Kashmir: The Case for Freedom
Arundhati Roy
KASHMIR
KASHMIR
The Case for Freedom
Tariq Ali
Hilal Bhatt
Angana P. Chatterji
Habbah Khatun
Pankaj Mishra
Arundhati Roy
First published by Verso 2011
The collection © Verso 2011
Individual contributions © the contributors
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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Contents
Chronology: 1947–2010
Introduction
by Pankaj Mishra
The Story of Kashmir
by Tariq Ali
Azadi: The Only Thing Kashmiris Want
by Arundhati Roy
Poems by a Queen of Kashmir
by Habbah Khatun
Fayazabad 31223
by Hilal Bhatt
The Militarized Zone
by Angana P. Chatterji
Seditious Nehru
by Arundhati Roy
Afterword: Not Crushed, Merely Ignored
by Tariq Ali
About the Authors
Chronology: 1947–2010
15 August 1947: British India is partitioned into the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan. The rulers of ‘princely states’, bearing in mind the wishes of their people, are to choose whether to accede to India or Pakistan. The Maharaja Hari Singh, Hindu ruler of Muslim-majority Kashmir, delays his decision.
October 1947: Armed tribesmen from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province enter Kashmir to join an internal revolt in the Poonch region. The tribesmen go on the rampage, looting and raping locals.
26 October 1947: Requesting help from India in quelling the revolt and invasion, the Maharaja signs the Instrument of Accession, acceding Kashmir to India. The accession is seen as provisional pending a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people.
27 October 1947: Indian forces are airlifted into Srinagar to repel the Pakistani militias. The fighting escalates into the first Indo-Pakistan war, with Pakistan disputing the accession and eventually sending in regular forces.
1 January 1948: India formally refers the Kashmir situation to the United Nations.
5 February 1948: A UN resolution calls for an immediate cease-fire and a plebiscite.
1 January 1949: The UN-brokered cease-fire ends the first Indo-Pakistan war, with India and Pakistan agreeing to a plebiscite and the withdrawal of troops behind the cease-fire line, leaving two-thirds of Kashmir under Indian control.
26 January 1950: The constitution of India comes into effect. Article 370 accords autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, with Indian jurisdiction restricted to defence, foreign affairs and communications.
October 1950: The National Conference party, led by Sheikh Abudullah, calls for elections in Jammu and Kashmir to create a constituent assembly to determine the future of Kashmir.
30 March 1951: A UN Security Council resolution rejects elections as a substitute for a plebiscite to determine the future status of Kashmir and appoints a representative to effect demilitarization, which is unsuccessful.
September 1951: Amid allegations of vote rigging, National Conference wins all seventy-five seats unopposed in Constituent Assembly elections.
31 October 1951: In his first speech to the assembly, Sheikh Abdullah argues for accession to India.
July 1952: Sheikh Abdullah signs the Delhi Agreement, providing for autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir within India.
July 1953: The development of the Prasad protest movement (led by Syama Prasad Mookerjee) in 1952, calling for the complete accession and integration of Kashmir into India, pushes Abdullah to make proposals for independence.
8 August 1953: Abdullah is dismissed as prime minister and arrested and imprisoned by India. Bhashi Ghulam Mohammad takes his place. Protests are put down with force.
17–20 August 1953: Indian and Pakistani prime ministers meet in New Delhi and agree to the appointment of a plebiscite administrator by the end of April 1954. However, as the alliance between Pakistan and the US deepens, Indian considerations over Kashmir become coloured by the Cold War and the plebiscite is off the table.
February 1954: The Constituent Assembly ratifies the accession to India.
14 May 1954: The Constitution (Applicable to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 1954 comes into force, extending Indian jurisdiction over Kashmir, effectively annulling the Delhi Agreement and curbing civil liberties.
24 January 1957: The UN Security Council reaffirms its 1951 resolution, stating that no action taken by the Constituent Assembly can be a substitute for a plebiscite in determining the final disposition of the state.
26 January 1957: The Constituent Assembly enacts the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, which states that ‘the State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India’.
9 August 1955: The Plebiscite Front is established to press for Sheikh Abdullah’s release and a plebiscite under UN auspices to decide the future of Kashmir.
20 October–20 November 1962: A border dispute in the Ladakh region sparks war between India and China, resulting in territorial gains for China from both India and Pakistan.
March 1965: The Indian Parliament passes a bill declaring Kashmir a province of India, claiming for India the power to appoint a governor, dismiss Kashmir’s government and assume its legislative functions.
August–23 September 1965: The second Indo-Pakistan war over Kashmir breaks out after Pakistan sends armed infiltrators across the 1949 cease-fire line.
