Kashmir diary: One year after Ragda

My mind had been imperceptibly wandering. I’ve been travelling recently, tanking up on a lot of innocent countryside gossip and also reading up quite a bit. If these are not alibis’ enough for my not been able to update my blog, I’ve another fish story. From time to time, I have this somewhat nonchalant urge to not write, as if attempting to rebel with this constant creative pow in me. Thankfully I am back in my element now.

I took a lot of mental notes which have now begun to mishmash in my head. Before it is too late to recollect [being a terribly forgetful chap], I shall jog my memory. Let us start on chipper notes. Cynicism can wait.

On a pleasant August noon, as the maroon sun shone in its relentless form, I along with a band of buddies set off for the hills of South Kashmir. Past caring, past peacock color fields prancing with the rice crop and past scent laden apple orchards, we trundled onto a secluded spot where fronds of shining mist greet you in a perpetual slow motion. We were met with an insane amount of traffic on our way [the cars have more than quadrupled in the last decade] as honks blared with mad abandon. Some geese scurried for cover. Apparently it was a holiday weekend, and I figured out, everyone wanted to holiday.

War-weary Kashmir was emptying out on Pakistan’s Independence day eve. To Pahalgam perhaps. Sixty two years is a long time to keep your fingers dipped in old wounds. While in Delhi that baritone intellectual Jaswant Singh was turning the Hindu rightwing cock and bull story on its head by declaring that Jinnah was a great bloke [which he sure was], and while Pakistanis sang their ‘qomi-tarana’ [national anthem] without having to fear Baitullah Mehsud for the first time in years, we drove on to the lush green woods of South Kashmir to camp, an act unthinkable of, only a decade ago.


My Kashmiri friends are very meticulous. They amaze me with their knowledge of camping tents and allied outdoor gear like gazebos, sun shelters and sleeping bags. Raj and Salus got down to pitch the NorthPole tents and in no time five all-weather tents were up, doors facing one another, high up in the hills of South Kashmir. A brook danced on cobbles nearby. Soon barbequing began in all earnestness and the fragrance of small mutton chunks, marinated overnight, spread. A local, in charge of the nearby fisheries farm, came over to inform us that the smell of meat in the wild may attract animals, especially bears. I knew this was the closest to real nature – virgin, dangerous and best that I could get to. And if ever I attempted to do a mini Bear Grylls [Conservative British politician Sir Michael Grylls and Lady Sarah Ford's son, famous for his Man vs. Wild TV series] this was my moment.

At dot eleven the sole lamp in the camping site [habituated by our five tents] went out. The darkness was the blackest I have ever seen. There was nary a bark except for the sound of clean water. The crackle of palsy laughter and the perpetual stream of gags, perhaps the only reassuring evidence that humankind still existed. In feeble candlelight [we had conveniently forgotten torches or battery operated lamps], more than 7,400 feet above the sea-level, many altitudes away from our loved ones, in the middle of an eerie pine forest, my band was digging up happiness.

I loved the chill that perforated me in a million places, notwithstanding my Puma light jacket. I smelled rain and before long a mizzle began, prompting us to scramble to our waterproof tents. Soon heavens opened up and it began to rain old women with knobkerries [clubs] as they say in Afrikaans. The patter of cold rain on my cozy tent was enlivening and something to die for. [I so love rains] Outside, the wind rustled in the woods, as though trying to speak someone’s name. Staccato lightening lit up the mountain silhouettes. No one really slept that night. We kept hollering at each other from inside our tents, completely transfixed by nature’s awe inspiring nocturnal display. Sleep came at daybreak.

We were awakened by the sweet tweedle of country birds. Like a childhood fairy tale. I ran, with others, to the adjacent stream, loud with the sound of cold water. Usually used to controlled showers in the confines of marbled wash-rooms, it was fun doing a balancing act in the glacial brook. We threw water at one another, we screamed at the top of our voices, as if trying to sing human hymns to the rainbow trout fish that kept plonking from time to time. I was entirely unaware of the sun tan I was getting. [Days later the first reaction from a pretty female journalist colleague at work was thus: Good to have to back, Samy. You look bronze. Were you holidaying in Greece?]

The outback was outstanding. We fetched groceries from a nearby tiny village. Since they didn’t expect a horde of mad boys to descend upon their languid three shop market and hence stocked no poultry, we were guided to a place they called Vayel City [City, in the hills, in a forest range, the guy must be bonkers I reckoned]. Well Vayel City proved to be no NYC. It was another piddly little village with seven shops. Luckily they had chicken. And the foul from Vayel City became our forest feast.

When you go red in the face and your eyes turn mild jade with glee, you know you are high. An olio of untrammelled nature, night long rain and beautiful pals is one such recipe. High up in the green hummocks of South Kashmir, I was spaced out because I’d all the three – a dale so beautiful that you’d think you are dead and this must be the phantasmagorical heaven, they speak of in the scriptures. A million globs of rain, like angel tears, coming tap-tap-tap, quenching our earthy lusts. And friends – you can never have enough of ‘em.

Sameer

Omar: you don't hang boots in six months

We have had a lot of rulers in Kashmir – stupid, passionate, dimwits, charlatans and the like. Omar is by far the youngest and the most poignant. I must have come down heavy on him in some of my commentaries but that is mostly to do with a journalist’s prerogative to act as a societal/political watch hound. I have no qualms in saying that despite his many imperfections, the boy has his heart in the right place.

I know he fumbled many times -- in handling the Shopian episode, in getting the separatist leadership arrested and the like. He even exposed his lack of political correctedness on a few occasions when he prejudged things and stepped on gas, issues he could have very well skirted. Some ugly things happened under his watch. However to his credit he has been brutally honest in owing up to most of it.

Kashmir is never an easy fief to administer. There is a perpetual squeeze from Delhi. That lug from the centre is oft times too hard to withstand [journalists know that better than the laity]. Top of it a million mutinies are always brewing in the valley. Everything is a tinder box. A crime, a mere charge, a rumor. Doing a balancing act isn’t exactly easy.

I think leveling charges of Omar's involvement in the sex scandal -- by the opposition PDP -- was plain shallow. Muzzafar beg is a smart fellow, who took his Harvard law lessons seriously and along with Mehbooba makes quite a gang. Since Omar is essentially a well meaning guy, and doing reasonably well, these guys plotted his downfall. Hence a counterfeit charge.

So Omar, taking the bait and real hurt, gave an impassionate statement on the floor of the house -- to announce his resignation. People may call it histrionic but Omar is not Farooq Abdullah. His diatribe does sound immature and rather schoolchild type but he is not exactly melodramatic. He is politically immature though. You don’t drive to the governor’s lodge on a rainy day and wake the old bureaucrat up.

It would be fair to assume that given our current crop of mainstream leadership – NC, PDP, Congress – who are chiefly a crooked pile, Omar stands out. And not because he is Farooq Abdullah’s son, but because at heart he is a regular Kashmiri, emotional but upright. Yes he surrounds himself with bootlickers [did you see them falling over each other to stop Omar from leaving the assembly] but I must concede that he is a refreshing break from the past. And his offer to quit may well check mate the wily PDP.

I hope he continues.

Sameer

[Blogged in a hotel lobby, in real quick time, as I wait for my chap to turn up]

A case for Kashmiri

Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation.
~Wilhelm von Humboldt
Influential 18th century philosopher, academic, linguist and a great friend to Goethe

Pardon me for being a little indelicate here but I must confess that one of the worst things to happen to us in the last two decades is a steady erosion of our identity. We are losing our ability to converse in our mother tongue without actually feeling a modicum of guilt about it. Everywhere one looks -- in private schools and government offices -- Urdu has gained ascendancy. Doctors speak in Urdu, interspersed with bits of English. Journalists love to chatter in Urdu. The chief minister too is at home in Urdu, having stayed out of Kashmir for most of his adult life. Leave alone Srinagar, people in even small towns have started to encourage their children to converse in Urdu, insecure like the elite, who have long banished Kashmiri from their lives. Now we have Kashmiri columnists writing in the local dailies, pontificating the importance of Urdu.

