Tormented

Daem phuit chi gamitsh myaen nazar
yoot matsar kyah?
mei rov labith lol shahar
yoot matsar kyah?

~ Zarif A Zarif, Kashmiri poet

My gaze has been silenced
What frenzy is this?
I lost my city of love,
What frenzy is this?

We are in the middle of this cruel completeness. The motif is flickering at such a rapid pace that it is near impossible to fathom what is happening to us. Still coming to terms with the rape and murder tale coming out of South Kashmir and its elaborate, planned, devilish cover-up, bullets flew thick and fast in North Kashmir. In a matter of less than 40 hours, four boys were sent to their graves. Prematurely. Suddenly. Coldly. Kashmir has stopped keeping a count of its injured. That is a mere footnote in our pursuit of justice.

Still hours later the scene shifts again to South Kashmir. A kid, 16 is summoned to a nearby army camp. Youngest in his home, Basharat went hopping to the 36RR fortress, never to be seen again. Parents, like anywhere else in the world, furious and restless, started making frenetic noises. Neighbors joined in. Omar Abdullah, the new czar of Kashmir, who surrounds himself with a useless bunch of advisors, joined the chorus, albeit in his condescending style: Find the boy or his body. Thank you, Sir. How easily does the lexicon change in the valley? People, alive and laughing minutes back, suddenly change into bodies. Omar’s narrative is not only tasteless but pure apologetic. Kashmir is too dangerous a place to let things drift in such an insensitive manner.

Salah Mattoo, my childhood pal, wrote in the London’s The Economist: ‘The Indian constitution affords all her citizens right to protest, which no doubt is at the heart of Indian psyche as it stems from its history of fighting the British for her independence. In Kashmir there exists no outlet for people to express their grievances.’ Alas protests in Kashmir trigger a panic button in the government war-rooms and they go to any darn extend to break it. In reality, any elected government in Kashmir [and Omar is no exception] does not want to do anything to displease the off-reality hawks, who sit perched in Delhi. Suppressing the sentiment back home is directly proportional to your status in North Block.

A very strange spiral has engulfed us. Like an F-5 tornado. And things move round and round in it. Half-bricks and Hartals and Curfews chase each other. In the absence of mandatory crisis management infrastructure to deal with human rights violations, people resort to throwing rocks [styled on the Palestinian Intifada]. There is a freedom camp [split in the middle – one side of it is this old, tough boy Geelani, hugely respected but rigid and other side is this young, dubious boy Mirwaiz, moderate but inexplicit] with its politics of dissent and strikes. The only common factor is the karakul caps they wear. The government of the day, unsure of how to go about it [how, on God’s green earth, can a Jammu based car-dealer advise Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson, how to deal with a sentiment for which six million people and the Sheikh himself staked everything. Pray, How?] End-result: Mirwaiz and co, locked up in their palatial homes. Geelani, too dangerous at his age, put up in a hut-prison. Omar hops all over his fief, like a czar pontificating the futility of stone throwing, while his subjects continue to die, under his watch.

I don’t think removing CRPF [we never used to fear them anyway in Sopore] will do any good. It is time for the creation of independent institutions to monitor human rights violations in Kashmir. If Omar has nothing to fear he should back calls for allowing independent organizations like the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others in Kashmir. No one trusts the government commissions. Two things, should they happen, may ameliorate the hurt to a large extend: disbanding of the thuggish SOG and removal of inhuman laws like AFSPA. Troop withdrawal can follow.

I used to love this beautiful, soft-spoken US-Kashmiri poet we had. Agha Shahid Ali. He died many years back and lies buried in Amherst, Massachusetts, close to the resting place of another great American poet Emily Dickinson.

An excerpt from a poem he penned on his beloved Kashmir:

Freedom’s terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir,
is bringing love to its tormented glass,
Stranger, who will inherit the last night of the past?
Of what shall I not sing, and sing?

