PERSPECTIVES
Thinking Kashmir
Shiv Visvanathan
Waiting is so much a part of
everydayness, including waiting
for peace, waiting for your loved
ones to come home, waiting
for curfew to end, waiting for
the army to go home. Between
silence and waiting one can
create a narrative of the Kashmir
conflict. Unlike the Holocaust
or partition, which have the
gigantism of epic memories, the
sadness of Kashmir is forged,
crafted out of thousands of little
memories, unwritten diaries
merging quietly together. It is
this alchemy of memories that is
struggling against government
policy, which sanitises violence
and erases memory to create this
strange machine that moves from
violence to violence in
facile amnesia.
This project is an act of listening, of recording
conversations of a worried academic with a
small group of students from Kashmir. It seeks
through their suggestions an alternative set
of perspectives and categories that breaks the
current impasse where Kashmir has almost
given up on Indian democracy. Here, a scholar
listened and learned from his students. This
is a small harvest of his understanding of
Kashmir. Thanks to Poonam Zutshi, Peerzada
Raouf, Mohammed Tabish, Peerzada Muqeem
and Misria Ali for their insights.
Shiv Visvanathan (svcsds@gmail.com) teaches
at the O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat,
Haryana.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
A
t a seminar on Violence and
Forgiveness, psychologist Ashis
Nandy was chairing and listening
to presentations on Afghanistan, South
Africa, the United States (US) and other
communities. After listening carefully,
he commented on the hollowness of inter-
national relations as a discipline, claim-
ing that it was one of the emptiest efforts
at thinking. He emphasised the gap bet-
ween peace as a responsibility and the
clichd predictability of concepts like
security. Peace, Nandy hinted, needed a
different language, a different ethic of
self-reflectiveness, maybe even a different
idea of the social.
Nandys almost casually profound com-
ments sound almost lethally accurate
when we look at the discourse on security
studies in Kashmir. The redundancy and
repetitivity of concepts haunts these dis-
cussions in a way such that the discourse
on security perpetuates the violence in
Kashmir.
Kashmir as a story desperately needs
to be retold not as narrative about bound-
ary, insurgency, terror, and law and order,
but as an attempt to articulate a dream
of citizenship. One requires not a struc-
tural analysis of nation-building, but a
phenomenology of pain, suffering, an
anthropology of silence and memory,
with a semiotics of citizenship and protest,
and a peoples idea of democracy. There
is a tacit world of democracy that we must
understand, which stands between the
said and the unsaid that needs to com-
prehend language, silence, the body, and
the body language of pain and protest.
On Storytelling
Historians of partition will tell you that
stories about the violence often begin
with narratives about the train. The works
of Saadat Hasan Manto are a good exam-
ple. Often his stories would open with a
line such as, the train from Amritsar was
seven hours late. The train becomes the
vol liI no 38
site, the embodiment of genocidal vio-
lence, the repository of future memories.
Similarly, historians of Kashmir will one
day observe how the violence of the last
two decades began with the destruction
of childhood, with the childs first encou-
nter with the army, with the brutality of
the bully-boy state. They will tell you that
the callousness of the army destroyed
the innocence of childhood.
In fact, terror and security spell the
end of childhood. It is children and women
who remember violence in a poignant
way. There is something wonderful about
a child roaming free, enjoying a place.
Memories are made of such forays and
adventures. Friendships brew to a wonder-
ful intensity through such experiences.
Walking is the ultimate philosophical
statement on freedom. To walk free and
without threat is to be a citizen. Walking
freely is one of the greatest entitlements
of freedom and citizenship. To walk
without being questioned, to walk free is
virtually to dream free. When you sup-
press a walk, cage a body, you cage a
mind. Violence begins when you destroy
the innocence of walking. A colleague of
mine related his story to me:
Let me tell you something about myself.
When the army in Srinagar beat me up for
the first time, I was 10 years old. Ask me why
and I will tell you I dont know. I seriously
dont. I was just walking on the road and a
soldier decided to frisk me, then slap me,
and then he and his fellow mighty warriors
together kicked me. There was no social me-
dia then and I didnt threaten them The
second time I was still 10 years old. The third
time I was beaten up by the CRPF, I was still
10 years old, and the next sixteen times I was
beaten up I was still 10 years old.