10 January 1966: India and Pakistan sign the Tashkent Declaration, agreeing to pull back to pre-1965 positions.
3–16 December 1971: The Indo-Pakistan war results in Indian victory and the succession of East Pakistan as the independent state of Bangladesh.
February 1972: The Plebiscite Front is banned from participating in the State Assembly election.
2 July 1972: India and Pakistan sign the Simla Agreement, which redesignates the UN cease-fire line in Kashmir as the ‘Line of Control’, to be respected by both parties, who are to resolve the Kashmir dispute through bilateral talks.
13 November 1974: In return for Sheikh Abdullah’s release and reinstatement as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, his deputy, Mirzal Afza Beg, signs an accord reiterating the State of Jammu and Kashmir as a constituent unit of India, without the condition for pre-1953 autonomy.
23 May 1977: Abdullah threatens succession unless India respects the provisions of Article 370 regarding Kashmir’s autonomy.
8 September 1982: Sheikh Abdullah dies. His son, Farooq Abdullah, assumes his position.
June 1984: Ghulam Mohammad Shah and other National Conference assembly members defect to form a new government. Jagmohan, the New Delhi–appointed governor of Jammu and Kashmir and a Hindu nationalist, dismisses Farooq Abdullah; Shah is appointed chief minister. Protests erupt and Shah imposes extended curfews.
7 March 1986: The Shah is dismissed from his post
and Jagmohan assumes exclusive power, which he uses to restrict the government employment of Muslims.
23 March 1987: The vastly popular Muslim United Front (MUF) contests the 1987 State Assembly elections. The Congress–Conference Alliance wins amid widespread allegations of poll rigging. Fierce repression thwarts any mass uprising against Farooq Abdullah’s unpopular reinstated government.
1989: Armed resistance to Indian rule breaks out, spearheaded by formerly imprisoned MUF members. Strikes take up one-third of the year’s working days and the State Assembly election is boycotted – turnout is under 5 per cent.
1990s: The insurgency continues; Pakistan-sponsored militant Islamic groups proliferate and Indian militarization intensifies.
20 January 1990: The day after Jagmohan is reappointed governor of Kashmir, the Indian paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) fires on a group of unarmed demonstrators, including women and children, in Gawkadal. The Gawkadal massacre prompts the mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, which are met with further violence.
1 March 1990: More than half a million people march to the offices of the UN Military Observer Group in Srinagar to demand the implementation of UN resolutions stressing the importance of the plebiscite and self-determination. The Indian army fires on demonstrators, killing twenty-six civilians at Zakoora Crossing and twenty-one at the Tengpora bypass.
30 March 1990: The largest political rally in Kashmir yet at the funeral of Ashfaq Wani, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader.
6 January 1993: The Sopore Massacre – Indian Border Security Police kill at least fifty-five unarmed civilians in Sopore in revenge for a militant ambush on one of their security patrols.
March 1993: Political, social and religious groups form the All Party Hurriyat Conference (‘Hurriyat’ meaning freedom in Urdu), calling for self-determination.
21 February 1999: Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif sign the Lahore Declaration, which focused on, among other issues, peaceful resolution of the Kashmir problem.
May–July 1999: The Kargil War, fought by India and Pakistan in the Kargil district of Kashmir.
2000s: The decade sees the armed struggle yield to a new phase of mass, non-violent protest. India and Pakistan restore diplomatic ties – engaging in talks over Kashmir and implementing confidence building measures – although this is interrupted sporadically by incidents of violence. The Indo-Pakistan diplomacy does not result in demilitarization in Kashmir or any agreement on its future.
May 2008: The decision by the Government of India and the state Government of Jammu and Kashmir to transfer land to the Hindu Shri Amarnath Shrine Board sparks the most widespread and sustained mass uprising against Indian rule since 1990. Armed police fire on the protesters, and the only functional road between Kashmir and India is blockaded.
21 February 2009: The Bomai killings, in which two worshippers were shot when the Indian army fired indiscriminately, inflames large protests in Bomai and surrounding districts, which then face indefinite curfew.
29–30 May 2009: Two women, Neeolfar Jan, twenty-two, and Asiya Jan, seventeen, are gang-raped and murdered in the Shopian district of India-administered Kashmir.
June 2009: Large protests erupt across the Kashmir Valley, accusing the CPRF of the rapes and murders. The protests are met with force and an undeclared curfew is imposed on the Shopian district.
30 April 2010: The Indian army claims to have killed three armed infiltrators crossing the Line of Control in the Machil Sector. It is later found that the encounter was staged and that the dead three were Kashmiri civilians, shot so that their killers could claim a cash reward.
