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‘This injustice will not go on forever’: Arundhati Roy writes to her jailed friend GN Saibaba

Arundhati Roy writes to Saibaba courtesy Scroll.in

To
Professor GN Saibaba
July 17, 2020
Anda Cell
Nagpur Central Jail
Nagpur
Maharashtra

Dear Sai,

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is me, Arundhati writing to you and not Anjum. You wrote to her three years ago and she most certainly owes you a reply. But what can I say – her sense of time is entirely different from yours and mine, leave alone the speedy world of Whatsapp and Twitter. She thinks nothing of taking three years to reply to a letter (or not). Right now, she has locked herself in her room in the Jannat Guest House and spends all her time singing.

The remarkable thing is that after all these years she has started singing again. Just walking past her door listening to her makes me glad to be alive. Every time she sings Tum Bin Kaun Khabariya Mori Lait (Who Other Than You Asks Me How I Am?) it breaks my heart a little. And it makes me think of you. When she sings it, I’m sure that she too is thinking of you. So even if she doesn’t write back, you should know that she often sings to you. If you concentrate hard enough perhaps you will be able to hear her.

When I spoke of our sense of time it was wrong of me to have so easily said “yours and mine” – because surely serving a life sentence in the dreaded Anda Cell makes your sense of time closer to Anjum’s than to mine. Or maybe it’s very different from hers too. I’ve always thought that the phrase “doing time” in the English language meant something far more profound than the slangy way in which its used. Anyway, sorry for my thoughtless remark. In her own way, Anjum is serving a life sentence too, in her graveyard – her life of “Butcher’s Luck”. But of course, she doesn’t live behind bars or have a human jailor. Her jailors are djinns and her memories of Zakir Mian.

Khaki Fiction

I’m not asking how you are, because I know from Vasantha. I’ve seen the detailed medical report. It’s unthinkable that they will not grant you bail or even parole. In truth, not a day goes by when I don’t think about you. Are they still censoring your newspapers and withholding books? Do the fellow prisoners who help you with your daily routine stay in your cell, do they take shifts? Are they friendly? How is your wheelchair holding up? I know it was damaged when they arrested you –kidnapping you on your way home as though you were a dangerous criminal. (We can only be grateful that they didn’t Vikas Dubey you in “self-defence” and say that you grabbed their gun and sprinted away carrying your wheelchair under one arm. We should have a new literary genre don’t you think – Khaki Fiction. There’s enough material to hold an annual litfest. The prize money would be good and some of the more neutral judges from our neutral courts would do excellent service here too.)

I remember those days when you would visit me and the cab drivers across the street from my home would help carry you up the steps to my wheeIchair unfriendly flat. These days there’s a street dog on each of those steps. Chaddha Sahib (father), Banjarin (gypsy mother) and their puppies Leela and Seela. They were born during the Covid lockdown and seem to have decided to adopt me. But post the Covid lockdown our cab driver friends are all gone. There’s no work. The cabs are dusty and unwashed. Slowly taking root, growing branches and leaves. Small people have disappeared from the streets of big cities. Not all. But many. Millions.

I still have those tiny bottles of pickle you made me. I will wait for you to come out and share a meal with me before I open them. They are maturing nicely.

I meet your Vasantha and Manjira only occasionally, because the weight of our combined sadness makes those meetings hard. It’s not just sadness of course, it’s anger, helplessness and, on my part, a kind of shame too – shame that we have not been able to make enough people see how unjust your situation is – how immensely cruel it is to keep a man who is certified with a 90% disability in prison, convicted of having committed some ludicrous crime. Shame for not being able to do anything to speed up your appeal through the labyrinth of our judicial system which makes the process the punishment. I’m sure the Supreme Court will eventually acquit you. But by the time that happens, what a price you –and yours – will have paid.

As Covid-19 lays siege to prison after prison in India, including yours, they know, that given your condition, a life sentence could so easily become a death sentence.

So many others, including some of our common friends – students, lawyers, journalists, activists – with whom we have laughed, broken bread as well as bitterly argued, are now in prison. I don’t know if you have had news about VV (I’m talking of Varavara Rao – in case your jail censors think it’s a code for something). Putting that grand 81-year-old poet in jail is like putting a modern monument in jail. The news about his health is very worrying. After days of ill health that largely went ignored, he has tested Covid positive and has been admitted into hospital. His family who visited him says that he was lying alone and unattended on soiled sheets, that he is incoherent and unable to walk. Incoherent! VV! The man who thought nothing of addressing crowds of tens thousands, the man whose poems fired the imagination of millions in Andhra and Telengana, and all across India.

