I have never spoken in public in Kashmir before. It is one of the most difficult things for me to do. Because I don’t know from what place to speak, because I am a writer who has a very complicated past, even personally, and questions of identity, of ethnicity, of what it means to be a woman in a very male dominated society, even in India, forget Kashmir (I am looking out for the sisters – hello- I can see just about five). All these things are very complicated for me and how do I begin this conversation, because I have not come here to lecture you, about what you should do about fighting this occupation. I really have come here to listen. And I have been coming here for some years now. To listen and to try to understand. I am not all here to tell anybody what to do. But, may be to try and speak a little bit about the complexities of some easy things that we fling around.
As a writer, sometimes, I flinch when words are used without precision. For example, we have all come to accept that the leaders of this struggle are called separatists. What does that mean? Two weeks ago I was in Ranchi, and a journalist came pushing his mike into my face, and asked, “Madam, do you believe Kashmir is an integral part of India, yes or no, yes or no?” I said, “Look relax, Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. And there is no need for you to keep asking me this thing aggressively. This is not something I have invented. It is not some radical position that I am taking. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted it. So let’s not use aggression in place of intelligence or information.”
So when that is the case, what does it mean to call the leaders of this movement, separatists? Because then you are already accepting it is a form of secession. Whereas, in fact, that is not the case. So then what do we mean when we say India?
There are so many different kinds of struggles going on in the world. There are struggles for self determination. Then there are struggles of those who are within nation, who suffer terrible trials, but when somebody says India or America, I begin to flounder. I try to think what does this mean. What does India mean. In 1947, we were told that India became a free country, a democratic, socialist – that came a bit later) – a sovereign republic when the constitution was adopted.
From the day India won independence from colonialism, it became a colonizing power itself. From the day, it went to war against Nagaland, against Manipur, against Mizoram. Since then, if you look at what the Indian state has been doing, you often hear, people flinging this accusation against the Maoists, that they believe in something called ‘protracted war’. Actually, if you look at the Maoist doctrine, in many ways, the idea of protracted war is very similar to the idea of Jihad.
It is a fight for justice. But the Indian state has waged a protracted war against people and subsumed nationalisms, from the time it came into being in 1947. And it has intervened militarily. Just look at the list: Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Telangana, Goa, Hyderabad, Kashmir – of course, Punjab, against Naxalites. And now they are thinking of calling out the Indian army in Central India, against the poorest people in the world. And Najeeb (Mubarki) just said, in his presentation, that it is a battle that Kashmiris face against Indian military occupation, as opposed to Palestine, it is a battle of inclusion – of them saying ‘you are our people’.
That is true and not true. Because if you listen to the conversations about whether the army should be deployed in Chattisgarh, they are always saying ‘how can the army be deployed against our own people’. And I have asked them so many people – so many times you meet army people at the airport- and I have asked them, are you admitting that in Kashmir you are deployed against people that are not your own; so you are automatically admitting to cause of Kashmiri people.
There has been an intervention, and if you look at the list that I just named of what kind of people, places the Indian state has called out the army and militarily intervened, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur – these are all Adivasi and Christian people. In Telangana they were mostly Dalit and lower caste people. In Punjab it was the Sikhs. In Hyderabad they were the Muslims, and in Goa they were the Christians. The list shows you an upper caste Hindu state that is constantly at war with the other.
So, now, when you talk about the identity or the struggle for identity – someone just asked the question, that is it not correct that the debates about what kind of Kashmir you want to have, should happen after the Azaadi?
That is never the case. If you look at Indian war of Independence, look at the great debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nehru and Jinnah. These debates have to happen. They cannot be postponed to a later date, because those debates are a part of the struggle. They are very much a part of the sharp blade of resistance. They are how you sharpen the resistance.
When these debates were happening in India, (whatever India is, the boundaries of what we knew as India were marked out by the British in 1899. So at this meeting day before yesterday, one of the people who spoke, said that India is a prison house of many nationalities, what is India), When the war of Independence was happening, of course, the British tried to use these divisions, to try and postpone, to divide and rule. It is an old, old colonial game – to pit the Hindus against the Muslims, Dalits against Upper Caste, this region against that. Of course, the colonial power will always use whatever cracks it can see.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t have those debates. Because if you don’t have those debates, and you try and paper over them, they still know where the fault lines are, and they still try to use that against you. So the Indian government is saying to the Kashmiris, Just like the British government said to the Indians, that the natives are not ready for freedom. And eventually look what happened. With all the legacy of so called non-violent struggle – (which was not a non-violent struggle. There were many armed struggles there and then, and part of it was non-violent), but eventually it left us with a legacy of partition, which was perhaps one of the greatest, most violent, upheavals in modern history.
