THE people of Kashmir exude fear. It can be smelt at every street corner; in the satchel of a child who goes to school; in the nervous hookah smoke of an elderly shoe salesman; in the eyes of mothers who send their sons to buy bread, unsure whether they will return that morning, or ever.

Little effort is made in mainstream Indian discourse to grapple with narratives that might be contrary to entrenched ideas of Indian sovereignty. The institutionalization of fear and Kashmiri aspirations for self determination are downplayed while the image of the Jehadi Islamist-terrorist is allowed to dominate popular imagination. The few voices of dissent are dismissed with contempt and hostility.

What do the past sixty plus years of independence count for if basic human rights are systematically and institutionally denied to a population? What are the means by which our democracy is sustained, and do they justify the ends? What is our capacity for softening hard-set opinions and internalizing inconvenient truths?

In a country in which one in five citizens live under some insurgency or the other, Kashmir – the bloodiest of them all, is a metaphor, warning and a laboratory in which everything, from concepts of freedom to ideas of tolerance should become the subject of scrutiny.

In Autumn of 2009, I dispatched myself to write a movie script set in Kashmir, drawing on all that I had gleaned in my reading (mainly media reports) as background for the work. Suffice to say that I returned having been disabused of my simplistic notions of the conflict.

Far from being the protectors, I had to admit that we had become the oppressors. Our illegal actions, I found, were a desperate bid, dulled by the smokescreen of chauvinistic nationalism, to dig bloodied hands into a piece of land, whose ownership is contentious, while constructing a hegemony regarding our legitimacy: an opiate that the ‘rest of India’ has dutifully consumed in byte-sized pellets.

We had divorced the Valley of Kashmir from its people. We had created a religious alibi for a separatist movement and convinced ourselves, aided by a callow and pliant national media, of the legitimacy of our claims. A ‘let Kashmiris go to hell or Pakistan, we only want Kashmir’ sort of refrain had obfuscated the debate. That, coupled with a media blackout of human rights abuses, brutally unleashed upon a hapless civilian population, far from closing the chapter on Kashmir, only opened one for Indian democracy. Unsurprisingly, the problem we have today is a public endorsement of this misconception.

 

Some centuries ago a Mughal emperor called the Kashmir Valley ‘paradise on earth’ and those who followed in his wake, joined in agreement. Today’s Kashmir is a place of great beauty and immense cruelty, such that it renders the word ‘irony’ impotent; indeed, language has no words for the assault of beauty and despair on the senses of a visitor.

About 100,000 people have died in a conflict that has raged for over twenty-five years, a significant number, innocent civilians. At least 10,000 people have ‘disappeared’. Mass graves containing corpses of 2156 bodies were dug out of 38 sites last year (official figures). Promises were made on the floor of the state legislature to identify these bodies using DNA and then to match them against lists of ‘disappeared’ people in Kashmir. Human rights activists estimate the existence of hundreds of other grave sites containing thousands of corpses littered around Kashmir.

Despite such evidence, the Government of India persists with denials and intimidation of whistleblowers. The J&K State Human Rights Commission has been asked by the state government to close the case, declaring that all the bodies in the graves are those of militants, while bafflingly citing logistical issues in the conducting of DNA tests and matching.

Temporary legislations invoked at the height of militancy have solidified into a permanent carte blanche, giving the armed forces total legal impunity. A dozen or more investigation agencies operate in a haphazard manner, striking terror across the valley. Each armed force (BSF/CRPF/Army) has an agency of its own for local intelligence gathering; then there are central agencies (RAW/IB/CBI) and local police – each with their own staff, interrogation (torture) centres and network of informants. Consequently, every second person in Kashmir is either a spy, informer or informal intelligence source. The unwritten rule of clamping down on all forms of truthful reporting means that when human rights activists, academics, journalists, photographers, writers, thinkers, film-makers start asking real questions, they are made to feel the full force of a powerful nation state – one that stands accused of staging the assassination of whistle-blowers or blowing-off a limb or two as deterrent.

 

It is no surprise that only a handful of reliable news reports, films, books and commentaries on Kashmir exist. And they are woefully inadequate to account for the horrors of the past twenty-five years. Most of these works have been produced only in the last five to seven years, before which the silence was truly deafening.

Then, considering the scale of human rights abuses in Kashmir, only a handful of perpetrators have been brought to trial – a remarkable statistic considering that there are allegations of a genocide in the state, one that rivals the worst in recent times. All arguments, protests and evidence of human rights abuses are silenced with two words: national security.