What one reads here is a standard
socialisation story. It is rite of passage,
not into adulthood or citizenship, but
into what is an army town. There is little
ethnography of the first memories of
brutality and even less recognition of
the repeatedness of brutality. Often,
there is no reason for being frisked and
beaten up. It is what one would call the
tyranny of the streets. Earlier, there
would be an occasional local bully
threatening a childs existence. Bullies
were entities that we outgrow, but never
43
PERSPECTIVES
forget. However, when a bully becomes
official, a different form of organised
violence is born.
A bully has limits, but an army officer
as a bully, when he beats with impunity,
he behaves with immunity; he is no longer
a citizen. He is an uncontrollable tyrant,
a tyrant of the street, a part of a network
of tyranny we euphemistically call a secu-
rity apparatus. Kashmir warns you that
brutality corrupts, and absolute brutality
corrupts absolutely. The corruption of
violence is even more insidious than the
corruption of money. Terror is commodi-
fied brutality. Official terror is as much
terror as that of warring groups. State-
sponsored violence has no claims to
purity with which the security discourse
and the security industry attempt to
endow it.
Security
The word security also sanitises violence
in a dubious way. Official violence is con-
sidered as legitimate violence while the
violence of the opposition is demonised.
Such demonology often blinds one to the
evil within. The language used is of epi-
demiology, of eradicating vermin. Violence
becomes a form of hygiene, sanitising
spaces. But, as you managerialise and
technologise violence, you lose a sense
of the pain you cause, you miss the phe-
nomenology of brutality and suffering
and fail to understand the immediacy of
the experience. You talk of targets as if
they were production quotas. Body counts
and quotas hide violence, banalising
numbers as a kind of duty. So many
killed today has the innocence of a
weather report, an act of god.
The destruction of childhood, the
emptiness of waiting, the failure of the
political, and the eventual lack of hope
is what eats into the fate of Kashmir. At
this moment, the political class, instead
of responding creatively, creates what
might be called the eternal replay of
hopelessness. History is immediately
abbreviated and we confront the imme-
diate. Hysteria takes over and suspicions
loom large. Every Kashmiri becomes
suspect at that moment. The media as the
prime hysteric is never analysed. The
politics of anxiety is worked out as hard-
liners on both the sides claim prime
44
time. Stereotypes are repeated, clichs
abound, and they have nothing to do
with Kashmir as it exists.
Kashmir could be seething like a caul-
dron, but it is already a tabula rasa in a
Delhi that is more interested in the US
and Europe. Kashmir is distant from Delhi
given our elites imagined contiguity to
New York and London. A dogfight in
Brooklyn is far more important than a
hundred dead in Kashmir. Fake encoun-
ters create a managerial rationale with
which the elite are content. As Delhi
readies to see no evil in Kashmir, the
pain, the furious searching of the fami-
lies, the silence, the rituals of mourning,
the anger and loss of the survivors, and
the desperation of families is ignored. As
dissent, dissatisfaction, loss and anger
brew in Kashmir, our middle-class elite
pat their own backs for a job well done.
No politician seems to make a mistake in
Kashmir. Each protest is a potted history
untouched and unconnected to previous
histories. The politics of official narrative
is lethal as it is enacted by media and
policy experts. It is a politics of silence
and forgetting. No one bothers about
Kashmir between two protests. There is
a Vietnamisation of Kashmir that we do
not talk about. There is use of excessive
force that creates temporary normalcy.
As one uses lethal equipment against
our people, we justify excess by creating
a demonology around hardliners. No one
considers what happens inside each
family as thousands of young men are
arrested. No one writes about the fami-
lies waiting day after day at the police
station for their beloved ones.
Somehow, one senses that India does
not understand the politics of worrying
about your near and dear ones, the
memory of waiting to see whether they
have survived the days security checks,
the humiliation, the funeral of friends,
the brutality of the army, the million
micro rituals of memory that create
protest as we know it. It is this logic of
memory that the Government of India
dismisses lightly. Harassment, scrutiny,
intrusion, interference, beating, surveil-
lance, and humiliation, each memory
is etched on the mourning wall of
Kashmir, and the Government of India
pretends ignorance.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
Unlike the Holocaust or partition,
which have the gigantism of epic memo-
ries, the sadness of Kashmir is forged,
crafted out of thousands of little memo-
ries, unwritten diaries merging quietly
together. It is this alchemy of memories
that is struggling against government
policy, which sanitises violence and erases
memory to create this strange machine
that moves from violence to violence in
facile amnesia.
The body rather than the nation is the
real site of Kashmirs politics of being.