But those debates that we are talking about, which you are all aware of, have been used by the Indian state to divide you and break you up, to make you fight each other, and as a result of that, from the fear of that, there has been a backing off from that intellectual engagement. So that eventually people are not exactly sure about what is the shape and what is the form of Azadi.
But there is absolutely nothing that should prevent people from debating openly, as long as that does not result in killing each other, or weakening the struggle in any way. Those debates are only going to make you stronger as long as you are allowing somebody to use those against you.
I just wanted to say, once again,… what kind of mask the occupation itself wishes to fit upon the resistance so that it can demonize it, so that it can come out looking like the good guy.
Why has this whole struggle been constantly put in front of the world and in front of the media as sort of struggle of fundamentalist Islamists? See the point is, if it is the struggle of fundamentalist Islamists, then that it is fine, put it forward, let the people say this is what we want, who is anybody to disagree. You have the right to be whatever you want to be.
See, in the late (19) 80’s what was happening in the international and in our regional areas, that sort of made this picture, that everybody was then supposed to fit into.
In the late 80’s, when capitalism won its jihad against soviet communism in the mountains of Afghanistan, two things happened in India.
India, (The GOI) which called itself Non Aligned, which held itself with some pride in the international arena, suddenly became completely aligned, and began to say we are the natural allies of Israel and the US. And the Indian government opened two locks – one was the lock of the Babri Masjid, and the other was the lock of the Indian markets.
And exactly at that same time, when it opened the lock of Babri Masjid, was the time when America flipped from calling the people who were waging their jihad against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, suddenly from founding fathers they became the world’s greatest terrorists.
At that same time, in India, began the movement for Hindutva, the whole Babri Masjid episode, and the corporatization. Both projects went side by side, hand in hand. And the end of a long manufacturing process of the opening of these two locks, ended with the production or manufacture of two kinds of terrorists – the Islamist terrorists, and the Maoist terrorists.
How does the Indian democracy function today. It has the BJP and the Congress. And it has ensured that whichever government comes to power, it will be right wing and it will be militaristic. Because it will always be dealing with some kind of terrorist.
So today we have a country that calls itself the world’s largest democracy, headed by a prime minister that has never won an election in his life. And with economic policies that mean India cannot have an 8 per cent growth rate without becoming a militaristic power. By militaristic I don’t mean internationally a super power, but by militarizing itself. Because the former finance minister and current home minister Mr Chidambaram – who was the representative, as a legal advisor of all the various major corporations and mining companies that are plundering the land today – says that it is his vision that 80 percent of Indian people should live in cities. This means that 500 million people will be uprooted from their villages. How can that happen unless that in not supervised by the army or the police. It cannot happen. So what we are seeing, what we are going to see in India today, is what you people have experienced over the last 20 years in Kashmir.
A lot of us, I mean, I have travelled, Gautam (Navlakha) has travelled, in Chattisgarh. You speak to the BSF or CRPF there. Many of them have been deployed in Kashmir and now they are deployed in Chattisgarh.
What you have is a situation, where India is a colonial power that has fought in Nagaland, and Manipur and all those states that I talked about. What it does is, it sends Nagas to Kashmir, it sends Kashmirs to Chattisgharh, the Chattisgarhis to Kashmir, the Tamilians to somewhere else, exactly like the British fought the first world war, the second world war.
And all of us are the subjects of this colonial power, willingly recruiting ourself to be deployed to oppress someone else. You go to Chattisgarh, the most dreaded people there were the Naga Battalion. And yet about ten days ago the commander of the NSCN, the Naga movement, had come to see me. He was telling me about the history of the struggle which began in 1956, and the ceasefire was signed in 1997. I said tell me, do you have a body count (because we know the body count in Kashmir – 70,000 people killed in 20 years)? He said, “the Naga government has a body count, but I think it is a little exaggerated”. I said what is it? He said, “250,000 people”.
I don’t know what he meant a little exaggerated, but even if it is double, and yet the world doesn’t know about it, because India has got its great publicity going on – ‘we are a democracy’.
