Gaamuk

The Adventures of Wasim Nawabid

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:54:37 +0530

The Man

In 1996, there lived a young man named Wasim Khan in Bonwari village in the frontier district of Kupwara in Kashmir valley. There are numerous street stories about this man. Wasim Nawabid, as he was locally known, is described by the learned and wise of Bonawari as a fair, tall man, a devout Muslim who offered five time prayers and was immensely kind to children and beggars. Yet this humility and generosity of Wasim Khan was clouded by gory accounts of his later years, when the conflict in Kashmir was at its acme and he had joined a mercenary force called Nawabids.

It was said that Wasim Nawabid killed and participated in the killing of at least nineteen people, which included innocent children and women. On one such occasion, Wasim Nawabid dragged a young girl, Sakina, out of her house in the neighboring Kakasarai village and shot her eight times between the legs; a reward for turning down his proposal of marriage!

This lethal abhorrence and self-righteousness gradually assumed the form of a curse which his family and a helpless Bonawari village was unable to bear and live with. Initially, his father, Gule Khan, a miserable looking man, was averse to his presence in the house and used to tell people who asked him about his son that he had ‘disowned Wasim Khan’, not ‘disowned his son’! Then, one fine day, when Gule Khan heard about the murder of Sakina, he decided to issue a disclaimer against his son in a local newspaper. The disclaimer made its way into a small column on the classified section of The Daily Aftab for which Gule Khan paid Rs 20. With a sense of relief and a mystical assurance that he was no longer responsible for the activities of a publicly disowned son, Gule Khan read the newspaper next day.’

Aaj, 15 October ko main, Gule Khan, yeh elaan karta hun ki Wasim Khan mera beta nahin hain. Jo mera beta Wasim Khan hua karta tha, who aaj say mere liye mar chukka hai. Gule Khan

Bashindgana Bonwari

Kupwara

WhenWasim Khan heard the news, he was left numb and shattered. It was a Sunday and he had gone to a pond in Bonwari with his fishing gear when he heard screams of his friend. From a distance, it looked like his friend was carrying a hurriedly torn portion of the newspaper in his hands on which the disclaimer was published. Wasim Khanknew the volcano created by his senseless adventures was gathering steam at the house for a while. Now the time had come for the lava to breach the walls and erupt. Leaving behind his fishing gear, Wasim started towards his house where an agitated Gule Khan confronted him at the porch that led to the wooden entrance of the two storied brick house.

“I swear by Allah and his prophet not to hear a word from your mouth. I have had enough. You are a murderer and you have no right to live in my house. You are no longer my son, as you must be aware.” And, as a, afterthought, Gule Khan added, “If your mother has any objections, she can leave the house with you as well!”

This was a Gule Khan Wasim Khan never knew, never met, never even saw before. The tone, the words, the allegiances. Wasim was speechless and didn’t know how to react. Against the backdrop of cold wails and heart-breaking pleas of his mother who had made her choice to stay with her husband, Wasim Khan packed his bag and left without protest, never to return back.

The Transformation

Wasim Khan became Wasim Nawabid some three years after he was arrested by the troops of 44 battalion of Rashtriya Rifles from a forest near the line of control along the Indian side of Kashmir. During his college days in Srinagar, Wasim Khan was always amazed by Physics and the logic of Conductors and Gates left him overwhelmed. Some freak accidents were bound to take place when Wasim happened to be in the laboratory. When the insurgency against the Indian rule broke out and Indian Army came and settled on the outskirts of Bonwari, as in every neighbourhood of Kashmir, a young Wasim decided to take up arms and crossed over to Pakistan for receiving training.

Wasim’s interest in physics was discovered and worked to his advantage by one Rahim sahib, a tall, broad man in his middle ages with a flowing beard, who used to come for delivering a sermon at the training camp after Friday prayers. No one at the camp knew Rahim sahib’s full name or who he worked for, but the kind of respect he was given at the camp was enough to silence anyone who might have had other thoughts. Rahim sahib discovered the spark in Wasim Khan during a sermon when a discussion on the atrocities committed by Indian forces on Kashmiri people gave other thoughts to Wasim and he confronted Rahim sahib.

For the next three months, a shabbily dressed used to arrive at the training camp in the morning to escort Wasim Khan to a palatial house in Muzaffarabad city which had a large lawn bordered by rows of flowers of different colours. The house was situated almost three hours drive from the camp and the journey bored Wasim Khan. But the mediocrity of the journey was forgotten with a generous lunch comprising of Qorma and Kebab which Wasim was served every day.

When the lunch was finished, Wasim was taken to a vacant playing field where he was trained to assemble mobile phone batteries with RDX canisters and fix a detonator to the assemblage. Wasim picked up the art without much effort; Physics being his area of interest. This exercise usually lasted for nearly two hours after which Wasim was taken back to the palatial house in Muzaffarabad where a long lecture of Rahim Sahib on the virtue of fighting infidels in Islam and why martyrdom should be the primary objective of every true Muslim followed.

After three months of rigorous training and perfect brainwashing, Wasim Khan started to believe that he was born to fight the enemies of Islam on earth. He also successfully made and detonated six powerful mines that caused tremors in a barren forest and earned him the title Wasim Bomber.

Soon, Wasim Bomber’s time to cross the border and fight the infidels in Kashmir came. His job was to prepare RDX mines for a Lashkar commander of Kupwara district who had crossed over recently along with three local boys.

“They will arrange the raw material. Don’t worry about that,” Rahim sahib assured him. The imagined mines were to be planted not far away from Wasim Khan’s village on a highway where an increased activity of Indian forces was witnessed.

However, on the scheduled day, when Wasim had crossed over and set up his base in Bonwari’s forests, the planned adventure was cut short by a random patrol of 44, Rashtriya Rifles, which spotted Wasim along with a local boy. A posse of tired but jubilant soldiers surrounded Wasim Khan like a pack of wolves. He gave up without a trifle of resistance. The forces, who would have conventionally sprayed bullets on him, instead took him to their camp, not far from Wasim’s residence where he was tortured for the next one month and kept in isolation.

A bruised and shattered Wasim Khan endured the pain of concrete pillars rolling on his broken legs and the shock of electric wires inserted into his genitals, but not for long. When the pain crossed the threshold and his rectum started emitting blood, Wasim broke down. It turned out that a collaborator of Bonwari was recently killed by unknown persons and his body was found dangling from a tree near the bus stand. The troops were searching for a replacement.

For the next two years, Wasim Khan provided anonymous tip-offs to Indian security forces which led to the arrest and killing of a number of militants who had become a pain for the forces. It was during these years that Wasim Khan took a serious liking for alcohol as he became more and more involved with security forces. They used to invite him to their barracks in the evening where alcohol was served free and Wasim Khan, after few weeks of unease, easily gulped down six of seven pegs before he was full and high.

When the news of his alcohol parties spread in Bonwari, he became a source of resentment and hatred. Unidentified masked men once dropped a letter at his house, threatening him to mend his ways or face the death of an infidel. The letter was seen by his father and it only added to the volcano that was gathering steam at Gule Khan’s. The masked men never came again!

The Guilt

The transformation of Wasim Khan into Wasim Nawabid was achieved without much effort by the forces who gave Wasim a Russian AK-47. With a gun in his hand and an intrepid lust for power, Wasim started settling personal disputes and extorted money from the rich and powerful of Kupwara. He soon joined hands with Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen or Nawabids and formally became a notorious figure of Kupwara district.

One morning in Ramzaan, the holy month of Muslim calendar, Lassae Baeng, the Muezzin of Bonwari, went to the mosque at the crack of the dawn to call the faithful to attend Fajr prayers. This was a month when the people of Bonwari, particularly the young men and women, suddenly became conscious to the existence of an Allah who tested the faith of his creation. When Lassae Baeng opened the door and turned on the light, he found a young man lying prostrated in a pool of blood.

Ya Allah! It was Suhail Mir, his son, a brave, selfless soul and one of the few good men who had picked up arms to fight the battle of freedom. The cowards had shot him 17 times in his back.For the first time, instead of the melodious Azaan of Lassae Baeng, Bonwari was awakened by his deafening screams, cursing wails and a plea of justice.

That day, many attended Fajr prayers in the old mosque of Bonwari and many more attended the funeral and burial of Suhail Mir, which was held under the dark, weeping skies. But not a single call of the faithful travelled beyond the clouds that hung gloomily over Bonwari.

