Kashmir Views

Sonamarg Diary

2009-11-13T11:59:00.003+05:30

Just a kilometer before Sonamarg, in the lap of nature, on the green rug, eight small tents are pitched in a row. Each in a shape of an octagon. Tucked next to a road that leads to famous Thajiwas Glaciers, these tents juxtapose with the sparkling stream (Sindh) that gushes loudly below the edge of a green slope on top of which sheep graze in thousands.

Outside these tents, Showket Ahmad, the first Kashmiri to have led any expeditions to couple of initial base camps of the world's highest peak, Mount Everest enjoys warmth of the big orange sun that had just emerged from behind the Himalayan ranges.

Donning sports gear, Showket a visibly stiff, red-faced round man with deep wrinkles on both cheeks sits in a wing chair.

As he puffs a cigarette sending in air loops of smoke, he opens up.

“I am leading a team of 'Highland Excursion Pvt Ltd'—an offshoot group of Australian adventure sports firm 'World Expeditions',” he finishes pointing towards a van with the agency’s name inscribed on its white coating.

These days Showket's team takes incoming tourists for rafting in Sindh and Zorbing or Sphereing (an adventure sports wherein a person travels in a huge round ball, generally made of transparent plastic) on the slopes.

"It is a new concept here. People are picking up," he says, while a young man rolls down the green slopes—Sphereing.

Having mastered adventure sports and a hardcore travel aficionado, Kashmir’s beauty and thrills involved in its exploration injected in him a 'Strange fanaticism'.

"I was born in Kashmir which obviously attracts everyone but it made me its bed-fellow. The first time I went up in the mountains I decided to conquer Himalayas. And play in its lap," he says easing his forehead ruts.

Born in the city's Khanyar, Showket had his primary studies from Biscoe School. He was insisted by his parents to be in civil service after graduation; however, he refused his father's suggestion.

"Rather, I chose to become a fashion designer. For some time I kept myself busy with it, but the aim was to be in adventure sports," he says as he fiddles with his sports watch.

He quickly drops his hand in a shirt pocket and comes out with an I-Card reading his designation and job at the Women’s Polytechnic, Bemina where he would teach in 2003 till 2006.

Besides, he would also spend some time participating in several rafting and skiing events across India. And the autumn of 2006 saw him leading an expeditionary team to Everest.

"That was an amazing experience," he says hurriedly with bright eyes that shine like a diamond. "But it was only till the base camp 1 and base camp 2.”

It costs around 20 lakh rupees to get on to the summit of Everest; and Showket's company had fixed him for the first two base camps only—both at the height of more than 6,000 m above sea level.

"Thereafter Sherpa's are the best guides," he explains.

In school, Showket had trekked Mahadev and after some years, he trekked to Kolohari, Annapurna Daulagari, Everest Circuit and Gokyo Lakes—all in Himalayas and each site a 20-day snowy treks. Months after the trip, Showket was soon skiing with the famous Australian skier and Everest Climber Nick Farr. Not once but several times.

However, it was Everest which he never went for. But he is planning for it.

"This company pays me good, and God willing, one day I will hit the Everest summit with my 10-year-old son," he smiles showing for the first time his white teeth.

And once on the tip, unlike others, he will not be pitching any flag or a memento, but he will do something unique.

"I will light a cigarette there," he says making himself sit relaxed.

"I don't believe in boundaries and nationalities. I am the child of this planet and the whole world is my playground."

There are other aspects of Showket’s specialization.

When he was in Fashion Designing, he managed to produce an unpublished dictionary on the fashion designing terminology.—a feat first by any Kashmiri.

"'A-Z of Fashion' was its name. But it didn't get published," he says. His work was supposed to be published by Prentice Hall, a New Jersey based publisher of academic and reference textbooks and technology.

“But it didn’t mature,” he says.

It was in the year 2006 when he finished its compilation and the same year he left his job in polytechnic and joined Highland Excursions.

Most part of the year, Showket stays outside his home and he hardly gets to see his family. But he says, it has hardly affected any relationship.

"My dad knows me. He understands my profession and my likings. Even the lady, I got married was told much before the wedding that the person would spend most of time in the jungles and mountains,” he laughs for about a minute.

He says he is thankful to all of them as such a job needs everyone's blessing and satisfaction.

As we talk, he seeks information from his colleague about a tourist's health, who was injured while rafting in the Sindh.

"He is okay now," Showket's colleague reports.

The conversation also gets interrupted when another colleague, Joti of Nepal, complains of pain in the abdomen and ribs.

"Go and get the tablets from the first aid box," Showket points his fingers towards the box. "Have some tea and take rest."

"He was also injured during rafting," Showket says.

Joti's condition takes Showket straight into a flashback, to a time, when he was also badly wounded during a Parasailing attempt over the Dal Lake in Srinagar.

"I was actually treading a Parasailing world record," Showket puts in.

Showket recalls the summer of 1998 when he tried to create a world record by trying to claim an unaided 330 feet freefall from a parachute over the lake. It risked his life as the attempt couldn’t be recorded while he wounded himself fatally.

"Everything was going as planned. But as the boat pulled me up, a sudden jerk off-loaded me midair detaching the rope with the boat," he explains using his hands to emphasize.

The cameraperson in the boat had him in the frame initially but the jerk caused imbalance and he lost his control.

Showket was nowhere in the frame.

The next moment saw Showket towering over the Lake. And he saw himself saying ‘Leave the parachute’.

"As soon as I left it, the upward pull kept me suspended for about a second in air. And then I came down like a meteor," he says.