I fear for VV’s life, just as I fear for yours. Many of the others accused in the Bhima Koregaon case – “the Bhima Koregaon eleven” – are not very well and are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19 too. Vernon Gonsalves who looked after VV in prison must be at particularly grave risk. Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde were in the same prison too. But again and again the courts refuse bail. Then there’s Akhil Gogoi locked up in Gauhati who has tested positive.

What a small-hearted, cruel, intellectually fragile (or should we just go ahead and say fearsomely stupid) regime we are ruled by. How pathetic it is for the government of a country as vast as ours to be so scared of its own writers and scholars.

Music, poetry, love

Just a few months ago it really seemed that things were going to change. Millions came out against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Students especially. It was thrilling. There was music, poetry and love in the air. A rebellion at least at last – even if not a revolution. You would have loved it.

But it has all ended badly. The entirely peaceful anti-CAA protestors are now being blamed for the massacre of 53 people in Northeast Delhi in February. That it was a planned attack is obvious from the videos of armed gangs of vigilantes, often backed by the police, rioting, burning and murdering their way through those working class neighbourhoods. The tension had been building for a while, so local people were not unprepared, and fought back.

But of course, as always, the victims have been turned into perpetrators. Under cover of the Covid lockdown, hundreds of young men, mostly Muslim, including several students, have been arrested in Delhi as well as Uttar Pradesh. There are rumours that some of the young folks who have been picked up are being forced to implicate other senior activists against whom the police have no real evidence.

The fiction writers are busy with an elaborate new story. The narrative is that the Delhi massacre was a grand conspiracy to embarrass the government while President Trump was in Delhi. The dates the police have come up with suggest that those plans were laid even before Trump’s visit was finalised – that’s how deeply entrenched in the White House anti CAA activists must be! And what kind of conspiracy was it? Protestors killing themselves in order to give the government a bad name?

Everything is upside down. It’s a crime to be murdered. They’ll file a case against your corpse and summon your ghost to the police station. As I write, news comes in from Araria in Bihar of a woman who has filed a police complaint saying she was gangraped. She has been arrested along with the women activists who were with her.

Some of the disturbing things that are happening don’t always have to do with bloodshed, lynching, mass killing and mass incarceration. A few days ago, a group of people – thugs – in Allahabad forcibly spray painted a whole row of private houses saffron and then covered them with huge images of Hindu deities against the wishes of the owners. For some reason, this made my blood run cold.

Truly, I don’t know how much further along this road India has left to go.

When you come out of prison you will find yourself in an utterly changed world. Covid-19 and the hastily called and ill thought-out lockdown has been devastating. Not just for the poor, for the middle class too. Including the Hindutva Brigade. Can you imagine giving a nation of 1.38 billion people just four hours’ notice (from 8 pm to midnight) before announcing a nation-wide curfew-like lockdown that went on for months?

Literally everything had to stop in its tracks, people, goods, machines, markets, factories, schools, universities. Smoke in chimneys, trucks on the roads, guests at weddings, treatment in hospitals. With absolutely no notice. This huge country was shut off like a clockwork toy whose spoilt rich kid owner just pulled out the key. Why? Because he could.

Covid-19 has turned out to be a kind of X-Ray that made visible the massive institutionalised injustices – of caste, class, religion and gender – that plague our society. Thanks to the disastrously planned lockdown, the economy has nearly collapsed, although the virus has travelled and thrived. It’s feels as though we’re living through a frozen explosion. The shattered pieces of the world as we knew it are all suspended in the air… we still don’t know where they will land and the real extent of the damage.

Millions of workers stranded in cities with no shelter, no food, no money and no transport walked for hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles home to their villages. As they walked they were beaten and humiliated by the police. Something about that exodus reminded me of John Steinbecks’ The Grapes of Wrath… I recently re-read it. What a book.

The difference between what happened in that novel (which is about the great migration during the years of the Depression in the US) and here, is what appears to be an almost complete absence of anger among the people here in India. Yes, there has been the occasional angry outburst, but nothing that couldn’t be managed. It’s almost chilling how everybody accepts their lot. How obedient people are. It must be such a comfort to the ruling class (and caste) – this seemingly endless capacity of ‘the masses’ to suffer and obey. But is this quality – this ability to accept suffering a blessing or a curse? I think about this a lot.
While millions of working-class people embarked on their long march home, the TV channels and the mainstream media suddenly discovered the phenomenon of the “migrant worker”. Many corporate-sponsored crocodile tears were shed at their plight, as reporters thrust microphones into peoples’ faces as they walked: “Where are you going? How much money do you have? How many days will you walk?”