Earlier that year, Suhail Khan’s sister, Sakina, had perished to the wickedness of Wasim Nawabid and Suhail, driven by the rage to avenge the killing of his sister, had immediately taken an oath on The Holy Quran not to rest till he paraded the naked body of Wasim Nawabid through Bonwari.

That, however, was not going to happen. Wasim was enjoying the alcohol party that usually followed such killings in the army camp. He was probably drunk. The killing would have raised tempers to uncontrollable levels of rage, but there was no one to lodge a protest within Bonwari, no one to seek justice from, no one to issue another disclaimer. Gule Khan and his wife had died in a freak bus accident earlier that year and the two storied brick house with a wooden door was lying vacant, unclaimed.

An Ugly, Mysterious Death

It was a sunny spring morning in Srinagar when an old man was crossing the Dal Lake near Nehru Park in his shikara to ferry his first customer of the day when he saw a young man entangled in the mess of weeds beneath the waters of the lake. The old man was stunned and immediately called his neighbours who informed the police. The body was fished out with the help of divers and a police team from Nehru Park police station took the body to the SHMS hospital.

Two large, empty bottles of Royal Stag whiskey were recovered from a bag that was slung across the man’s shoulders. The post-mortem report said the man had died of drowning and a ‘highly dangerous’ level of alcohol and narcotics was found in his blood. A doctor, who conducted the autopsy, told the police that the deceased was perhaps hallucinated by excessive alcohol and drugs and fell in the lake imagining that he was entering the park separated from the road by a narrow but a deep channel of water.

No one came to claim the body for the next three days as it lay unattended in an outdated SMHS mortuary. The body soon started showing signs of decay and a foul smell filled the corridors of the hospital which lacked proper machines to preserve human bodies. When the patients visiting the hospital started complaining, the administration and the police woke up and sought the favor of a local committee of Sonawar to arrange for the burial of the unknown man.

The gravedigger of Sonawar, Soule Kak, a noble soul, was summoned to the committee’s office along with his tools. He agreed to dig a grave. When asked how much he will charge, he made a face saying he was doing it for the sake of Allah so that it may be counted in his good deeds.

The Curse

It was 8 pm. Soule Kak was hitting a vacant plot in Sonawar graveyard with a blunt azada for the third time. The two graves that he had prepared since morning had collapsed mysteriously just when some final touches were being given to them. Soule Kak casually attributed the collapse to the bad deeds of the unidentified man who was going to be buried.

Suddenly a drizzle started to wet the hard, dugged-out soil of the two collapsed graves. The dark air of the graveyard was filled with a beautiful, earthy smell. A gas, which was arranged to light up the grave, was blown away by harsh winds as they started to gather speed in the dark graveyard. It was secured and a small portion of gas mantle hanging nakedly from the valve was enough to light up the grave.

Then Soule Kak said all is fine and done, and the unidentified man was brought to the graveyard and buried. A large number of people attended the funeral which was held in a public park. Some wise men claimed that the man had achieved martyrdom, as promised in Islam for the people who drown!

The unidentified man was soon rendered to the pages of history as a case of ‘normal’ drowning death that hardly evoked any question or suspicion in an era in Kashmir when thousands of people were killed with bullets of impunity!

Two years later, the police in Kashmir issued a press release that said the man, who was found in the waters of Dal Lake and was given a warm farewell with prayers for a place in heaven, was Wasim Nawabid of Bonwari.

A Lost Brother

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:06:00 +0530

Fate had perhaps conspired to bring them together, to kill them. When I returned home from Delhi in July last year, they did not know each other well. In fact, far from being friends, they were nemesis of each other. But destiny was ordained to end their lives, like a tragic chapter which changes the entire course of a novel. On February 27, Pintoo Baya, my cousin, an elder brother to me, was on his way to Jammu with his two friends when their car fell into a deep gorge near Digdol on Srinagar-Jammu highway. There were no survivors.

We got to know about the accident on Thursday morning. My initial reaction was that of shock and disbelief. A lump appeared in my throat. I kept hoping that the news of accident would turn out to be a rumor, that we will soon receive a phone call that all of them are well and alive. We decided to reach the house of Ammi, my mother’s eldest sister. On the main road, I saw a number of vehicles with wailing men and women, young and old, rushing past the bus stop. I began to realize that this was no rumor. There was grief in the air. I can’t recall the last time when I saw such agonizing scenes in my life.

We are not sure about the circumstances under which they died. The police at Ramban told us that the car had lost control and skidded from the road which led to the fall. No one saw the accident. At least no eyewitnesses were questioned. The man who saw the car fall into the gorge informed the police in the night but the vigilant cops started the rescue operation in the morning. The corpses were recovered by locals of Ramban and it took nearly 14 hours to bring them home. The three friends were lying under raining skies and freezing cold for full 10 hours. No one came to their rescue.

On Thursday midnight when their bodies were finally brought to their houses, the entire town of Chrari Sharief was in mourning. As I shouldered Pintoo Baya’s coffin and we placed him on a wooden slab for his funeral bath, there was a frown on his face, something which contradicted the notion of a peaceful death. His body was found nearly 500 metres above from the spot where the other two – Nazir Kaw and Ahtisham Haji – lay dead. There was a trail of blood between the two spots. He had perhaps tried to challenge the fate by moving to a safer spot where he could be spotted. Perhaps he kept screaming in darkness, hoping for the help to arrive. His nails filled with soil told the story of his struggle. Perhaps he was searching for his phone and tried to call Ammi, or his wife, to tell them that he had met an accident, or to bid the final adieu. That call never came. He perhaps lost consciousness, or he died before he could dial the number. We can’t be sure. He lost the battle.

Of the three, I had very less interaction with Gaash Kaw. But he was a noble soul who never harmed anyone, or not anyone I know. His elder brother, Zaffar Kaw, had died in a gun battle in 1995 when the town was razed in a fire. Only his youngest brother is left now to live with the pain of lost brothers for the rest of his life. Ahtisham was a friend and one of the finest chess players in the town. People knew him as one of the most sober youth who would never give you a chance to extend greetings. He was the only son of his mother.

Pintoo Baya was one of the most outspoken, promising and upright members in our family. He was the kind of a self-made person who would never extend his hand for help. When we were growing up as teenagers, I remember that I was envious of his smooth hair, given my own husky texture. He was the first person to teach me how to ride a scooter. Years later, he would purchase an LML Vespa and become the first person to trust my driving skills by offering to ride his scooter without his help. He had many dreams and plans for himself and his children. But the proverbial man proposes and God disposes, on the night of darkness.

Pintoo Baya left behind two daughters and a son, the eldest among them is Sehla who is seven. On Friday, I took her out to buy her some sweets, an easy ruse to distract the children from the tragedies at home, as my experience has taught me. I told her that I was going to give her driving lessons. She said her father was going to perform Hajj soon after which he had promised to buy her a Scooty. She doesn’t know that her father is never going to come back. I don’t have the heart to tell her that. No one has the heart to tell her. Perhaps Baba will never return from Hajj!

There are some lessons that we must learn from such tragedies. Death, like the meteorological department, comes with no forewarning. We shall be prepared to face it in our lifetime. The three young men of Charari Sharief who died on Thursday have left behind their families who have to live with this burden and pain forever. Two of those who died have small kids. Most of them have meager resources to rely on and live their life, like their fathers would have planned for them.

Let there be be a society or a committee in every town and village across Kashmir valley which could take care of such tragedy-stricken families. The least we could do is to contribute a minimum monthly donation which could be used for the families in grief, and there are many.

Let’s remember that there are nearly 80,000 families who have lost their loves ones to the war in Kashmir. There are almost 8000 half-widows waiting for their husbands to return home. More than 10,000 children have become orphans. They have been abandoned by fate and forgotten by society. Let this organization take care of such families. Let us endeavor to civilize our nation by taking care of people who need our help. There is nothing more gratifying than to see a smile on the face of a boy who has lost his father. It would be much better to come to the rescue of destitute orphans and widows than to have air conditioners in mosques.