The contact with water surface was so firm that it sent a splash of water in air with the diver successful in his feat. As the waves spread constantly over the surface. There was no movement in the water. Just a huge bubble burst. Showket was fished unconscious. The impact had ruptured his eardrums, a mid rib hanged by the skin as the blood mixed with the water. His chest bled profusely.

To his shock, nothing was recorded.

"I was successful in creating a record, but I needed to prove it through a camera. I was nowhere in the frame," Showket says in a low voice.

He did not try it next time. He was sad. Not because he had evaded death, but his bravado remained unrecorded.

Visibly disturbed but content deep downwards, Showket scratches his head, tries to ignite a half-puffed cigarette that was doused hours back. No one speaks for a moment. And then the conversation begins with a cup of tea.

"I am mad about cigarettes and tea—my permanent companions," he says between couple of sips.

The sun starts descending, scattering red flash till the mountains that stand guard on the rims of bowl-shaped Sonamarg. Shadows of these blue-coloured tents begin lengthening till they permanently halt, while hooting shepherds come down from slopes with the herd.

"Pack up boys," Showket gives a call. Colleagues start rolling up raft boats and green plastic sphere.

“Expedition to these mountains,” he stresses, “is never an easy going”.

“It is like eating grass and struggling because your food supply is running low. Or perhaps it's the adventure of using water can for three days in a ferocious blizzard outside your tent. And all it needs one to be a fanatic."

Baba Umar in Sonamarg

Electronic Intifada

2009-09-14T12:25:00.000+05:30

Post-Amarnath land transfer row, a technologically savvy new age Kashmiri youth is offering belligerent resistance to the State and the mainstream media.

In a small corner of a modest but well-lit room, Haseena, 45, at her spinning wheel is an archetypal image of a Kashmiri mother. She is at work by a poster-size photograph of her elder son Tanveer Ahmad Handoo who was killed in the CRPF firing last year at Safa Kadal, Srinagar, during the Amarnath land row.

The family remembers Tanveer with a video which is a treasured possession for them. This is a two-minute long flash video of a dying Tanveer captured on a mobile phone. The video shows images of protestors on August 14, 2008, near the Safa Kadal Bridge and gunshots followed by images of Tanveer and another injured youth Tariq Ahmad. The video not only preserves the memory of Tanveer’s martyrdom but has also become iconic of a new electronic front between the Kashmiri resistance and the Indian State.

Says Tanveer’s brother, Riyaz Ahmed Handoo, while viewing the video clip: “These are the last moments of my brother’s life after he was shot in the abdomen and before he could even make it to the hospital.” The Handoos say that the mobile clip was shot by an anonymous protester in the crowd and someone shared it with them via Bluetooth. For Riyaz, the memory of his brother’s death is the memory of his brother’s life and he wants the video to be there on his mobile phone forever. This disturbing image of a Kashmiri life fading into death has become a symbol of protest and martyrdom in the neighborhood. The video was widely circulated on the Internet and was uploaded on video sharing websites like YouTube as “Kashmir Burning” that fuelled protests across Kashmir.

The same video also shows Tariq, a worker, sustain multiple bullet injuries. But Tariq survived. “This is me,” he says heartily on being shown his video on YouTube. “That day I received two bullet hits.” Tariq feels a deep sense of gratitude for the anonymous Internet users who shot and uploaded his video immediately after the firing. But Tariq is not alone in applauding the efforts of these anonymous Internet users. Many in the diaspora feel that the Internet users have succeeded where the mainstream Kashmiri media has failed.

This phenomenon typifies an emerging trend with the Kashmiri youth disgruntled with the mainstream media: Kashmir’s own electronic intifada. The new media technology which was once perceived as the gaming tool of an indulgent youth has emerged as a weapon of resistance. In Kashmir’s Internet cafes and homes, a technologically savvy new age Kashmiri youth is offering belligerent resistance to the dogged ways of the old media. This new electronic intifada does not need anything other than a few mobile phones equipped with video recorders and fast Internet connections to help upload the videos of Kashmiri protest to video sharing websites like YouTube and Google videos.
Malik, one of the young Kashmiri Net warriors, says: “Our battle is fought on two fronts. In the streets between unarmed protestors and the troops, and on Internet by the youth.” Malik is cautious enough not to give us his full name as he is certain of reprisals by security agencies. He does not come out to protest on the streets but records the way in which protests in Kashmir are brutally and violently suppressed by the police and the Indian paramilitary forces, often leading to serious injuries which are sometimes captured live in these videos. Malik calls these videos “the struggle digitized.” He also explains what motivates him to anonymously record these protests: “Every day people in Kashmir witness brutalities. I just make sure that the truth gets out to the world outside Kashmir.”
Malik is not alone in this virtual war. The young, tech savvy netizens of Kashmir record the everyday brutality in Kashmir and upload them to provide instant updates of the developing stories in Kashmir. Some of these videos on YouTube give an idea of the political energies released by the new media in Kashmir. The videos might often appear to be amateurish but they do serve the purpose of bringing the Kashmir protest to Internet users worldwide.

Post-Amarnath land transfer row, this appears to be the beginning of an intrepid and intractable, young and mobile, uprising, an uprising which challenges the control of India’s security agencies over the flow of information from the Kashmir Valley. Does this role of the new media in Kashmiri politics suggest a new direction? “Of course, yes. But change will take time,” says Sameer Bhat, an award-winning Kashmiri blogger. Bhat, honored with an online bloggers award in 2006, quotes a study from a public opinion research organization, Pew Research Center (PRC) that suggests that the penetration of bloggers and other alternative media in the recent flare-ups across the world has been immense.

