*History, the Nation-State, and Self-Liberation: A Gandhian Reading of Kashmir

New Delhi, August 15, “Independence Day”

The “integration” of Kashmir into India, or what some (if a distinct minority) would call its annexation by the Indian nation-state, has been discussed largely from the legal, national security, policy, and geopolitical standpoints.  But what might a Gandhian reading of Kashmir look like?  The BJP claims that it is now freeing Kashmir from the stranglehold of a colonial-era politics and the Nehruvian dispensation which had no stomach for a truly manly politics.  The BJP is thus in the process of creating a narrative around the abrogation of Article 370, the removal of J & K’s “special status”, and the “opening up”—an expression that, in such contexts, has meant nothing more than asking for the abject surrender of a people to the regimes of neo-liberalization and rapacious “development”—of the state as the beginning of the “liberation” of Kashmir.

All of history is the constant struggle of people for liberation from forces of oppression.  We need a narrative of liberation different from that which has peddled by the BJP, which I shall frame in three fragments, to unfold the history of Kashmir and the possibilities of redemption for its people. Swami Vivekananda, in a long visit to the Valley in 1897, is said to have been anguished at seeing the desecration of images of Hindu gods and goddesses.  Bowing down before an image of Kali, Vivekananda asked in a distressed voice, “How could you let this happen, Mother?  Why did you permit this desecration?”  It is said that the Divine Mother said in response, “What is to you, Vivekananda, if the invader defiles my images?  Do you protect me?  Or do I protect you?”

Vivekananda in Kashmir, 1897:  he is seated, 2nd to the left.

Secondly, it is an indubitable if deplorable fact that a considerable number of people, especially in north India, began to view Gandhi towards the end of his life as “The Father of Pakistan”.  Nathuram Godse was not alone in adopting this viewpoint: some others, too, saw him as the author of Pakistan and therefore willed Gandhi dead.  The BJP MP, Anil Saumitra, who recently put up a Facebook post declaring Gandhi the Father of Pakistan, is scarcely alone among his party colleagues in holding to these views.  “Since Pakistan was carved out of the silent blessings of Mahatma Gandhi, so he could be the rashtripita of Pakistan.”

Gandhi, the Father of Pakistan, as declared by BJP MP Anil Saumitra in mid-May 2019. Source: https://www.thehindu.com/elections/lok-sabha-2019/pakistans-father-of-the-nation-bjp-suspends-mp-party-office-bearer-for-facebook-post-on-mahatma-gandhi/article27164013.ece

But the designation of the “The Father of the Nation”, I would argue, is somewhat misleading for a wholly different reason.  No nationalist was such a staunch critic of the idea of the nation-state; and no one endeavored with such assiduousness as Gandhi to bring women into the orbit of public life and feminize politics. Long before society started expecting men to be nurturing, Gandhi was articulating a space for the view that men should remain men even as they should seek to bring out the feminine within them just as women should remain womanly but seek to bring out the best of the masculine within them.  The Mother in the “Father of the Nation” was doubtless more interesting than the Father in the “Father of the Nation” but in Modi’s India there is only contempt for such a view.

Thirdly, Gandhi’s little text of 1909, Hind Swaraj, must be recognized as the unofficial constitution of India.  Gopalkrishna Gokhale, held up by Gandhi as one of his gurus, was acutely embarrassed by this tract and was certain that it was destined for oblivion.  He advised Gandhi to dump it, but its author, as obdurate as ever, is famously on record as saying towards the end of his life that, barring a single word, he stood by everything he had written nearly 40 years ago.  Its subtitle, Indian Home Rule, has led most readers to read it as a tract for political emancipation from British rule.  But deeper reflection has led other readers to the awareness that Hind Swaraj argues for a more profound conception of liberation, a liberation that frees one from the baser instincts, gives one raj (rule) over one’s own self, and allows one to own up to notions of the self that we may otherwise be inclined to discard.