But you, like so many of the others who have been imprisoned, campaigned for years against the very machine that created this dispossession and this poverty, the machine that ravaged the environment and forced people to flee their villages. While all of you who spoke up for justice – many of those same TV channels, in some cases those very same journalists and commentators – celebrated that machine. They denounced you, stigmatised you, labelled you. And now, while they weep their crocodile tears and worry about the negative 9.5% growth predicted for India’s GDP – all of you are in jail.

Even through those tears the applause in the media for every move this government makes never dies down. Occasionally it swells into a standing ovation. The first novel I read during the lockdown was Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman. (Grossman was on the frontlines with the Red Army. His second book, Life and Fate displeased the Soviet government and the manuscript was “arrested” – as though it was a human being.) It’s an audaciously ambitious book, the kind of audacity that cannot be taught in creative writing classes.

Anyway, the reason I thought of it is because of an extraordinary description in it of a meeting between a senior Nazi Army officer who has been flown in to Berlin from the frontlines of the war in Russia. The war has already begun to go very wrong for Germany, and the officer is meant to brief Hitler about the ground reality. But when he comes face to face with him, he is so terrified and so thrilled to meet his master that his mind shuts down. It scrabbles around furiously for ways to please the Fuehrer, to tell him what he wants to hear.

That’s what’s going on in our country. Perfectly competent brains are frozen with fear and the desire to flatter. Our collective IQ is plummeting. Real news doesn’t stand a chance.

Meanwhile the pandemic rages on. It’s not a coincidence that the winners of the sweepstakes for the worst-affected nations in the world are those led by the three geniuses of the early twenty-first century. Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro. Their motto, in the now immortal words of the Delhi Chief Minister (who has begun to buzz around the Bharatiya Janata Party like a pollinating bee) is: Hum ab friends hai na?

Trump is very likely to be voted out of office in November. But in India there’s no help on the horizon. The Opposition is crumbling. Leaders are quiet, cowed down. Elected state governments are blown away like froth on a cup of coffee. Treachery and defections are the subject of gleefully reported daily news. MLAs continue to be herded together and locked up in holiday resorts to prevent them from being bribed and bought over. I think that those that are up for sale should be publicly auctioned to the highest bidder. What do you say? Of what use are they to anybody? Let them go. And let’s face up to the real thing: we are, in effect, a One-Party Democracy ruled by two men. I don’t think many even realise that that’s an oxymoron.

During the lockdown so many middle-class people complained that they felt like they were in prison. But you of all people know how far from the truth that is. Those people were at home with their families (although for many, particularly women, that ended in all sorts of violence). They were able to communicate with their loved ones, they could go on with their work. They had phones. They had the internet. Not like you. And not like the people in Kashmir who have been under a sort of rolling lockdown and internet siege since August 5 last year when Section 370 was abrogated and the state of Jammu and Kashmir lost its special status and its Statehood.

If the two-month Covid lockdown has been such a huge blow to the economy in India, think of Kashmiris who have had to endure a military lockdown along with an internet siege that has lasted for the most part of a year. Businesses are collapsing, doctors are hard pressed to treat their patients, students are unable to attend online classes. Also, thousands of Kashmiris were jailed before August 5 last year. It was pre-emptive – preventive detention. Now those prisons full of people who have committed no crime, are becoming Covid incubators. How about that?

The abrogation of Section 370 was an act of hubris. Instead of settling the matter “once and for all” which was the boast, it has unleashed a sort of rumbling earthquake in the whole region. Big plates are moving and realigning themselves. According to those in the know, the Chinese PLA has crossed the border, the LAC, at several points in Ladakh, and occupied strategic positions. War with China is a whole different ballgame from war with Pakistan. So, the usual chest-thumping is little nuanced –more like gentle patting than thumping. Talks are on. So far of course, India is winning. On Indian TV. But off TV, a new world order is making itself known.
This letter is getting longer than I intended it to be. Let me say goodbye for now. Have courage dear friend. And patience. This injustice will not go on forever. Those prison doors will open and you will come back to us. Things cannot go on like this. If they do, the speed at which we are coming undone will develop a momentum of its own. We won’t need to do a thing. If that happens, it will be an epic tragedy on an unimaginable scale. But from the ruins hopefully something kinder and more intelligent will rise.