Sameer

You can't curfew our hearts

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.
~Tacitus

Baramulla is a small, hilly, quaint township in north Kashmir. As I blog, it has been curfewed over. The orders may have been announced or unannounced but everyone has to adhere or you die. If you perchance don't know that a chocolate-color-curfew [the only presence is the cops/CRPF with their brown outfits, lording over empty roads and street dogs] is on, you may well be shot in the head or heart by a CRPF jawan lying in wait. In the last 36 hours, five kids have been killed in this fashion. Their only crime was that they had gotten together [in their naivety or in a bout of emotional impulse] to protest alleged misbehavior charges against the local police by a woman, which has since been rubbished by the cops. In the 21st century Kashmir you can't show your fists. Expression is dangerous. Resentment is prohibited. Dreams have been curfewed over.

Agree a furor exists. Agree that there is a huge mistrust that people harbor against India and the state government, agree that the same cops said a month back that those two unfortunate Shopian girls bore no injury marks and died of drowning [since proven wrong], agree that there is a trust deficit with the police who even failed to register an FIR in Shopian for a long while [eventually forced to do so], agree that the separatist leadership has been severely gagged, agree that people are genuinely angry at the Omar led government’s insensitivity, especially the way things were mis-handled in the aftermath of the rape and murder case -- not a dram of remorse exists. Instead the local police and CRPF -- exactly the likes of riff-raff -- who when they are not killing, while their time away by smoking bidis and cutting off color jokes while watching C-grade Hindi films, have been given a free rope. And boy do they whip the people!

I don’t know how to put it straight but people get beaten up a lot in Kashmir. And that shit happens everyday. People are slapped on highways and lowlands. In orchards and bylanes. For little or no reason. The catch is high-handedness. Ergo, to break up an instant protest, the Khaki scoundrels use excessive violence, which is not only disproportionate but plain inhuman. The fiercely independent Kashmir Times correctly editorializes that they are armed with blanket powers under the prevailing draconian laws and enjoy immunity for their acts. The dreaded instrument of repression is evident in the kind of blatant human rights abuses they commit and get away with. Omar, the new CM with old prejudices, can’t do much. He can, however, promise enquiries as the body count grows.

There are restrictions on movement. There are house arrests. There are beatings. There are bayonets held up to scare us. There are tear-gas canisters. There are furious bullets piercing innocent 20-somethings. There are attempts to silence protest. When has the stick suppressed the giggle of children? For 62 long years there have been protests, even before that. It is a mad trapeze in our hearts. They attempt to disperse people, chasing unruly crowds but fail to disperse the aspiration that hangs still in the smoked air.

You can curfew the lanes but not our dreams.

Sameer

The Frenzy Returns

We are now faced with the fact, my friends that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
~Dr Martin Luther King Jr, iconic leader of America’s civil rights movement, ‘Beyond Vietnam’ address, Riverside Church, New York, NY, April 4, 1967.

A fear of the awkward looms. Last year around the same time a new-found furor floated about. Fresh slogans were coined. Millions marched. The frenzy returns this season. Kashmir is agitated like an active volcano, brimming with broken promises, chunks of deceit, voting machines, lordly corrupt leaders, rusty bullets, cherry-color blood. Tulips. It imploded, yet again this June. Does this month symbolize anything for us? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The imperial British formally accepted the idea of Pakistan – a separate homeland for Muslims of the Indian subcontinent on June 3, 1947. Six decades on Kashmir still gets these June jolts. At the moment a charade of democracy is on display in Kashmir, a place overhung by Chinars and smoked over by fumes of our moral mildew.

Early June, when it smells of green apples in countryside Kashmir two cheerful girls – Asiya and Neelofer – went giggling to their tiny orchard and simply melted into the evening. A frenetic search yielded no results. Next morning, as if by magic, both girls appeared near a depth-less canal – bruised, battered, repeatedly raped and killed in cold blood. In Kashmir rape is rare as goblins. Despicable as it is, the incident soon turned murky. The doctor, who conducted the post-mortem, told Kashmiri newspapers that the two ladies were gang-raped.

