FOR articulating the self, words fall short. And, even if they suffice, the manifestation requires more than just words. In Kashmir, when mere slogans did not prove good enough, first the guns were picked up and then stones replaced them. What seems to follow is silence, but is it not the silence of violence?

Sixty-five years on, peace is only a fraudulent word in Kashmir, maybe a horizon that moves farther each time one thinks it is just within reach. Since 1947, the narrative of Kashmir has been punctuated by violence. What has changed over the years is only its vocabulary. For, violence is a reality that the people can register or come to terms with; it is peace which is befuddling. In fact, the subtext of violence remains even in the silence of the violence. Add a line, subtract another, but there is no escaping the sound of violence. Peace actually seems something piecemeal, something waiting to be undone.

According to the South Asia Intelligence Review, ‘The steep and continuous decline in terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) continued through 2011, bringing fatalities to a new and dramatic low. 2010 had been described as the "most peaceful year" in over two decades of insurgency in the state, with 375 terrorism-related fatalities. 2011 witnessed a further consolidation, with just 183 killed in the state.’ But confining to the Kashmir Valley, my intention is to explore people’s engagement with violence on a daily basis and, thereby, to read the vocabulary of violence that has changed for both the outsider and the insider living it.

For J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, a ‘bumper tourism (2012) season doesn’t mean that there is no main issue.’ If Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin’s statement that he has withdrawn all his men from Kashmir is any relief, then 17-year-old Imtiaz’s proclamation that ‘India can’t cow us into giving up our slogan for azadi’ is disturbing. Do we call it wit or wisdom when a taxi driver informs: ‘If Geelani Sahib is in Delhi rare are the chances of a bandh in Srinagar.’ And for 10-year-old Junaid, an orphan of conflict, learning to spell ‘absconding’ is an accomplishment of growing up in the valley. This is only the beginning of a conundrum that Kashmir is today, a discourse with no single truth, different perspectives and many realities. Normalcy has returned or evaded yet again, one wonders, but what sense has violence made is the bigger question.

 

That history is not only selective but is also selectively recollected is hard to deny. Kashmir’s past, the narratives of it being a paradise, Nehru’s promise, Sheikh Abdullah’s intentions, happenings on the ground and interests of many others – all offer several contradictory reference points, depending on which side of the conflict one is speaking for. Distortions, adaptations and incomplete versions leave enough gaps to facilitate a rehash of the Kashmir story as the context changes.

Two bomb blasts in July 1988 changed life in Kashmir as people knew it. Not that the years since India’s Independence were all quiet. But violence from thereon became an assertion, maybe for Kashmiri political identity, or maybe just as a means to an end. But what end exactly, well, that no one knew and at that point, it did not even matter. But not protesting, not taking up arms would have been, as most Kashmiris put it, unpardonable. When the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) started the militant movement in the valley it did have the people’s (in the valley) support, and was seen as an indigenous movement driven by a nationalist ideology. Of the four JKLF founders, two – Abdul Hamid Shaikh and Ashfaq Majid Wani – were killed in police encounters. The other two, Javed Mir and Yasin Malik, carry on the ‘struggle’ and both claim that the sound of silence today is as loud as that of the violence of the 1990s.

‘In 1989, the reference point was the gun and when, in 1995, I declared ceasefire, it was a most unpopular decision; my own people did not support it,’ says JKLF chief Yasin Malik. He has seen all the three phases of the Kashmir movement – democratic, armed, and now stone pelting. ‘It is unfortunate that the transition from undemocratic to democratic means was not respected,’ he adds, while asserting that even after ceasefire, many of his colleagues have been killed and that he has been arrested several times. Javed Mir, now associated with the other faction of the JKLF, offers a short and crisp explanation: ‘Violence is noticed.’ While India and Pakistan signed agreements, the Kashmiri awaam was not asked what they wanted, he argues. ‘The gun had to be picked to send the message loud and clear.’ It wasn’t just dissent. For, they didn’t consider themselves to be part of the country called India, neither politically nor culturally.

 

As college students, along with many others, Yasin Malik and Javed Mir had been holding demonstrations and protests on the campus, revolting through democratic means. But after the results of the 1986 elections, widely believed and accepted as rigged, their (and those of other leaders) revolutionary voice was muffled. So, the gun was an open rebellion, even more revolutionary in nature. The demand for a separate nation became violent in nature. Soon, the assertion of identity was also the making of, or accomplishment of, a Kashmiri identity. The AK-47 – often spelled out as Azad Kashmir-47 – became the insignia of the movement, of a coming of age for the youth, of an aspiration and a statement of what one was. Boys who picked up guns were not just freedom fighters, they were the real men of Kashmir, looked up to as role models, the poster boys for the younger ones in Kashmir.