Violence, pain and memory are different
dialects inscribed on the body. A scar is
violence, pain, memory, and becomes a
polysemic mnemonic speaking all the
dialects of suffering. The body also em-
phasises vulnerability and companion-
ship. In not understanding the language
of the body, security experts land up
misreading the language of protest. The
way the army intrudes into the ethical
space of the body, imposing interroga-
tions and body searches, inflicting rape
and other forms of brutality, virtually
inaugurates the descent of the body into
the hell of the Kashmir imbroglio. The
body literally becomes an embodiment
of the fragility of personhood and citi-
zenship. Because one begins with mobs
and with the sense of the statistical, one
loses the sense of a bodys sense of being
and non-being in Kashmir.
If one begins with the language of the
body rather than with the abstractness
of concepts, one creates a space for empa-
thy and understands the many dialects
that silence, rage, despair, and hope
speak in Kashmir.
Silence and Waiting
Silence is an interior monologue with
oneself, trying to unravel decisions and
choices. Silence needs a lexicon, a set of
punctuation marks, a linkage to the sense
of the unconscious to be understood.
Democracy is too worried about partici-
pation and protest as overt behaviours
to be able to engage with silence. Silence
and waiting are located in time, but the
historical or political time of politics has
no sense of the subjectivities involved in
silence and waiting. The way a time
table for peace is proclaimed and altered,
as hope is repeatedly composted, needs
vol liI no 38 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

dialects of silence and waiting. Time,
both as a form of violence and healing,
needs to be considered. There is a poly-
semy to silence that the paranoia of a
security expert refuses to understand.
Silence has depth, a life of its own
articulating a relation that demands to
be understood, articulating a relation
between the said and the unsaid. A childs
silence and a womans silence speak diff-
erently. It embodies an interiority of
pain, a struggle with the citizenship of
despair that needs to be chronicled.
Silence has an interiority of which security
experts have little sense. This silence is
abject; it ferments with time, with wait-
ing, another ritual that needs a deep
ethnography.
Waiting has not received its literary
and philosophical due. A history of wait-
ing needs to be written around Kashmir.
Mourning articulates a sense of loss. It
has an architectonic of grief, a sense of
solidarity. Waiting is often solitary. It has
silences. Its punctuation marks are ago-
nising. The numbness of waiting blinds
one to the epic demands it makes on us.
Waiting is a dialect of its own, with its
own sense of the body, its own sense of
time, its own prayers of hope, and its
sense of futility.
Waiting is a form of disempowerment.
Waiting challenges the linearity of
chronological time. It is pregnant with a
different emptiness. Waiting defies the
industrialisation of time. Waiting resists
and resists control. There are no recipes
for waiting. There is no pocket watch to
measure waiting. Waiting embeds hope,
but the futility of waiting can curdle
hope. The history of waiting in Kashmir
is yet to be written. We have a cascade of
anecdotes, but once one grounds wait-
ing, protest becomes a more comprehen-
sible phenomenon. Kashmir, then, is
understood as a hyphenation of a string
of phenomenaloss of childhood, frus-
tration of youth, waiting, protest, mourn-
ing, and a semiotics of militancy still try-
ing to steer away from terror. The poli-
tics of everydayness needs to be mapped
before we confront more visible effects
like party, politics, and religion.
It is between silence and waiting that
one can create a narrative of the Kashmir
conflict. Kashmir is a conversation that
Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
has not taken place. It has been abbrevi-
ated, downsized, emasculated by a whole
array of attitudes, frameworks, categories,
and the failure of a cognitive, ethical,
and political imagination that needs to
be explored. The standard narratives of
the oppression of Dogra rule or the
so-called integration of 1947 do not keep
as narratives. The focus has all too often
been on nations and leadership, so that
Kashmir in terms of a local, vernacular
imagination, a decentred polity where
Delhi or Pakistan do not define and deter-
mine the terms of discourse, is unavailable.
A syncretism of old and new possibili-
ties is needed. The old-fashioned ideas
of conversation and adjustment might
make a new fashioned sense, as culture
comes to the aid of political experimen-
tation. Maybe, the speech of everyday
life and the virtue of listening need a
space again. All the aesthetic spaces of
art, craft, architecture, poetry, and even
religion in this aspect have to be opened
up to heal the violence of the time.
