I do
not think ordinary Indians support the brutality of army occupation in Kashmir.
Despite what the Indian state says, and despite what the Indian army and CRPF
(Central Reserve Police Force) are doing, I honestly do not believe that any
ordinary Indian supports the torture of young men, the blinding of people
attending a funeral, the rape of women, the killings and maiming and abuse and
humiliation that are now a routinized fact of daily life in the Kashmir valley.
To believe that ordinary Indians
enjoy watching this spectacle of violence, that ordinary Indians take pleasure
in the torture of children, would be to think India is now a country
comprised of sadistic psychopaths. I honestly do not think ordinary Indians are
psychopaths. India is a large and complex country, a huge and diverse society.
Everything that happens in Kashmir, the brutality of the army and the security
forces, cannot signify the whole truth of India we tell ourselves. It seems
somehow unfair to ordinary Indians that what happens in Kashmir reflects them
all.
But the time has come now to squarely face some hard truths
about Indians and the dissimulations, psychological and social, by which they
continue to live in their country and call themselves ‘Indians’.
If what their government tells them is true, that there is no
‘India’ without ‘Kashmir’, it is only stating a bald historical truth. The day
India came into existence as an independent postcolonial country was the day
‘Kashmir’ came into being as an occupied territory. India became postcolonial
and colonizer in the same instant. There is no historical contradiction here:
this is the zombie afterlife, as a friend describes it, of British colonialism.
We know this history, we know its consequences, and we are seeing it unfold
every day in the Kashmir valley. But they still behave as though they can
continue to think this is an abstract question or old history.
But they must stop lying to themselves. They must find the
courage to accept the truth that every killing in Kashmir by Indian security
forces, every rape, every murder, and every child brutalized, is a referendum
on India. Not on Kashmir. It is a referendum on the existence of India as a
political project.
If India can only remain India, as they are
told by their government, by insisting Kashmir is an integral part of it
against any wishes of the Kashmiri people. It depends on the rape of women in Kunan
poshpora. It depends on, feeds on, the brutal torture and disappearance of 6000
people in the Kashmir valley. A CRPF soldier pushed a needle into the eye of a
5 year old child. People attending a funeral have been blinded by pellets. This
is what is being done in Kashmir today. This is what is happening in their name
as Indians. Do they truly, as Indians, absorb the full weight of this fact? Do
they truly, as Indians, understand what this means? There is absolutely nowhere
for them to hide now. At all.
The
historical birth-story of India explains the terror that grips ordinary Indians
when the question of Kashmir arises. This fear, fed and played on by the
official position of the Indian state, says: If even once it were admitted that
Kashmir is actually not an integral part of India, has never been a part of
India, what will happen to the idea of India? If once it is admitted, even
once, that the fantasy of territorial integrity and India’s credentials as a
secular country can be undone by speaking of Kashmir, what will happen to
India? What sense will it make to speak then of India as a country? If
they want India to be India then Kashmir has to be resolved.
Indians
should demand their freedom. Freedom from the killing, blinding’s, rapes,
torture that apparently enable their freedom as Indians. Freedom from
occupying this horrifying role in which they find themselves. They should
refuse to accept this role: they must have the courage to say their existence
as Indians cannot be determined any longer by the continuing oppression of the
Kashmiri people. If this is the condition of India’s existence, then they do
not want it. They want freedom from this position in which they have all been
placed.
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