With love,
Arundhati

Pakistan's Covid-19 strategy is to open Kashmir issue

In Urdu

After fanning Civil War in Libya, Erdogan turns to Jammu & Kashmir

Rooh e Kashmir - The results of an investigation

Cash for Violence in Kashmir and recent developments on Kashmir Issue - Hamid Bashani

Muslims and Kashmiris

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

IN the aftermath of the anti-Ahmadi violence in the 1950s, Maulana Abul Hasanat Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Qadri, President of Jamiatul Ulema-i-Pakistan, demanded an Islamic state in Pakistan. And he deposed before the Justice Munir Commission that looked into the violence.

Q: You will admit for the Hindus, who are in a majority in India, (a similar) right to have a Hindu religious state?

A: Yes.

Q: Will you have any objection if the Muslims are treated under that form of government as Malishes (Mlechhas) or Shudras under the law of Manu?

A: No.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman heads a faction of the Jamiat today. I gained a nodding acquaintance with the maulana when, for a reason difficult to fathom at the time, he became a regular interlocutor with Indian journalists visiting Pakistan. The maulana’s portly bearing and merry laughter had a likeness to Friar Tuck whose Robin Hood, albeit too briefly, Musharraf had become. A version of the English legend has the monk fording the river in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood on his back when, in midstream, for no apparent reason, he hurled his friend into the freezing waters. That’s more or less what the maulana is said to have done with Musharraf. 

In recent days, the cleric from the doctrinaire Deoband school of Muslim theology has been raging at Imran Khan, accusing the prime minister of insincerity towards the Kashmiri people facing Indian high-handedness since Aug 5. The stance is double-edged.

Fazlur Rehman has friends in high places with the Indian government. Besides, he has the entire Jamiatul Ulema-i-Hind (JUH) and the Deoband seminary eating out of his hands. Atal Behari Vajpayee embraced him and Manmohan Singh welcomed him to the prime ministerial residence. This was around the time when Benazir Bhutto was struggling to get an appointment with Vajpayee in New Delhi, when, as the grapevine had it, she was seeking his intervention to iron things out with Gen Musharraf.

Important Pakistani visitors from the left and liberal corner have not had the ease of access to the prime minister’s office in recent years as the maulana did. His equation with the Modi establishment is not clear, but given the Indian prime minister’s chummy relationship with the rulers of Saudi Arabia — a common link between Rehman and the JUH — it’s not difficult to imagine an agreeable prospect.

The fact that the maulana would routinely drive off to the Deoband seminary, not far from the Indian capital, following his official sojourns, suggests a link between the two stops. That P. Chidambaram made a much-publicised visit to the seminary as home minister further indicates a strong political interest between the Indian government and the orthodox clerics of Deoband. And perhaps it also delivers a handy vote bank that the clerics control.

There are Indian Muslim groups as well as non-Muslims who harbour sympathy for the Kashmiri people, but it is mostly with regard to their claim on Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy within the Indian arrangement. Such groups also speak up against perennially violated human rights endured by the mainly Muslim people of the disputed area. To that extent the JUH has stood with the Kashmiri people, but only from the perspective that their interests were not separate from those of Indian Muslims.

In 2010, during Congress rule there was a surge in India’s stand-off with Kashmiri Muslims, and the JUH, a close cross-border comrade of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, did express its formulaic sympathy. A recent statement was, however, more assertive in its pro-government stance, effectively endorsing the abrogation of Kashmir’s autonomy.

“It is our belief that the welfare of the people of Kashmir lies in getting integrated with India. The inimical forces and the neighbouring country are bent upon destroying Kashmir. The oppressed and beleaguered people of Kashmir are stuck between opposing forces,” the JUH argued, virtually ad-libbing the official view on the abrogation of Kashmir’s autonomy. “The JUH stands steadfastly for the unity and integrity of the country and has accorded it paramount importance. As such it can never support any separatist movement rather it considers such movements not only harmful for India but also for the people of Kashmir.”