Official discourse has to look at itself
both as a reification of certainty and its
breakdown, chronicling the stumbling
that follows the discovery of expertise as
a form of illiteracy. Security experts see
violence as a temporary aberration, which
the forces of law and order will rectify.
The fact that this temporariness of vio-
lence has existed for over 50 years makes
time feel meaningless. It is only when
one creates a history of waiting, silence,
of humiliation, that one can grasp the
symbolism of stone-throwing.
Stones
A stone-pelter is seen as a sibling of a ter-
rorist, but, in fact, he is a citizen crying
out in despair. Terror is a statement that
disallows the possibility of rational dis-
cussion. There is anonymity to terror.
When a bomb goes off, one is not even
sure who will be destroyed. Terror dehu-
manises ethical space, while the stone-
pelter choreographs ethical space. The
body is the site of protest. He stands with
the crowd in solidarity, where each stone
thrown is a mix of appeal, rage and des-
pair, a desperate attempt to stir citizen-
ship into an act of agency. Stone-pelting
has a specific focus of protest. Terror is
almost random in its consequences.
vol liI no 38
PERSPECTIVES
Stone-throwing is a ballet of resistance,
a statement of protest going beyond sile-
nce. It is a peoples weapon easily wield-
able by an eight year old or an 18 year
old. It became a global semiotic act when
Palestinians used it. A stone expresses
the asymmetry between power and pow-
erlessness. Given the disparity between
stone and tank, stone-throwing is seen
as non-violence. For the Palestinians,
this was biblical irony as they reversed the
story of David and Goliath by playing
David armed with a slingshot against
the Israeli Goliath. A little stone and a
terrorist bombing are worlds apart, yet
they inevitably merge in the eyes of a se-
curitarian state. The stone was the
weapon of the weak against the strong.
If one witnesses an act of stone-throw-
ing, one senses the vulnerability of the
thrower. He is no match for gun, grenade
or pellet. It captures the spontaneity and
solidarity of the crowd, creating a tempo-
rary space, an environment of solidarity.
Yet, what one confronts is not recogni-
tion of the asymmetry of power, but a
statement of excess as the military unlea-
shes full force on the pelters. An army
unused to crowd control uses force or
defiance, creating heavy casualties. Yet,
it also creates a politics of protest, giving
the weak a sense of hope, an agency. Yet,
the semiotics of stone-throwing, whether
in Palestine or Kashmir, is deliberately
misunderstood. By twinning the stone-
pelter and the terrorist, one makes sure
that democracy has little space for
manoeuvre.
The very asymmetry of the stone
against the security forces creates a
drama invoking a sense of a childrens
crusade. Stone-throwing is a last desper-
ate statement of a non-violent people
pointing out that the institutions of
peace, of law and order, of appeal have
broken down. When institution-building
in terms of judiciary and rule of law
break down, then to assume the army is
engaged in nation-building seems surre-
al. Stone-throwing is a ritual of protest,
of solidarity, mingling all the loneliness
and silence of Kashmir. It combines a
sense of a wake and a carnival, a cathartic
act of desperate communication with
Delhi, a message that things could have
been different. It is a marker, where, on
45
PERSPECTIVES
one side lies the world of conversation,
empathy, negotiation, where face meets
face, and on the other side is the conti-
nent of terror where violence escalates
schizmogenetically.
Terror
The destruction of innocence begins with
childhood, but the repetition of violence,
the continued humiliations of ordinary
people that corrodes citizenship, spreads
like an epidemic through adolescence.
The ID card, which is a mark of citizen-
ship, becomes a marker of humiliation.
There is no such thing as a legitimate
citizen; there is only a legitimate card.
When identity becomes the pursuit of
constant identification, citizenship emp-
ties out further.
There is also reciprocity to violence that
one must understand. When one watches
security forces, especially the army, there
is a sense of the official, of men in uni-
form doing duty. There is a pomposity to
the rituals of the army. It is the very rituals
of intrusion, frisking, and constant sur-
veillance that make security an everyday
gauntlet of humiliation rather than an
assurance of entitlements. Security is
impersonal, brutish, organised and brutal.
It does not have the consoling power of
safety. Safety has warmth, while security
has emptiness. Safety grows with trust,
with a sense of reciprocity, of openness,
but security unfolds a panopticon, a
regime of surveillance. There is also a
paradox wherein the army, which is sup-
posed to protect us against the enemy,
the external threat, creates that pro-
found inversion where every resident is
a potential enemy.