Let’s get it straight here. Most Kashmiris speak a very Kashmiri variant of Urdu. We simply translate Kashmiri – our cradle tongue – into Urdu – our official language -- without caring two hoots about syntax or idiom. Native speakers of Urdu would scoff at our Urdu diction. The truth be told, but for notable exceptions, our Urdu is mostly mediocre. Our English being generically flawed, we seem to be taking a certain strange pride in not bringing up our future generations in Kashmiri. In reality it is wacky had it not been so tragic.

There is a beautiful York County maxim: As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue. We perhaps need the toasted Urdu we so love to talk in. We also can’t do without English to comprehend sciences and computers and art. However it can’t be at the expense of Kashmiri. I don’t know how many Kashmiris know that 148 languages in the world have lesser number of speakers than Kashmiri. It is such a pity that we belittle our heritage, our very roots. Emerson got it right when he said that we infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course if many hundred years has contributed a stone. Kashmiri is our intellectual wealth. We simply can’t afford to squander it.

I fail to understand why Geelani gives most of his fiery speeches in Urdu? I am at loss to fathom why the Tabligis ambush people and drown them in their Urdu jargon? Why does the Mirwaiz suddenly switch over to Urdu, lording over his followers from downtown Srinagar? None of the aforesaid is official. The mainstream may hide behind the official language façade, when they talk in Urdu. But why can we not have two official languages like Bihar [Hindi, Urdu], like Assam [Assamese, Bengali], like Himachal [Hindi, Pahari], like UP [Hindi, Urdu]. We are such a crooked pile.

Outside the English speaking world -- in Europe and elsewhere -- mother tongue is afforded the highest status. In fact in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and other advanced economies like China, Japan [including Russia] as well as smaller countries in Asia, the medium of instruction is their respective mother tongue while children have the option of learning English language as well. In Kashmir, we are not asking for such concessions. It is time that we seriously introduce Kashmiri as a compulsory language in our school curricula [government, public and private schools].

Kashmiri children need to learn their language, the literature of which dates back to the 14th century. In simple terms we are as old as the English literature. Surely we shouldn’t feel shame reading it. And our children need not squirm at the thought of having to look at a Kashmiri textbook. UNESCO in its global monitoring paper on education concludes that the importance of mother tongue-based schooling for educational quality is key. In developing nations mother tongue-based bilingual education not only increases access to skills, the report suggests, but also raises the quality of basic education by facilitating classroom interaction and integration of prior knowledge and experiences with new learning.

In essence a language helps us express ideas and thoughts. When it comes to the mother tongue, thoughts often come straight from the heart. We dream in Kashmiri, we understand its humor, our laughter and tears have Kashmiri hints, when we are in pain we moan in Kashmiri. We express our best and the deepest feelings in Kashmiri -- because it is our real cradle tongue.

No culture is complete without its language. Kashmir needs to revive Kashmiri. We can perhaps take cue from Israel. One of the most spectacular feats of that country after its formation [illegal/legal – that’s another debate] was its miraculous resurrection of the dying Hebrew language. A pragmatic educational policy can be a great beginning to set the skew right here. Also we need to perhaps lessen our fixation to converse with family and friends in non-Kashmiri funny accents. There is no pride in it. It only makes us linguistically silly. And our expressions poor. Kashmiri is rich enough.

Sameer

The loyal singer

Rafi came to our household in the late 70s I am told. He was all of 15 when he arrived in petite London, as people in Sopore liked to call the town then [taking a certain pride in the fact]. I was born a few years later but the London connection always baffled me. Sopore was, and still is, famous for its rich apple produce. I was to learn much later that they grew blackberries, raspberries and gooseberries in England. Apples and plums too can be found around London but only as wild forms and barely edible - unless you're desperate. In Sopore orchard caretakers would often chase us over long furlongs whenever our desperation to filch an odd apple took the better of us.

So Rafi, the young boy in a duffle coat came to our home for work. His father thought Rafi could stay in a big town [Chota London], pick up a few social graces and make some money. My folks took a liking for the boy, who was actually named Ramazan. When my mom asked him about his likes, he surprisingly said singing. Apparently the sole transistor in his village belonged to a rich man where his father used to work and Ramazan would listen to it, when he accompanied his father, with veneration. He must have quietly begun rehearsing. Thereafter his father brought him to the town.

And he helped mom in scutwork, watering flower pots, tidying up the kitchen and allied little chores. Also he would sing to her. Songs of the village, Kashmiri folk songs and most enthusiastically songs of the popular singer Rafi, he had picked up from the old radio in his village. Soon mom had a new name for Ramzan: Rafi. Hence everyone in our home, my dad’s chauffeur, workers in our orchards, our neighbors and relatives started to call him Rafi. He took it well. The re-christening made him even perkier with a satirical sense of humor.

Years later I was born and Rafi loved me dearly. He would carry me on his back, become a horse for me and ofcourse sing for me. New songs he picked up from our Texla Black and White TV [It would take five minutes to start]. Since TV was a rarity in the 80s, even in Chota London, Rafi would often narrate, with much melodrama, the plot of last night’s movie to eager yokels in the bakery where he would go to fetch the hot oven-baked morning flatbread [Lawasa]. He got told off for getting late but Rafi was not the one to mind such mild admonition. So he continued to work, cut jokes, watch endless stupid Hindi films and live with us.

Then came a time when gunmen began to appear in our locality.
They were everywhere and carried real guns, inspiring awe. Rafi would dismiss our wonderment with his unique brand of humor. ‘That guy with a double magazine Kalashnikov, he once told me pointing to a militant, can easily cut throats of the enemy’.
How can you say that mama, I asked curiously? ‘Oh, he used to cut people’s pockets earlier’, came the prompt response with a mischievous grin. In all likelihood Rafi was speaking the truth. During those difficult militancy years, he used to close the lawn gates early in the evening and when dad went out for the final prayer at night, he accompanied him to the mosque, just in case. [He had overheard in the bakery that gunmen harassed the landed gentry]

Then there came a time when I had to go out for higher studies. It broke his heart. He had only seen the places, I was headed for, on TV. Rafi thought I would drink and date debauched women. He had these simple notions about life. On my last night in Kashmir I remember he had a long talk with me, filled with innocent, naïve bits of advice. Like a wide eyed babe in the woods. I soon took a flight to alien lands and never really went back in the real sense. My only date with Kashmir remains my annual sabbaticals.

While I was away Rafi went on to get married and raise a family. He left us but continued to visit, especially when I came from vilayat. Since there was no phone in his village, I had to drive to his village, to his tiny hut [he liked it there, found peace, he told me] and bring him over to our home for a week. Ofcourse he would ask me a million questions about the new world, since he had grown to be so fond of world news on his radio -- BBC Urdu. I had to simplify things for the guy, who helped me grow up.

Rafi, I am told, after he went back to his beautiful village [his hut was in the middle of a mustard field] learnt other crafts. He became a mason in summers and wove carpets in the winter. However Rafi found time in every season to come down to his first place of vocation – our home -- and rustle up great food for my folks. And he spoke with me on my sister’s cell phone.

Day before he clambered on the roof of his little hut, ostensibly to fix a leaking arch. It was raining outside in the mustard fields. A loose brick led to his fall. Rafi fell and he was dead. While it was still raining outside.

It feels like missing a step on the staircase of memory.

I hope he sings to my mom in paradise.

Rafi
[1964-2009]
A God fearing, old school, loyal – Godspeed.