The irony is stark. Both the JUH and its Pakistani counterpart headed by Fazlur Rehman are or should be at loggerheads on Kashmir. And they are also tethered to the Saudi establishment for inspiration and sustenance. However, Saudi Arabia has veered close to the Indian stand and even felicitated Modi with its highest civilian award. Imran Khan has chosen to swallow the disappointment and has signalled that it’s business as usual by choosing to fly to the UN General Assembly session in New York on the Saudi crown prince’s private plane. The Kashmiris must be watching the denouement with awe and trepidation.

The JUH leverages Indian Muslims in what is clearly a rather self-serving relationship it has with any government of the day. But this is also how the Hindu right prefers to project the equation. Add­re­s­­­­­sing the media in the aftermath of the derailed Agra summit, then senior minister Jaswant Singh obliquely described the link between Indian Muslims and the Kashmir issue. The gist of his comment was this: if India gives away Kashmir to comply with the two-nation theory, should Indian Muslims not be put in trains to Pakistan?

A different answer to the question came from a senior leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front in 1992. Javed Mir had dodged the security dragnet when practically every Hurriyat leader was put behind the bars. I asked Mir to comment on the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which had just taken place. He said he couldn’t care less what became of it or the dispute, because it concerned Indian Muslims who had shown scant interest in the struggles of the Kashmiris.

Hamid Bhashani on The Kashmir issue

India's Foreign Minister Explains

Will Modi's Muslims pay the price for Kashmir?

By Girish Menon

Modi’s Muslims, i.e. most middle class Indians (this writer included) supported Modi’s decision to de-operationalise Art. 370 in Kashmir. It is now three weeks since the decision and India’s security forces appear to keep the casualty levels low so far. There are many scenarios possible when the communications shut down is lifted. In this piece, I will examine the best possible scenario for Modi’s supporters and how they may still be called upon to pay a very high price.

In response to India’s action, Pakistan’s selected PM Imran Khan has promised to be an ambassador for Pakistan Coveted Kashmir (PCK). He has promised to raise the issue at the UN Security Council in a month’s time. And until then he has asked Pakistanis to protest for ½ an hour after their mid-day prayers. He has succeeded in getting the attention of foreign media, though the lack of body bags has resulted in a waning interest.

The Indian government, worried about the global interest, has responded with its own version of diplomacy with a majority of UN Security Council Members not giving Pakistan any crumbs for comfort. So what price will India pay for their support and how will Modi’s Muslims react when the pain increases?

Firstly, it is possible that India may send troops to Afghanistan to facilitate the smooth withdrawal of US troops in time for Trump’s re-election.

Secondly, President Trump wants India to give US companies’ better access to its markets. This could mean Huawei is forced out of the 5G selection process. It could mean that India will not insist that Indian consumer data is stored in India. It could mean compromises on many other positions that India has steadfastly adhered to as part of its economic interests.

Thirdly, India maybe forced to purchase more expensive defence equipment from the US. India's policies of indigenisation of defence production may be completely dropped. A forerunner to this thinking was palpable when the Rafale offset was given to private contractors without sufficient safe guards.

Economic growth in the Indian economy is already at the much derided Hindu rate of growth. Investment by firms is down, while firms are shutting down and unemployment is rising. If India removes further trade barriers to the already suffering French and US economies – it will result in benefits to the workers and businesses from there. But what about Modi’s Muslims who are drooling about the benefits from a $ 5 Trillion economy?

I suppose, when the economic situation gets really bad the Supreme Court can clear the path to build Ram Janambhoomi temple. This will win the 2024 elections and pave the way for the $ 5 Trillion Ram Rajya.

===

Misconceptions about Art 370 - Is the Indian government misleading its people?

Pakistan’s Crocodile Tears for Muslims – Global, Indian or Kashmiri

By Girish Menon

It is two weeks since the Indian Parliament de-operationalised Art. 370 and used the armed forces to crush any dissent in the few Muslim majority districts of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir. It is well known that when any army administers an area there will be human rights violations; and I don’t expect anything different in the Kashmir valley. But does Pakistan’s rhetoric in this matter inspire confidence among embittered Kashmiri Muslims on the Indian side?

Pakistan (the land of the Pure Muslim) was founded on the principle of the Two Nation Theory for Muslims from the Indian subcontinent who were afraid of being persecuted in a post-British, Hindu majority India. From its inception, Pakistan persecuted its own Hindu, Sikh, Ahmadiya, Shia and Christian populations. It also persecuted Sindhis, Balochs, Pashtuns etc. and ended up as the land only for the Punjabi Sunni. It acquired the epithet Bakistan (leftover land) after its Bengali Muslims left to form Bangla Desh.