Security, like terror, has an element of
organised excess, which makes the ritu-
als of democracy brittle. Security asks a
citizen to suffer security in silence.
Complaint, protest, anger, and irrita-
tion, which are all normal reactions of
normal citizens to intrusions in their
daily life, are now taboo. The silence of
citizenship as submission thickens till it
becomes a stew of anger, of overflowing
discontent. Security analysts see protest
as reactive, a knee-jerk response to
official violence. They fail to see the
sheer layers of grievance that have been
fermenting below.
46
To be subject to constant surveillance
is to live in constant humiliation and it is
the rituals of humiliation that lead to the
drama of protest. Memory becomes cru-
cial because all a child sees is constant,
redundant crudity of an army destroy-
ing the normalcy, the playfulness of citi-
zenship. Students walking together are
suspect. Couples stealing a romantic or
private moment are suspect. Citizenship
becomes empty and corrosive turning to
a perpetual irony of humiliation. All a
child remembers is the bullying, the bru-
tality and officiousness of the army.
To protest in such circumstances might
be a sign of health rather than that of
treason. When even basic rites and rituals
of civility are ignored, a citizen has to
protest. A Thoreau or a Gandhi or a Vclav
Havel could argue that. You do not need
the shrillness of a Yasin Malik. In this
moment of humiliation and isolation,
the crowd, the warmth, the eloquence of
the crowd becomes the only Linuss
Blanket of consolation.
To pelt together, to protest together is
often to restore a sense of being together.
A crowd becomes a larger than life version
of yourself and, because it is larger, the
army might think twice before touching
you. Pelting a stone against the state is
like unfurling the inner flag of freedom
in yourself. In its compressed concrete-
ness, a stone carries the tangibility of
humiliation and the potency of protest.
Maybe, only a Frances Ponge can celeb-
rate it. You do not throw a stone. In a
ritual of protest, you pelt it. The
togetherness of stones is semiotically the
togetherness of helpless citizens. The
army, Delhi, and our think tanks are too
illiterate to understand it.
If I were to write a history of freedom,
create a museum of resistance, I would
begin with a pile of stones. Our experts
forget that when a child pelts a stone,
they are questioning authority in a
transparent way because what a stone
communicates is their sense of despair,
vulnerability, and their feeling of brittle-
ness before the pomposity and brutality
of the state. A stone is a mnemonic, a re-
minder to the state of all it has ignored
or been indifferent to. Why does a stone
acquire lethal quality only in Kashmir?
Stone-throwing crowds are a dime a
SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
dozen in India, and our police handle
them every day. Yet, in Kashmir, every
stone pelted becomes a lethal threat to
the state. Security always plays on the
irrationality of anxiety. Hysteria, as the
official hyperbole, destroys any rationality
or reflexiveness in the response. The
worlds of distance, the many utopias of
expectation and hope between a grenade
and stone are fused irreversibly in the
discourse of security.
Protest is often the drama of the body
asking the body politic to return to its
former integrity. Protest knows it is a
flow that can dissipate or dry up. Protest
knows its temporariness. Yet, it tries to
reach out to the government as a scream,
a cry of anger in pain, a distilled move-
ment of agony telling a regime that sen-
sitivity and speech are still possible.
What is a symptom of pain is read as an
index of threat, what is an attempt to
speak a dialect of democracy is now read
as a threat. The very act of misreading
protest forecloses the possibility of demo-
cracy. The security specialists in Delhi,
oozing their technocratic machismo,
might be a greater threat to democracy
than any crowd in Kashmir. It is time
that democratic theory psychoanalyses
the language of security for its anxieties
about democracy as disorder, its lack of
trust in the resilience of a people. When
one of my students says, I protest so I
can remain Kashmiri and Indian, the
tone deaf establishment refuses to listen.
Kashmirs years of protest were choked
in silence, while news of terror is imme-
diately amplified by the state itself. Pro-
test is the spontaneous violence of the
crowd, while terror is organised, calcu-
latedly excessive, and sees protest as
effete, even feminine. Terror summons im-
mediate media attention. Protest might
be quickly subdued and forgotten. Protests
in Kashmir have gone tired with waiting.
The noise of protest, the scream, the
shout, the eloquence of the clenched fist,
the crescendo of pain often mutes the
other tropes associated with itsilence,
waiting, searching, the agony of helpless-
ness. If protest is an interjection mark, it
is calibrated by silences, the silence of
living in a regime that does not know
how to relate or respond, the everyday
waiting, hoping your menfolk and
vol liI no 38 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

children will come home, realising that
the label missing is a blanket rubric for
all the violence, and the forms of dying.