Just how, then, do these fragments inform our understanding and move us closer to a long-term and not merely forced resolution of the conflict over Kashmir?  It is the Home Minister’s contention that now, post-Article 370, terrorism will cease and Kashmir will be set on the path to “development”.  But this is wholly delusory:  my three fragments on offer point, respectively, to the necessity of liberation from history, liberation from the idea of the nation-state, and liberation from a strangulating conception of the ‘self’.

The champions of Hindutva have imagined themselves as the liberators of Hinduism itself, but their understanding of Vivekananda, whom they hold up as an icon of muscular India, is as shallow as their understanding of everything else.  Hinduism can do very well without Golwalkar and Amit Shah:  Do I protect you, or do you protect me, the Divine Mother asks.  History is no guide here:  many imagine that we only have to sift ‘myth’ from ‘history’, then install a “true history”, but history shackles as much as it emancipates.  As Gandhi might have said, history takes care of itself.  India is no ordinary nation-state, even if the greatest and most pathetic desire of the present political administration is to turn it into one:  thus the obsessive fixation on Akhand Bharat, on the national flag, and on the national anthem.

There is no Hindu or even Indian “self” without the Muslim partaking in it.  Munshi Ganesh Lal, who visited Kashmir in 1846 and recorded his observations in ‘Tuhfa-i-Kashmir (“Wonders of Kashmir”), found little to distinguish even the Kashmiri Pandits from Muslims.  The world of Indian Islam is very different from the putatively authentic Islam of Arabia and west Asia. This is well understood in Pakistan, where, since at least the time of Zia-ul Haq, a rigorous attempt has been made to disown the indubitable fact that Islam in Pakistan belongs to the Indic world more so than it does to the world of West Asian Islam.  The purists in Pakistan have met their match in the ideologues of Hindutva in and outside the Indian state who would like a pure nation-state even if they understand how mouthing pieties about Indian pluralism and the glories of diversity is political correctness.  What is singular about Kashmir, then, is precisely this:  here we can see with clarity the impossibility of redemption until we have unshackled ourselves, as did Gandhi, from debilitating notions of history, an impoverished conception of the self, and the decrepit notion of the nation-state as the culmination of history.

First published at ABP Live as “History, the Nation-State, and Self-Liberation:  A Gandhian View of Kashmir” on 14 August 2019

 

 

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*Reterritorialization and Neo-Liberalization: “Opening Up” Kashmir

Even as much of the country has erupted with joy at the BJP’s audacious steps in abolishing the state of Jammu & Kashmir, creating two new Union Territories—little more than “Bantustans”, say some—and thereby, as is assumed to be the case, “integrating” the Kashmir Valley into the Union of India, some serious questions have arisen about the possible consequences of these changes.  Article 35(A), which was added to the Constitution through a Presidential Order on 14 May 1954, conferred on the legislature of Jammu & Kashmir the power to define “permanent residents” and the rights that accrued solely to them, among them the privilege of being able to buy land and property in Kashmir.  This provision has now been scrapped.

Will Kashmir now be flooded by non-Kashmiris, as many are stating and some are hoping, and should we now expect real “development” as the Home Minister has promised?  Let us, for the moment, ignore the fact that, in comparison with most other Indian states, Kashmir already fares better on development indices, whether one considers infant or maternal mortality rates, under five mortality, levels of malnutrition, or the extent to which children have been immunized against common diseases. The painful truth is that almost no state in India can be described as truly “developed” in the conventional sense of the term; and some states—Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, to name a few—lag well behind the preponderant number of the world’s countries, and can only be compared to countries such as the Congo, Burundi, Niger, and the Central African Republic.  Will development for Kashmir mean direct investment in infrastructure, the creation of manufacturing jobs, and the growth of education, or will it also mean, which is absolutely certain, the purchase of properties in Kashmir as holiday homes by the rich of Delhi and Mumbai and unchecked environmental degradation?

There is an expression which for 200 years has guided colonial enterprises.  Africa was described by rapacious European explorers as finally having entered into the pages of history when the continent was “opened up” to European exploration, trade, and ruthless exploitation.  The “opening up” of Australia meant the evisceration of entire peoples just as the “opening up” of the Americas led to the genocide of native peoples and the disappearance of different modes of being in the world.  The narrative is now cast in a different if related language:  the “opening up” of Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union and the dismemberment of the Eastern Bloc signified the emergence of new markets and the entry of millions of people into the paradise of consumption.  Our Home Minister cannot stop gushing over the imminent “development” of Kashmir, but does this mean anything more than “opening up” the state to the unabated greed of Indian industrialists, loan sharks, and predatory capitalists?