The Tragedy of Afzal Guru

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:54:33 +0530

On Monday when, 29 years back, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation front’s ideologue Maqbool Bhat was hanged in Tihar, a letter reached a besieged village in north Kashmir’s Sopore locality. The hastily typed message (Afzal was written as Afjal) informed Tabasum that the mercy petition of her husband Mohammad Afzal Guru was rejected and that he was going to be hanged on Saturday morning.

Afzal was dead already. A martial law had been imposed across villages and towns in Kashmir. A 13-year-old boy had been shot dead for protesting the execution. Two protestors chased by government forces drowned in Jehlum River in panic. One lost his eyesight. India had converted Kashmir into a prison by caging people inside their homes, gagging their voices and denying them their right to protest, and the world’s celebrated democracy had hung herself, again, in the eyes of ordinary Kashmiris.

We were a group of staff who had stayed back at our office on the night Afzal was hanged. The news was broken to us by our driver. We were shocked, to say the least. After all, everyone knew that Afzal was denied a lawyer at the most crucial stage of his judicial trial. There was no direct evidence to hang him. Scandalous questions were raised about the 2001 attack on Indian parliament which only Afzal could have answered. Why would they hang him in such a hurry? Afzal also had a right under Indian constitution to challenge the rejection of his mercy petition which was open to judicial review.

But a shaky nation state like India whose sovereign structure is threatened by the growing domestic conflicts, rising corruption and increasing poverty need people like Afzal Guru to bury the secrets of its dark underbelly. India needed Afzal to keep the public gaze away from its dirty power corridors, away from its dangerous roads and streets haunted by rapists, away from thousands of impoverished people who die of hunger and lack of medical care every day, away from the battles which bleed the idea of India, day after day.

So I recalled that the beats of drums of nationalism must be kept alive to give people a ‘patriotic’ cause to rally around in a dangerously polarized and fragmented country where the cloak of justice is used as a tool of vengeance. There was something very unsettling and sinister in the manner in which the execution was carried out. These are symptoms of fascism and India has seized to be a secular democracy in Kashmir long time back.

At our Srinagar office when it became clear that Afzal was no more, a realization soon dawned on us that this brazen denial of justice was what ordinary Kashmiris have been facing over the last 24 years. Afzal was dead, buried under the same ground in Tihar jail which held Maqbool Bhat, while many Indians had begun celebrating the hanging, like some medieval people, symbolizing the callousness of their own country, barely aware that India lost the moral authority to rule Kashmir long time back when the first bullets were fired at Gawkadal bridge; that with Afzal’s death, their country had given Kashmir another martyr to strengthen their political beliefs against the repression of a military nation.

Maqbool Bhat inspired a group of Kashmiri youth who began a popular uprising in 1989 against the Indian rule in Kashmir. There is no doubt that the hanging of Afzal will have larger political fallout on the psyche of youth in Kashmir who saw and participated in brutally suppressed popular protests against Indian rule in 2008 and 2010 and see in Afzal’s death a symbol of their own unfulfilled and subjugated desires.

It has almost been five days now. Kashmir has been turned into a prison. Every Kashmiri has become a suspect in his own home. There is a shortage of food items and medicines. Internet & cable TV has been banned. Newspapers are prohibited from going to press. People are not allowed to mourn a death.

And yet it will be shoved down the throats of people in Kashmir that their welfare was in seeing themselves as citizens of world’s largest democracy. Any attempt to challenge this notion, like Afzal’s case reminds us, makes one an outcast and attracts hatred of ‘nationalists’ in India with a noose waiting in some dilapidated jail to silence the voices of sanity.

While India lost the moral authority to rule Kashmir long time back, by hanging Afzal, it has relinquished a huge opportunity to reconcile with the people of Kashmir. Ever since Maqbool Bhat was hanged, his mother has been demanding mortal remains of her son be returned. This year, when Kashmir was preparing to commemorate Maqbool Bhat’s hanging, the world’s largest democracy responded by hanging another Kashmiri whose guilt was not proved beyond doubt and whose mother died waiting to see her son return home.

In Afzal’s hanging, many resilient Kashmiris feel proud of having being born in these dark times to see Afzal facing gallows, of having inherited his legacy. They are holding their heads high in this moment of profound grief and have internalised this wound and the pain associated with it. As the Supreme Court order stated, Afzal was hung ‘to satisfy the collective conscience of society’. India would do well to remember that it symbolically forgot to include the collective conscience of Kashmir in that decision.

A slightly redacted version of this piece appeared in The Friday Times

The Last Word

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 13:54:00 +0530

A war of words has broken out between the mainstream political parties in Kashmir over who was the better harbinger of democracy in Kashmir. The leaders of the ruling National Conference blame the opposition, People’s Democratic Party (PDP), of ‘derailing’ the democratic process in Kashmir through ‘politics of conspiracies.’ The PDP charges back. “The NC has repeatedly eroded the institution of democracy in Kashmir,” the party president, Mehbooba Mufti, was quoted as saying.

Across the border, there was an ominous sign for the people of Kashmir. The two ceremonial democracies of south Asia decided to put the Kashmir conflict in their stinking backyards and move ahead on issues which are less contentious; trade and tourism, for example. There was a time when a scandalous narrative in India’s mainstream media demanded the perpetrators of Mumbai 26/11 carnage be brought to book before the leaders from the two countries could sit together and talk about peace. Times have changed. The two sides have now realized that pragmatism doesn’t serve their capitalist interests. Rhetoric does.

Thus the recent agreements signed by the two countries to allow the visit of traders and facilitate picnicking tourists to cross the border was more crucial to the peace process than to deliver justice to the innocent people who have been killed in Kashmir over decades of strife. Kashmir issue can wait, we are told. There is no urgency to bring the 23 years of oppression in the valley to its rightful closure! The wise men of the two hysterical nations have decided the fate of Kashmir between themselves, not considering that the people of Kashmir have paid with their blood to see their land free of occupation and oppression. Kashmir is made to pay the price for saving the sliding economies of the two countries.

The leaders in Kashmir, meanwhile, are on an auto-mode. There was not much reaction from the harbingers of democracy to the much-trumpeted peace talks, save a daylight blood-spilling brawl between the protectors of law with a lawmaker in his air-conditioned car acting as a biased boxing referee who willingly allows a fight to continue to see the opponent smashed, and the shame of a gun-wielding ex-legislator caught in a shameless act with a woman failing to shake our corrupted conscience. A report in a local daily suggested that the moderate Hurriyat leader Umar Farooq might receive his doctorate degree from none other than the President of India. This is another facet of a ‘vibrant democracy,’ upheld and protected by tweets emerging somewhere from the magnanimous lawns in Zabarwan hills.

These harbingers of democracy have been convinced in their delusions that the state of the state will flourish by confining and stamping dissent. What they don’t realise is that the real democracy for the people of Kashmir lies buried in its mass graves, in the heart of every person who has been a victim of this brutal war. The last word on this goes to Syed Ali Shah Geelani, “The prevailing system in Kashmir is based on deception and lies. It can’t survive for long.”

The piece appeared in Kashmir Life weekly here

The Peace Facade

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 13:52:00 +0530

A loyal, unnamed Quaestor in the great Roman emperor Hadrian’s army, who built the city of Hadrianopolis (now Adrianopolis), had his eyes gouged out and his right arm amputated in the winter of 127 AD. Scandalous rumours that the Quaestor had embezzled funds collected for the construction of a giant wall meant to keep the barbarians away from Britain had reached the emperor. For three long years, the ugly ghosts of an unlit torture chamber became permanent companions of the Quaestor. Later, when an official inquest discovered that the Quaestor was innocent, he was summoned before the remorse-filled Hadrian.

Not that Hadrian had paid any attention to the bleeding, amputated arm or the puss-filled lacerations of the Quaestor, but the king was visibly shaken due to the ineptitude of his judicial insight. “My Lord! Look how my loyalty to the throne has been rewarded! I want justice, my lord,” the Quaestor demanded. A Legate was immediately summoned and asked to bring a new uniform and a fresh pair of boots for the Quaestor; a show of solidarity with a man whose integrity had stood the test of moral and judicial scrutiny. The Quaestor was sent home with a basket full of fruits and asked to resume his duties only when his wounds healed completely! The perpetrators were never punished. Justice that is!

