When Kashmiris, Nagas and others sought justice

By Jawed Naqvi 

The creation of Pakistan from the Indian subcontinent was not inevitable. It happened despite several attempts to avert its formation, including efforts by the Muslim League. Former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh has given a compelling account in his book of the Congress party’s arrogance and culpability in forcing Jinnah to say enough is enough.

By the same token, the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan was not a pre-determined fact. Islamabad’s grievous mishandling of the situation led to a truncated Pakistan. The same argument could apply to Kashmir. It is of course not surprising that the Indian middle class, led by its Murdochian TV channels, advocates military force to tame Kashmir’s anti-India upsurge in the way Gen Yahya Khan unleashed military terror in East Pakistan. However, somewhat hypocritically while it celebrates India’s military intervention, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, when it comes to Kashmir the Indian middle class takes the opposite view.

As with Pakistan and later with Bangladesh, there was, and perhaps still is, nothing imminent about Kashmir’s Azadi from India. But everything has been mishandled for years (and is being made worse on a daily basis) by New Delhi. And that has paved the way for people to believe that Azadi is the only option which gives them justice and dignity. In the early days of Kashmir’s alienation from New Delhi, Nehru had asked leftist film scribe Khwaja Ahmed Abbas to intervene on his behalf with Sheikh Abdullah. Nehru died before there could be progress. Now Manmohan Singh has assembled a group of interlocutors. One of them has already come up with the most original non-starter – suggesting the Indian constitution be changed to accommodate the Kashmiris’ sentiments. Now you don’t need a constitutional change to withdraw troops from Kashmir, or to free its political prisoners, or to hold serious talks with Pakistan, or to punish the rapists and torturers who are claiming to be the defenders of the Indian state, or to hold a referendum to ascertain the people’s will in Kashmir. You need an administrative order and a will to carry out the mandate of democracy.

That’s all.

The government sensed trouble when a group of representatives of seriously disaffected people came together on a platform at a recent seminar about Kashmir in Delhi called ‘Azadi—the only way’. The furore over sedition charges against Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani who also addressed the seminar was a complete red herring, a compulsory digression for the Indian state and its rightwing props because neither Roy nor Geelani said anything they hadn’t said for years. The furore was a deliberate decoy to head off the debate on ‘Hindu terror’ after Indresh Kumar, a senior member of the RSS, was named in a CBI charge-sheet for a bomb blast in the Ajmer Sharif dargah in which many were killed.

However, in chasing a completely false lead about sedition and so forth, the state and the media may have missed out on the significance of an historic meeting of disparate ideological and political groups. Nagas, Manipuris,

Sikh separatists, Maoists and human rights activists, among others, were discussing their separate injustices at the hands of the Indian state in the context of the brutalisation of Kashmir. Even as they had assembled at the Little Theatre Group under the ruse of speaking for Kashmir, India’s intelligence agencies could not have been entirely unaware of the momentous nature of the event. Ironically, the Maoists and the Kashmiri separatists who had come together for the first time on a platform in Delhi had once shared a common history.

For example, the Maoists are but an evolved offshoot of the Telangana struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad, in which communist cadres had participated in his armed overthrow. The Kashmiris are the inheritors of an anti-feudal struggle against Hari Singh, the former ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, that was led by Sheikh Abdullah.

It was in 1941 that Abdullah’s Jammu and Kashmir National Conference joined All India States Peoples Conference, the arm of the Congress Party that was working for democracy in the princely states and was pitted against the Rajas who were technically outside the realm of British empire. When the Sheikh joined the Quit India movement in 1942, he was welcomed and applauded. But when he launched a Quit Kashmir campaign against Hari Singh in 1946, he was surprised by the aloofness from many in the Congress. It does not seem to bother our contemporary democrats that Kashmir’s Accession certificate was signed by a discredited monarch who did not have the trust of his people.

Anyway, at the recent Azadi meeting one set of comrades whose history goes back to the Telengana peoples’ struggle against a feudal ruler came out in in support of another set of comrades whose independence had been subverted by the newly formed Indian state. In Hyderabad the Indian government had encouraged a people’s movement to overthrow the Nizam, in Kashmir it subverted the people to sign a controversial Instrument of Accession with its feudal ruler. Even Lord Mountabatten made mention of the need to get the people’s approval on Hari Singh’s transactions with New Delhi, but all that is now forgotten history.

Let me end here, by quoting the views of two important speakers at the Azadi meeting, which were largely ignored by the media and the state in their hunt for Arundhati Roy. Varavara Rao, a self-confessed Maoist and poet, said in an interview after the event that the Maoists were firmly behind the Kashmiri people’s struggle for the right to self-determination and justice.

A Naga separatist, who spoke at the meeting, also gave reasons about why his movement stood in solidarity with the Kashmiris.

Varavara Rao to Tehelka magazine: “I feel Azadi is the only way for Kashmir. Self-determination is the right of every nationality. Being a Maoist, I support revolutionary and independent movements of people. On that Marxist-Leninist principle, I support the nationality struggle of Kashmir and of the Northeast. I come from the Hyderabad riyasat. Both Hyderabad and Kashmir were invaded by India. Even the Indian Union uses the word ‘accession’ in both cases. They annexed Hyderabad on the pretext that the rulers are Muslims and the ruled are Hindus. In Kashmir, they said the king is Hindu. In both places, they played the Hindu card.”

The general secretary of the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights, N. Venuh, is an advocate of independent Nagaland. In his speech during the convention on Kashmir, he espoused the cause of Azad Kashmir, drawing parallels between the two states.

“We are not part of India, so we cannot be called secessionists. The government has to give us our rights. We can be friends with the Indian State, but cannot be part of the Indian Union.” On similarities between the Naga struggle and Kashmiris, he said: “Yes. History tells us that Kashmir is a disputed territory. This is why the UN office is still there in Srinagar.

The Kashmiris should have the right to self-determination. They should be allowed to decide whether they want to be with India or go their own way. This is true for Nagas. We never wanted to be a part of India.”

As I said, the recent meeting on Kashmir was a landmark event. Call it secessionist or a call for sedition, or whatever. Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani were not the main story. This is what the Indian media and the Indian state would do well to understand and, if possible, accept.

Read the original article here.

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4.Indian Maoist violence

5.Azadi It's the only thing the Kashmiri wants. Denial is delusion

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