Why the ‘Liberal’ Defense of Occupation is Flawed

[This is in response to Neera Chandhoke’s article in Economic and Political Weekly, titled “When is Secession Justified? The Context of Kashmir” (November 13, 2010)].

Neera Chandhoke argues against Kashmir’s right to self-determination. She couches her argument in a way, which suggests that Kashmiris want to ‘secede’ from India. This assumption, formulated as a case of secession, leads to a fundamental flaw in her argument. First, Kashmir is already recognised as an international dispute (UN Security Council resolutions 47 and 91, for instance),[i] and the status of Kashmir as part of the Indian ‘union’ is, therefore, not settled. Apart from this fundamental legal issue, Kashmiris have been collectively demanding the right (based on the universally accepted national and democratic right to self-determination) to decide if they want to become part of India, or not. Since 1949, all countries that constitute the UN, including India, have in the case of Kashmir acknowledged this right—a right, which forms the fundamental basis of international political order. These two issues that Kashmir’s ‘union’ with India has neither legal validity nor a democratic one are the fundamental points of departure for any fruitful discussion of the Kashmir question.

a letter

Dear fellow Kashmiris,

I’m writing this letter from New York, a place far away, yet so close to everything. This city can make you forget, by filching reality away from you. But it also reminds you perpetually, by bringing you close to a different reality, through the pain and suffering of others. There are exiled specimens from all over the world here (yes, mostly those permitted to come to the US). There are Irish and Greeks, escapees from famines and wars. There are Jews from Germany and Germans from Russia, ones who survived persecution. There are Latinos from El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, and Bolivia, who fled Western-backed dictatorial regimes in their countries in the 1970s and 80s. There are Africans who narrowly missed genocide in Southern Sudan. There are Kurds from Turkey, and Berber from North Africa, driven out of their lands by years of conflict. And, then there are African Americans, who were forcibly brought hundreds of years before to slave for their White masters, and who, despite recent claims of dawning of an age of “post-racial America,” are still groveling at the bottom of the socio-economic heap. Their stories tell a similar conclusion: The world is shrinking for small nationalities and powerless minorities.

The Deception of the Indian Liberal Discourse on Kashmir

After two months of almost continuous clampdowns and lockdowns, 50 systematic killings, and hundreds of incarcerations, the debate in India about protests in Kashmir has continued to hover between bleeding-heart liberal talk and state attempts at dissimulation. While state deception, and the Hindu right racket, is obvious, expected, and nothing new, the increased space for liberal discourse has given a false impression that there is a change in heart. The liberal discourse in India on the question of Kashmir is not open, fair, or objective, but often borders on, and oftentimes overlaps, the more popular, explicitly nationalist polemics.

From news shows to newspaper articles every death in Kashmir is slyly or openly justified. Since the day some protestors in Pampore and Srinagar burnt a few police jeeps and a couple of decrepit old, low-level government office structures, fit not even to be cowsheds, the Indian media suggested that people are shot because they attack public property. They tried to conceal the fact that most of the victims were killed before those structures were burnt down. But then even before the Pampore incidents big media in India tried to create a moral equivalence between intentional murders of dozens of unarmed Kashmiri protestors and Indian paramilitary soldiers not getting enough rest, or their jeeps getting a few bumps.

Trapped within the Hindu Nationalist Imagination

On 26 January 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, after travelling by road all the way from the southern tip of India, was airlifted from Jammu to the heart of Srinagar where he half-raised the Indian flag near historic Lal Chowk. All of Kashmir was put under severe curfew, and the army was given shoot-at-sight orders. Throughout the day soldiers shot dead more than a dozen Kashmiris in the streets of Srinagar. Over the previous two years, the Indian government had unleashed a reign of terror on the people, with massacre upon massacre of unarmed protestors dotting Kashmir’s timeline. Joshi’s Ekta Yatra (Unity March), protected and provided of full support by the Indian government, was an important reminder of the nature of the Indian state and the relationship it sought with the people of Kashmir. The event was designed to put on display the majoritarian character of Indian nationhood, and line up power of the state behind it to send barely coded messages to audiences in India and in Kashmir.

The Chatham House Poll–what did it show?

The Chatham House poll conducted in the autumn of 2009 in Jammu, Ladakh, Kashmir and Azad Kashmir has revealed an interesting pattern of opinions held across these regions on issues ranging from the perception of major problems people face to effective solutions to the Kashmir issue and the best means to achieve them. Robert Bradnock, under whose supervision the poll was conducted, however presented the results somewhat shoddily leading to confusion over the real import of the opinion poll. This confusion has prompted media in India and Pakistan to portray the polls selectively or in a self-serving manner, largely reflecting their nationalist stances on the Kashmir question. The poll, in reality, points to some interesting developments in Kashmir and indicates a way toward an eventual, mutually agreeable solution.

Of Mystification and Mimicry

In her recent work ‘Along the Archival Grain’ Ann Stoler writes about the ways in which the colonial administrative apparatus gathered, connected, and disconnected events to turn them, as needed, into legible, insignificant, or unintelligible information. The government appointed bureaus and commissions to write down what the state deemed as expedient truth. They shed light on certain aspects of events only to create shadows elsewhere. But the archives that were created in the process were neither stable nor indicative of the state’s absolute power to inscribe the final truth. Instead, the archives turned out to be sites of the state’s immense anxiety and self-doubt. Given my deep belief that the work of state institutions in India is driven only to uphold the interests of its governing classes, even if the work goes counter to the principles of justice and objectivity, I was least surprised by the CBI report in the Shopian case. CBI only acted out a denial script that the J&K chief minister had instinctively mouthed during his controversial first press conference after the incident came to light.