This story, although apocryphal, aptly describes the poetic gimmickry surrounding the “peace process” that has suddenly found the dislodged train of India and Pakistan back on track. When India’s foreign minister, S M Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart, Hina Rabbani Khar, shake hands to the glitter of cameras in Islamabad in the coming days, we will be told that the wretched, evasive peace has finally found roots in the valley. The pedagogues of secular modernity of the two hysterical nations will shove it down our throats that the normalisation of ties between the two countries will sent peace messiahs running to bring this damned battle of egos to its rightful closure. They won’t tell you that there is nothing normal to see thousands of unidentified bodies lying buried in the mountains of this forgotten land; their revenants waiting for the perpetrators to be punished.

In this battle of rhetoric, the ultra-secular nationalists of the two countries will say that a box of spices brought from Pakistan to India after undergoing repeated molestations at the borders will bring solace to the people in Kashmir whose lives have been brutalized by 23 years of violence. What they won’t tell you is that there is no justice, no peace and no solace to see thousands of half-widows waiting for their husbands to return home. They will also claim that peace between the two countries was in the interest of the people of Kashmir, as if the wars have been gratifying at some point in history! What percentage of people in Kashmir is associated with trade is anyone’s guess!

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing to glorify when you keep hundreds of teenagers behind the bars and put up a fake show of Greek pomposity. Thus rhetoric serves the purpose. How peaceful is the peace when the separatist leadership is under virtual house arrest while those who fall in line are given audience by no one less than the head of the state. The truth is that the so called peace process will be blown to pieces if a lunatic jihadi decides to meet his creator and strikes in any part of India. But the revivalists of the doomed capitalism have to serve their interests. Let’s not spoil their party!

The piece appeared in Kashmir Life weekly and Express Tribune

Harud, a new beginning

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 22:17:00 +0530

In the 2009 Spanish movie “The Milk of Sorrow”, Peruvian director Claudia Llosa attempted to describe the implications of a conflict on the life of children who are born in times of great distress and violence. Set in a ravaged town of Peru in the late 90’s when the war between the statist “good men” (Peruvian security forces) and the “bad men” (Sendero Luminoso) was drawing to a close, leaving behind a trail of destruction; thousands of war widows, victims of rape committed by Peruvian security forces, and orphans, Ms Llosa narrates the tale of Fausta, a young girl who has contracted a mysterious disease leaving her without a soul; a dark void consistently reminding her of the violence and trauma that the women in Peru suffered during the war, and which Fausta must carry throughout her life.

The film opens on Fausta’s mother who is lying on her death bed; a parched face with puckered lips and open hair showing no signs of revivalist proclivity, singing, no, wailing, for her daughter Fausta who has become a victim of this strange epidemic. The women in Peru believed that the blot of a violated chastity was transmitted through the milk to such children who were breast-fed by their infected mothers, robbing them of the idea of hope and resistance.

Perhaps someday, you can understand, Fausta’s mother moans on her bed, for what I wept, what I begged on knees, to these children of bitch!

Aamir Bashir’s Harud, too, is born out of distress, out of the anguish that leads our protagonist to search for a better life in a conflict ridden territory of Kashmir where fear of surveillance, survival and a limited freedom under India’s rule looms in the air like dark clouds. The movie is set in Srinagar, the capital of Indian administered Kashmir, and revolves around the life of teenaged Rafiq and his parents. Rafiq’s elder brother has disappeared and the blame is being laid on the Indian security forces. His father, played by the brilliant Iranian actor Reza Naji, is suffering from some unknown mental illness. Rafiq’s family is distraught, disillusioned, like many families caught in the violence. In other parts of Kashmir, the people are suffering daily humiliation of military crackdowns and curfews at unwarranted times. Kashmir has become hell. But that hasn’t made Rafiq give up on the hope that good times will be back in Kashmir.

Empty mind is devil’s workshop, or so Rafiq’s mother (Salma Ashai) thinks, as she takes it upon herself to keep Rafiq occupied, for the fear of losing another son, lest the security forces take him away, as has happened in Kashmir, lest the cacophony of violence that has swept the valley of Kashmir consume him, lest Rafiq takes the route that hundreds and thousands of disillusioned youth did in Kashmir, and vanished. And as Rafiq sets on the journey which will ultimately cost him his life, the trauma of a child born and raised in a conflict comes to haunt him, which, like Fausta, will leave him distraught and pulverized.

The good thing about Harud is that it stays away from the politics surrounding the Kashmir conflict and rather prefers to delve on the individual lives which have been brutalized by the two decade long violence, save an odd reference to Pakistan which, Aamir tells me, comes from a sense of disillusionment in Kashmir with the gun culture. For the last two decades, the trauma and violence suffered by the people in Kashmir was blemished by a vicious narrative peddled by the mainstream cinema in India, so much so that the death of dozens of youth in Kashmir fails to meet the nationalistic standards that could lead to express condemnations and calls for justice.

The violence obsessed Indian filmmakers who have overlooked an innocent majority victim population while depicting the conflict of Kashmir, have a thing or two to learn from Harud. Aamir has done a good job with the camera. The visual narration of Harud reminds of the magical Iranian filmmakers like Jafar Pinahi and Abbas Kiarostami whose stories of pain and suffering induce a sense of deep guilt and piety which stays with you for a long time after the movie is over. Rafiq too stays in the mind but he is gone too soon. Here, Aamir has a lot of ground to cover. Dialogues and script could have been much, much better. The soft paced narrative and abstract story telling might frustrate audiences; particularly in India and Pakistan, where the success of a movie is determined by how famous the protagonist is and how imaginatively he portrays the vulgarity and banality on a sacred space.

Harud signals the birth of a new era of cinematic resistance which will go a long way in shaping the craft of storytelling in the subcontinent, particularly in the restive Kashmir valley.

Cast: Reza Naji, Shamim Basharat, Shahnawaz Bhat, Salma Ashai.

Director: Aamir Bashir

Genre: Drama

Indian "nationalism"; Why Kashmir won’t move on

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:01:00 +0530

Manu Joseph, a senior Delhi based journalist and the editor of Open magazine recently asked why it was obscene to accept that a historically wounded people are ready to move on. He was, of course, referring to the people in Kashmir where a war has left 70,000 people dead, 8000 victims of enforced disappearances, thousands of orphans, half widows, migrants living in make-shift houses, rape victims, handicapped; in short, a gruesome trail of death and destruction which has few parallels in modern history.

As Mr Joseph points out, it is difficult, almost impossible to convince the uber-nationalist Indians about how merciless the war in Kashmir has been. If you tell any ordinary Indian that 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, they will blame most of the killings - if not all of them - on terrorists from Pakistan. Why, because they have seen it on news channels and read about it in newspapers. If you narrate the horrors of Kunan Poshpora village to them, they will say the charges against the security forces were motivated and never proved. If you say that 8000 people have been subjected to enforced disappearances, they will simply tell you that you are lying!

This is mainly because the Kashmir dispute has greatly contributed to the understanding of “nationalism” in a fragmented country like India where the major political parties like the Congress and the BJP have used the issue to polarise the opinion of people. The dispute is also a sentimental one for the ordinary Indians who have seen their armed forces sacrifice their lives to keep the Kashmir territory under India’s control. The true nature of the war, the cost paid by ordinary Kashmiris with their blood has never been revealed to the people. In an emotionally charged and chaotic atmosphere such as this, any argument blaming the Indian state for coercing Kashmir into submission is seen as anti-national or, if things get out of hand, a pro-Pakistani view and vice versa, which is bound to invite wrath of “patriotic” Indians. Sadly, the truth becomes a fatality.

Indian film industry and the electronic news media have played a very important role in shaping this parochial idea of nationalism. The war in Kashmir has been cinematically depicted as the ploy of a Moolah bent on destroying the “secular” fabric of India from his dilapidated hideouts across the border in Pakistan. India’s vibrant media, whose members have been openly accused of corruption, relay a daily dosage of “nationalism” to its thriving middle class viewers with jingles of patriotic Bollywood songs playing in the background. Charged debates are held on prime time news where bigots, sickly informed people, self-proclaimed experts, literally anyone who can speak are passed off as authoritative voices on Kashmir who, instead of accepting the wrongs done to the people of Kashmir in the name of nationalism, lay the blame on ordinary Kashmiris and Pakistan for igniting trouble in the valley.