In the post-mortem report, the doctor added, they mentioned that the injuries and samples collected from bodies clearly suggested rape and murder. A friend who has access to the pictures of the two girls was quite unequivocal: ‘Third degree gang-rape, around a dozen times - multiple times after death’. A strike was swiftly called to condemn the horrible act. Tempers frayed.

Like most conservative societies in the world Kashmiris are extremely touchy about two things – our religion and identity. Add honor to the list. I agree it is an arguably naïve stance to take in a modern world but back home in Kashmir we have been living in a timeless warp forever. To make matters worse the 38-year old CM [much is made of his age] proved that he is as inept at gauging the pulse of people as his notoriously colorful dad. Adding fire to the fuel, Omar attempted to sweep the muck under the proverbial rug.

He declared in a press con that primary findings indicated the girls were neither raped nor murdered. It was prima facie a case of drowning. [In ankle-deep water]. In pre-judging the findings Omar was not only plain condescending but utterly insensitive too. [The victims families have since gone on a hunger strike, seeking justice for their daughters]. Public sentiment smoldered. Sensing trouble Omar changed tack and conceded that ‘something has happened there’. Yes, Mr CM – multiple rapes on two young girls -- our girls -- their helpless cries piercing the sad air of their small village. Dying a most painful, brutal death next to – [who knows may be inside] a CRPF camp. Pray, when will you guys stop being smug and stop living in denial?

An investigation was ordered. Justice Jan is going to look into the matter and shall report to his neighbor [lives next to Omar] in 30 days. Is that going to ameliorate the hurt? Rather than coming out with a forceful statement, assuaging the victims’ families and at least sounding a little more empathic, an insane police force has been let loose against those protesting human rights violations. Instead of making a candid, passionate appeal, what you get to hear from the chief minister’s office is the same old trite, banal, moth-eaten crap: These are communal forces, vested interests, anti-development, political rivals out there to get me. The trigger-happy cops and paramilitary forces, whose only vocation in life is to fire tear gas canisters at school kids, occasionally successfully comatosing some of them with a direct hit, roam aimlessly like wild creatures.

Often enough the state uses brute force to get over with a given situation. In reality, nothing goes away. It simmers slowly. And it comes back. You think it is over, as the very brilliant British-Pakistani intellectual Tariq Ali once said, while it isn't. The administration is choosing to go after anyone -- having especially singled out Syed Ali Geelani -- who dares look them in the eye and say the uncomfortable truth to their face. It is an irony. The Jammu based English daily Kashmir Times is far more pragmatic and insightful in its coverage on the Shopian incident while Kashmir based English papers are editorializing the futility of resistance. I reckon many ideological constructs lead people to take the kind of political positions they take but we can't truly afford to decontextualise our economic well-being from our legitimate aspirations.

Tulips without stipple isn't exactly beautiful. The stipple is our very cherished honor.

Sameer

To resist or not to resist

Freedom is never free
~An old European maxim

And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.
~Shakespeare, Hamlet

Kashmir stands at a very strange crossroad in its chequered history. These are confusing times. We are, I must admit, slightly tipsy, unsure of which thoroughfare to take. For well over 62 years there have been green ghosts haunting us. Hard as we have tried to, we haven’t been able to exorcise them. Ever. Ours is a uniquely inscrutable nation. At various moments in the past six decades we have dared to aspire, fight elections, sloganeer like crazy, flirt with that Utopian idea of freedom and fought a low-intensity battle with a nuclear power. We have been variously bruised, humiliated, punched at, reviled, threatened, pampered and bought over.
Yet we continue to dream.

Cut to 2009. The calculus is as weird as it always has been. Omar Abdullah rules the kingdom. His loyalties lie with India. Most Kashmiris, especially the young like him. For once he sounds totally sincere and bright. I personally feel he is a refreshing break. Syed Ali Geelani is an ailing old man who rules the dissenting space in the same fiefdom. His loyalty is not to India. A vast chunk of people like him too. He too sounds utterly convincing and captures popular imagination more than Omar. He wants an end to India’s rule in Kashmir.