Sameer

Defiance Day

July 13 is the closest we have to a national defiance day. It marks the beginning of our assertion as pretenceless, independence-seeking, audacious people. Most historians agree that on July 13, 1931 the sky was tenderly overcast in Srinagar and there had also been a dust storm that morning. But no tempest could stop the fervor in the hearts of people, who had gathered outside the Central Jail in Srinagar. They wanted an open trail for the mystery man – Qadir – who was being tried by the Dogra ruler’s [Hari Singh] kangaroo court.

Qadir, now relegated to the margins of Kashmir’s vicissitudinary history, still has historians confounded. Most chroniclers of our nation’s narrative cannot agree on where he came from or what happened to him after July 13, 1931. All we know of him is that he was a butler to Major Abet, a British army officer, British Resident in Kashmir. On June 21, 1931 Qadir gave a rousing speech to hundreds of assembled men at Khankah-Mohallah in Srinagar. Kashmir had never seen such upfrontry. Pointing to the Maharaja’s palace in the Zabarwan foothills, Qadir hollered the famous words: Demolish the edifice of injustice, cruelty and subjugation.

The immediate provocation was the desecration of the Holy Quran by Maharaja's troopers in April that year. The Dogra feudatories would often treat Kashmiris like shit and had no regard whatsoever for their faith. A huge resentment was already brewing against the vainglorious rulers for years of persecution and all it needed was a sharp spark. Infact people had assembled to find a way to channelize their sentiment on the June day when Qadir gave that fiery speech. Before he spoke, a committee was formed to continue the fight against the Dogra oppression. Seven wise men were selected: Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Sa’ad-ud-Din Shawl, Mirwaiz Moulvi Yusuf Shah, Mirwaiz Ahmadullah Hamdani, Aga Syed Hussain Jalali, Munshi Shuhab-ud-Din, and Khwaja Ghulam Ahmad Ashai. [Yes Mirwaiz’s and Omar’s grand-dads too. We share a collective legacy, don’t we?]

Four days later Maharaja’s men zeroed in on Qadir and put him in chains. He was swiftly charged with sedition and waging war against the state [yes the same sections of the Ranbir Penal Code, Omar still slaps on the pro-Freedom guys]. Qadir was to be tried on July 13, 1931. But he had already kindled a fire, which was going to consume Kashmir, in its enticing warmth. Around noon, as more and more people encircled the Central Jail in Srinagar, Maharaja’s troopers panicked. Matchlock guns were cocked. People refused to bulge, demanding the release of Qadir. Never before in almost 350 years [since the Mughal annexation in 1586; the vain rule ended 1753] was such an angry defiance palpable in the airs of Srinagar. Soon gunshots pierced the rebellion. Khaliq Shora, a feisty man from Srinagar, was the first man to fall. Kashmir had its first martyr. Crimson blood spilled. Twenty seven others died. Two women among the martyrs. Scores lay injured. The magnitude of Dogra brutishness was such that no one attended to the injured hours after they were shot.

July 13 marked an epoch in our assertion of a bold, new, chivalrous defiance. Hitherto called cowards and slaves, Kashmiris rose to the occasion and attempted to storm the ugly walls of tyranny, just like the French did in Bastille, on July 14, 1789. Sadly we couldn’t breach the walls. What was to follow was a murky trapeze that involved a series of compromises and deceits and charades. And as years went by the committee constituted in Khankah mohallah to take the struggle to its logical conclusion split. The Mirwaizs went their way, the Sheikh ofcourse we all know, walked into the glory-land, only to fall later. Ever since both sides have staked a claim to Kashmir’s past, its martyrs, its patch-work history. Both have dibs on a sentiment which in reality belongs to no one person. It is a collective legacy.

It was a spontaneous, collective act of rebellion, of revolution, of uprising which was to give an impetus to Kashmir’s centuries old yearning for freedom. Not that we were not rebels before but July 13 truly made revolutionaries out of us.

And we were never ever the same.

Sameer

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

Midsummer Night Out

When I suddenly act cute for no reason and nod approvingly in a smart conversation on the subtle difference between blended grain and blended malt whiskey, I know I am being daft. So here I was with random people [being pals with this one hell of a guy, only] at 4am, passing the pot to the distant twinkle of a starry sky. I’d this sense of a cross between being lightheaded and permagrin. Or both.

Smoking grass is such a youthful thing to do. There is a boylike recklessness to it. The Jamaicans call it spliff, I think. I was trying hard to remember name of this guy from ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ who does dope. That Irish bloke Wilde, who left the British Isles forever -- after being jailed for being a non-conformist by the prudish Brits -- made his protagonist smoke weed in his masterpiece.

Last night the night sky was sooty and the lights would flicker like a musical rhapsody. I could soon spot stars. Rare. Ever since I left the hills, I haven’t really seen the stars sparkle. There were these stars, on a clear cloudless night, hundreds of them, muted silver in color, no bigger than orchid seeds. [Jesus probably got it wrong when he said in the Bible: The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seed] Orchid seeds are much smaller, I reckon, and the stars these days look tinier and farther away than their usual.

The night changed shades. Like a gal changes clothes. From pitch-black to a deep azure. The leaves were visible, clung tightly to twigs in the tall park trees, reveling perhaps in a quiet plant hug, while the whole world slept around them, disturbed only by the silly cackle of our stoned laughter. A cricket hopped on a cork and disapprovingly jumped off the Bowmore cap, wiping its antennae as it disappeared into the night. There was no cricket song to the darn insect.

Pals in pot fumes are like these wacky songs the soul needs from time to time.

Sameer

Drama at the Chateau of Versailles

The French President has re-kindled the debate over Hijab at the Chateau of Versailles. Breaking one and a half century old tradition, Sarkozy addressed the French Parliament, greatly upsetting the opposition, which criticized the speech as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Like Louis XIV. The Sun King was the archetypal absolute monarch, who ruled France from 1643-1715. People were not allowed to knock on his door in the Chateau of Versailles. Instead, they had to gently scratch on the door, until the permission to enter was granted. As a result, many courtiers grew long fingernails. Sarkozy is styling himself as a modern day Louis XIV. [Major political parties like the Greens and Communists refused to attend the Chateau of Versailles event and the Socialists left early, saying that the venue for the address smacked of monarchy and a thirst for power]

Not surprisingly Sarkozy, who famously likes his pictures photo-shopped to look good [Paris Match had to retouch photos of Sarkozy in order to erase a love handle], attacked the concept and culture of Hijab in his Chateau of Versailles policy speech. "It will not be welcome on French soil," he began, sounding every bit like an authoritarian demagogue that he is, ever ready to trade away civil liberties for political gains. “We cannot accept, in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. That is not the French republic's idea of women's dignity." Sarkozy has indeed chosen to fight a very wrong battle.

Two things are going to come out of it immediately. One – the decision will stigmatize Muslims at a time when France needs to do more in its fight against discrimination in the job market, which had led so many Muslim youth to feel forgotten by French society. When France needed their erstwhile colonial subjects to lay train roads or dig tunnels for them back in the 1940's and 50's they got them to work like mules. The immigrants significantly contributed towards French nation building*. Only when their second generation grew up in Paris suburbs and started attending schools, the French went cold in their feet. It so smacks of racism.

Two – we are now sure why Sarkozy flunked grades in school and college before he obtained his baccalauréat. He continues to not comprehend this simple idea about the diversity of cultures. Given that the concept of laicite [secularism] is sacred in France, the point is whether women are forced to cover themselves or are doing so voluntarily out of their own will, and whether wearing the Hijab undermines French secularism. It does not. Like the same way Mr President has “no issues” with nude photos of his wife because he thinks the pictures are tasteful – and importantly -- the CHOICE is Carla’s, the CHOICE to don a scarf should be the sole discretion of a Muslim woman.