Indian film industry too has played a dubious role in narrating the story of Kashmir. For example, not one movie has been made by Bollywood where an army soldier is shown firing on unarmed protestors, as has happened in Kashmir, because it will apparently show nationalism in a bad light and may “demoralize” the security forces. Thus we see these forces depicted as great saviours of humanity who came to the rescue of ordinary Kashmiris in 1989 when the conflict erupted in Kashmir valley, not as men who carried out massacres in Sopore, Bijbehera, Gaw Kadal and Pathribal, and the young men who picked up arms to fight against these atrocities are shown as supporters of Pakistan’s ideology of breaking India’s sovereignty!

This is a tricky situation that India has dragged herself into. The vicious propaganda wars waged to build a castle of lies is decaying and the skeletons kept hidden inside the closets of nationalism are slowly tumbling out. India is an uber-nationalistic and a deeply polarised country where the character of a person is determined by his allegiance to a very sordid idea of nationalism, and where a mythical honour of country comes before the justice for the ordinary victims of state atrocities. Over the last two decades, the state successfully managed to throttle any voices of dissent, which came out in support of a free Kashmir, or at least talked about ending atrocities by men in uniform. Not anymore.

The dawn of the social media in Kashmir has dramatically changed the dynamics of this conflict. The young generation who have seen their loved ones perish in front of their eyes are no longer dependent on a petty journalist from India to write about the atrocities unleashed on them. They are writing their own stories now. How then to get away with this “morally indefensible” occupation of Kashmir where a new generation of writers, poets, journalists, singers and intellectuals have risen in one voice to protest the occupation of their land?

Blame the ordinary people for inviting trouble. Blame the Pakistan for starting the war. Blame the elite for preserving the wounds. Blame the kids protesting the occupation for throwing stones. Blame the separatists for igniting passions. Blame the writers for speaking “lies”. Blame whosoever comes in the way of nationalism. Thus spoke Manu, that “Kashmir is happy”:

“Trauma in Kashmir is like a heritage building—the elite fight to preserve it. ‘Don’t forget,’ is their predominant message. They want the wound of Kashmir to endure because the wound is what indicts India for the many atrocities of its military. This might be a long period of calm, but if the wound vanishes, where is the justice? India simply gets away with all those rapes, murders and disappearances?”

As if speaking out against the gruesome atrocities in Kashmir was a crime. As if demanding rightful answers from the state was morally not the right thing to do. As if keeping the wounds fresh in our memories was being seditious, anti-national. As if seeking justice for the thousands of women searching for their husbands was not worth a fight. As if demanding punishment for the murderers of ordinary Kashmiris in the name of nationalism meant pushing Kashmir into dark ages.

Kashmir doesn’t live in a solitary Cafe Coffee Day in Srinagar or in the wooden hotels perched on the hills of Gulmarg where a plate of kebabs and hot tea laid out on table besides a window opening into snow clad mountains makes it easy and romantic to draw conclusions that Kashmiris want to move on. Kashmir lives in far flung areas; in villages where people shut their doors before the sun sets, lest a rapist barges in to outrage whatever little is left of their modesty; in towns, whose people are waiting for their long gone sons to return home, in mountains where unidentified bodies lie buried, unclaimed, in the rivers whose waters have turned crimson with the blood of ordinary Kashmiris, in the heart of each and every Kashmiri who has been a victim of this gruesome war.

It is far easy to rally around the cause of mythical nationalism and jingoistic patriotism than to stand up for the rights of a subjugated people. This is a just battle, and it has just begun.

This piece appeared in Express Tribune here

The 14 Symptoms of Fascism

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:04:11 +0530

Eric Bochene

(01) Powerful & Continuing Nationalism — Fascist societies/cultures tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

(02) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights — Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist societies are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

(03) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats — The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

(04) Supremacy of the Military — Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

(05) Rampant Sexism — Governments of fascist societies tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homo-sexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

(06) Controlled Mass Media — Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

(07) Obsession with National Security — Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

(08) Religion & Government are Intertwined — Fascist societies tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

(09) Corporate Power is Protected — The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

(10) Labor Power is Suppressed — Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

(11) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts — Fascist societies tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

(12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment — In fascist societies/cultures, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

(13) Rampant Cronyism & Corruption — Fascist societies are almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

(14) Fraudulent Elections — Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Few saddest things in the world

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:36:00 +0530

A mad man licking his wound,
another beggar cooking his food
with the drain water.

The carcass of a shit yellow dog,
with a million bees on it.

A badly dressed whore, in a lighted street,
silently waiting for her client, her meal.

A dog walking the streets - helplessly,
with his visible jelly like cerebrum.

A group of talented artists performing
to a handful of retired men and housewife
populated crowd.

The soot laden smoke of an aged, slow moving
train when it is raining heavily.

The watery eyes of a grandmother aged scavenger
and her leathery skin, wrinkled as my old shoe.

My eighteen kilogram niece
with her twenty kilogram school bag.

A young poet working as a clerk.

Imtiaz Akhtar.
Jodhpur, March. 2011

The author can be reached here

Faith (A short story)

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:07:00 +0530

Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?

Student : Absolutely, sir.

Professor : Is GOD good ?

Student : Sure.

Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?

Student : Yes.

Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?

(Student was silent.)

Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Is satan good ?

Student : No.

Professor: Where does satan come from ?

Student : From … GOD …

Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?

Student : Yes.

Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD did make everything. Correct?

Student : Yes.

Professor: So who created evil ?

(Student did not answer.)

Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?

Student : Yes, sir.

Professor: So, who created them ?

(Student had no answer.)

Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?

Student : No, sir.

Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your GOD?

Student : No , sir.

Professor: Have you ever felt your GOD, tasted your GOD, smelt your GOD? Have you ever had any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?

Student : No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.

Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?

Student : Yes.

Professor : According to Empirical, Testable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?

Student : Nothing. I only have my faith.

Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem Science has.

Student : Professor, is there such a thing as heat?

Professor: Yes.

Student : And is there such a thing as cold?

Professor: Yes.

Student : No, sir. There isn’t.

(The lecture theater became very quiet with this turn of events.)

Student : Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.

(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)

Student : What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?

Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?

Student : You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?

Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man ?

Student : Sir, my point is your philosophical premise is flawed.

Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?

Student : Sir, you are working on the premise of duality. You argue there is life and then there is death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are viewing the concept of GOD as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing.

Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?

Professor: If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.

Student : Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?

(The Professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going.)

Student : Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a scientist but a preacher?

(The class was in uproar.)

Student : Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?

(The class broke out into laughter. )

Student : Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?

(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable.)

Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on faith, son.

Student : That is it sir … Exactly ! The link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things alive and moving.

This story appeared on a Facebook post. It declared towards the end that the student was the great Albert Einstein. Another version is that the student was former Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam. Doesn’t really matter.

Reflections on Jantar Mantar revolution

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 21:59:20 +0530

The Drama

So we had an insouciant, television revolution in Lutyen’s Delhi. How peaceful it was! It took just four days and no bloodshed! No Gaddafis here, no bombing of ‘revolutionaries’, no martyrs, a pure pep talk on corruption and its ‘harmful effects’ and lo, our moment has come, “India has shown on TimesNow tonight that enough is enough! It is a people’s movement and we have won”, thunders a brutally honest Arnab Goswami. A wild dog suddenly starts barking in our street. There were more journalists and onlookers at Jantar Mantar than the actual number of protestors on more than one occasion over the last four days!

April 2011

Friday 11:30 pm

The Meeting

I had the pleasure of meeting a “philanthropic” (that is what his visiting card says) on Wednesday night, one Mr P Rajdeep, the ‘official media coordinator’ of Anna Hazare campaign, at Jantar Mantar. Most of the journalists, who covered this ‘campaign’, must know Mr P. He has the same story for everyone; that he owns four Rolls Royce cars and has never travelled on a passenger flight. He also runs “Swabhiman Foundation”, an ‘education and equality foundation’ in Thane, Maharashtra. He has contacts in government too and may help you out, just in case, “I book a chartered plane for myself. Who do you think I am? I haven’t come here for money. I don’t need money, yaar. I want to be a part of the system and change it”. In the same breath, “If you want, I can fix an appointment with any bollywood actress you want. You look very handsome”! Bollywood actresses are now going to bring me revolution. Sure sire. Why not!

