Book Extract: Throbbing with ‘Undefeated Despair’

If we look at today’s India and see how the State chooses to quell people’s struggles and rebellions against the many injustices— through tyrannical methods of thrashing, intimidating and arresting activists, intellectuals, media persons and minorities—there is a feeble but uncanny resemblance with Kashmir. Ironically, while the Modi government is trying to integrate Kashmir, what it is effectively doing is making India an extension of Kashmir. In terms of dilution of India’s federal polity and civil liberties, media regulation policy and tyrannical methods of dealing with protestors and rebellions with a slew of illegal detentions and vilification campaigns, the Indian mainland is experimenting with the Kashmir model elsewhere.

In May 2021, the Lakshadweep administration arbitrarily and unilaterally tweaked land laws, which is feared to have dispossessed local tribals of their homes and hearths and paved the way for obnoxious ‘development’ by industry and realtors. No consultations with locals and no environmental assessment. Every time a Kashmir-type experiment is replicated in some form and scale in another part the country, Kashmiris are quick to notice the similarities. A common refrain in Kashmir is that they came to integrate Kashmir into India, but it looks like they are integrating the rest of India into Kashmir. The downslide of democracy and civil liberties in mainland India is not so frightening yet, and there are still hopes of resistance struggles at the grassroots to keep that in check. But unlike in the rest of the country, there is still enough nationwide acceptance of the tyranny in Kashmir, with its cumulative mess of festering sores and an unsettled dispute. A resolution of the dispute in Kashmir, not as a piece of territory shared between India, Pakistan and China but in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the people was always central to peace and the relevance of South Asia on the global map. It should have and could have happened long ago, but it didn’t, for lack of statesmen in both New Delhi and Islamabad. The scrapping of Article 370 has sealed the paths to peace because that formed the basis of any engagement with Kashmiris for an amicable resolution of the Kashmir conflict. Even if India’s journey towards a Hindu Rashtra is halted and reversed—a possibility—it is naïve to expect that Kashmir could [share] the same destiny.

In the past seventy years, J&K’s autonomy and democracy have witnessed only erosion, not [restoration], through a string of betrayals. The final betrayal, with far-reaching consequences on its socio-economic and political landscape, has annihilated even the tiniest speck of pretence of democracy. As a consequence, there is neither any hope of a resolution nor the desire in Kashmir Valley to remain linked to India. By taking away J&K’s special status, India stands to be the bigger loser, as it has completely stonewalled a longer, lasting peaceful resolution. The Indian government can use all its power to subjugate and suppress the local peoples in J&K and their multiple and complex aspirations for now, but it cannot sustain this till eternity.

In the long term, the present situation could throw up two major challenges. One is that the increasingly acute aversion to India in Kashmir will reshape the existence of Jammu and Kashmir, with its regional and religious diversity, as an entity. Would the two regions of Kashmir and Jammu drift away, or could there be a possibility of shared solidarities replacing traditional inter-regional and inter-religious divisions as Jammu’s pro-Indian and even pro-Hindu rightwing tendencies begin to dwarf under the weight of the collateral damage its population is suffering, as has happened in Ladakh? Less likely. Unlike Kargil and Leh, where ethnic identity is a unifying factor, Kashmir and Jammu regions have different geography, history, politics and identities. Yet, the possibility cannot be ruled out.

As Prof. Siddiq Wahid, a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi said, “When centrifugal forces start to assert, centripetal forces start to react, and there could be a feeble probability of finding places of the latter coalescing.” The second challenge is the strategic concern within South Asia to the detriment of India, which could be left firefighting on the borders with a hostile population within. In the fragile setting of Kashmir, this is like dumping fuel that could trigger an inferno of unimaginable proportions. Massive discontent within, sustained by choking the residues of democratic spaces and civil liberties, is a potent stimulant for local insurgencies, which, in the context of the fragile relations with both Pakistan and China, could become India’s undoing. Any prolonging of these border conflicts could spiral out of control.

Prof. Noor Ahmad Baba, Central University of Kashmir, warns that the existing and defining mood of despair and fear in the Valley today has the potential of radicalising some sections of Kashmiri society. Given the emerging global and South Asian scenario, it would compel the Indian government to rethink both its Kashmir strategy and foreign policy, he said, and added: “There are huge implications as both internal and external factors signal a proposition of immense loss, which India can ill afford.”

At present, Kashmir throbs with a silence that is pervasive. Those imprisoned within exist like living corpses even as they go about their daily lives, illustrating John Berger’s concept of ‘undefeated despair’, which he used to describe the survival skills of ordinary Palestinians. As they try to make sense of the new reality, Kashmiris continue to live as they have ever, celebrating marriages or births, cracking jokes, getting together, even as they try to resist through art, poetry, writing, congregating and even maintaining silence. Across J&K, seeds of consciousness, contemplation and introspection are germinating in the minds of the people, particularly the younger generation, and finding some escape in conversations of varied hues. Silence is being broken by feeble murmurs of disappointment, despair, anger and dissent, much of which remain within the confines of private walls.

It [has] some visibility in social media, and shows in writing, art and feeble protests, even if all this is brutally stamped by novel methods of suppression. The silence stems not only from fear but also the knowledge of what Kashmiris are pitted against and from pragmatism, waiting for the avalanche to subside. Breathing beneath the [colossal] silence is a deceptive volcano, which could erupt in a chaos of different forms and varied voices. What would be its most dominant articulation—a frightening, violent rage or a kaleidoscope of ideas and vision? That moment is yet to come.

Today, Kashmir finds itself sapped of hope at the cusp of doom. What filters in some optimism are lessons from history: that things never remain static forever and that global economic and political discourse, dictated by greater powers, has the potential to change the fate of a far-off, insignificant region, though often not without adverse implications. But if and when the global and regional tectonic plates begin to shift, J&K’s foray into a zone of optimism will not only take time, it will also come at a price. It will neither be easy nor bloodless.

At this point in time, what is known is that this god-forsaken land is condemned to multiply its baggage of trauma and grief—with or without bloodshed.