This book was first published in 1911.

The possible further consequences of what is entailed by the “opening up” of Kashmir are perhaps best understood by turning to what may be described as the reterritorialization of Tibet.  In the first half of the 20^th century, following the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) was largely an independent nation. After the communists triumphed over the nationalists in China, Mao sought to integrate the TAR or Tibet into the People’s Republic.  The Dalai Lama was told in no uncertain terms that such integration could be accomplished peacefully, by his voluntary accession to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), or by force.  The Dalai Lama accepted Mao’s 17-point agreement in August 1951, and Beijing lost no time in rolling out the narrative, which had been some years in the making, that Tibet had now been liberated from its feudal past and that Tibetans would no longer live as slaves to theocratic leaders. That surrender is captured in the farcical “Peaceful Liberation” Monument, now dominating Lhasa’s Potala Square, which also celebrates the entry of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into Tibet.

The Peaceful Liberation (of Tibet) Monument, Potala Square, Lhasa; photograph: A. Bleus; source: https://alixbleus.me/2016/11/01/tibet-peaceful-liberation-monument-potala-square-lhasa-mg_3620/

Some commentators have adverted to the cultural genocide effected by the Chinese in Tibet; others hotly dispute the use of the term “genocide.”  What is unquestionably the case is that, from the outset, the Chinese sought with utter deliberation to alter the demographic composition of Tibet—as they have done so in Xinjiang (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, otherwise known as XUAR).  The strategy of territorialization did not commence with the Communists: indeed, it is the Qing who, in the 18^th century, started bringing the Han Chinese, and settlers from other ethnic groups, into northern Xinjiang. Still, the 1953 census showed 75% Ugyurs and 6% Han; by 2000, the Han portion of the population had grown to 40%.

The settlement of Han Chinese into Tibet, as a matter of deliberate state policy, has a more complex history.  In 1949, shortly before Tibet’s absorption into the PRC, the population of Lhasa stood at around 130,000, not including the Potala Palace and some 15,000 monks. The Han Chinese amounted to a mere 300-400.  The dramatic demographic shift is captured in the 1992 census statistics on Lhasa:  in a population of 140,000, the ethnic Tibetan population had shrunk to 96,431 while the Han Chinese had grown to 40,387.  This shift was accompanied by the widespread destruction of monasteries, libraries, and other manifestations of the cultural inheritance of the Tibetan people.  This is what may rightly be described as reterritorialization, or the defacement and obliteration of the physical, cultural, and intellectual landscapes of a people and the imposition of a new demographic and socio-political reality.  Should we at all be surprised that China justified the introduction of Han Chinese into Tibet with the argument that “after the democratic reform”—that is, the annexation of Tibet—“the People’s Government helped all the former slaves, about 5% of Tibet’s population, and large number of homeless serfs to settle down.”  To introduce improvements in livestock breeding, agriculture, and medical care, it was necessary to bring the Han as instruments of “revolutionary change” to a “backward” place.  While China was thus “helping” and civilizing the hapless Tibetans, it was allowing millions of Chinese back home to die of hunger—again, with the absolute complicity of party officials.  This is what the Chinese, and our own Home Minister and his cheerleaders, call “development.”

Still, if the picture in Tibet is complex, it is because the Tibetan Autonomous Region as a whole remains 90% Tibetan.  The Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959; the Potala Palace is now a museum; and dissent is dealt with sternly and swiftly.  There are Tibetans who dream of independence, no doubt, as indeed they should, but the Chinese shred these dreams into pieces. Some activists claim that the Tibetans have been reduced into a minority in their homeland: not only is this patently false but they fail to understand that the Chinese have accomplished what they set out to do.  To return, then, to Kashmir:  Some are prophesizing a Hindu invasion of Kashmir and the erosion of what is called Kashmiriyat.  That may well be alarmist, and the more pertinent question for those who follow events in Kashmir is whether the Indian state will effect something similar to what has transpired in Tibet by way of reterritorializing the Kashmir Valley.  What will they seek to efface from the extraordinary cultural legacy of Kashmir and how will they effect the changes in such a manner as to absorb Kashmir while giving it the semblance of “autonomy”?