Rape needs no justification. Beating a
citizen unconscious is celebrated as sov-
ereignty. It is the power of immunity
which allows you to invade and destroy
a body. Waiting is not just waiting for
family; it is waiting for normalcy, wait-
ing for the violence to end. Waiting and
silence are stretched in time. On the one
side memory thickens with each blow,
each act of humiliation, and on the other
side, power is an act of forgetting what
one has done to a people. It is as if Kash-
mir has to nurse its trauma, its wounds
in silence, waiting for justice, waiting for
normalcy, waiting for citizenship.
I remember two students of mine, one
who pretends Kashmir does not exist,
and the other who acts as if her Kashmir
died decades ago. One erases being, one
exiles being to an untouchable past. But,
for both, cauterising Kashmir is better
than waiting for normalcy to return.
Between silence and erasure, they have
wished away a problem. Two Pandits
who seem to say, I lobotomise therefore
I am. Doubly exiled, from Kashmir and
from India, they are creating a double
antiseptic that sanitises pain. Two won-
derful Kashmiris, who began by feeling,
I am from Kashmir, therefore I am,
two decades later, they admit quietly, I
erase, therefore the rest of me can be.
I still remember another story of a
physicist, a Kashmiri Kaul, who preached
Immanuel Kant and worked on particle
physics. He epitomised secularism, eulogi-
sed a secular Kashmir. His identity badge
was his secularism and his science. I met
him 10 years later and his language had
changed. It was one of loss, of mourning
for the fate of the Kashmiri Pandit. His
secularism had shrunk and all he could
talk about was the fate of his community.
As one watched him, quickly one sensed a
double missingnessthe missingness of
his community waving quietly to the miss-
ingness of his former self. Kashmir is a
compound of too many small tragedies,
erosions, erasures and suffering like a
skin that bears the traces of each damage.
One has to admit that the right and
left battering each other over symbolic
capital does not exhaust the polysemy of
Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
Kashmir. Kashmir is a model for under-
standing different cultures. One sees this
in the politics of memory as the politics
of representation in art, poetry, film and
photographyan examination of the
potential.
Memory can be problematic enough,
but the politics of memory can be even
more traumatic. When pain becomes an
ideology, it moves from fundamentals to
fundamentalism. It literally decides who
can suffer and who can theorise about
pain. In this battle of the left and right,
Sahmat and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, authenticity lies at right angles to
ideology. Neither side realises that pain
is a commons, that suffering cannot be
patented. It is not the exclusive monopoly
of a people. Each side problematises the
other in claiming to itself the cosmopoli-
tanism of pain and justice. Where one
sees pain, the other dubs as tactics, what
one calls history, the other dubs as erasure.
As an old friend of mineU R Anan-
thamurthy, a storytelleronce warned
me, storytelling is creative and plural.
One cannot provincialise pain. Pain needs
vernaculars and dialects. Pain needs a
cosmopolitanism of solidarity, of empa-
thy, where Kashmir can understand
Lebanon, Bosnia, and can seek to grasp
an Auschwitz. What one needs is the
plural memory that talks of all sides.
Memory anticipates justice and when
memory is one-sided or replete with
erasure, justice is doomed. There is no
Pandit justice or Muslim justice. There is
justice, but there is a Muslim narrative
and a Pandit narrative. To destroy
storytelling is to emasculate justice.
Truth-telling and storytelling create the
preludes for justice.
If you want to make Kashmir a part of
India, then you cannot have a Kashmir
with caveats and qualifications, a Kashmir
under laboratory conditions. A Kashmir
open to media has to be a plural Kashmir,
and a plural India. We cannot have a
whole that is less than the parts. We can-
not have a nation state that imposes
strictures on every aspect of Kashmir. A
civilisational Kashmir and a civil society
Kashmir has to be part of a triptych with
the Kashmiri state. Secularism and syn-
cretism will be both parts of the new
order. If memory is a forest of symbols,
vol liI no 38
PERSPECTIVES
the state cannot reduce it to a meagre
garden. Memory and erasure haunt Kash-
mir in equal measure. Democracy as an
act of storytelling has to create the rights,
the spaces for each kind of memory.