“Regarding Kashmir, our struggle is in transition. The Kashmiri youth are yet to use alternative media as effectively as the Palestinians. But what has really changed with the new media is the difficulty to defend lies which are often privileged as the truth by our politicians,” says Bhat who is also one of Kashmir’s earliest bloggers. Bhat also observed that the urban youth have used the Internet in conflict zones to combat the pro-authority spin that often skew mainstream media accounts.

“We have an example of a non-profit online publication, Electronic Intifada, which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective. Be it Obama’s campaigning, Hurricane Katrina, or Gaza siege, lots of people around the world rely on blogs and video sites that give them first hand accounts from ground zero,” Bhat says. As an example, he cites the assassination of Benazir Bhutto when, according to researchers, 20 percent of UK’s population relied on Pakistani blogs and video sites to know who was the actual perpetrator when conflicting media reports began to emerge.

Bhat feels that it is not merely news which is being recorded with the help of the new media but history itself. Bhat clarifies: “Kashmir’s history was either written by Kashmiri Pandits or by the Europeans colonists. We might not be writing books, but our blogs and video sites will offer alternative accounts for a new literature and history.”

The experts are skeptical however of the impact such online content can create for Kashmir. “If we compare videos or written material being uploaded by Kashmiris against their counterparts in Iran, Iraq, Palestine (or for that matter, even in India, Pakistan, US or Brazil), the result will be in fractions. It may take time to register a serious impact on world opinion,” explains Tawheed Ahmad, a Google staffer. Ahmad, however, believes that the high speed connection and cheap access could shape emerging trends for new media in Kashmir.

But perhaps an even bigger danger for this new media revolution is the security agencies. “Nobody should be under the impression that government is unaware of such activities on the web,” says a senior officer of the Intelligence. Asked if any arrests have been made so far or any content uploaded on the web, the official refused to give any further information.

Whatever the government response, people like Haseena do not want authorities to remove the video of like her dying son from YouTube. The blogger, Sameer Bhat, also feels that it would be “stupid” for the government to filter or censor online content from Kashmir. “If ever such a move is reported from the Valley, it will place India on the list of severe and repressive regimes like Iran and China which closely monitor online content,” Bhat says.

Baba Umar

The article has been taken from the third issue of www.conveyormagazine.com (P 54-55).

Manmohan’s speech is a crude attempt to defuse the Sharm-El-Sheikh ‘shock’

2009-08-19T10:03:00.000+05:30

Already on the backfoot over Sharm-el-Sheikh joint statement that included Baluchistan tangle in the bilateral talks and de-linked terrorism from composite dialogue between India and Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his August 15 speech has only articulated the conventional rigid Indian policy towards the Kashmir problem.

Terming the ‘separatist’ ideology completely irrelevant, Manmohan Singh held forth the ready reference of elections held in J&K for the local assembly in 2008 and for six parliament seats in 2009.

But it was apparently an attempt to salvage something after the Sharm-El-Sheikh ‘shock’ and countering the domestic pressure that enveloped Indian politics later on. Congress handlers may conceive any diplomatic script that suits their need to calm down BJP and the Left, but does this entire suit Manmohan’s admirably see-through personality he is best known for?

In May 2006, when he chaired the Second Kashmir Roundtable, inviting Hurriyat Conference on the common table was seen as ‘something serious from India’ towards achieving peace in the region.

Singh was seen as someone, unlike his predecessors, sympathetic to Kashmiris.

The best example is when the conference was over, he cut shout his visit and argued that the security ring his stay in Srinagar entailed was troubling common people and tourists.

Three years later, the statement made by the same leader from the ramparts of Red Fort has surprised many. If yesterday Manmohan displayed honesty by acknowledging a ground reality, today he seems ignoring a bigger one.

Who says separatists or for that matter the separatism is irrelevant? Shutdowns still take place on the call of separatists; government still resorts to iron-hand tactics; at least 25 separatist leaders are languishing in jails. Doesn’t this mean that their still is a huge gulf between the state and its ‘subjects’?

Before the assembly elections, in a television interview to an Indian news channel, CM Omar Abdullah had reckoned the combined force of all separatists saying that he could never manage to congregate more than 40,000 crowd in any of his political gathering when the separatists assembled close to 10,00,000 people in the historic Eidgah.

These are the realties which occur under the very nose of establishment that daily reports to New Delhi. One wonders why the worthy prime minister chose to ignore these towering realities.

However, separatists reacted smartly this time. Calling Dr Manmohan Singh a victim of contradictions about Kashmir issue, they said sometimes the PM speaks of Kashmir’s resolution through talks and sometimes he denies Kashmir’s disputed status, thereby making his own position ridiculous. ‘Hold referendum if we are irrelevant’ they dared the Prime Minster.

Not only this, they have called for a two-day protest on August 21, 22 to prove their relevance, which they believe is going to trash Singh’s assertion that the separatists have lost ground to those who have elected through the franchise. Let’s wait for Friday and Saturday. No guesses on whose showdown it would prove!

Justice for Asrar ---Facebookers protest jolly friend’s murder

2009-07-10T14:33:00.000+05:30

Two years back when Asrar Mushtaq Dar opened his Facebook account along with his friends, he would not have thought that the same page would be used by his friends to write him virtual condolences.
In his own mind, Asrar was not a warrior of the year 2009 neither a revolutionary defending his country with stones. But a fun loving boy from what many call as ‘Gaza Strip of Kashmir’—Maisuma.

Soon after the news regarding the recovery of the throat-slit body of the missing youth Asrar reached every home, his Facebook page turned into a virtual book of condolence.