First published on 12 August 2019 by ABP network:

https://www.abplive.in/blog/reterritorialization-and-neo-liberalization-opening-up-kashmir-1052781

*How Democracies Wither: The BJP’s Constitutional Coup d’état in Kashmir

“History, in one stroke,” declared the Indian Express on August 6^th in a large headline extending across the width of the newspaper.  That, we may say, was an objective rendering of the decision taken by the BJP-led Government of India to remove the “special” status occupied by Jammu & Kashmir over the last seven decades and, in its own estimation, truly “integrate” it into the Union of India.  Though the word “historic” has been utterly trivialized in contemporary discourse, who can doubt, whatever the shade of one’s political views, that August 5^th marks a “historic” or red-letter day in the history of the Republic?  But, on a less objective note, the lines from Hamlet may resonate strongly for some:  “Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (I.ii.256).

A deed most foul has been done.  A veil has come down upon Kashmir, but it shall surely lift—even if there will be no suhaagraat, no night of consummation.  The country has been overwhelmed and, for the present, few understand, and even fewer are willing to accept, that a constitutional coup d’état has taken place in India.  The very idea of a constitutional coup will be foreign to those who are accustomed to thinking of a coup as the overthrow of a democratically elected government and, more likely, the imposition of a dictatorship or military rule.  Coups bring to mind tanks on streets, subterfuge, massive misinformation, and fallen heads—a nasty affair.  It has already been argued by the present government and its supporters that everything that was done by the Centre was within the parameters of the law and that Parliament has only exercised its sovereignty.  A bill was introduced to bifurcate the State of Jammu & Kashmir into two Union Territories, one (J & K) with a Legislative Assembly and one (Ladakh) without, and the bill was passed by the required majority both in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha.  On this view, the BJP has, if anything, done everything within its power to affirm and even embellish the sovereignty of Parliament, and all talk of a “constitutional coup” should be construed as nonsense.

Let us, however, first consider only the circumstances—and not the legal conundrums—under which Kashmir was blanketed into such darkness that overnight a State of the Union was wiped out and ceased to exist as such.  Misinformation would be a mild word to describe how the Centre prepared for the coup by describing, in vaguely worded statements, some “terrorist” threats of which it had received information that compelled it to cancel, for the first time in living memory, the Amarnath Yatra, order tourists to leave the Valley, and move in more troops into what is already the most heavily fortified piece of territory in the world.  The word “terrorist” has, of course, become a license for the most egregious offenses—more often than not, by the state, and not merely in India.  The state has only to shout the word “terrorist” and everyone is expected to become compliant, submissive, and patriotic.

On late Sunday, August 4^th, the government took the next steps necessary to pull off the constitutional coup.  In the stealth of the night, it placed democratically elected leaders under house arrest.  Then, in the hours following, it placed the Valley under lockdown.  All internet, mobile, and landline connections with Kashmir were snapped:  the reader might like to think of quarantine being imposed, not just on a mere few suspected of harboring a contagious disease, but on an entire population of some 12 million.  Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which imposes curbs on people assembling together and owes its origins, not surprisingly, to colonial-era legislation, was brought into effect.  Yet more troops were airlifted into Kashmir—as if there weren’t enough over the 600,000 or more Indian army soldiers, CRPF, and BSF who have already turned the state into a heavenly paradise for large-scale corruption, all of course overlooked in the name of “national security”.  This is, need it be said, exactly how a clandestine state operates—a state, in other words, that bears no responsibility to its citizens.