The low voter turnout has to be seen
in this same symbolic vein. Kashmiris
who flocked to earlier elections are now
saying elections mean little if they are
decontextualised from the rest of demo-
cracy. A single digit turnout is surreal
within an Indian situation. Once again,
it is a clear-cut statement that democracy
is not working and security has brutalised
democracy. The confidence in India as a
democratic project is decreasing. It is
when India loses the semiotic battle that
Kashmir will be lost. The voter turnout
is a last, desperate early warning signal
that India is bumbling over Kashmir. One
has to recognise the nature of the scandal.
To paper it over and say that fear was the
key, is to refuse to understand a people.
To read every act of collective mourn-
ing as a message of militancy is obtuse.
What Delhi needs is not a security con-
sultant parading body counts as a sign of
effectiveness, but a hearing aid, a trans-
lator or a communication expert who
reads a scream as a cry of agony uttered
by a human being in pain. Surely, citizen-
ship is entitled to that. Maybe, Kashmir
just needs someone to reach out and
console it, to emphasise compassion that
clinical concepts of violence control may
not possess. Maybe, it needs someone to
remind us all that prayer and protest as
acts still emerge within a domain of faith,
while terror might have moved beyond it.
Suggestions for Peace
There are two immediate projects one
can suggest. The first is a greater inter-
vention of civil society in Kashmir. I am
not arguing merely for a civil rights
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47
PERSPECTIVES
report. Such an investigation has an epi-
sodic value, but, once complete, it almost
becomes discontinuous with society. The
rest of India has to open out to Kashmir,
bridge the world between the inanity of
tourism and the emptiness of terror. One
has to recover the everydayness between
such spaces by reimagining Kashmir. For
example, universities could create sum-
mer schools in Kashmir, research collab-
orations, and small rituals of exchange
where Kashmir is not always reduced to
a problem. Peace has to begin in the
playfulness of mutual discovery.
The university as a world of knowledge
systems owes a particular apology to
Kashmir for constructing a field called
security studies. As a mix of policy obje-
ctification and machismo, security stud-
ies is a travesty of a knowledge system,
more a servant of power rather than an
analysis of it. It is full of clichs clothed
in paranoia, which perpetuates the
banality of the analysis.
Kashmir has to become a site for a
debate between democracy and the
national security state. Terror and its
companion security have to be faced,
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48
questioned and that act of questioning
has to be transparent. In fact, Kashmir
has to become a site where the demo-
cratic imagination renews and experi-
ments with concepts like development,
security, and sustainability. Everydayness
creates new narratives, where the sheer
act of conversation, listening and story-
telling creates the possibility of alterna-
tives. Sometimes the world of expertise
reifies reality, creates an artificial lang-
uage that shuts out the world of every-
dayness, of ordinary language, the
wisdom of common sense, and shrugging
of messages from it as if they were hypo-
chondria. Through this act, it sustains
the iatrogenic nature of problem-solving,
where the analyst has to become the
case study. Unfortunately, humility and
expertise rarely go together.
A student of minea young poet
struggling with Kashmir and international
relations as a masters subjectput it
acutely: Peace, he said, cannot be objec-
tive, something rational derived from a
social contract or based on a costbenefit
analysis. Rationality has its place but one
needs something polysemic and plural.
EPWRF India Time Series
SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
Peace cannot be linear; it must be a com-
posite with the strength of composites.
Peace must be contradictory, multifacet-
ed, full of tensions, and wants and gos-
sip so that one can quarrel, debate and
engage with it. Peace, he seemed to sug-
gest, needed competing theories of soci-
eties and through an act of complemen-
tarity, peace emerged.
Even grumbling about peace is an
engagement with peace. It becomes a
way of being involved with it. It must
have something for everyone to own up
to. It must be constitutional, but built
out of tacit categories, and understand
everydayness. Peace is not a target, it is
a process. It is not a building, but a tool
and a toy, like a kaleidoscope. It is both
robust and fragile; after all, a kaleido-
scope is a bit of cardboard, a few rubber
bands, a bunch of broken bangles stick-
ing hopefully together. Peace is a per-
petual hypothesis, tested and verified
every day. A peoples peace cannot be an
experts peace. Kashmir is a plea, an
invitation for civil society to invent a
durable peace. It is a gift to the future of
Indian democracy.
Features
Presents All-India
and state-wise
annual data from
1980 onwards.
Structured in six
major sections :
Demography
Health Status
Infrastructure
Human Resources
Health Education
Health Finance
vol liI no 38 EPW Economic & Political Weekly