Sumit Singh, his Facebook friend inscribed: “When I heard about you I was in shock. It is impossible to believe but still we have to. My friend I miss the days we spend together Zed Education.

Another friend who knew Asrar was Ifat Pandit. She wrote: “May your soul rest in peace. It is hard to believe that he is no more. Big shock.”

Falak Hussain, Asrar’s friend wrote: “I feel so sorry for your friends and family.... I am sure we'll earn justice for u.... Please people let’s do something for the young soul...”
Mushahid Hussain, a close friend scribbled: “I will miss you my friend. I will always miss you. You were and will always be my friend.”

Adil Abbas wrote “Asrar we miss you... Please come back!”
Not only this, the first day of his death also saw over 150 of his friends joining a cause ‘Justice for Asrar’.
According to Asrar’s college friend, Adil, who did not give his second name for the fear of parents’ anger, Asrar despite a guy from Maisuma would never stone pelt.
He would never indulge in fighting nor discuss politics with his friends.

But he says, he missed twenty days of college at a stretch which seems to be hinting at something.
“He was purely a funky, stylish, and a cool dude. He was an average student but a sharp minded who would also work in part time as computer accountant in Infahs Cybernetics India Pvt. Ltd.,” Adil said with his eyes saturated.

A look at Asrar’s profile and photo shows it all.
In one of the pictures, he makes a cross of himself against a rock wall, something done on ship by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Yet in another picture, his rosebud lips, long face, brown hair, bright and clear complexion gives him an honest frame.

Adil said that one of his best picture uploaded on Facebook was his pose with his much-adorned bike—the same bike along with which he disappeared on July 3.
Another thing that would haunt Asrar’s friends is his birthday which was on July 22.
“We used to celebrate it. He would have turned 21 this July.But…,”they said.

Asrar’s Facebook profile reveals the personality he was which even his friends might not have known until today when everyone of his acquaintances scroll through his Facebook page to see his pictures and read about him.

His favorite cause was ‘Stop Human Rights Violations in Kashmir’, his activities having fun, racing and listening music, his favorite film ‘Final destination 1, 2, 3.....’ ‘The Heartbreak Kid’, ‘Die Hard 4’ along with other movies.

Asrar would also share his thought on several causes which include, Truth Commission For Kashmir, Justice For the Victims of Shopian Rape/Murder, Kashmir, No polythene please, Curfewed Night, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate Freedom), Coffea Arabica, Srinagar (Kashmir), Project for Peace (Paigaam for peace), Islamia college Rocks!, I Love My Mom.

He would also write on a theme called ‘If I could turn back the time’ which his friends now say he could never.

Kashmir is dying. Are you listening!!!

2009-05-27T12:55:00.000+05:30

Arif, now dead, was not meant to look like this. His rosebud lips, long face, bright and clear complexion that gave him a truthful air bumps with the monster reality of how he was shot.

He was only 17 when he was aimed at and killed with the bitter accuracy of a “lawful” ‘uniformed- mercenary’.

In his own mind, Arif, was not a warrior of 21st-century neither a rebel defending his territory with stones. But a motivated student who had study material in his childlike hands when he was attempted.

On Friday afternoon after finishing prayers, Arif went home at around 2:30, came back to collect some reading material from a close by computer centre and fetched some friends for Rajouri Kadal—Srinagar’s enraged area where hatred against policemen and troops is bitter and profound. As the group reached Kawdara, where hundreds of youngsters had gathered to stone pelt the incoming wave of troops, the group smelt risk. Before they could think of getting out of the melee Arif got separated from his friends when policemen and paramilitary CRPF strode in with force.

Spotting Arif in dark alley and parallel to a house where he had concealed himself, an obsessed cop thought to set off a projectile. Arif looked cautiously from the corner of the alley. His arm curved resting on his back. His one hand gripping rolled white pages of study material. And the other hand gathering support from the red brick wall.

Arif must have felt safe, but he didn’t stop pushing his head in and out of the alley. The cop aimed him. The view finder must have shown Arif’s face. The cop pulled the trigger. A flying tear gas canister left the cask. Soared for a while. And then hit Arif on his face. Injecting probably his right eye. The blood splashing the walls and mixing with Arif’s cries. The thud must have eased the grip on notes. The shell remaining closely ploughed into the skin. Partially out and partially pegged into the drenched face. Its rear end detectable, soaked with blood. The other end breaking head bones and tattering brain muscles.

Arif must have felt deadness. The cop happy to see crowd dispersed. And a small group of boys that surrounded Arif quite stiff to pull out the burning shell. Arif was numb. But his heart wasn’t. There was some hope. The group shouldered him to hospital.

At SKIMS, Arif was placed in ICU and was breathing on life supporting system until Tuesday afternoon. It took the cop few seconds to empty his barrel by pumping a teargas canister into the innocent face and it took Arif five days to lose the battle of life.

The 10th standard student vanished. The Royal Public School will look gloomy for few days. Mudasir and Rahil would miss their friend for life. In Kashmir this is routine. Arif is a part of statistics. To outer world it hardly matter.

In an age of careless slaughter, such killing has become institutionalized. Police in riot gear see every jeans and T-Shirt clad, a hatchling stone pelter. Familiarity may make Arif a hero. He may be hailed as the ‘hero’ of Srinagar’s resistance. But watch out. We have been here before. Since two decades, faces like Arif had bled and scythed in Kashmir streets. So observe the crimson cheeks, rosebud lips, bright and clear complexion that form the portrait of every Kashmiris worst terror: a child who is being killed to satisfy a power that wears a uniform.