Pakistan initiated four formal wars against India viz. 1948, 1965, 1971 and1999. It launched proxy wars in the Punjab in the early 1980s and in Kashmir from 1989 onwards which resulted in the displacement of a large number of Hindus who were resident in the Kashmir valley. It did not adhere to the UN resolution of 1948, the Simla agreement of 1972 and its miltablishment jeopardised peace initiatives between civilian governments including Modi’s by attacking the Indian Parliament, Mumbai, Pathankot and Pulwama.

Internationally, the pious Pakistan general Zia ul Haq earned his spurs by firing on Muslim Palestinians even before he came to power illegally. The Pakistan state persecuted its Mohajirs who fled India after the 1947 partition. Recently too, it did not step in to help Syrian refugees, the Rohingyas or the Uighurs (all Muslims) who suffered in large numbers.

Now the Pakistan media alleges that India is using genocidal policies to subjugate Kashmir. However, I don’t see any counter relief policy by Pakistan welcoming aggrieved Indian Muslims in general and Kashmiri Muslims in particular to cross the border and to settle in the Sunni Islamic paradise called Pakistan. After all, the other famous land of the faithful, Israel, is an open haven to Jews from all over the world.

Pakistan’s support for Indian Muslims is part of the Ghazwa-e-Hind rhetoric. They hope that Indian Muslims will take up arms (which they have supplied) to create a fifth column so that the armies of the faithful can wander in and establish Imran Khan’s Riyasat-e-Medina.

Unsurprisingly, Pakistan’s friends and members of the Islamic ummah viz. the UAE and Saudi Arabia have not supported it’s rhetoric. Also, most Indian Muslims have decided to follow their self interest and ignored the calls from across the border. Now, it is up to the Indian government to ensure they win the hearts and minds of the doubters in the Kashmir Valley.

More importantly, the Indian government should focus on the dire economic situation in the country which affects people from all denominations. Success in this area will ensure that Kashmiri Muslims will wish to stay with India and not raise the call for Azaadi (freedom from both India and Pakistan).


---Prognosis for the Future (in Urdu)

-----Interview with Imran Khan which validates the above theses

Do and be damned; don’t and still be damned

Girish Menon

It’s been a week since the BJP government abrogated Article 370 and included Jammu and Kashmir as an integral part of India. Most of the reaction to this move has been positive within the provinces of Jammu and Ladakh. It is difficult to gauge the views of the population in the Muslim majority Kashmir valley because of the news blackout. I’d guess there should be a significant number of people who may be upset by this decision. In mainland India, the move has been welcomed by most of the people and a majority of MPs in both houses of the Indian Parliament.

Outside India, Pakistan politicians including their selected Prime Minister have been venting their spleen on this surprise move by India. Opinion in the rest of the world has been muted much to the chagrin of Pakistan. It is rumoured that the US President was forewarned by India of its plans.

So what next for the protesting Kashmiris? The Kashmiris living in the valley could be divided into the ruling elites, those families directly affected by the violence since 1989, and other citizens living in the region.

As far as the ruling elites are concerned, they must admit that it is their actions since the 1950s that has enabled the Indian government to get the support of the rest of India for such a move.

As far as Kashmir residents who have lost their family members in the intermittent 70 year old war with Pakistan there is no likelihood of an immediate peace in the region. Pakistan’s proxies, along with some local politicians will make it difficult for the Modi government to boast that they have solved this perennial problem with a piece of legislation. This means that in the short term there could be more deaths in the valley.

Those valley residents who have only been indirectly affected by the war so far, in the short term some of them may be unlucky to get caught up in the fire exchanged by the warring forces. I hope that their bad luck will run out soon and they will be able to experience a ‘normal’ way of life soon.

The Indian government appears intent on a hard stance on law and order matters while being liberal on incentivising industry to start productive activity and employment in these parts. Both parts of this strategy needs to succeed to convince the Kashmiris that their interests are better served with India. This could lead to the chants of ‘azaadi’  (freedom from both India and Pakistan) to die down.

The current Indian government has five years to get this brave decision right. If the situation deteriorates then they further jeopardise their dreams of continuous power for the next decade and beyond. Already the weakness in their handling of the economy is manifesting itself in the Hindu rate of growth with deleterious consequences for employment. If they fail on Kashmir as well, there will be a rising number of citizens who will soon call Modi’s Article 370 decision the second time when he has been foolhardy.

Just wait and watch.