Modern states have no business telling women how not to dress. When we do not feel intimidated by a topless girl walking around a beach, do we really need to fret at a girl covering her hair? I think there is something profoundly hypocritical about banning Hijab in the name of pseudo-secularism and gender equality -- while the French government continues to subsidize private education for that globally influential misogynist religion -- the Catholic Church -- at a higher rate per pupil than public schools.

Sarkozy’s initiative has even his own cabinet split in the middle. The French immigration minister, Eric Besson, believes such a ban will only create tensions. It will isolate Muslims. France is home to five million Muslims. Hijab has always been a cultural symbol and Muslim women have worn it for more than 1,430 years. The dress was only put on trial after the events of September 11. Sarkozy only reinforces the paranoia.

You can’t claim to be liberal and ban individual choice. The French – and Europeans largely – have come to practice an absurd form of secularism which has indeed come to rubbish everything that secularism stands for. We seem to be at such a point in history where we are seen to care too much about the rights of beetles and houseflies while rubbishing the inherent beauty of human co-existence and liberty. When governments go all-out to abolish cultural symbolism close to the belief system of a billion and a half people around the globe, the cherished human rights, naturally, go up in holy smoke. Like Jeanne d'Arc. That was 1431. This is 2009.


Sameer
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* As the major colonial power after Britain, France could call on a potential workforce from what is called the Maghreb [North-West Africa: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia], certain countries in Sub-Saharan Africa [Senegal], Indochina [South-East Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos] and the DOM-TOM [Départements d'outre-mer and Térritoires d'outre-mer] like Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guyana [in the Caribbean]. The vast majority of these workers were from Algeria, the jewel in the crown of the French colonial empire.
[Source: The University of Sunderland,UK]

How serious are we about our Human Rights?

Bhaiyoo mea bacha (brother save me), moajee mea bachao (mother save me).
~Cries of the two girls allegedly gang raped inside an army truck by Indian troopers in Shopian, as heard by an eye-witness

I don’t know how a non-Kashmiri may react to this. As a Kashmiri, despite having acquired a different accent in alien lands, I can very well identify with the sad shrieks that purportedly came from the army truck. We mostly call for our mothers or brothers whenever we are in pain. We think, in our simple world view, that they are our guardian angels -- in dreams, in life, in death. And will come to protect us. Every single time. That explains why Asiya and Neelofer – now sleeping an eternal sleep in the peach fragrance of countryside Kashmir – must have hollered the way they did. And that is why the poor man, shivering in his old hut, is speaking the gospel truth.

My first reactions as I read the news story was this: How dehumanized have we become? There are people – and the tribe is swelling -- who have become bored with the narrative by now. They seem to be insulated at the moment -- and hence -- they foolishly think, such a thing might never happen to them. That is such a make-belief attitude because in reality no one really is immune. In choosing to prefer economic well-being over human rights they allow for the door to be left ajar, and a likelihood for such an atrocity to recur in future. May be, just may be, the economic realities of life make everything secondary, even inherent rights one gains as a human being.

I was talking to a friend in London, fiercely tutored, Ivy League, deeply interested in Kashmir affairs. He observed that there is no push for human rights in Kashmir from the people at the helm of affair: be it the state or the separatists. The truth be told there is no human rights set-up in Kashmir. It is not that people are unaware – they understand what living in occupation entails. Kashmiris however don't seem to care about these things collectively; even though it is in our interest. 'I think they don't care because human rights don't lead to a financial gain', my pal quipped. We have become an individualistic society – like so many other societies around the world -- pretty much interested in personal fortunes.

The debate about human rights should be at the core of our consciousness. Unfortunately it isn’t. We remember our human rights only when there is a rape or a murder or a dead body is thrown out of a speeding SOG van. If human rights was what people valued more than a stable economic system and job creation then they should have been clear that the valley will not vote until there is a proper human rights protection and the enforcement of human rights violations in Kashmir. Instead we voted a bunch of people, who make a crooked pile, into power. Do we expect an elected MLA to speak up sincerely for human rights? [Ms Mufti’s antics can be squarely dismissed as political gimmickry] As long as lowly people salute them and open doors to their cars and as long as their lofty Karakul’s sit intact on their petty heads, anything goes.

In Kashmir there is no communitarian sentiment or communitarian institutes which will have a serious impact in terms of consistently advocating and defending the rights of people. The marches and protests do help but can they solve our problems. Perhaps not. It is like saying lets march against Pinochet and he will give us human rights. Omar -- the CM, says his officials misled him, Umar – the cleric is mum. The Bar Council is meek. Most voices are either disparate or desperate. If the leadership is like this how can there be a human rights centered movement in Kashmir? Old boy Geelani can’t certainly pull it off, alone.

That leaves the people in a conundrum. One will find it surreal that one day they will support the government [which oppresses them], next day they will deride the CM for hurting them; following on, they will be back to the government for patronage, give them support, knowing fully well that they will hurt them again; and lo and behold they do hurt them again. Now that is both odd and erratic.

The people of Kashmir do not deserve to suffer just because they voted a bunch of lackeys to power. Or just because our leadership isn’t up to it. Till date we have not shown consistency in our actions and as a result, the government knows that a protest means nothing and that we will bear the insults for a few days and then things will be back to normal. It is the utter lack of consistency and lack of development of institutions by Hurriyet that is responsible for our directionless response. One cannot play ping pong with government and give in every time they ask for votes. That makes us politically immaterial.

We can, perhaps, begin by developing an intellectual culture in Kashmir and start working towards a human rights oriented approach. Till then, I am afraid, the body-bags will come.

Sameer
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PS -- The women in the picture are mothers whose sons have gone missing, after being picked up by the army, in Kashmir. Srinagar, June 10, 2009

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

Dr Sen is Free

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr Binayak Sen spent the best part of his life working among the poorest people in India, who live far away from the government’s attentions, with no access to clinics, hospitals, doctors or medicines. He has saved thousands from certain death from malaria, diarrhea, and other easily treatable illnesses.
~Arundhati Roy

Binayak Sen is a mild-mannered doctor. Unlike our elitist doctors who sit in plush AC-ed comfort of their clinics during the day and enjoy walking their imported doggies by sun-down, Dr Sen chose to serve India’s underbelly -- the most downtrodden of her people -- the tribals and poor mine workers in Chattisgarh. And he is not an average medico. A well-known pediatrician, Dr Sen bagged the prestigious Jonathan Mann award for Global Health and Human Rights – the first winner from South Asia -- for his service to mankind.

As noble as they come, Sen lived among the unprivileged and worked tirelessly to extend health care to their children. Dr Binayak set up a hospital in Chattisgarh for the poor. He also founded a health and human rights organization that supports community health workers in around two dozen remote villages. As an activist for the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Dr Sen went out of his way to defend the human rights of these tribal, illiterate people.
That got the government’s goat.

Flimsy and fake charges were labeled against Dr. Sen. He was imprisoned for being innocent and kindly and pro-poor.
When I last met with Arundhati Roy in Delhi she was clear about it: There is very little doubt that Dr Sen is in prison because he spoke out against the state government’s policy of bullying the tribals. His incarceration is meant to silence dissent, and criminalize democratic space. The fearless Ms Roy later wrote that Dr Sen’s imprisonment is meant to absorb all our attention so that the stories of the hundreds of other nameless, faceless people - those without lawyers, without the attention of journalists - who are starving and dying in the forests, go unnoticed and unrecorded.

For two years Dr Sen languished in a dingy jail room in Raipur, Chattisgarh. There was a strange irony to it. There is this very fine, bright, good-natured doctor at 59 and all he is trying to do, without any publicity and fan-fare, is a sincere effort to help those who remain on the margins and those with no access to proper health care. And the state is trying its best to handcuff him and punish him for being good. [Dr Sen was accused of waging war against the state] And they threw him in a dungeon to rot. Pity.