Recently I travelled in north Telangana with a woman called Padma. She was with the Peoples War Group. She was arrested just a week after she had her appendix removed. She was beaten in the police station, till she hemorrhaged and had to have almost all her organs removed. And then they broke her knees and told her that you will never walk in the forest again. She was imprisoned for eight years, the only time she was allowed out, was when her husband who was also in CPI Maoist was killed. She was allowed to attend his funeral.
Now today she runs an organization called Committee For The Retrieval Of Dead Bodies From Illegal Encounters in India. She goes around north Telangana, mostly in a tractor, getting the bodies of people who have been killed by the police, to their homes. I travelled with her to these homes. The biggest home that I went into was much less than the size of this platform (around 10 feet by ten feet). And Padma told me, you know Arundhati, these are ‘middle class’ homes. The poorer people don’t have house. They live outside, in the open, or under a thatch.
This is what is going on in this country.
I went to Cuddalore, which is in Tamil Nadu, with a friend of mine who is a Dalit MLA. I said to him, take me to a place where a Dalit soldier who was killed in Kashmir has been buried. There was an SP with us. He took me to a garbage heap, where there is a separate pump for water for Dalit soldiers to be cremated. And the upper caste people will not allow the body of that Dalit solider to be carried past their houses because it will pollute them. I turned around and I asked the SP, “Tell me that what is your job here? Is your job to make sure that those bodies are carried down the street with dignity and buried with dignity?” He said, “Madam, my job is to preserve law and order, which means to make sure that that does not happen.”
So when we are talking about identities, and battles, and struggles, sometime my mind is a whirl. I don’t know how to think about these things any more.
Earlier this year Gautam (Navlakha) did that journey, and so did I, travelled for weeks, I spent two and a half weeks with the Maoists in the forests. They have been working there for 30 years, doing politics, which means not just guerilla warfare. What is their first initial battle with (for) people who have nothing but lion clothes? Fighting for tendu patta ka daam ki paanch paise zyada chahiya (fighting for the price of tendu leaves, asking for five paisa more).
And that was a monumental fight. And today that political work of theirs has become something which Indian government for reasons of their own, calls the greatest internal security threat.
But in that forest I walked with the comrades, I walked with the people’s liberation guerilla army, fifty percent of whom are women… I went in there thinking like many liberal feminists that an armed struggle is disempowering for women. That the women inside are going to be in terrible condition. I was disabused of that, because many of the women who joined that struggle joined it in order to get away from the patriarchy of their own traditions and their own community. And what women they were!
And I tell you, for the first time in my life in India, I lay in that forest, and I felt that there was enough space for all my organs in my body. I saluted them, I said wow! This gives us reason to stand up and say Zindabad!
And I believe that, here too in Kashmir, women have played a very, very important part. Everybody doesn’t have to go, pick up a gun or become a guerilla fighter. I keep saying in India that I believe in a biodiversity of resistance. And I want to say that here, that resistance is a beautiful thing. But it has many meanings and many facets. What constitutes resistance, is not just one thing, just like you cannot call a group of trees, which is just one kind of tree, a forest.
A forest has biodiversity. And that is what makes it strong. It just cannot get wiped out by one kind of forest. In that way, in India there is a biodiversity of resistance, a standing up to state. And that biodiversity of resistance requires that you tap into everybody. It is not just to say, the stone pelters are doing what they are doing, so I can stay home. But a real resistance would be, what can I do. I am a doctor, or I am a lawyer, or I am a teacher, or I am a housewife, but what can I do that will lend solidarity to this struggle. Because, at the end of the day, all colonial occupations are facilitated by the creation of a native elite. It is not that the Indian army is occupying Kashmir. There is an elite that is allowing that occupation.
In India too, it is not that when the British colonized India, that there was thousands of British troops that were holding India down. It was a co-optation of the elite. So, when we talk about, how do you resist an occupation. I think there are two tiers. One is a set of goals or a set of demands that you might place on the occupying power – that we want you to withdraw the AFPSA, we want you to demilitarize, we want you to release prisoners – a set of demands. But that occupying power is eventually what it is; it is an occupying power. Its power concedes nothing, unless it is forced to.
By merely asking it is not going to happen. So then, how do you actually take this resistance forward.
Because either you see the last twenty years of resistance as a linear progression, in which you have fought, you have paid a price, you have won something, you have lost something, you move forward and consolidated and then the occupation has put an end to that, then something else happens and you move forward a little more.