Those for Omar want to bury Kashmir’s acrimonious past and there is a growing number who speak about the futility of rebellion. Against strikes and mass protests. They quote statistics to drive home the point that our economy is battered because of this bedlam. Tourists flee like hunted deer and the poor labourers go jobless. World has changed, the argument goes and bricks are no answer. With time wounds must heal.The opposing camp has a diametrically opposite ideological argument. And they too speak in a guileless tenor.
A hundred thousand people did not get certainly slaughtered in Kashmir for nothing. Our parents’ were kicked around and our women dragged out of their kitchens not because we would settle down in the end to sit with a third generation Abdullah who didn’t even know Kashmiri till a few years back. The wounds, the feeling goes, go dark and deep. Big enough to keep dolphins in.

***

After years of bloodshed, after a long, drawn battle people sat to reflect and introspect by a river in which much of their crimson blood has mixed. Much has been lost – brothers, friends, sons, children and honor. Some are still unreported from the dark dens they were schelepped to. Just when our transitional phase seemed to start, someone waved to us across the river. A nice boy with a plow on his back talked development and joy. And tulips. And truth. People liked the sound of his chatter. They forgot old wounds and clapped. Hard.

Just then the plow boy’s dark knights come swooping from behind. They lunge at the crowd randomly. The order is abruptly broken. Claps give way to shrieks. People protest. The state wants to take away the luxury of innocence! It tramples upon human rights with impunity. Slogans rent the terrified June air. Will our sorrows never be sad enough? Will our lives never be important enough? There are no answers. Only tear-gas shells, occasionally falling on passers by.

***

Kashmir has some real soul-searching to do. Are we for shut-downs, as Geelani would like us to or do we stay mute? What if tomorrow it is our turn to be picked up in a bottle-green color SOG gypsy only to be thrown out dead? Another corpse, another numeric, another commission. But wait, does a strike also not mean zero-income to the poor vendor, to the artisan who lives off tourism or to the boatman in his waiting shikara? The middle-class and the elite [that includes all of Hurriyet and perhaps the likes of us] are sure insulated [when are they not?], but aren’t we being insensitive to the plight of the less-privileged?

What do the strikes give us? What do we want to prove? Who takes note of it anyway? I reckon, a shutdown may not mean anything per se but it sure symbolizes something. It is like declaring outloud – look here, you bully – whatever it is – freedom, frenzy, nuttiness, romanticism – is clearly not over yet. Woodrow Wilson, the Nobel prize winning 28th US president and a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era once remarked, ‘The history of liberty is a history of resistance’.

As long as Omar Abdullah does not rein-in his piratical troopers there will be people leaving work and coming out of their homes – spontaneously – and protest. As long as brutal laws, meant to doctor the dreams of people, are not done away with, there shall be strikes. Agreed it is a conflict in our souls: do we allow our economy to be destroyed or do we let our collective dignity go, like a tent on a stormy night? Do we listen to our head or our heart? History is testament that as a nation, Kashmiris have mostly gone by the sentiment.

Sameer

Discard AFSPA

Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is a tool of state abuse, oppression and discrimination ~ Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s foremost independent organizations dedicated to defending human rights

India should repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. It is a dated and colonial-era law that breaches contemporary international human rights standards.
~ UN Commissioner for Human Rights Navnetham Pillay

A middle-aged Kashmiri dealing in hand-me-down cars was fetched to a Special Operations Group [SOG] camp. SOG is equivalent to Schutzstaffel [SS], a semi-independent small police force but a very powerful one. They can pick you up, torture the daylights out of you and very conveniently dump you. They travel in run-down Maruti Gypsies and jump out of their vehicles in a menacing fashion.
No elected chief minister has been able to rein in this band of uncouth, brash gumshoes. Less than a week after 30% of Kashmiris came out to vote for the parliamentary elections, the SOG not having tasted blood for a long time, brutally interrogated and subsequently killed the innocent man they had fetched to their camp.