Last year, twenty-two Nobel laureates from around the world appealed to the Indian government to allow Dr Binayak Sen to receive the 2008 Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights in person. The government denied the permission. Eminent people like Dr Amartya Sen and Prof Noam Chomsky called for his release. In April 2009 Amnesty International described the charges against Dr Sen as baseless and politically motivated and said his continued detention is in breach of international law.
Respected publications like the British Medical Journal and Wall Street Journal [WSJ] condemned Dr Sen’s confinement. WSJ labelled his imprisonment as 'Good Works, Bad Reward'.

On May 25, after more than two years of imprisonment, Dr Sen was granted bail.

Goodness shall prevail.

Sameer

Rainbow Times

There is a beautiful land
Where all your dreams come true

Minutes mosey past me. Life looks like a compact rainbow. Or like a kind ice cream topped with brutish chocolate. It feels so varicolored. Fast and fake. A heavy moth comes and plops down on my heart. It takes off, circles around and sits again. Cars lumber. Along gravity. Another day is gone.

How stupid modern mankind must be? I oft ask myself. How mercilessly we strive to work and get ourselves occupied with random stuff only to let all our dreams -- with so much of beauty in them -- just slip by. We live a short life, after all. They say the doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.

Silly mechanical lives – laden with doors that open to cards and not to the gentle push. Windows that have free enterprise intaglioned across their broadness, clocks that give us time zones of faraway latitudes. We are internationalized, globalized. And tend to forget ourselves, our identity. Most of my friends talk in English. I miss the sound of Kashmiri words.

A lovely poem I chanced across last night might make it a little axiomatic.

Red is the color of a lot of lollipops,
Orange is any orange on a tree.
Yellow's the color of a bag of lemon drops,
Green is a piece of seaweed in the sea.

Blue is the color of the sky in summertime
Indigo is a Siamese cat's eyes.
Violet's the color of a flow'r in wintertime.
These are the colors of the rainbow skies.

There is a beautiful land
Where all your dreams come true;
It's all tied up in a rainbow,
All shiny and new;
But it's not easy to find
No matter what you do.

It's not on top of a mountain
Or beneath the deep blue sea
Or in London zoo or in Timbuktoo,
Or in Timbuckthree.

And if you traveled the world
From China to Peru,
There's no beautiful land on the chart.
An explorer could not begin
To discover its origin
For the beautiful land is in your heart.

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

Notes on Life

Life’s such a malkin. It freaks you out. I always expect something or the other to happen to me and much to my chagrin diametrically opposite situations take shape. Eventually I realize [I do realize but oft times pretty late] that one shouldn’t expect too much. Things – and people for that matter -- never turn out the way you want them to. And why should they?

I am also greatly unsure of how to live for the day. It beats me.
I never seem to get it. The words of Frederic Nietzsche, the 19th century German thinker whose works hugely influenced the freewheeling and scandalized the faithful, comfort me: I love those who do not know how to live for today. What genius! At age 24 he was the Chair of Classical Philology [linguistics and renaissance humanism] at the University of Basel, youngest ever to hold the position. Poor Nietzsche, he died a madman. God, I hate smart people.

The domestic help who cooks for us so that we live for another day throws away a lot of left-overs everyday. Every frigging day.
Then there are these dark, gunky, hungry kids who tap at my car window pane at the traffic signal almost everyday, pointing to their scrawny naked tummies. They live off surplus, stuff we choose to discard. And I keep telling myself why the heck do we put up with this injustice? Why the crazy skew? This shit contrast. The crying shame. It gnaws away at my belief or whatever remains of it.

I reckon I will learn to move on someday. Life is all about making adjustments and headways. I don’t know what pastures await me.
My soul has a song. An old country song. You can’t afford to not have songs in a soulless world. One shouldn’t really care about the hearers!

Sameer

United Colors of Democracy

Your history gets in way of my memory
Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001)
Kashmiri-American poet and intellectual


It is election time in India. Can Kashmir be far behind? Since Kashmir is an integral [that misused, concubine smelling term] part of India, whether or not some people like it, polls are being held in the hills too. It is a completely democratic exercise, mind you. Only 700,000 troopers, equipped to the boot, watch over three million eligible voters. One soldier for every four Kashmiris. The highest civilian military ratio anywhere in the world. There shall be no coercion though. Rigging the ballot-boxes isn’t fashionable anymore. It is going to be one big democratic exercise.

Consequently all dissenting voices have been locked up and others imprisoned in their homes. They can till their sward gardens or watch cable TV while people queue up to cast their votes without any anti-poll noise pollution. That is mandatory, feels the Kashmir chief minister’s pontific dad. When he is not playing golf or talking in a theatrical, almost comical way, the old man likes to give free advices and address himself in third person singular: Farooq, Farooq.
If he had all his marbles, he would know that dissent, like debate, is part of a democratic polity. If you gag your opponents, and then sit back to enjoy free and fair elections on TV over endless sun-color cups of Kehva – it amounts to nothing.

There are blokes who think Elections are a solution to Kashmir.
Yet others enlighten that elections do no mean a solution but pave a surefire thoroughfare to progress. A large chunk however feel these elections only go on to legitimize India’s title in Kashmir. There is a little driblet of truth, perhaps, in all these stated positions and each party to the dispute is acutely aware of that. But herein lies the rub: there is a lot of double-dealing. You can’t give Lone II a free run with his band of rural volunteers in tow, gonging village after village, while old boy Geelani isn’t even allowed a short stroll to his brick-colored mosque.

One cannot have the cake and eat it too. While the mainstream media never runs out of ink, writing plaudits for democratic forces at work in the little valley, it carefully chooses to photo-shop the autocratic whip the same forces use to bully anyone who dares differ with them. Hence they go after those who ask people to resist from pressing the button on the voting pads. Ideally in any democracy it should be left to the people – after getting a fair chance to hear both sides – to decide whether to go dab their index finger or not. In Kashmir, alas, that is often not the case.

Is a frail, ailing old man or his ideas such a threat to the biggest democracy on the planet? Why should the pro-feedom camp not be allowed to run a counter campaign against elections? Why should the state claim to hold free, fair, fearless election while it imprisons, summarily locks up and puts out all dissenting notes? Why should the area going to polls on a particular day be sealed off, insulated and declared inaccessible to anyone from outside the district? Why the in-your-face hypocrisy? Why tom-tom democracy when you actually make a light-hearted mockery of it?

Blockading the political views of a group under the guise of security is such an absurdly tyrannical arguement. A society can't be free really unless it attunes itself to listen to dissent. Voltaire, the greatest of French thinkers once beautifully remarked, 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'

So are we headed for the big breaking news, ready to be broken to us on May 16: Sajad Lone wins Kupwara/Democracy triumphs.
Do we have the two-bit mike-brandishing journos gearing up to run barefoot after him like those kids in the old tale [was it Pied Piper!] for their two-bytes?

Quite possible. United Colors of Democracy.

Sameer

The curious case of Sajad Lone

Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing
~Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)
Politics is a competing enterprise. People will often act lickerish to get to the top. Power, the general thinking goes, brings great clout. History, after all, gets written by conquerors. We have, I fear, confused power with greatness, I recall of Stewart Udall. The truth be told, it is the quest for power that brings out the endless spiel, the big promises, the empty rhetoric. These days no one comes to politics for public good. Kashmir ain't any exception.