And together with the lack of regret, the cunning and the emotionless comments from jugglers who rule Kashmir could mean Arif soon becoming a poster boy of Srinagar’s resistance and the culprits, as ever, psychopaths.

Who wouldn’t have wanted to save this youngster? Everybody would have, except for the uniformed men who have menaced Srinagar streets into a permanent marsh.

They stroll with smoking guns in squad of mindless vampires haunting alleyways and road intersections.

Past week they forgot that Arif was just a little child who was not to be exposed to an education through canister shells and bullets. And it was not his fault to pay that early, the fee of hate that is flamed with blood.

Meanwhile, Arif’s acquaintances say that common Kashmiris are very compassionate. But the pain has tentacles. And it will always be there for his family.

Srinagar and the Reckoning Day

2009-05-25T12:29:00.000+05:30

The server brews a pot of steaming coffee and places it on the wooden table by the overstuffed chairs around. Two other waiters pile plates and talk loudly in Kashmiri at the Graduate Tea shop. ‘Graduate’ because a science graduate runs it after failing to secure a decent job.

It is located in a shopping complex tucked near a pleasant fringe of river Jhelum that cuts across the Srinagar City.

It is almost 2:00 in the afternoon when I enter the shop. Back and forth, over the tables and on the faces of devoted visitors, heavy beam of glaring light of Television make patterns. The empty coffee boxes decorated on the shelves start shaking after someone ask a waiter, “Zore Thaw TV Thoda (Increase its volume a wee bit), making it certain that the news about parliamentary poll results is audible to all information hounds, who have gathered in the teeming tea stall.

“Who is winning in North Kashmir?” a young man sitting in one of the corner tries to inquire from his friends. “Sajad Lone has lost and it’s UPA that seems to form the government at Delhi,” he gets the answer from his friend sitting opposite to him. The news anchor establishes it right away.

The young man is round. His eyes bright, big, but wet. The color of his little beard real. His body lingers just around the last edge of his youth. He seems almost 18.

I feel the young man sensing a hint of scandal or potential misfortune for Lone.

He feels embarrassed. He appears depressing after the news. The only thing that I feel he will like to do is sledgehammer the TV set or upside down the tables. A look at his face reveals anger, so much, that he may wish to either pull his hair or at least try to scream. I can make that he must have been sure of Lone’s win. He can't, however, seem to have imagined the apparent. It is hurtful. And he is upset.

While I watch the small screen flashing fresh results repeatedly, SMSs begin to pass. Again, Mr Sajad Lone the subject matter. The content mostly sarcastic. Largely meant for those who had wished luck to separatist leader, Mr Lone. The SMS displays a sort of ‘obituary’ for the first separatist leader who broke the election boycott call to stand as a contender.

It reads:

Marci 4r Sajad—Election Ladeth Konu Moudokh, Hindustans Saeth Ruzeth Kith Roodukh, Te Harith Zinde Keth Roudukh.

Means:

· Why didn’t you die after contesting elections?

· How come you exist while siding with Hindustan (India?)

· How are you alive after losing elections?

I read the SMS, save it and keep the phone in my pocket before having a final look at the youngman.

Before this place, I toured many parts of the city. Everywhere people hooked on instant announcements, sequestering themselves before TV sets and radios that reflected larger mood prompted by the parliamentary poll results and greatly by the Lone’s decision to vie.

In a corner of a dimly lit hall, at my college where I had just gone to get a certificate, and check the mood as well, I saw Mr Sheikh—a senior clerk literally hugged to a small black Kochibo radio.

Across the day, I was told by the staff around that Mr Sheikh was snooping to know who had won. He had had more than a dozen cups of tea besides three packets of cigarette.

Mr Sheikh is thin and lean with typical sharp features. Dark face, laced with patchy skin. His best possession right now. Radio.

He has been listening to radio for a day and a half. A more than five hours of news without any work didn’t lead to any withdrawal symptom.

At another tea joint I visited, just before 4:00 pm, someone scorned Varun Ghandi’s win at Philibit saying that he made his victory sure by indulging in anti-Muslim tirade, but at the cost of BJP’s stature.

Others but well-informed enthusiasts deliberated on the wisdom of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P Chidambaram.

“The economists have ultimately prevailed. It is another six-year government,” a youngster said.

In Kashmir’s markets, across the day the usual crowd was there, but those who turned up were more fascinated in poll gossip, instead of hedging over prices.

At bus stands, in grocery shops, colleges canteens, offices everywhere I went people were snooping over what the final results would mean to Kashmir.

“PDP has lost in South,” Bilal, a student told me in a rough voice, before boarding a Sumo vehicle for Pulwama. He did not vote when South Kashmir went for ballot, however, he wanted PDP to prevail.

Quite usual in South Kashmir.

In the evening I was at Kashmir’s one of the angriest spot, Batamaloo where irritation against troops– together with frequent traffic jams, run deep. Here too people visiting shops and saloons had vigorous debate on the results. With mostly Mr Lone dominating the topic everywhere.

Perched on a shelf in a saloon, youngsters waiting to get shaved or get their hair done, were glued with the TV screen amid conversations.

“Again Congress,” Rafiq who is known to me sighed. “But how will it matter to us,” he told me when I began to leave.

Rafiq didn’t want Mr Lone to win either. Reasons, he said, were known to everyone.

He liked to say; however, that it was a sign of Mr Lone’s immaturity and that he was quite opposed to, what he believed was like an ‘incredible stage-managed polls where Mr Lone was bound to be among the losers’.