Ofcourse such rude interludes spoil the party for the ruling clique. Omar, the young chirpy chief minister of J&K is proving to be an able administrator and likes to give sweet interviews to hacks in his flower strewn garden. That his notorious cops are throwing dead people out of moving autos doesn’t exactly help matters. The inspector at the dreaded camp has been put under suspension and an investigation ordered. Does that not happen every time?
When have murdered men needed justice?

Part of the problem is the huge, almost crazy, powers that the law enforcing agencies yield in Kashmir. They can kill at will. That has to end at all costs. All talk of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee by Omar is nice. For such a thing to happen, he has to prioritize the removal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) – the draconian law which gives full immunity to security forces in Kashmir. The cold, cruel act has been in force since 1990.

Under this law Kashmir has been dubbed disturbed, as in physically, mentally and emotionally – and the doctor is the state.
Now the doctor wears a dirty look and carries a gun and is authorised to – [hold your breath] -- fire upon people even if it causes death/arrest without a warrant with the use of necessary force anyone who is suspected/enter and search any home/detain anyone.

Not surprisingly soldiers have often been high-handed in Kashmir. They beat people up pretty often for little or no excuse and even show no mercy to the elderly. Occasionally, as with the poor car dealer, they feel like to kill. Under AFSPA troopers have legal immunity for their actions. The law says that there can be no prosecution, suit or any other legal proceeding against anyone acting under the aegis of AFSPA. So all talk of teaching the culprits a lesson is pure nonsense.

There is an urgent need to do away with this stupid law. We are not a disturbed people. Surely people who queue up in long lines to vote senators to the Indian parliament can’t be disturbed. It should be the first priority of all newly elected senators as also Omar Abdullah, the new Chief Minister to get the law abrogated. Omar especially has a historic opportunity to show that his administration will be different.

Most human rights organizations have called for repeal of the extreme law. Amnesty International recently renewed its appeal.
Let no more children be orphaned because of some silly, irrational piece of legislation.

Sameer

Lest we forget

A hugely popular watch online shows the backward Bush timer.
As I post George Bush Jr has about 80 days and 16 hours left in office before he finally exits as one of the worst-ever presidents of the United States, and consequently the free world. History -- which Arundhati Roy calls an old house at night -- is not going to be fair on the Texas cowboy whose IQ is stuck somewhere around 30.
[I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family. Bush — Greater Nashua, N.H., Jan. 27, 2000]. Smart.

Bush Jr is going to go down in text books as someone who locked up people in America's dirty dens, in foreign lands, without an ort of guilt. Post-presidency the idiot may relax in his ranch and chomp on his daily quota of pretzels, without ever realizing how his irrational actions forever changed the lives of completely innocent people -- for absolutely no sin of theirs.

Here's an excerpt from the blog archives.

An innocent man writes in the high security Guantanamo bay, a place rightly called the 'Gulag' of our times by Amnesty International.
This clearly moved me to tears:

The...Ramadan was absolutely unique. It was probably one of the best ones that I have ever spent in my life. Despite the extreme circumstances, the cheerfulness and spirit of everybody was unforgettable. The highlight was the congregational prayer, particularly Taraweeh, the final evening prayer, exclusive to Ramadan. The usual noises of talking and shouting reverberating across the blocks was replaced by a solitary voice, melodically reciting verses of the Qur'an, which brought tears to my eyes. Who knows what those hundreds of others were feeling, remembering, contemplating, at the same time as me? But I knew one thing: everyone there had a reason to weep. And the sadness was almost sweet.

After a tough legal fight by the civil liberties guys and human rights agencies, the US Supreme Court allowed those imprisoned at Guantanamo bay to challenge their confinement. In what many experts saw as a major rebuke to the Bush administration, came as a faint glimmer of hope to those languishing in Camp Delta.

Scot McClellan, Bush's press advisor -- and White House spokesman -- for a long time wrote a compelling book earlier this year. He calls his former boss misguided. Thanks Scot, didn't we know that!

Sameer