Sajad Lone’s decision to run for Indian parliament didn’t come as a bolt from the blue. In our neck of woods, it was perceived as, another seasonal political jolt which we have grown so used to. Didn’t we all stand to attention -- like dazzled cavemen -- to a tall, nationalistic, Hadith quoting Sheikh? And the lion of Kashmir roared and growled and a frightened people clapped. And the confused Maharaja panicked. The lion rechristened his party to make it sound more secular. An Indian prince charming, who always kept a rose in his coat's third button hole, took a liking for the lion and made palsy overtures. The lion didn’t realize that the prince was going to be his master and not a friend. And the day he realized it, the poor thing was thrown into a moth-eaten cage. Only to be tamed forever. Thence he would only purr like a domesticated cat. His progeny continue to be relevant to Kashmir.

Sajad, in that respect, comes from a lesser tribe. He isn’t exactly a lion. His dad was a popular mainstream politician turned separatist leader. As a ninth standard student in Sopore high school Lone Sr was arrested in connection with the Zachaldara bomb blast case. He became a lawyer and later a cabinet minister twice [under Sadiq and BGM]. He joined the separatist bandwagon in the late 80s and was shot dead in 2002. Sajad is the youngest of the Lone sons, the eldest being a permanent fixture in the Mirwaiz court.

Sajad went for higher studies to London. At the time of his father’s death, he accused both India and Pakistan for Lone’s murder. Sajad is married to Asma, the daughter of Amanullah Khan, boss of the separatist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) the group credited with starting armed insurgency in Kashmir.

Sajad, a blunt bloke never got along well with the separatist leadership in Kashmir, who harbored doubts about his credibility. To his credit Lone II is the only leader to have come out with a comprehensive document ‘Achievable Nationhood’ that discusses various dynamics of the Kashmir issue. He perhaps understood, before anyone else in Kashmir, that the proverbial tide is turning and the last assembly election was the final clincher. Being part of the elite crew helps and Lone II's connections in Delhi proved helpful.

Sajad’s decision to run for Elections-2009 is a huge gamble which he must have thought over and over in his head. He might as well make it to India’s House of Commons and there will be people back home who wouldn’t like the sight of an erstwhile separatist sharing pews with right wing senators, the likes of whom pushed around and humiliated his late dad in Jammu long years back. Political expediency makes you forget things quickly. The problem is that you may like to give voice to your grievances at the altar of democracy but since democracy is all about numbers -- you are bound to be gradually piffled away. The bravado gets lost in the din.

In hindsight fighting for your rights is oft times toilsome. You could very well smirk at the relative impatience of Sajad’s arguments. Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary [made into a fashion icon by the MTV gen these days] was cut up in Bolivian jungles for daring to challenge the powers that be. Freedom is never ASAP. The mainstream Indian media is showering praise on Sajad not for nothing. The poster-boy of separatist camp has switched sides. Geelani and his old ilk can’t be trusted. Sajad can be!

Kashmir has had a trust deficit with India. Locals are more likely to tell you that they trusted India when the Indian troops landed in Srinagar for the first time in October 1947 [Kashmir was a princely state before Oct 47] but the much-promised plebiscite was never held. All elections were historically rigged. One gentleman who lost to an infamous rigged election result from Srinagar’s Habba-kadal constituency in 1987 went on to become the boss of United Jehad Council [an amalgamation of major militant outfits in Kashmir] and calls himself by his code-name Syed Sala-din. His polling agents, Yasin Malik, Javed Mir and Hamid Sheikh all became top militant commanders. While Sheikh was killed, Mir is in Hurriyet, while Yasin Malik, is a major separatist leader.

I’ve no doubt that Sajad is a bright fellow and sounds sincere, especially in the apologia that he wrote for the media the day he officially declared his candidature. He talks about delusions of grandeur, peddling of failed methods or escapism, and avoiding tendencies towards defeatism – nice psychology talk. It remains to be seen how he delivers on the floor of the house. He is going to take oath, if he ever gets elected with his hand on the constitution of India ~ a document that calls Kashmir an integral part of India.

The psychologist knows what the heart wants.

Sameer

Water, water everywhere -- but not a drop to drink!

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. The rhyme of the ancient mariner sprang to my mind as I hopscotched through Kashmir during my last visit. Vale of my childhood, where water was the last thing people would possibly bother about. We used to throw water at each other in school and the fun was fondly called ‘Aab Jung’ [water war]. But those were innocent years, with only a few residential areas and a lot of farm land. The rivers were filled with fish. The lakes, I remember, meandered around hills and a golden kingfisher would dive in to catch a little trout in its cuspidate beak. In the years to come, that innocence was gradually lost. It was molested by indifferent times. The fish drowned in the waters. Then there was scarcity.

Kashmir in 2009 is headed for an entropy. No architectural planning, no policies for housing, no letup to rampant de-forestation and no respect for law of the land. To make things worse everyone wants a separate home with fencing, complete with gardens and flowers and bees in them. And a place for keeping that sparkling new car. This has lead to a steady shrinkage of agricultural land and a dip in the ground water table. Natural resources are -- naturally -- stretched thin. Construction is at an all time high – homes in all kinds of funny, concrete shapes are coming up. But everyone complains that winters are too cold now and you want to tell them: look when you use too much concrete and glass – trying to replicate Delhi -- you can’t expect the cosy warmth of a genuine Kashmiri home.

Talking of water I first noticed the desperation when we drove to the Manasbal Lake. There are tiny picaresque villages on the way. The narrow pot-holed road is lined with beautiful orchards full of pink blossom. At a bend in the road, near a hamlet called Poshwari [meaning flower meadow – no flowers though], we met with villagers, who were blocking the road. They told us that we cannot go further up because they are protesting the acute water shortage in their area. No mini-bus, car or scooter was allowed to pass. Only the occasional security vehicle whizzed past, because nobody dares stop the ‘military’. The villagers were pretty animated and no excuses worked. So we parked our car to one side and waited.

I knew all my media accreditations – that usually allow me an entry to the Prime ministers’ garden -- won’t work with these folks. So I warmed upto a few protesting guys. Why are you troubling people like this? I asked. “Jinab, they shot back [That native naïve way of addressing anyone dressed in city garb] we have resorted to this extreme step because we don’t have a drop of water to drink”. Our women walk five miles to fetch a pail of water and all we can do is sit and watch helplessly. “We couldn’t even take a bath on the Eid day,” a young man added for effect. I noticed dandruff on his shoulder; I guess he was not exaggerating. Do you think anyone will take notice of your peaceful sit-in? I questioned an old man who was snorting his tobacco. “We don’t know – Jinab – but what else can we do. We have tried everything possible,” he said with an exasperated expression.

We finally made our way through the melee but I felt bad for the poor guys. It is hard life for them. We live in a world of contrasts, I often tell myself. Zero-bacteria bottled water for some – me included – and nary a drop to drink for others. [My pals in the US drink Evian water. Direct from Évian-les-Bains, on the south shore of Lake Geneva, they tell me]. I broached the issue with a top tourism officer – incharge of Manasbal waterways. Though the guy was smart and knew quite a bit about water sports, he gave me that amused look as I raised the topic. You know Sam, he went on in an avuncular fashion, you are a financial journalist but you can’t understand this petty business. These villagers are illiterate and they won’t understand the water schemes that the government has launched for them. I didn’t buy his government-like argument. It was a typical passing-the-buck and blaming-the-aggrieved answer.

Back in the first world, as I sat covering an international event in a five star hotel days later, I asked for some water. As I waited for the maitre d'hotel to bring me water, I casually asked a second attendant for water. Two bottles of Himmelsberger arrived in the next one minute. German water. The extravagance of our lives. I thought about the peasants in that lovely flower meadow. I know no one ever took care of their necessity.