The long-term fallout of such ‘state sponsored’ terror on the ordinary people of Kashmir is nothing short of devastating. Their lives are unimaginable, their culture decimated and their sense of self-worth ground to dust. A chilling assessment of what that actually means is evidenced by the exercise of listing catch-phrases and words evolved to frame and reference their daily existence: false (fake) encounter, half-widows, disappearances, mass graves, third-degree torture, rape, crackdown, checkpoint, bunker, civilian trooper, renegade, ikhwan, militant, terrorist, informer, interrogation centre and so on constitute a smattering of the new lingua franca of hell on earth.

 

Yet, the situation in Kashmir today is not like it was when I first visited in 2009. The summer of 2010 saw more than a hundred young men die on its bloodied streets. The tactics of militancy made way for peace protests, the stone had replaced the AK-47. Tired catch-phrases like ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘foreign hand’ could not explain the summer of 2010.

Ordinary men and women, many of them school and college students, placed themselves in the line of fire and became ‘martyred’ for the cause of a free Kashmir. The stone-pelters of 2010 asked, now that militancy has been controlled, why are Indian armed forces still given a free run in Kashmir? Why is Indian administration articulated in the language of fear? And is repression a sustainable model of governance? In other words, how long will the Centre continue to impose itself on the ordinary man and woman of Kashmir in the name of sovereignty?

One of the results of this is that the Indian state is represented by the solider who patrols the streets of Kashmir. The soldier, dislocated from his home and family, fighting a guerrilla war against a faceless foe, ostensibly to defend a people with whom he shares neither a common culture nor language. He is indoctrinated into viewing all Kashmiris as Pakistanis and all Muslims as the enemy. He is made to stand guard in a village not knowing when a bullet might make his child an orphan. It begs the question: what goes through the mind of a man in uniform when he is given power of life and death? How does an army man who has inflicted torture, crackdowns, fake encounters and killings, retire to live with his family, kids and grandkids? Have we created an armed force that nourishes sadism and then lets it run its grisly course?

 

I travelled extensively around Kashmir while filming my feature documentaries, Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir, gathering a diary of impressions, words, images.

I tried to reconcile this to the relatively free society that the fully insured, upwardly mobile middle classes of urban India consider their birthright. In doing so, I wondered what forgiveness means to the Kashmiri mother Parveena Ahangar (Nobel nominee and founder of APDP, Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons) who has been waiting for twenty years for some news of her ‘disappeared’ fourteen year old son? Or to the widows of Dardpura (otherwise known as the village of half-widows) whose husbands were rounded up at the dead of night fifteen years ago, either by the Indian Army or by militants themselves, never to be seen again. How has the long wait for news from a lost husband, or father or brother dulled their ‘humanity’?

What of the hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves in areas sealed off by the Indian Army? And the brave human rights crusader, whose leg was blown-off by a mine intended to kill him after he trekked up inhospitable slopes to find and reveal these graves?

A psychiatrist says that every Kashmiri suffers from some level of PTSD, trauma or chronic depression, as a result of the last twenty-five years of militancy and its response. Yet there is only one, woefully inadequate, psychiatric hospital in the entire valley.

Watching these recorded testimonies on the editing table, trying to fashion them into cinematic narrative, I was struck by the very human ability to find hope in deepest despair and humanity in the face of extreme pro-vocations to the contrary. In my journey to understand a political trauma, I ended up trying to grapple with the essence of what makes us human, what ‘civilization’ is and what it is not.

Following the first screening of Inshallah, Football one of the interlocutors appointed by the Government of India requested a summary of our findings in the valley. This only emphasized that over the last twenty-five years of reportage on the Kashmir Valley, the only point of view that has been permitted in mainstream Indian discourse is that of the Government of India. Facts have been so grossly distorted or underplayed that there is now a yawning gap between reality and perception.

 

It is a matter of regret that there exist only a handful of films that try to set the record straight – the less said about the obfuscating yet deadly influence of Hindi commercial cinema, the better. Small wonder then that the Government of India’s own censor board first refused Inshallah, Football a certificate, then after hand-wringing gave it an ‘Adult’ rating (a film about an teenage Kashmiri’s dreams to play football in Brazil), making it difficult to release the film in India. Following that, the same film was awarded the Government of India’s national award for the best film on social issues, 2012.

Without a sincere attempt to acknowledge the fears of the ordinary Kashmiri, reconciliation and peace may continue to elude India in Kashmir.

 

* The writer is an Oscar-nominated film-maker whose two-part film series on the valley – Inshallah, Kashmir and Inshallah, Football – can be watched online at http://distrify.com/products/1170