Conclusion

India looks reformed on news channels tonight, a society just cleansed of all its ills and ready to lead in the new ‘Indian’ century. Protest marches, candle light sit-ins, signature campaigns on social networks, are all going to do wonders for us. We won’t have to do anything, just agree that corruption is bad, ‘Like’ a Facebook page and ridicule the elected government on the rapacious media That’s it. ‘Our moment’ will come. Cheers. Now what’s wrong with this woman at India gate turning down the offer of a TimesNow bite, “I am sorry but I am here with my family on a picnic,”? Thats defeatist. So what? Can’t you go for a picnic and enjoy a little revolution too! Now why did you take a sudden break, huh Ornab? What a miserable sight!

The Belief

I won’t allow myself to be misled by this farce. The way this ‘revolution’ has been enacted in a corporate media whose members are accused of partisanship and corruption certainly raises doubts in my mind about the people and the character of the movement itself, and it has got nothing to do with Kiran Bedi’s endorsement of Proctor and Gamble’s Ariel detergent powder! From where have these creatures popped out suddenly and seem to be manufacturing consent over this Lok Pal Bill? Does the acts of these crusaders of morality mean that our laws are toothless and the constitution is riddled with flaws visible only to this section of civil society, the supposed custodians of morality!

Voila. Sedition, sedition. It’s a blasphemy to question the character of the elected parliamentarians, an elected government, don’t you know that? We have a set of colonial legislations to prevent such adventures by you radicals, separatists and terrorists who want to break our country. Anna Hazare has earned the mandate of people to question the authority of an elected government. He has been voted on news channels and social networking sites to question the authority of this corrupt government, of a constitution, of a farce called democracy.

Anna Hazare and his supporters including corporate media hoodlums are a fit case for invoking charges of sedition for questioning the authority of a government elected by a people’s mandate, a ballot-box democracy. They should be jailed for perverting the constitution of this country!

Sedition, sedition!

The anti-thesis

Oh please, give me a break. That’s a cynic talking! Let’s not dig too much into these conspiracy theories. A 76-year-old former Indian Army driver has a corrupt government and its babu fiefdom kneeling for mercy and how! Anna’s life should become an inspiration for our younger generation. Let’s look at the brighter side of things to come. LokPal bill is going to end all our miseries. No one will sleep hungry in this country now. No one will be killed for demanding his/her constitutional rights. We will soon be set free. Women will no longer parade naked to protest the rapes by security forces. Teenagers won’t be killed for demanding basic human rights. Farmer suicides and malnutrition death are all going to stop. This LokPal bill is going to change it all. We are soon going to emerge as an impervious utopia. Corruption will finally be a thing of past so that we may focus our energy towards more amusing things like IPL and Poonam Panday, or maybe get busy with our own lives”.

Bottomline

Why do they call us terrorists then and keep our brothers incarcerated for years without trail in Kashmir when we come out to protest? Oh yes, terrorism and radicalism sound a convenient business in a ‘secular’ country with a Sikh prime minister! Let’s not live in delusions. This popular opinion that you are witnessing on your news channels is a creation of a corporate media milking the debauched government hit by a series of scams that is struggling to prove its relevance every day in a dangerously divided country. Tis a strange whimsy of the mystical civil society who will like to make us believe that we are living in world’s largest democracy. I won’t buy that.

This article was carried by Pak blog-zine PakTeaHouse and monthly news magazine, Hardnews.

The Absurdism Of Interlocution

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:53:07 +0530

We swear by the fundamentals of absurd-ism

of that all we have learned

our solutions will mimic the ludicrousness

that we employ in our education, research, and other related shit

No sir, freedom needs a definition, an academic one

about independence, who could define that?

its a controversial-ized

contradictory

concomitant

concoction

and by the way the freedom and independence are two different entities

prior dependent on the relative flexibility of the two contemporaneous blotch(s) with in the marvelously designed context of coordinates, space and time

while the later one acts as a diminutive module within the prior

there we go; now what do the Kashmiris want?

well, we would tell you what they want;

air, water, food (probably); how about

housing loans, iPads, tiled roofs; well yes

they want development

bilateral trade, you see;

build more roads, buildings

give them jobs, dig tunnels

the trade should start from both sides

open the check-points, monitor them

And yes in all this talks are important, keep on engaging them

Engage all the sections

when we say Kashmir, we don’t just mean Kashmir

it includes, the Jammu, Ladakh, POK, Gilgit, Skardu,

Honolulu, Falkland Island, Baffin bay;

the say of Manmohan, Jagmohan, Rohan, Sohan

Almardu, Sokardu, Gunanshu; of Mr. Robin,

Mr. Masharfan, Mr. Tenperson and others, and

their children and their toys; the Monkey,

the Donkey, one Bear and lot other Mules

to comprehend our meticulously arduous task

to comply with the SOPs of the theories

we would need the live samples of the assassinated,

maimed, bundled youth. See you all the next season

Guest post by Shoaib Rafiq

A lost hope

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:40:09 +0530

I lost a dream

In the winds of Autumn

When Chinars shed blood

And streets become killing grounds

Freedom is the cry of forlorn

Of lost blood and blighted hopes

In the land of doomed

Where justice is a curse

And promise is a lie

Where sun rises to set

I lost a dream

In honor of his highness, the United States of Amrika

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:21:31 +0530

Ugly Osama and a divine intervention

Bravo! The world has just become a safer place to live in! The cursed, war monger Osama Bin Ladin is dead. We are a free people now (as if we were in chains!), free of Osama’s perverted theocracy and radical chauvinism. Silly old man used a dogmatic understanding of Islam to legitimize the flogging of poor Afghan women! How can a modern world stand that? Or was it the cruel Talibs who lynched those sad, helpless women on TV? Whatever! The world has just been liberated from an ugly revenant of Islam who waged holy wars against the modern nation states. Today, in his sudden death, the wretched man couldn’t even find a proper grave. But then that must make him happy. He was a Salafi, no? Salafis don’t raise graves of their dead, unlike Sufis, the liberal Muslims, who dance and utter mysterious poetry and are totally acceptable to the highly moralistic western ethos and its libertarian gunghos! Wahabbis are the wickedest of them all. They bomb every other shrine and kill innocent men and women in the name of a divine god. Shias too! These utterly fragmented perverts believe that the world will be governed by a divine rule of law one fine day; a law which demands execution of every infidel present on the face of earth, starting with US and its NATO allies and technically all of us, and that too in presence of great champs of democracy! Silly creatures!

The Abbottabad Hangover

Much has been said and described about the cruel adventures of Mr. Bin Ladin in the western lands; the bombing of train stations, the plane-ing down of sky-scrapers, and his various plots and subplots to strike ‘western targets’, which are situated - depends on how democracy is construed - everywhere in the world. Newspapers and online journalism is full of horrifying accounts of how innocent civilians perished to the adventures of insane jihadis while their wicked preacher in Tora Bora kept releasing videographed messages, threatening the west to give up its presumed obligation of saving a less-blessed civilization from his religion-driven fanaticism. We know this narrative already. Some have made movies and some have won awards as well. But there is a bright face of Mr Bin Ladin too. Jason Burke briefly mentioned this in one of his many reports filed for London Guardian and I asked him about it. But perhaps he didn’t bother to waste time on researching a story which would probably get killed by his editor and never see light of the day for obvious compulsion of peddling a US-defined narrative of terrorism. Perhaps there are better stories in a war that has consumed thousands of innocent civilians than mere acts of charity of a jihadist. Or maybe this is just jihadist propaganda.

The Charity

There is a village, probably situated around Kandahar, where Mr. Bin Ladin is said to have carried out one of his last acts of charity by donating money for constructing a well before disappearing in the mountains of Waziristan. Burke’s reply was cryptic and somewhat symbolic in many ways of how western media and its funny imitators in the third world countries interpret the story of terrorism and relay it on a 24 hour basis to a muted audience across the globe. Burke tweeted me that he didn’t know the name of the village exactly, but from his vague recollection he thought the village was Koshilabad. A cursory search revealed that there is no such a place called Koshilabad in the world! I thought Burke was suffering from Abbottabad hangover and told him so. He never replied back.