Sameer

Home is where the heart is

The plane begins to debark over Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, and as you look outside, a most beautiful mural appears and something suddenly shifts in you. Everything comes rushing back. Mustard in full bloom, little hutments happily piping up old smoke, beige hillocks. A million meadows in amber and jade look like nature naked in the dell, teasing you to un-strap. Raindrops began to cling to the window pane. As the airplane touches down the air-stewardess announces that the temperature outside was 8 degrees. You could almost smell the mustard, the rain on your nose, the patter of roofs. You know you are home.

The airplane’s doors were flung open to a glacial breeze. It was pouring like from a bucket. Every time I come home, it is raining.
I don’t mind at all. Frosty troopers wearing hooded military jackets -- guarding the airport -- looked on with cold eyes. The airport has been recently re-done and everything looks big and clean. Only people remain the same. They say it is an international airstrip now though only one flight operates to Dubai -- once in a fortnight. Suhail, my buddy, had come to collect me. As we drove on it was still raining boats and casks.

We headed for a coffee to ‘Sheesha’. It is an exotic coffee hut. Yes a hut, not a café’. It is all done up in broken shards of mirror including the couches and walls and it looks like a prismatic, avant garde watering hole. You get coconut cookies [coconut biscuits of the school] and for a while you want to drop all frigging pretences and wolf it down. Diet cokes and Atkins can go to hell when you are sequestered in such a cozy ambience, far from the maddening crowds while it rains outside. I felt like a shack boy drinking a shack juice.

I decided to drive home. It was damp and chilly but familiar. Perhaps the best thing about coming home is that everything – people speaking in the language of your childhood, the old man selling the hot alov-mung [potato wedges], the signposts, the smells, the ducklings marching behind the female duck, pistachio-colored eyes – have an intimate connection with you. Even the chill is usual. Your marrow knows it. Though I was only wearing a pair of jeans with a tee [the puma ultra light jacket made me look like a scouser from Liverpool] I think my glen bones, like most Kashmiris, are programmed to withstand the cold. We just can’t take heat.

It is the onset of spring in Kashmir. There were sprouts – thousands of them -- in orchards along the way. The flowers looked forlorn on the twigs while raindrops shook them in a naughty way. It kept getting darker and colder. People were rushing back to their homes in mini-buses [called matadors] and cars. Suddenly it dawned to me that Kashmir ceases to work by six -- around this time of the year.
I accelerated and was home in no time.

John Howard Payne was one of the most gifted American poets. He was born in New York and died in Tunis, Tunisia, where he lies buried. Payne – and I love his poetry – wrote 186 years ago:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam/Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

John, I agree.

More Kashmir posts to follow.

Sameer

Life is a cheat

This is a minor transgression. Just one of those days when I feel like spraying the blog with some silly philosophizing graffiti. I was wondering why do black and white dolphins have to jump out of blue waters, to heckle at our colorless serfdom, in our dreams? Life has become so uninspiring! I read over tea in the morning that Americans* are planning more pilotless drone attacks in Pakistan*, where robots decide who to kill and who not to. [Programmed to kill, they usually spare none]. In India a fetor always accompanies frenzied activity. They are making cement hued fly-overs everywhere you look. Only people look a little rudderless, unsure of where to go.

A carpenter working on a log of wood in the woods was pounced at for no reason. Perhaps for daring to be poor. Poverty is great misery. It makes you faceless and grim. And people can treat you like shit. While his little children cried [when has that mattered] six cops held the poor carpenter under their brave jackboots. Then a volley of bullets ended his misery forever. They plan to add another terrace to the Tulip garden by the Dal Lake. For tourists to see. A poor man’s unmarked grave is nothing. When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre once said.

Every day I wake up after dreaming a caboodle of half-dreams, I reason that human beings are all flawed. No one is perfect. I think our imperfections make us more real and hence human. We come with an odd mix of eccentricities and ecstasies. As a raconteur that excites me pretty much. Was it Fitzgerald who let the thought out that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat.
The redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. We should, perhaps, forgive ourselves.

I’m headed for a Sabbatical. I hate to carry on with activities sans joy, laughter minus happiness and life without a shred of love.

God, I reckon I’m a shade depressed. Can’t fathom why.

Sameer

*[There was a time, not too long ago, when both blocks -- the CIA and Afghan resistance fighters [then Mujahideen and now extremists] planned attacks together against the 4oth army]

Peacemaking in poppy lands

In less than three weeks from now – on April 3 and April 4 – 26 leaders from 26 NATO countries will clink glasses in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany. Over glasses of pinot noir and pilsner, the NATO buddies will celebrate their 60th anniversary summit. It has also been 26 years since the embarrassing disintegration of the Soviet Union. Hence the two-day celebrations! The clink of burgundy glasses notwithstanding, NATO is caught up in quick sands in Afghanistan. In a recent well-argued policy paper F. Stephen Larrabee, Distinguished Chair in European Security, Rand Corporation, goes on to deduce that NATO's very reputation is at stake in Afghanistan.

NATO seems to be losing it in the craggy hills and poppy meadows of Afghanistan. Since the invasion of this beautifully desolate country in 2001, NATO has lost close to 600 personnel. Taliban, rejuvenated and resurgent, backed by stealth elements in Pakistan’s notoriously naughty Inter-services Intelligence [without whom the cold war might still have been on] is back in business. The hugely influential American think-tank Brookings Institution [which everyone at Washington reveres] accurately sums it up: The south [of Afghanistan] is in worse shape. For the last two years, British, Canadian and Dutch troops have been fighting desperately to stabilize Kandahar, Helmand and Urzugan provinces against a determined Taliban based across the border in Pakistan.

Mullah Omar’s recent statements point to the audacity and confidence of Taliban. The one-eyed boss of Taliban [good plus bad] says that NATO forces will leave defeated shortly, like the Soviets in 1989. Omar has gone to the extent of offering NATO safe passage out of the country. All independent reports coming out of Afghanistan indicate that Taliban is encroaching steadily into the provinces around Kabul. In any case President Karzai’s writ is limited to the capital only. He faces elections in August and has begun to make tough noises. He has lost his mentor’s [US] blessing, which is openly calling him a useful idiot. When news reports in American and British newspapers start calling a foreign puppet government corrupt, it should consider its days numbered.

Amidst this escalation Obama, caught up neck deep in the recession ravel, is planning a charm offensive in Afghanistan. He is poised to increase troop levels pretty soon, perhaps by as many as 30,000. Tariq Ali, the brilliant British intellectual perhaps rightly points out that Obama advisors on Afghanistan are not on the button. One reason why NATO won’t succeed in the country is because they are by and large seen as complete aliens, talking an imperial language. They don't know anything about Afghanistan. Neither the language, nor the culture. Importantly the shelf life of any foreign army in Afghanistan has historically been limited.

Holbrooke is the special envoy in the region. Now the guy did help resolve Bosnia after the Balkan war. Since his arrival, there has been a sudden change in the American lexicon. The term ‘enemy combatant’ [made infamous by that Texan brute] has been dropped now. Suddenly there is good and bad Taliban. How does one determine who’s good and who’s bad Taliban, I asked the Afghanistan Ambassador to India, Sayed Makhdoom Raheen today. ‘Those who owe their allegiance to the constitution of Afghanistan and agree on a participatory democracy constitute the good Taliban’, Mr Ambassador replied. We can’t afford to lunch with that dreaded Omar, he chuckled to make it easier for me to place the bad Taliban. Simple. [Journalists are so dumb!]

Afghans have always been warriors. They have been weird in equal measures. Today, nearly 30 years after he was killed in a communist coup, Afghanistan’s president Mohammad Daud – who overthrew his cousin King Zahir Shah in 1973 and became the country's first president -- was reburied in Kabul. Since 1700 30 men have ruled Afghanistan [Karzai being the 30th]. Of these, only four served out their terms and died a natural death. Others were dethroned, assassinated, imprisoned, deposed and killed, deposed and exiled, deposed and hanged, beaten to death and so forth.