The movement, however, was soon hijacked by the Islamic fundamentalists, leading to the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Violence was now legitimized in the name of religion. Contributing to the violence, in whatever form, was the direction towards becoming a ‘good’ Muslim, true to Islam. ‘We couldn’t understand what azadi meant. Is it jihad? If so, then what is jihad, killing people? Azadi is not achieved through malafide interests,’ counters Krishan Kaul, now a retired school teacher, who stayed back with all the courage he could gather at the time of the Pandits’ exodus. Rahul Pandita, in his memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, recalls the response of the JKLF when Pandit leader H.N. Jattu wrote an open letter asking the JKLF to clarify its stand on the issue of Pandits: ‘In Tankipora, one of Jattu’s close associates Ashok Kumar Qazi, was accosted by three armed men. He was shot in the knees, was kicked, making him fall into the drain. One man unzipped his trousers and sprayed piss over him. As he writhed in pain, the men fired a few more shots and killed him. His killing was JKLF’s answer to H.N. Jattu’s letter.’¹

 

Undoubtedly, there is no reference to any effort made by the JKLF to stop the exodus or propagate its secular, nationalist intentions. However, poet and a respected Kashmiri intellectual Zaheer Ahmad Zaheer goes on record to say that a Pandit friend wrote back to him saying that ‘he couldn’t meet Zaheer before leaving as a BSF commandent had come at midnight and had coerced them to leave.’ Hence, the common declaration by Kashmiri Muslims: ‘We didn’t ask them to leave.’ Any attempt to get a straight answer from Yasin Malik is bound to fail. He is a veteran leader, experienced enough to not be politically correct. But off the record, he accepts that the ancestors of Kashmiris have been Hindus and endorses the view that Pandits have every right to return, that they must.

For Amit Wanchoo, the director of Eaton Laboratories and a member of Immersion music band, it has been a different story. ‘We could have left but didn’t. My Muslim friends formed layers of protection, even better than any Z security.’ ‘We have kept the kashmiriyat alive after risking our lives,’ says Krishan Kaul. If ‘kashmiriyat’ was essentially a Kashmiri-ness equally shared by the Muslims and Pandits, it is history now.

 

For the most in 1990, ‘kashmiriyat’ was tested and it failed. Islamization overwhelmed and engulfed the idea of ‘kashmiriyat’ as a base both for a cultural as well as political identity. But not for Dukhtaran-e-Millat chief Aasiya Andrabi: ‘Kashmiriyat is the other name of brahminism. Otherwise the majority in Kashmiris are Muslims and the identity is Islam. The slogan of kashmiriyat is to dilute the religious character.’ Perhaps, she is right. Flip the pages of history, and it was only in 1930 that the word was first used in public space to mobilize the people, to justify that Kashmir with its ‘kashmiriyat’ is distinct and, hence, can’t assimilate with the Indianness, which has only been an assimilation of many differences. If the Indian nation state incorporated many nations, could it not accommodate the Kashmiri nation?

But, where do Kashmiris like Shaukat, for whom it was neither nationalism nor religion that made him pick up the gun, fit in? Violence was not a choice, but there was no choice left for him. After his father was taken into custody, tortured despite not being even remotely involved in the movement and then released, paralyzed, Shaukat gave up his B.Sc studies and joined the militant ranks. ‘My father’s only fault was that he couldn’t reply to the army men in proper Hindi,’ says Shaukat. His reasons were personal and took the shade of common sentiment: ‘What we want is azadi.’ For him, both the gun and the stone would put an end to the helplessness that a Kashmiri feels.

 

The last few years have seen a transition to a less volatile mode of mass rebellion against an imposed Indian identity. People, particularly youth in large numbers, took to the streets with stones in their hands. The act of pelting a stone at the security forces, this violence, was not aimed as an end in itself. Neither objectivity nor morality, not even nationalism or religious affiliation, is at play here. The act becomes a matter of being. The random irrational or calculated rational violence contains inherent value, not merely an instrumental one. When a Kashmiri youth picks up a stone, for him it involves annihilation of the enemy and not necessarily killing.

Malik says: ‘They once used to enter army camps and kill Indian soldiers, even as fidayeen. But now they themselves are getting killed.’ People’s Conference chief Sajaad Lone, however, believes that ‘there is a certain level of social sanctity to the concept of dissent when it comes to the core question of resolution of the Kashmir issue. So the sanctity we accorded to violence as a means of achieving the objective in 1989 has eroded. But sanctity of the Kashmir conflict remains unchanged. It has not withered completely, it is still there in significant measure, but is fast moving towards insignificant measures.’

The stone thrown on the street is being intelligently shadowed by a sharp understanding of oppression; hitting the soldier in uniform is attacking India. ‘Ask a child to paint India and he would draw a security man with a stick in his hand,’ says Amit Wanchoo. Sajjad Lone endorses, saying: ‘Azadi in Kashmir basically means dissent; it is a rebellious concept. They are rebelling against the present state of affairs, what they want will eventually evolve. It is dissent and we need to accept that the dissent is very intense and it could take different forms. There is a dissent against the concept called India, not the Indian people but the way the Indian state has behaved in the last sixty-five years.’