Afghanistan may hold the key to Kashmir

By Girish Menon

When Pakistan annexed regions like Gilgit-Baltistan, hitherto part of Raja Hari Singh’s kingdom, there wasn’t the kind of shrill shouting in India as witnessed now in Pakistan after India abrogated the temporary Art 370 from its constitution yesterday. What does this act mean for some of the constituents involved in the dispute?

The UN resolution which Pakistan quotes as the basis of dispute resolution states that Pakistan should pull back its troops to the position prior to its invasion of Raja Hari Singh’s territory and then India would conduct a plebiscite in the whole of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan never adhered to the first part of the UN resolution and therefore the plebiscite part of the resolution never came into question despite Pakistan continuously harping on it.

For the Modi government the timing of this move appears helpful because it distracts the public from raising serious questions about the poorly performing economy. The narrative (fickle at most times) had begun to portray the Modi government as socialist, a label which the corporate/electoral bond funded party wishes to avoid by a mile.

For the military regime in Pakistan this Indian action poses a dilemma and an opportunity. The military has been shouting from rooftops that it has shut down the funding of its jihadi outfits in Kashmir. It was this statement that enabled Pakistan to receive the IMF bailout. Will the military now once again release the Hafiz Saeeds to act with impunity while risking a stoppage of the IMF bailout? 

The Pakistan military has promised Donald Trump an ‘honourable’ exit from Afghanistan well before the US presidential elections. The military would facilitate a peace agreement with the Taliban which will enable Trump to deliver on his manifesto promise. In return for this the Pakistan military will receive US funding equivalent to its current spending levels in Afghanistan. This will enable the Pakistan military to avoid the conditionalities of the IMF deal and start funding the jihadi outfits in Kashmir. The risk is the failure of the Pakistan military to deliver an exit strategy congenial to Trump.

So it is up to all those countries opposed to Trump (not the USA) to ensure that the regressive Taliban militants do not come to power in Kabul and enable the Americans to run away just like they did from Vietnam. India may have to take a lead in this matter with Iran, if it does not want hostilities to rise in Kashmir.

In the short term, India may have to deploy more security forces in Kashmir. This will mean larger unplanned expenditure. This will be a big injection of government money into the demand deprived Indian economy and could give a fillip to growth. While the lot of the Indian consumer may not change radically, at least the government can claim that the economy is on the path to reaching the $5 trillion mark.

As for the people of Kashmir they may have to face some more difficult times unless they join the Pandits in an exodus from the valley. The Indian government can ensure that the property rights of all displaced personnel is respected when such people decide to return back to the valley. The government could also open safe havens to these new refugees.

Of course, most conflicts develop a life of their own and these new refugees may find themselves in government camps for a much longer time.

In the rest of India, there is no mood for any settlement with a military dispensation in Pakistan. Moreover, the BJP agenda is to recover the Gilgit-Baltistan regions which was illegally grabbed by the Pakistan militia. 

Currently, a war-like situation suits the rulers in both countries. What the people of Kashmir want is not on the agenda.

Can the Indian Parliament unilaterally change Art 370 and 35A?

Think like a civilisation

The biggest casualty of unquestioning enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought writes Shiv Vishwanathan


This essay is a piece of dissent at a time when dissent may not be welcome. It is an attempt to look at what I call the Pulwama syndrome, after India’s bombing of terrorist camps in Pakistan. There is an air of achievement and competence, a feeling that we have given a fitting reply to Pakistan. Newspapers have in unison supported the government, and citizens, from actors to cricketers, have been content in stating their loyalty, literally issuing certificates to the government. Yet watching all this, I feel a deep sense of unease, a feeling that India is celebrating a moment which needs to be located in a different context.

Peace needs courage

It reminded me of something that happened when I was in school. I had just come back from a war movie featuring Winston Churchill. I came back home excitedly and told my father about Churchill. He smiled sadly and said, “Churchill was a bully. He was not fit to touch Gandhi’s chappals.” He then added thoughtfully that “war creates a schoolboy loyalty, half boy scout, half mob”, which becomes epidemic. “Peace,” he said, “demands a courage few men have.” I still remember these lines, and I realised their relevance for the events this week.