It would take the Home Minister to put the constitutional touches to the coup.  Much has been written in the last few days on whether the actions of the Centre will withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.  It cannot be said that the present Supreme Court inspires much confidence in those who believe in democratic values and the unfettered reign of the “rule of law”. Since many others have commented on the legal questions, it will suffice to make only two points which touch on the question of what I have termed a constitutional coup d’état.  First, unlike other States or Union Territories to which J & K has been likened, for instance with respect to the question of restrictions on the sale of land or property to non-residents or “foreigners”, J & K is distinct in that its relationship to India is also and uniquely governed by the Instrument of Accession which Maharaja Hari Singh signed on 26 October 1947.  “Nothing in this Instrument shall be deemed to commit me”, states Article 7 of the Instrument signed by Hari Singh, “in any way to acceptance of any future constitution of India . . .”, by which it is meant in part that there is nothing which warrants the argument that J & K must necessarily be subject to the Constitution of India.

Secondly, we must understand the sleight of hand by which the Home Minister was able to argue that it had followed the letter of the Constitution.  One particular provision (sec 3) of Article 370 makes possible an amendment, but it stipulates in no uncertain terms that “the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the State . . . shall be necessary before the President issues such a notification.”  The Constituent Assembly of the State of J & K, it should be noted, was dissolved—not merely adjourned—on 17 November 1956.  Thus the legislative body without which the President of India is not empowered to make a decision does not exist.  The Centre took upon itself to argue that, in lieu of the Constituent Assembly, the State Assembly of J & K could well serve the purpose—except that, rather conveniently, since J & K has been under Governor’s or Central Rule, it then devolved upon the Parliament of India, as the next highest sovereign body, to take the matter into its hands.  And so the constitutional coup was accomplished.

Constitutional coups are, if anything, more dangerous than the classic type of putsch where the dismissal of a government and “regime change”, or the replacement of one type of dictatorship by another, takes place in the open.  Even many who are critical of the BJP and its aggressive championing of Hindu supremacy, however much it may be disguised by platitudes about an “inclusive society”, or the utterly pedestrian and insincere slogan of “sabka saath sabka vikas sabka vishwas” (everyone’s support, everyone’s development, the trust of all), have been taken in by the coup effected by the Centre.  Indeed, it is possible to argue that the BJP is far from being the only party that was hostile to Articles 370 and 35(A), and students of Indian politics are well aware of the fact that many of the provisions of Article 370 had been hollowed out over the years.  J & K has also been under Governor’s rule on previous occasions.  (For all practical purposes, President’s Rule and Governor’s Rule are the same, except that, since many provisions of the Constitution of India were not applicable to J & K, the state was placed under Governor’s Rule.)  Why, then, some will argue, should a ruckus be made over the Centre’s arrogation to itself of the right to dismantle the State of Jammu & Kashmir, create two new “Union Territories”, and ensure that the Constitution of India applies to this state as much as it does to every other state of the Union?

What makes a constitutional coup far more dangerous in certain circumstances to the survival of a democracy than the common army-led putsch or dictatorship is the fact that it obscures the vital question of the relationship of means to ends.  However much the Centre may have felt justified in abrogating Articles 370 and 35(A), the fundamental question of the sovereignty of the people, on which the idea of a Republic rides, cannot be dodged.  The people of Kashmir were, needless to say, not consulted in the least; to the contrary, they have been isolated, much like hardened criminals who are placed in an isolation cell.  A democracy is also to be distinguished from other forms of government in its attentiveness to people and common citizens; in a different language, it is distinguished by its sensitivity to means.  It is all the more ironic that a constitutional coup d’état should have taken place in India, since it is difficult to think of anyone else in modern history who was more attentive to the question of means than Mohandas Gandhi, the so-called “Father of the Nation”. Gandhi went so far as to argue that it was enough that those who were in politics paid attention to the means.  The present government, on the other hand, is dedicated to the proposition that ends alone matter:  only the faint-hearted, the romantics, the idealists, and the effeminate think of means.  The constitutional coup effected by the BJP is yet another one of its orchestrated blows to eviscerate the memory and legacy of Mohandas Gandhi.

First published on 9 August by ABP, here:  https://www.abplive.in/blog/how-democracies-wither-the-bjps-constitutional-coup-detat-1050840