11 June 2010: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, seventeen, is struck in the head and killed by a teargas canister fired at close range, while walking home from school. His death sets off another summer of protest, during which a military curfew is imposed and more than a hundred Kashmiris are killed.
Pankaj Mishra
Introduction
Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than eighty thousand people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killing fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley’s four million Muslims are exposed to extrajudicial execution, rape, and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.
Why, then, does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn’t be louder or clearer. India has contained the insurgency of 1989, which it provoked with rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who periodically fill the streets of Kashmir’s cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle the voices of the new generation as it did those of the old one. In the summer of 2010, soldiers shot dead more than a hundred protesters, most of them teenagers.
The New York Times described these protests as a comprehensive ‘intifada-like popular revolt’. They have a broader mass base than the Green Movement does in Iran, or indeed than the uprisings in the Arab world have enjoyed. But no colour-coded revolution is heralded in Kashmir by Western commentators. BBC and CNN don’t endlessly loop clips of little children being shot in the head by Indian soldiers. Bloggers and tweeters in the West fail to keep virtual vigils by the side of the dead and the wounded. The United Nations does not hold emergency sessions to discuss its response to the killing of scores of unarmed protestors.
Kashmiri Muslims are understandably bitter. As Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist, says, the stones flung randomly by protesters have become the expression of a ‘neglected people’ convinced that the world deliberately ignores their plight. The veteran Kashmiri journalist Masood Hussain confesses to the near-total futility of his painstaking auditing of atrocity over two decades. For Kashmir has turned out to be a ‘great suppression story’.
The cautiousness – or timidity – of Western politicians is easy to understand. Apart from appearing a lifeline to flailing Western economies, India is a counterweight to China, at least in the fantasies of Western strategists. A month before his election, Barack Obama declared that resolving the ‘Kashmir crisis’ was among his ‘critical tasks’. Since then, Obama hasn’t uttered a word about this ur-crisis that has seeded all major conflicts in South Asia. David Cameron was advised to maintain a similar strategic public silence during his visit to India last year.
Those Western pundits who are always ready to assault illiberal regimes worldwide on behalf of democracy ought not to be so tongue-tied. Here is a well-educated Muslim population, heterodox and pluralist by tradition and temperament, and desperate for genuine democracy. However, intellectuals preoccupied by transcendent, nearly mystical, battles between civilization and barbarism tend to assume that ‘democratic’ India, a natural ally of the ‘liberal’ West, must be doing the right thing in Kashmir, that is, fighting ‘Islamofascism’. Thus Christopher Hitchens could call upon the Bush administration to establish a military alliance with ‘the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism’, even as an elected Hindu nationalist government stood accused of organizing a pogrom that killed more than two thousand Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Electoral democracy in multiethnic, multireligious India is one of the modern era’s most utopian political experiments, increasingly vulnerable to malfunction and failure and, consequently, to militant disaffection and state terror. But then the West’s new masters of humanitarian war, busy painting grand ideological struggles on broad, rolling canvases, are prone to miss the human position of suffering and injusti
ce.
Indian writers and intellectuals, who witnessed the hijacking of India’s secular democracy by Hindu supremacists, seem better acquainted with the messy realities concealed by stirring abstractions. But on Kashmir they often appear as evasive as their Chinese peers are on Tibet.
People in mass democracies are usually slow to recognize the nature of the undeclared wars conducted by their representatives. But by the late 1960s there was hardly a public figure in the United States – from J.K. Galbraith to Philip Roth – who did not feel compelled to build up a chorus of denunciation against the country’s deeply dishonourable involvement in Indochina. In comparison, the deaths, in less than two decades, of nearly eighty thousand people in neighbouring Kashmir have barely registered in the Indian liberal conscience.
Indians may have justifiably recoiled from the fundamentalist and brutish aspect of the revolt in the valley. But the massive non-violent protests in Kashmir since 2008 have hardly released a flood of pent-up sympathy from them.
A few Indian commentators have deplored, consistently and eloquently, India’s record of rigged elections and atrocity in the valley, even if they speak mainly in terms of defusing rather than heeding Kashmiri aspirations. But many more have tended to become nervous at the mention of disaffection in the Kashmir Valley. ‘I am not taking up that thorny question here’, Amartya Sen writes in a footnote devoted to Kashmir in The Argumentative Indian. In the more resonant context of a book titled Identity and Violence, Sen yet again relegates the subject to a footnote.
A commonplace secular-nationalist argument in India is that Kashmiri Muslims, if given the slightest concessions by India, would go radically Islamist or embrace Pakistan, emboldening separatists in the northeast. But it has never been clear that radical Islam has a sustainable appeal in Kashmir. The Kashmiri feeling for Pakistan, too, is highly capricious, almost entirely fuelled by hatred of the Indian military occupation.