 

Stone pelting has been fed on the two-decade-long local memory of arbitrary detention of residents, widespread torture, hundreds of graveyards for the victims of conflict becoming shrines to the loss and ‘Kashmir cause’. The pent-up bitterness and a sense of being dominated, it seems, is waiting to explode. It only requires reasons, at times finds its own like the Amarnath land row. But what must those who picked up arms be thinking as they watch the streets being taken over by younger people, the stone pelting tehreek – a movement? What counsel do they have to offer to this new generation of Kashmiris who grew up in the tumultuous 1990s? What lessons are these veterans, in turn, drawing from the young and the new phase of violence?

Both Malik and Mir say it must be taken seriously and respected. For the form of the resistance is fluid and can swing back to the place where it has come from. Independent MLA, Engineer Rashid asserts that the stone pelters, contrary to the common conception, are neither uneducated nor do they belong to the ‘poor’ class. ‘Those born in the nineties have seen the family members sacrifice their lives for the movement and after 20-plus years, they would be frustrated to see nothing has changed on ground. They are bound to react, rebel and assert,’ Rashid adds.

At another level, for a Kashmiri, violence in any form becomes an agency that allows him to act, confirms that he is capable of action. Beyond the simple questions of acquiring control or potency, it involves a person’s ability to make decisions for himself or to disagree with the status quo. Therefore, it becomes an important dimension of freedom and freedom’s connection to anti-state violence. ‘A few years ago commuting from my home in Bandipore to Srinagar was not just a pain. It was humiliation. I was born and brought up in Kashmir and now I have to prove that at every turn of the street,’ says Rehmat Ali, a daily-wager. Obviously, he is referring to the presence of barricades and check-posts of the army. So, defying curfew orders, protesting against the establishment, pelting stones at everything that symbolizes the state, all become for Kashmiris acts of freedom, though violent in nature. The graffiti ‘Go India. Go back’ is no ordinary rejection.

 

Shift to the other side. Security, defence, law and order is the main text and, if reading between the lines, it is the assertion of national Indian identity that forms the narrative of the state violence. As Appadurai writes: ‘The worst kinds of violence in these wars appear to have something to do with the distorted relationship between daily, face-to-face relations and the large-scale identities produced by modern nation-states…’² Keeping not just the border but also the idea of a nation secured is a job that has taken a toll on the security men. Are they just doing their job or does the act gets bigger than the job or, rather, does the practice becomes the job itself? But can men in uniform find another way, be a bit reasonable? The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the state police inspector generals (IGs) accept that at times their men are boorish and say that it is being looked into. But they do not endorse the idea that when a state resorts to violence against its own citizens, it is confessing that it no longer has the strength and power of legitimate authority to command the compliance without coercion. In Kashmir, even coercion is a violent act.

‘Would it be wrong to say that the greater the use of violence against those who question its legitimacy, the more the Indian government expresses its own doubt about the effectiveness and efficiency of its legitimate forms of authority, strength and power?’, a Srinagar based journalist, preferring anonymity, questions me. And, when pushed to an extreme, state violence becomes state terror – frisking, checkpoints, crackdowns, interrogation, all have gone on for too long. Even now, the trust between the people and the men in uniform is still missing. Though understandable, the suspicion, the security measures, the past, has made security men sit on the edge. But when does it stop?

 

Violence has blurred boundaries between acts of violence, conflict and peaceful resolution. The notion of normality in case of Kashmir must be understood in the context of the times. But living in a world while being aware that perpetrators, victims and witnesses come from the same social space, can play havoc. The experience of violence in one’s own homeland is bound to produce another subjectivity – the felt inner experience of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational power.³

For a Kashmiri Pandit, the violence by people with whom he shared the culture and more, has not only left him homeless but given rise to questions about his Kashmiri identity. The act of violence of the Indian government, in the form of ‘wanting’ refugee camps and lack of concern towards the Pandits has left them with doubts about the concept called nation and its reality on the ground. They have been stripped of their identities, Kashmiri and Indian, only to be adorned by another – nowhere’s people.

 

There is no denying that violence has generated its own objects, created interior meanings. In Srinagar, I ask seven-year-old Lalam about his father and he says, ‘Woh bhag gaya’ (he has run away). Ask him what that means and he gives a blank look. It is not as if he does not understand, but what words should he use to explain it? Missing is too simple, having fled does not tell the entire story, absconding is a new word for him and he wonders if that is the right one. For 13-year-old Imran, it is a little better. He is quick to say that his father was martyred, shaheed. He was killed in crossfiring between the security forces and militants. They are the orphans of the conflict. So are Kashmiri Pandits. ‘Each one of us has been a part of a tragedy that can offer no catharsis,’ says Amit Wanchoo. Anything more or less may fill the gaps in the narrative but does not help in reasoning about it.

For over 20 years, violence marked the daily existence and reality in Kashmir. All were touched by it; very few were not scarred. Then the guns fell silent and gave way to stones. But does the absence of violence necessarily mean peace?

 

* Manisha Gangahar, ‘Silence of Violence’. Special story on Kashmir violence for Day and Night news channel, 2012.

Footnotes:

1. Rahul Pandita, My Moon Has Blood Clots. Random House, New Delhi, 2013.

2. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.

3. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.