One sees an instant unity which is almost miraculous. This sense of unity does not tolerate difference. People take loyalty literally and become paranoid. Crowds attack a long-standing bakery to remove the word ‘Karachi’ from its signage. War becomes an evangelical issue as each man desperately competes to prove his loyalty. Doubt and dissent become impossible, rationality is rare, and pluralism a remote possibility. There is a sense of solidarity with the ruling regime which is surreal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was encrusted with doubts a week before, appears like an untarnished hero. Even the cynicism around these attitudes is ignored. One watches with indifference as Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah virtually claims that security and war are part of his vote bank.

Thought becomes a casualty as people conflate terms such as Kashmiri, Pakistani and Muslim while threatening citizens peacefully pursuing their livelihood. One watches aghast as India turns war into a feud, indifferent to a wider conflagration. The whole country lives from event to event and TV becomes hysterical, not knowing the difference between war and cricket. It is a moment when we congratulate ourselves as a nation, forgetting that we are also a civilisation. In this movement of drum-beating, where jingoism as patriotism is the order of the day, a dissenting voice is not welcome. But dissent demands that one faces one’s fellow citizens with probably more courage than one needs to face the enemy. How does one begin a conversation, create a space for a more critical perspective?

What war feels like

Sadly, India as a country has not experienced war as a totality, unlike Europe or other countries in Asia such as Vietnam or Afghanistan. War has always been an activity at the border. It did not engulf our lives the way World War II corroded Germany or Russia. War is a trauma few nibble at in India. When our leaders talk even of surgical strikes, one is not quite sure whether they know the difference between Haldighati or modern war. They seem like actors enacting an outdated play. In fact, one wonders whether India as a society has thought through the idea of war. We talk of war as if it is a problem of traffic control. Our strategists, our international relations experts fetishise security and patriotism. The aridity of the idea of security has done more damage to freedom and democracy than any other modern concept. Security as an official concept needs a genocidal count, an accounting of the number of lives and bodies destroyed in pursuing its logic. The tom-tomming of such words in a bandwagon society destroys the power and pluralism of the idea of India as a society and a democracy.

The biggest casualty of such enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought. Our leaders know that the minute we create a demonology around Pakistan, we cease to think rationally or creatively about our own behaviour in Kashmir. We can talk with ease about Pakistani belligerency, about militarism in Pakistan, but we refuse to reflect on our own brutality in Kashmir or Manipur. At a time when the Berlin Wall appears like a distant nightmare and Ulster begins appearing normal, should not India as a creative democracy ask, why is there a state of internal war in Kashmir and the Northeast for decades? Why is it we do not have the moral leadership to challenge Pakistan to engage in peace? Why is it that we as a nation think we are a democracy when internal war and majoritarian mobs are eating into the core of our civilisation? Where does India stand in its vision of the civility of internationalism which we articulated through Panchsheel? Because Pakistan behaves as a rogue state, should we abandon the civilisational dream of a Mohandas Gandhi or an Abdul Ghaffar Khan?

Even if we think strategically, we are losers. Strategy today has been appropriated by the machismo of militarism and management. It has become a term without ethics or values. Strategy, unlike tactics, is a long-range term. It summons a value framework in any decent society. Sadly, strategy shows that India is moving into a geopolitical trap where China, which treats Pakistan as a vassal state, is the prime beneficiary of Pulwama. The Chinese as a society and a regime would be content to see an authoritarian India militarised, sans its greatest achievement which is democracy. What I wish to argue is that strategy also belongs to the perspectives of peace, and it is precisely as a democracy and as a peace-loving nation that we should out-think and outflank China. Peace is not an effeminate challenge to the machismo of the national security state as idol but a civilisational response to the easy brutality of the nation state.


Dissent as survival

In debating with our fellow citizens, we have to show through a Gandhian mode that our sense of Swadeshi and Swaraj is no less. Peace has responsibilities which an arid sense of patriotism may not have. Yet we are condemned to conversation, to dialogue, to arguments persuading those who are sceptical about the very integrity of our being. Dissent becomes an act of both survival and creative caring at this moment. One must realise that India as a civilisation has given the world some of its most creative concepts of peace, inspired by Buddha, Nanak, Kabir, Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi. The challenge before peacedom is to use these visions creatively in a world which takes nuclear war and genocide for granted. Here civil society, the ashram and the university must help create that neighbourhood of ideas, the civics that peace demands to go beyond the current imaginaries of the nation state.

Our peace is a testimony and testament to a society that must return to its civilisational values. It is an appeal to the dreams of the satyagrahi and a realisation that peace needs ideas, ideals and experiments to challenge the current hegemony of the nation state. India as a civilisation cannot do otherwise.