be said that the imperialist from you-know-where, already stationed in countries nearby, would not then presume that at long last the valley was his for the taking, with all the Afghanistan-like consequences that could follow, both in terms of turmoil and cultural defilement?

Not to mention the kind souls from Pakistan’s wild western provinces, many in fact now resident in the country’s main city centres? How might the Kashmiris resist their call to a jihadist embrace, in disregard of the time-honoured ethnic Kashmiri prizing of exclusivity and identity? And if they were to become more insistent even after a polite “no”, who would come to the aid of the Kashmiris? 

Kashmiris grow more insistent every day as the current imbroglio continues that jobs, development, opportunities, are not the real issues. Yet in time these might indeed become issues of great magnitude for a prospectively landlocked valley lacking both monetary and infrastructural resources. These resources may then have to come from other places with all the attendant implications, whether the donors are the Saudis, the Yankees or the Chinese. Altogether, a pickle in the making.

The road ahead

If these be not unfounded considerations, what is to be done?

It is time that the question was addressed with some candid concern. 

A good beginning would, I think, be made if all the contending parties recognised that Kashmir is a problem that may never be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. And it would be wrong to think that this avowal is merely a pre-emptive ploy. I doubt that time will prove me wrong. 

Let me say at once that the two options which seem closest to the heart of the contending parties – the union and the agitators – I see as non-starters. On the one hand there is the Indian state’s wish that things will drag on as before until exhaustion seals a fait accompli and on the other hand there is the desire, however fervent, of the young agitators for a country of their own in the valley. 

The first is bad not only because such a fait accompli is unlikely in the extreme but also because it belies the founding pretensions of the republic of India – chiefly its claim of “unity in diversity”. And it reinforces a sentiment widely felt even beyond the valley, that the Indian state, especially after the beginning of the neo-liberal era in the 1990s, has become increasingly impatient of both secularism and democracy and wholly inimical to the rights of the majority of Indians who to this day feel they have, in Abdullah’s words, no “definite and concrete stake in India”. This applies to the lives of India’s tribal populations, to Dalits and to minorities of varying description on a differentiated scale of neglect. In this context, if the Indian state believes that sooner or later the Kashmiris will tire and turn around, it is only fooling itself. 

And the second is a bad option because, as suggested earlier, secession of the valley would be fraught with negative consequences for all parties in the dispute and for the subcontinent as a whole. 

These recognitions return us willy-nilly to salutary reflections on the possibility of recuperating and refurbishing the covenant of the federative promise and principle – something on which the state’s accession to the union had been based in the first place, setting a uniquely outstanding example both in terms of plurality of citizenship and of political partnership in opposition to totalitarian impulses in both areas. 

This Kashmiri still thinks that the aforementioned Delhi Agreement of 1952 still offers the most workable and fair point of engagement. With the caveat – which with the advantage of hindsight any cool Kashmiri would recognise – that extending the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India and the Election Commission of India to Jammu and Kashmir, far from impinging on the state’s autonomy, would in fact be credible guarantee of protection from excesses and denials. 

As for the majoritarian nationalists, they are as much a menace to the rest of India as they are to any attempt at a fair solution in Kashmir. That being so, the Indian state and civil society must needs muster the strength and the will to defy and overcome their shenanigans if the nation is to be saved not so much from the Kashmiris as, first of all, from them. 

It is good, better late than never, that the prime minister has made some moves of the sort suggested here. Let his government and society at large understand fully that it is now or never in Kashmir, and thus avoid slipping into another decade-long siesta after the ongoing violence inevitably lulls. 

As for Pakistan, I am tempted to simply nod in assent to the words of Sheikh Abdullah before the UN Security Council when he went there to plead India’s case in February 1948: “I refuse to accept Pakistan as a party in the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir state. I refuse this point blank.”

After what Pakistan has done to its own people over the decades, this refusal seems entirely appropriate. What the people in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir choose to do, how they decide their fate, is best left to them. Significantly, a 2009 Chatham House poll showed that some 58 per cent of Kashmiris favoured the formalisation of the Line of Control between the two parts of Kashmir as the international border between India and Pakistan. This is as it should be. And once that happens, human and other commerce between the two Kashmirs can be put on a sound international footing, all ambiguities and hassles removed. 

If initiatives along the lines of those mentioned above are not undertaken soon, it may be pointless to write anything further on the subject of the Kashmir problem. Neither reason nor analysis nor conjoint effort will then sort it out, only a conflagration that could lead who knows where.

Note

Literature on Kashmir is mind-bogglingly plentiful and I have sought to look into as much as time and tide allow. But, for purposes of this piece, I wish to record my indebtedness to three authors on Kashmir, chiefly – Prem Nath Bazaz, Balraj Puri and MJ Akbar, on whose work I have drawn with abandon. The interpretations thereof being entirely my responsibility.

Archived from Communalism Combat, July-August 2010, Anniversary Issue (17th).Year 17, No.153 – Cover Story 1

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