The country continues to baffle.

Sameer

Pakistan's musical chairs

Pakistani politicians are a filthy rich and terribly mischievous.
The poor country is torn between its wealthy leadership. They jockey for power shamelessly and once they grab it, they abuse it like their mistresses. They mostly talk about democracy but don’t mean it at all. ‘Pakistani Awam’ [the people of Pakistan] is a recurring theme in their speeches but in effect they are so full of themselves. They bicker in the open like whoremongers. Jinnah’s dream has gone sour.

The country is in the throes of a vicious power struggle. The wealthy ex-PM-cum-Amir-ul-Momineen designate [Leader of the faithful] Nawaz Sharif is a bitter man these days. He is frothing because Benazir Bhutto’s widower, that colorfully shady character who cuts off-color jokes with foreign female politicians, has not lived up to his word. Zardari and Sharif hugged tightly last year as they forged an alliance to restore democracy in Pakistan after long years of military rule. It appears now, Sharif feels, that Zardari had a dagger in his achkan [long coat] when they hugged.

Zardari, on his part, has been saying to his aides [there are only his men now, he is slowly doing away with his late wife’s and father-in-law’s most trusted supporters: Raza Rabbani is out of favor, Aitzaz Ahsan cannot be trusted, Makhdoom Amin Fahim has been completely sidelined, Sherry Rahman is not happy] that he cannot afford to trust the ex-Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhari. The ex-CJ who dyes his hair each morning, like Sharif, is more of a rakish activist rather than an honorable justice. The corrupt Zardari is more than sure that once Iftikar is reinstated, he will let the Damocles sword loose on him.

The truth be told Sharif is no great fan of judiciary. Perhaps the only common strand between him and the tough nut Iftikar is their love for the black dye that they apply -- in the characteristic subcontinent style -- in an effort to hide their years. Sharif wants to use Iftikar to stymie Zardari’s rise in the Pakistani politics. The president’s men realized this and attempted to check- mate the wily Sharif’s. Zardari’s hand-picked judiciary recently disqualified both Sharif brother’s from holding any political post in the country because of a nine year old high jacking charge [that joke when Musharraf was returning from Sri lanka in a plane, low on fuel]. As soon as the court gave its loaded verdict, Zardari moved swiftly like a predator on an empty stomach to dismiss the PML-led Punjab government.

Sharif was left totally miserable. Since reinstating judge Iftikar was one of his poll planks, he decided to join the lawyers and threw in his lot [and he’s pretty influential in Punjab] behind the lawyer’s movement. The long march [March 12-March 16] was planned. Sharif wanted nothing short of a revolution. Since he trucks comfortably with the Islamic parties, the right-wing got behind him. They too feel sidelined by the whisky-sloshed President. Zardari, despite his foibles, is deeply secular, like his party. The feud for Pakistan is taking place at many levels.

Zardari, though petty minded, too has a point. The hitherto dominating north Punjabi elites don’t like the idea of a Sindi, non-Punjabi administration and they are doing everything to undermine his presidency. The Iftikar drama is part of the same game. In any event, the argument goes, the judiciary is never a vehicle of change. It is at best a referee. Nawaz is singularly fixated on the idea of installing the ex-CJ because he knows that it may well prove to be Zardari's fall. Hence the President is balking.

As it always happens in case of Pakistan, America intervenes.
Their own fucked up strategy, now called war on bad Taliban, not war on terrorism [Obama is such an aesthete] in neighboring Afghanistan may go completely haywire in case Pakistan implodes. Holbrooke last night made desperate calls to both Zardari and Sharif.
Media reports suggest that a fevered backroom give-and-take is on.
A compromise may be in the offing soon. For the while, the army though increasingly impatient, may stay put in the barracks.
Kiyani is not exactly Mush.

The amusing power games in Pakistan are hugely distracting its leadership from tackling the real problems that confront it – the unholy tangle of terrorism and economic depression. Left unsolved they may well sink Pakistan along with the Islamists and liberals.

Sameer

How many deaths will it take...

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
~ Prof Howard Zinn, leading historian and author

The air was laden with a hint of festivity. Two friends, let us call them Amin and Javed, woke up to a frosty February morning unsure of what the day had in store for them. They lived in the same village, a picaresque hamlet called Bomai, situated on the foot of a hazel colored Kashmir hillock. It was a special day for the teenagers, one that they had planned over many days. They were going on a trip to the neighboring village, where a locally venerated saint’s birth anniversary was being held. Many boys and girls [along with adults] from the tiny village went on foot across the sienna hammock to visit the astaan [shrine]. The boys were apparently all kicked up.

The thing with the countryside, as with most urban centers, in a conservative place like Kashmir is that religion and rituals can be a damn serious business. It is all pervasive. You will basically come across naïve, loving people who just happen to take their faith and tradition very seriously. The saint lovingly called Mehboob-ul-Alam [love of the world] and Sultan-ul-Arifeen [king of knowledge], was born to a Rajput landlord family some 500 years back in Tujar. Lore has it that he was ennobled from a young age – and preached a unique blend of love and mysticism. People thronged the place to get blessed from him. Five centuries later the love affair continues. His birthday is still a big occasion in the hills.

Days before the urs, as the birthday is called locally, a fair-like aura sets in. Hawkers suddenly get busy installing stalls that sell dumplings and fritters, shaped like small potato wedges. Immigrant sweet-makers erect their small shops to make helva [sweet confection] and paranthas [oily round bread] that sell like hot cakes. Village shopkeepers stock up on everything from Chinese toys for kids to fake perfumes for shy damsels, who put on their best firak-yazar [loose tunics with matching trousers] and set off to the astaan, giggling along the way. Children shriek with joy. Men sing hymns aloud. Boys bum around.

Amin’s mom served him tea and bread for breakfast. He couldn’t eat too well. All he wanted to do was join his friends at the fair. Javed too hurriedly gobbled his breakfast and rushed off to meet his band. Together they wanted to visit the neighboring village, look at the girls, puff off, pay the obligatory visit at the holy saint’s shrine [where incidentally Sultan-ul-Arifeen isn’t buried, being just born there]. They thought they could perhaps come home late carrying small plastic bags with helva and alov-mongey [potato wedges deep fried] in them. Without having to fear a parental rebuke. Such little pleasures.

While the teenagers waited at the village square for other friends to turn up, an army party pulled up, guns cocked and gaze cocky. They began to randomly frisk people. Pushing some and vexing others. The boys avoided eye-contact with the troopers who came from the nearby army camp, notorious for its reputation. Riding roughshod the army men began to eve-tease girls on their way to the fair. Some people gathered courage and asked the troopers to behave. Insults were exchanged. The boys, curious, joined the crowd.

The day that had begun on a cheerful note was beginning to look morose. A rude interlude hung. People, historically, used to attend the urs had never observed such nuisance. The army tried to chase them away. People refused to budge. This construed an act of defiance. How could the village folk not scoot when they are chased! Guns were aimed at unarmed people. Since people in these parts of the world cannot have human rights and no international humanitarian law applies [India believes UN resolutions on Kashmir are old and hence redundant] -- it was decided to fire upon a bunch of harmless village people.

The crackle of gunfire sent people scurrying for cover. The carnival unexpectedly turned into a carnage. Blood splattered on the damp February soil. The hate colored bullets entered Amin. He lay in the village square, Rs 100 bill tucked away carefully in the pocket to buy some snack, dying a slow death. Javed fell to another bullet, eyes wide open. Little dreams lost forever.

Nothing much. Two more innocents. Two more Kashmiris. The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic, I recall of Joseph Stalin.

Protests, some hollering, a strike. Enquires. Commissions. Normalcy.

Amin and Javed, in their teens, go to graves and will never attend the fair again. Not fair.

Sameer