Rafiq was convinced that everything went according to the script.

“And that's progress…..” he laughed.

Sajad Lone's 'other-way' of solving Kashmir dispute

2009-04-16T18:47:00.000+05:30

For months we all heard news reports about the possibility of People’s Conference Chairman Sajad Lone contesting parliamentary elections. Some denied it overtly while others called the news reports as a handiwork of several covert ‘Conspiracy Nuts’ sitting somewhere at 10 Janpat. Few took the shortest path. They simply sought the reaction form horse’s mouth on his Facebook leaf.

But before a large section of Kashmiris conjure up ideas over what the news reports actually predict, the horse opened his mouth. So wide that it left nothing to question, but his fidelity towards the pro-freedom cause, he has been a part of.

Because of the experiences Kashmiri’s have, a deep-seated realization has been there that the primary adversary Kashmiris had encountered and have to be wary of is not the one that assaults from outside, but the one that smacks from within. From Abdullah’s, Bakshi’s and Mufti’s, everybody in the ladder came up with their ‘other-way’ proposals of solving Kashmir issue but Kashmir saw itself being pushed into a permanent quagmire, just because their leadership based on their “gifting” or “talent” didn’t work before the powerful centre.

Now it is Sajad, who we heard saying that he has changed the methodology not the ideology. And we are also witness to the day when he kept his hand on the holy Quran and swore about his non- allegiance with the Assembly polls or to get himself on the seat on India-set protocol. If ever he wins one of the 543 parliamentary seats. The new ‘methodology’ may require him to swear on the constitution--a document that describes Kashmir an integral part of India, which he has been scornful about for long.

We are told that he is aspiring to enter Parliament to raise the voice of Kashmiris. But is India or its people unmindful of the situation here. They know it all. They know greatests and highests of Kashmir. They know Kashmir has the world’s highest battlefield in the name of Siachen. They know in Kashmir, the concentration of troops, which is hanging somewhere between 500,000 to 700,000, is largest anywhere in the world. They know Kashmir has the world’s largest and heavily fortified army cantonment at Badami Bagh. Human rights violation, killings, custodial disappearances, torture and property plunder caused by the troops—they know it all. In spite of this, there has been a total trivial response from the world’s largest democracy, its followers and media. A killing from militants’ side will take no time for police to launch manhunt, and if caught, the culprit is within weeks, brought to justice. While as bullet from trooper’s rifle that kills an innocent Kashmiri will go unnoticed. Leave aside booking the trooper, the government’s response at central level will be deplorable. Booking a trooper, it would deem, will demoralize the rest of troops who are fighting India’s battle in Kashmir. There already know that there are 400 cases of custodial disappearances and torture that are pending New Delhi’s nod for trail since more than a decade.

Sajad what is the guarantee that you will be listened and whatever solution to Kashmir tangle you propose will be accepted? Could you press for scraping Armed Forces Special Power Act or Disturbed Area Act? Did you forget how the centre rebuffed several times the tender of their oldest loyals National Conference (NC) for persisting on autonomy? Didn’t New Delhi reject to heed self-rule application of People’s Democratic Party (PDP)? And what about Hurriyat core members who went for talks with their head held high but came back, regretting and airing contemptuous words against their corresponding team.

Sajad may be having a plan B of re-entering pro-freedom camp. But at this time he might be thinking that the population will rush to embrace his merger with the parliament and forget all about their individual history, rights and mores. In a single fell swoop, they way it happened every time, in yet another loyalist’s presence around, Kashmir will be clobbered into absolute tyranny where people will be helpless to do anything because their leaders will have become worthless? And because Sajad might be followed by some more guys there.

Why are Kashmiris used to betrayal! Disloyalty by comrades. Calculated, deliberate and despicable switch overs! Seems separatist leaders are tired. These are same leaders whom the CM Omar Abdullah in an interview called a “mighty force” to be reckoned with. He was stunned to see lakhs coming out on the calls of pro-freedom leaders past summer, while he acknowledged that he never ever managed more than 40,000 strong crowed in any of his public gatherings.

The situation could be better illustrated by Rudyard Kipling’s lines: ‘If any question why we died. Tell them because our fathers lied’.

Sajad might have heard about the Great Wall of China. The stories of the building of the great wall in China epitomizes his “change of methodology” diagram of solving the world’s oldest unresolved dispute and playing hide-and seek in the separatist camp. It is said that to shun invasion from the militia in the North, the Chinese got on to put up a great wall for defense. It took several years to build the wall, which was unbelievably high and wide to endure and repulse enemy attack. However, during the construction, Chinese were raided three times by the armies from the North. They simply induced the gatekeeper through hefty bribe and marched through the gate.

Yes, you got me right.

India seems and has been successful in copying the counter-insurgency tactics first engaged by Russians in the second Chechen war that began in the year 1999. That strategy, with a wee bit of amendments, modified to suit the context and realities of Kashmir, mingles a synchronized political and armed response with nonconventional tactics that include political jargon, information warfare, financial action, confinements, wipe-up operations, and more critically, ad hoc appointment of local leaders.

Now that Sajad is another ad hoc leader in the list, he will be covered by journalists who are already covering pro-India political parties, but before someone else, who had represented Kashmir’s aspiration on all fronts, from the separatist camp, think of the ‘political switch over’, there should be a binding contract for anyone to sign before entering the camp. Or he/ she should not be allowed to be counted among the separatists, lead any protest, or make speeches even if he is the son of the most powerful had–been pro-independence leader.