What would have been the reaction of those villagers to the slaying of Mr Bin Ladin in Abbottabad? Were they sad, agitated, jubilant, drunk, mourning, cursing? How did the village women react? Did they felt liberated in Osama’s death too, like the berserk crowds in Washington? Were the village kids angry? It is not clear whether the well was constructed or not and whether it has been democratized by a cruise missile, but someone should go and ask the villagers what terrorism means to them, how much a sense of liberation prevails in them when a bomb is dropped on their homes by US drones, whether the acts of modern saviors bring them any sense of hope or total isillusionment, whether the man that brought them water was a lunatic jihadist or a modern crusader. I am sure they will have a fine story that will make a nice copy, and may just win an award!

The impending realities

Will Osama’s death make our lives any better? Or where we better off when this campaign of eradicating evil from our modern civilization was initiated by a noble US. What changed in the last ten years, really? Is the world truly a safer place to live in? Of course we face more security checks at every sorry place we run into, but are we safe? How many people were killed in Osama’s terrorist attacks over the last 10 years and how many perished to the misguided cruise missiles and bunker busters? Do we have any figures? Anyone? What does safety mean to the thousands of innocent civilian who get killed in drone attacks and are later collated as an accepted travesty of war called collateral damage? What does security mean to the thousands of young men decaying of unknown charges in the torture chambers in Gitmo and elsewhere? What does terrorism mean to the poor families that were wiped off from the face of earth? What happened to those 35,000 innocent civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan that got killed in the last decade? What about the children that were vanquished along with their toys by the cruise-missile democracy? Who will carry their pictures and pictures of thousands and thousands of other innocents and who will plead their cases, and before whom? Who is the savior now and who is the tormentor? Has ‘justice’ really been served? But as Islam has just been liberated from the much-molested curse of OBL, long live America and may God bless the people of United States of Amrika!

Now, what are these ‘tyrants’ in Africa up to?

This piece was written days after the Navy Seals took out Osama Bin Ladin, the world’s most wanted man, from his mansion in Abbottabad, Rawalpindi.

Till we meet again ....

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:38:26 +0530

You had promised

That you’ll never leave me alone

Then why did you go?

Leaving me orphaned

I have so many questions

To ask

Why now?

Why didn’t you stay?

For some more time

So that you could see

Those dreams coming true

You had seen for me

To see me succeed

And making you proud

About you and me

I can’t say enough

You’re my light

My sunshine

You’re my strength

You are my courage

My miracle

You are my hero

You are my everything

Now that you’re gone forever

I’ll not give up

I’ll live

To love you

To keep you alive

In my breast

No longer will I miss you

You are with me

And within me

And you didn’t go alone

A part of me went with you

Every day I wonder

Should I cry or smile

Because the pain is gone

No more suffering

You are no longer weak

You are free

In the mornings, I cry

Evenings give me hope

Every passing day

Brings me a smile

As I come closer to death

I come closer to you …..

Guest post by Showkat Nanda

On Kashmiri Pandits and 1990 uprising

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:12:00 +0530

There is a common perception among Indian masses and the larger global community that the tragic exodus in 1990 of Kashmiri Pandits, when the valley was on the brink of an all-out war with the Indian state happened mainly due to a Muslim majority in Kashmir which had taken to arms to get rid of “Indian occupation” turning its ugly head towards its immediate enemy which it found in its Hindu minority. This is a flawed argument.

It was a warm summer in 1990 when mysterious posters pasted across restive towns and villages of Kashmir valley instructed and threatened the Pandits to leave the valley or else prepare to face death. It was a scary phenomenon, no doubt, and this existential exigency was compounded by the killings of Pandits, many of them holding high government offices, in rapid succession by “unidentified gunmen”; in many cases separatist militants were blamed. Sadly, some of them are today roaming scot-free. It would be only fair to say that justice has not been done to those Pandits as it has not been meted out to thousands of Kashmiri Muslims killed in this brutal conflict over the last two decades.

There are however many exceptions to what has been described, albeit incorrectly, as the ”mass exile” of Kashmiri Pandits. Sanjay Tickoo is one such Pandit who decided to stay back, despite the threats to his life and fully aware of the vicious sword that was hanging over his head. Like him, there are nearly 3400 Pandits who displayed a remarkable courage and faced the threat to their life head-on and braved it. Today these Pandits are living in their homes, in Kashmir valley, away from the din and chorus of Kashmiri Pandit expatriates milking the state which didn’t made efforts to protect their interests at the time of 1990 uprising and is now happy to exploit their disadvantaged state. Having found lucrative careers for themselves and their children, many of these migrant Pandits are now comfortably settled in different parts of India and outside India, careers which can only be dreamed of by the people caught in a protracted war in valley where the lack of employment has forced students with doctorate degrees to work for meagre Rs 1500 a month! Many of these Pandits do visit Kashmir, like tourists from Indian plains, to escape the harsh heat and to enjoy snow clad mountains from the warm Gulmarg resorts but returning and settling in an impoverished state is not on their agenda.

Keeping the “exile” bandwagon alive is!

In fact, many of these truculent Pandits have joined ranks to form notorious groups such as Roots in Kashmir and Panun Kashmir whose hatred fuelled activities have widened the trust deficit between the two communities. By raking up issues which fall in the larger paradigm of the Kashmir problem and questions which should be asked of the state rather than pinning the blame on the Muslim majority of Kashmir, these pesky groups have ensured that efforts to reconcile with the larger Muslim population and to bring Pandits living in shoddy camps across India back to their homes are discouraged and scuttled. Over the years, with their silly boisterousness, they have appeared at every forum in India where Kashmir problem was discussed with a specific aim to disrupt the proceedings by hurling eggs and vile abuses at Kashmiri separatist leaders and every liberal and saner voice which advocates equal rights to the coerced Muslim population of the valley. Their protest against the government which completely disowned them in times of crisis in 1990’s includes, but is not restricted to, a night out shindig under open skies in south Delhi parks where rock bands perform to the screaming and howling of drunken people, and nice evening tea socialising parties at the famous Lodhi Gardens.

Coming back to the issue of Pandit migration, who was behind those threatening posters and the subsequent killings of Pandits hasn’t been properly investigated and remains mired in endless controversies and arguments. But aren’t there cases of Muslims being tortured, maimed, killed and chased out of the valley in this period too? The mysterious Muslim conspiracy against the Hindu minority notwithstanding, this dark period between 1989 and 1994 saw a systematic execution of a number of Kashmiri Muslims too. Tragically, their deaths aren’t written as the human cost of the war that was waged by two nuclear armed countries in the valley, neither these killings are described as a systematic cleansing of Muslim majority of Kashmir who were not willing to recognize the rule of the Indian state. They are seen as an accepted travesty of war waged by the majority people in the first place.

The dubious circumstances that led to the exile of Pandits from valley have led many reasonable people to believe that it was orchestrated by Indian state through its Governor Jagmohan in an attempt to paint the indigenous, secular uprising against its misrule with communal colours; by pitting a Hindu minority population against Muslim majority and blaming the killings of one side on the other side to polarise the opinion and to maintain its hold on the state. The truth however lies buried somewhere between these two extreme arguments or is, perhaps, a mixture of both. Wajahat Habibullah, a senior administrator in the state at that time writes in his book that there were some instances of transport being organised for a few groups of Pandits. Who was behind this despicable policy of transporting Pandits out of valley in a hurry has not been investigated. He also recalls groups of Muslims appealing to him to stop the Pandits from leaving. He had then suggested to Jagmohan that a television broadcast on behalf of Kashmir Muslims requesting Pandits not to leave the valley be made. His request was turned down.

Dr Mridu Rai, the author of highly acclaimed book ‘Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects’, who teaches history at Yale University says this sudden departure of minority from Kashmir had a dramatic effect on the uprising in the valley, “The departure of a majority of the Kashmiri Pandits, a departure moreover that occurred in large numbers within a remarkably short space of time, has had a dramatic effect on outsiders’ understanding of the uprising against Indian occupation in Kashmir. It has had the consequence, for one, of putting Kashmiris who remained in the valley-most of whom happen to be Muslim but not all of whom are-beyond the pale of rightful consideration of their political demands. It made it too easy to equate their campaigns demanding political self-determination with what the Indian state-and its well-wishers including, currently, the government of the United States of America-to reduce them to a misguided movement under the thrall of Islamic fundamentalism. Some of this thinking is reflected in the resolution passed fairly recently in the United States’ Congress, declaring under the guidance of Mr. Frank Pallone, on not remotely sound reading of History, that Kashmiri Pandits-the “aboriginal” inhabitants of the valley-have been the victims of concerted violence against them”.