Or you look at it as if, are you short circuiting yourselves. Have you created a circuit, in which something happens and it just keeps getting short circuited, and you cannot consolidate the gains you have made. I am not saying that this or that has happened, but this is a question that the resistance has to ask itself.
Is it progressing or is it a series of short circuits where you gain something and then you lose that ground again or then you gain something and then you lose that ground again. Is that what is happening, or is there a steady progression, however, slow forward. Is there a clear idea of what is going to happen next? That doesn’t mean you can control it, you have to face losses, but are you moving ahead? Because, sometimes when u get to hear talk about the fact that Kashmiris have been ruled, repressed or occupied for centuries, then you must worry that occupation is not a part of your cellular structure. It doesn’t have to be a part of your cellular structure.
And is there anything you can set, are there any goals you can set, not to the Indian state, but to yourselves. For example, is there any possibility of saying that the goal of the resistance is that we don’t want our people to join the police, we don’t want our people to join the CRPF.
The first time I went to Chattisgarh, after many years of travelling through Kashmir, it really broke my heart, the journey from Raipur to Dantewada, stopped at this Dhaba, and it was full of Kashmiri BSF, who were going to oppress the Chattisgarhis.
Can we stop this colonial power from using us in these ways? The Naga mothers actually, called back the Naga Batallion, at one point, from Chatttisgarh. Can we see the design in this? Can we set ourselves some real goals that we are not going to let this happen.
I think to understand that meeting place between the occupation and those who are facilitating it, not necessarily, I don’t mean this in an ugly way, but I mean can people see that what they are doing is actually undoing the work of stone pelters or undoing the work of the militants. Because you gained a tremendous amount of ground in these last four months. Are you going to concede that, or are you going to build on that? How to do that? How to understand what this occupation is, what it does to your minds. Because otherwise what happens, is that however terrible the price that is paid, however many people have been killed, the real risk is that it turns into a tempo tantrum, a tempo tantrum by children against their parents, and then the parent says, OK come down, I give you something. You don’t want to have a tempo tantrum. You want to be part of resistance.
I agree with Gautam what he talked about elections. However, it is important to understand how that election was used against you in the world. It was used against you. And I remember I was in Kashmir, when the Amarnath uprising happened, and I wrote that piece, and after that when the elections happened, I was at the Srinagar airport, and someone came to me and said, “you know Arundhati you must never trust us Kashmiris, because we will let you down”. I said, “It has nothing to do with me, it is a battle that you are fighting.”
That is also a part of the psychological operation that you must not trust yourself. But you must understand, what is the message that is going out. You can’t allow somebody else to paint your portrait for you. Let you paint that portrait, and to do that there has to be a deepening of the understanding of the politics.
I have written extensively about Narmada Valley, where there was a huge movement against big dams. And sometimes I wish the intelligence of the Kashmir valley could be fused into the intelligence of the Narmada Valley, because there are two different kinds of intelligence. In the Narmada Valley, they talk about repression, but they don’t even know the beginning of what repression can be. But they have a very, very sophisticated understanding of the economic structures, the ecological price, of the cultural price, that this new world order is paying (extracting).
In Kashmir you have such a sophisticated understanding of repression, but a very rudimentary understanding of the big picture, of how economics, how the corporate world is working. When you say, we want to control our own resources what does that mean. You know that we want to build our own dams, make our own mines, displace our own people or is there a new understanding.
There are these repositories of understanding in the world that need to merge and fuse with each other. I think there is so much to be gained by this, by understanding.
I read about the reports of what happened in Delhi, a few days ago, when the meeting happened, Geelani sahab was there, and I was also there. I was kind of curious why nobody seemed to even wonder, how did that meeting happen. Who organized it. It was a historic thing. There were people from all over India who came and spoke out in solidarity, who are today being accused of sedition, who might run the risk of being imprisoned. But why is nobody curious, who were those people? Why did they risk it? It is not like Geelani sahab just parachuted in there and meeting was organized by the Hurriyat. Somebody organized it. Somebody sent out those invitations. Somebody expressed solidarity. Who were they, and why did they do it?
I am not saying this, because you need to express solidarity with suffering people elsewhere. I am not saying that. It doesn’t matter. I think it will deepen this resistance to understand that politics in very, very serious ways. And it will make you stronger, and it will make them stronger too.