And if there were an obligatory agreement to sign before entering the separatist camp, the fine print should include: "The undersigned concedes that the seat is sacrosanct, which if rejected after being made use of, may be perilous for the common Kashmiris who have already lost their 100,000, fellowmen and that it would result in the extensive expressions of antipathy from the public side, that would also not be limited to slur and slander.”

Some one said that Sajad would surely represent himself in Parliament not Kashmiris. But one thing he can be expected to do is tell the parliamentarians that when a militant is killed in an encounter thousands march into streets, sloganeer in favour of freedom and lay the dead to rest before fighting against the troopers for the corpse. While as no one cares when a trooper is killed in any encounter. Sajad can tell them that the alienation is deep rooted and so much strong that ‘buying’ shepherd won’t do, it may need to buy the cattle, which New Delhi will never allow to happen. Because that would mean giving up claims of having Kashmir as a proud possession and priceless crown (An overturned world map will show the existing position of Kashmir—a green Valley trampled under India’s feet.)

As I write above about hiring loyalists, I am reminded of Chechen separatist turned Moscow loyalist, Ramzan Kadyrov. Like Abdullah’s fought India’s rule in Kashmir for sometime and later switched over side, Kadyrov and his father also fought federal forces of Russia in early 90’s, with Ramzan, leading a small band of fighters in the first Chechen war.

Kadyrovs switched over to the Moscow side at the start of the second war in 1999. Since then his militia enjoyed the patronage of Russia's state security service. And after his father, Chechnya's then president, was assassinated in 2004, Kadyrov became deputy prime minister and prime minister a year later. Married with five children, he has a pet lion, a wolf, bear and rare Siberian tiger to pride himself on.

I wish to live to the day to see what Sajad will be given. Kashmir free of tyranny or outright dejection as has been the norm of New Delhi to deal with such loyalists.

Sajad Lone's 'other-way' of solving Kashmir dispute

2009-04-16T18:33:00.000+05:30

The situation could be better illustrated by Rudyard Kipling’s lines: ‘If any question why we died. Tell them because our fathers lied’.

Yes, you got me right.

Now that Sajad is another adhoc leader in the list, he will be covered by journalists who are already covering pro-India political parties, but before someone else, who had represented Kashmir’s aspiration on all fronts, from the separatist camp, think of the ‘political switch over’, there seems to be a binding contract for anyone to sign before entering the camp. Or he/ she should not be allowed to be counted among the separatists, lead any protest, or make speeches even if he is the son of the most powerful had–been pro-independence leader.

I wish to live to that day to see what Sajad will be given. Kashmir free of tyranny or outright dejection of what he is sure to get from New Delhi.

Palestinian scarf takes Kashmiris by storm

2009-04-10T10:45:00.000+05:30

As television screens and YouTube flashed images of Israeli bombing on Palestinian children and maimed bodies draped partially in the black-and-white checkered scarfs, almost 3000 miles away in Kashmir, I met a young protester, Bilal, who had decided to don the traditional Palestinian headdress as a sign of sympathy with the Palestinians.

Wearing it around neck with embroidered fringes hanging by his shoulders, Bilal shouted a slogan “Israel” while hundreds of other boys retorted “Hie Hie” (Down with you) with fists blossoming from the shoulders during a protest march in the Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar.

Like most of the Kashmiris, Bilal supports Palestinian people’s struggle against Israeli belligerence.

“And this scarf stands for my views,” he said.

In another such protest march, as I crossed a market street heading for an intersection, I looked at the upright, nicely-groomed, mostly young, mostly white and brown crowd, many wearing the scarf and holding fists high, asking Israel to stop the aggression, to free Palestine, and to stop "thinking like Colonialists."

Here I was reminded of kuffiyeh's political message that took shape when Palestinian peasants wore the utilitarian cloth over their heads in solidarity against British rule in the 1930s. Its place in Palestinian identity was hardened in the 1960s when Arafat and his resistance faction adopted it in its fight against Israel, while the trend of wearing it reached Kashmir, this time, however, more profusely.

The boys I talked to said that they feel what Gazans are enduring from past sixty years. And wearing the headdress, they said, they feel more connected with the land and the resistance where it was born.

When I was six or seven, the Palestinian scarfs were a famous possession among Kashmir’s armed guerrillas who had declared confrontation against mighty Indian troops after 1989. I remember, they would roam around the city with guns slung on shoulders but later the trend of donning it was reduced to those going out for religious tours and Muslim clerics.

And those days people would call it Molvi scarfs (scarfs for clerics), but now youngsters, mostly students are attracted to the cloth who visit Kashmir’s markets every day looking for Kaffiyeh—The Palestinian scarfs.

And if we observe the shops in city's diverse Nowhatta, Koker Bazaar and Maharaja Bazaar and other neighborhoods, vendors could be seen selling the bright-coloured item in several brands while as stylish youngsters could be seen in the city's attractive cafes and restaurants sporting red, blue, green and crimson versions of the scarfs.

The dress, however, seems to have hit the streets of Kashmir much to the displeasure of older Kashmiris who say that the scarf stands for Palestinian’s honour and valor.

“What are the youngsters here going to prove…They have made it a craze,” a visibly frail Bashir Shah, told me while explaining the customs of his time.

When Shah was young, he was awarded the scarf in a local Madrassa for his brilliant comprehension of holy Quran. It used to be an achievement and only few would headdress the cloth.

But Shah’s time Kashmir has changed when peace would prevail. Now the killings, protests and violent demonstrations have become the routine and from protest rallies to small informal talk shows, supporters of the Palestinian cause have begun adopting the traditional scarf as a show of shared aims.

By the way I too bought one.