“And, of course, we have recently (Jan 7, 2012, The Deccan Herald) witnessed the drama performed by the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Farooq Abdullah, acting in callous disregard of the history of the state whose administration he did nothing to improve and only with his usual selfish concern for his own political ”family’s” flagging forturnes, not only “apologizing” but conceding that the departure of Kashmiri Pandits from the state constituted an act of “ethnic cleansing”, she said.

I asked her whether she believed there was complicity on part of Muslim population in Kashmir in the migration of Pandits, “Your question is a complicated one that collapses several claims. As a blunt answer such as your bald question invites, no, I do not believe there was complicity on the part of the wider Muslim population in Kashmir in the migration of Pandits. This is a grave question and needs much deeper and nuanced investigation than is available at present. But my first response will be one I have made before, elsewhere, viz that it is ludicrous to hold a whole majority population accountable for the deep loss that ‘their’ society suffered in conditions in which nobody’s existence in the Valley was remotely certain. What is even more callous is that that question is asked in the absence of examining the losses sustained by the Muslim majority of the Valley. It is an abominable exercise to pit human beings against each other, along lines of religious difference, in the way in which this narrative does. You would think that the experience of the Partition of 1947 would have taught South Asians to know better”.

According to government statistics, not more than 219 Pandits have been killed by separatist militants over the last two decades. Most of them died in the initial years of the armed uprising. In contrast, Muslim population of the valley had to bear the brunt of the conflict with more than 70,000 left dead. Thousands have disappeared. Many Muslim families became target of efforts to coerce the population into submission but they didn’t budge. Several Muslims too, like Pandits, received death threats over the last two decades but they didn’t leave Kashmir. We were taught that one can’t leave his/her home because one just can’t. The ache for home lives in all of us. It can’t be questioned or erased. The wounds inflicted on us haven’t and won’t heal but we have stood the ground. Our entire town was burnt down in 1995. There was no one to organise transport to ferry us to a safer location. We had to do it on our own, by braving bullets and jackboots of world’s largest democracy, to find a place to live in, moving from one house to another, till they razed our house to ground, and there was nothing left that we could return to. Only ashes.

But we stood our ground. We stood and built memories out of those ashes, out of the sordid ruins, out of those miseries, for they bring us solace, of what we are and what we have endured. We stood our ground and faced the consequences unlike the Pandits who escaped to safer habitats, leaving the valley and its people alone to the monsters on ground, to face them on its own. But face we did, we are still facing them, and we are proud of it. Unlike Pandits, we didn’t beg anyone to fight our causes. We fought our causes on our own, with whatever little armoury of resilience was left in us, in our own sublimely tragic ways.

Muslims in Kashmir have repeatedly asked Pandits to return to their homes, to live side by side with harmony and tranquillity with them but Pandit’s haven’t, for once, rallied for their cause, asking questions of the state that has subjugated the people in valley, demanding answers for the miseries that it has wrought upon them. Here I am, again asking you, beseeching them, to come back. Times have changed. Some of you who stayed back give us hope of a better tomorrow. They are the heroes of our struggle against communal forces. They make us proud and bring character to our cultural ethos. They remind us that Kashmir, one day, can and will again become a heaven on earth. That day will come, my dear Pandits, but you won’t be there to see it for yourself. Dear Pandits, what happened with you in 1990 was shameful and condemnable. Please return back if you still consider Kashmir as your home. We will welcome you with open arms.

In response to Aakar Patel

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:01:00 +0530

Media commentator Aakar Patel, who also co-owns a publishing and content outsource company in Mumbai, recently wrote in a Pakistani daily about the Kashmir freedom struggle and how India gets away despite its reign of oppression and coercion in the valley. For a change, Aakar is one of the voices from Indian mainstream who infuse a fresh life into the waning secular Indianess. However, his skewed proclamations where he raises questions like “What does azadi mean? It means freedom, of course. But freedom from what? (sic)”, which are not new to the Kashmir discourse, stink of ignorance and self-righteousness, and must be rebutted.

Aakar wrote that Kashmir freedom struggle evokes less or no sympathy from the western nations because of its religiosity. To put it bluntly, he sought to blame Islam for being a roadblock in the Kashmir freedom struggle whose intended goal is to achieve separation from India. Here one would like to ask Aakar whether he is trying to suggest that had the majority of Kashmiris been uncastrated monks in monasteries, the west would have considered the struggle secular enough to damn India for its brutality. How does he know?

Aakar’s obsession with the west and its model of “democracy” notwithstanding, which he aspires to follow studiously, he conveniently overlooks the fact that the west looks upon India as a booming market where it can sell its armaments and technology. India, the largest importer of arms in the world, is planning to enhance its stockpile by buying $100 billion worth of new weapons over the next 10 years. US, Israel and Europe are its major arms suppliers. Did Aakar even consider this? With what supremeness of logic does he expect the western countries to raise the issue of Kashmir with India and cut the hands that feed their economies?

Western nations aren’t concerned or don’t talk about human rights violations committed by security forces in Kashmir specifically because they don’t want to lose a lucrative market. If non-Islamism of freedom struggle was a factor for bringing conflicts into the focus of the west, why hasn’t the western media paid attention to the Maoist conflict that has bled the heart of India? Why the conflict in Sri Lanka wasn’t paid attention to by the west? Apart from the sloppy noises, why doesn’t Tibet come under the radar of the west’s so called morality dictating authorities? These questions Aakar doesn’t care to answer because they will raise more uncomfortable questions. Also, the western media doesn’t cover Kashmir with proper concern and continuance because it doesn’t want to meet the fate of The Economist!

Aakar also asks what is wrong with the Indian constitution. “It is not utopian, but it works”, he claims. “Kashmir’s leaders who demand azadi from India’s constitution should explain why they are rejecting it”. There are two points that will answer this question. One, that the Indian constitution works (and he is honest enough to admit that it works partially) doesn’t necessarily mean that the people on which it is enforced have no option but to go with the will of the majority and accept it. One evil doesn’t necessarily give moral superiority to the other, lesser evil.

Two, his partiality in addressing this issue raises crucial questions that lie at the heart of a raging debate on whether India is a secular democracy where all the citizens are treated as equals or whether India, as a soft fascist state, is prejudiced towards its large minority in times of duress and crisis, as has happened across the India where Muslims have been systematically targeted by the state agencies, particularly in cases of terrorism. The answers to these questions are anyone’s guess!

When it comes to the effectiveness of justice delivery institutions, nothing can explain the flaws of Indian constitution more than the fateful women of the Kunan Poshpora village who are waiting, even after 21 years of having been allegedly raped by security forces, to see their perpetrators punished. How can one explain the greatness of Indian constitution to them? How can one convince the mother of Sameer Rah who was trampled under the boots of the “world’s largest democracy” or to the 5000 odd families who wait for their victims of enforced disappearances to return home safely to believe in the greatness of Indian constitution? What about the 3000-odd half-widows who battle against hope to see their missing husbands come back from oblivion? What reprieve has the Indian constitution offered them?

It was a year after the partition of subcontinent when the Indian republic was yet to come into existence that the Indian Prime Minister, acknowledging the disputed nature of Kashmir issue, took it to United Nations. Now Mr Patel wants that Indian constitution to be shoved down the throats of Kashmiris if they don’t accept it. Had Aakar bothered to verify the facts, he would have known that Kashmiris have never cherished the rights granted by the “close-to-utopia” Indian constitution like the people living in India. Kashmiris challenge the applicability of Indian constitution in the valley precisely because it neither works in Kashmir nor does it provide the fruits of its greatness to the people the way it does to people living in India. For the last 22 years, the state has been held hostage by draconian laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act under which thousands of people have been killed and subjected to enforced disappearances. Why should Kashmiris even consider examining flaws of Indian constitution when it is nothing more than a source of torments for them?

Post Script: The western nations particularly the US of A have used the human rights issues to exercise its leverage over lesser blessed countries where it sniffs opportunities that can be utilised and useful resources that can be exploited. If only human suffering was enough to evoke sympathies of the west, we would have found NATO troops camping in Sierra Leone or Sudan instead of Libya and Afghanistan. They don’t come to save your humanity. They come to save their economies, their nations.

This article was carried by Express Tribune here. The original piece appeared in Express Tribune here.

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Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:31:08 +0530

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