The filth and Fury

2009-03-11T12:37:00.003+05:30

Her portraits of naked Pakistani women are her proud possession. Mushaal Mullick, now wife of Kashmir’s Muslim Pro-independence leader Yaseen Malik, may soon arrive in Srinagar with canvases of an even more sexually explicit nature. The artist known for her flesh tones, critical outrage, shadowy, disturbing and other worldly “unholy shit”, if she gets the time, would soon sketch Kashmiri women. Who knows?

Mullick on her site, mushaalmullick.com , says that she began water color paintings at the age of six and then moved to other media including pestel, charcoal, and glass painting. Her inspiration stems from the raw beauty of the 'feminine mystique,' and the horrors of abject poverty.

Raw beauty she says. Take any of her sketches, even though if you try to pick the least “explicit” pictures, the oil on hard paper has displayed her subjects both ‘poverty-stricken’ and ‘victims of male-chauvinism’ showing to men, a cloth like thing on their bodies. Bare, however.

‘ART THEY WOULD SAY IT’

I think Mullick is a classic example of what happens to nude artist who are luckily born in an Islamic country, when they achieve early success, get their work fit in the discourse and template of west and the high-profile society of their country; they tend to coil around looking at the same thesis and artistic brushes and ‘raw beauty’ because they know where their market lies.

Mullick promotes her “art”, and aim to collect aid for NGO’s that work for women development in Pakistan. Imagine a picture of bare chest Pakistani women getting sold for money which is to be used for ‘women development’ inturn. Sounds out of the ordinary.

However, the real issue here is that the artists who has had Pakistani women painted naked may not have the maturity to understand the value of women in Islam and life of Prophet ( SAW) and his teachings or either she may be not fully aware of the ramifications of what she is doing.

Hey, I won’t love to be called a boy from caves.

Because I am wearing Wrangler jeans, have Addidas jacket enveloping me and just finished a burger at my workplace along with Kashmiri Kehwa (That's cultural fusion)

Another interesting thing about her is that her husband, Yasin Malik is the third high-profile Kashmiri separatist leader to marry a non-Kashmiri woman. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chief priest of Kashmir, married a US citizen of Kashmiri origin while Sajjad Ghani Lone, another pro- independence leader wed the daughter of JKLF leader Amanullah Khan from Pakistan Administered Kashmir.

The other day, an old fatigued lady at the backseat of a 407 bus wished pro-independence leaders to marry girls who are the victims of Kashmir Conflict.

“Why didn’t the pro-freedom leaders or their sons marry girls from Kunanposh pora,” she sought the answers. “Awaam would have followed their foot steps.”

About the Raped Village

Sexual violence has been used as a weapon in a conflict area. Kashmir too had its fair share. An example being the mass rape of more than 40 women, allegedly by troops, during a crackdown in Kunanpospora village in early nineties. The event has left a black scar on the victims and their families; so much that nobody has been marrying the girls of that village because of the stigmatization after the shameful incident.

The Rape of 40 women also echoed in Assembly House on Feb 28 when after about a decade, the Speaker, Abdul Ahad Vakil, expressed anguish over the way the government had ignored the need for the rehabilitation of the rape victims, while the perpetrators were let go scot-free.

Anyways it is Maisuma—the Gaza of Kashmir, where the couple will be living. The area will get a new arrow in the bow as the artist has vowed to back her husband’s non-violent struggle on the Kashmir issue. Good one.

But hope she uses the brush to paint Kashmir’s ‘inner conflict’ and ‘unresolved conflict’ in ‘not-so-bad’ way.

Meanwhile, I read that Shahid-ul-Islam, friend of the leader called Malik’s choice of bride as his own personal affair.

Now this how a friend should arbitrate.

Shahid—a father of three, who recently left separatist quarter APHC and started working with a German lady, some Catherin, (sorry if I spelt her wrong) in a social welfare organization believes that the Kashmiri freedom struggle is a political and not religious struggle.

“And as far as I know Mushaal is a well-known painter and if she finds her paintings as a way of expression, there is nothing wrong," he had commented.

Shahid—the “reformed man” seems to have not bothered visiting the site before jumping over to comment.

True comrade.

Two decades of Exile

2009-02-23T22:31:00.000+05:30

This is an important piece of work. And much enough to enlighten and inform the community that has been holding Kashmiris responsible for their exodus and killings (209 Kashmiri Pandits killed since 1989, say JK cops in first . Though everyone has condemned the killings of the minority people, they are yet to condemn the killings faced by the popular majority. But this one is exception. Read on...

Professor Manohar Nath Tickoo

Professor Manohar Nath Tikko, 74, was a college teacher and head of the department of Education at the Governmnt College Islamabad. He lived in Haire Mohalla, Janglat Mandi in Islamabad before he left Kashmir at the peak of insurgency in 1990. For the last two decades, he is living at the scorching locale of Bohdi in Jammu.

Q1) What prompted your migration?

A:-I left with my family on Friday, 31^st May 1990 with the first light in the dawn and reached Jammu same day in the early afternoon. I still remember that fateful day when I was forced by none other than my own wife and daughters to leave. All my Muslim neighbours came to my home biding my family a fond farewell with tearful eyes. Me and my neighbours never wanted my family to leave Kashmir but there was definitely a massive psychological fear created by unknown agencies against the Kashmiri Pandits which forced us to leave. Although the fact remains that not a single Muslim forced us to leave.

Q2) Do you nurture any dreams of coming back?

A:- Well, I do believe that Pundits will get back to their home land but I can't predict a time for it. However, I don't not believe the Central [Indian] or [local] State government claims that the Pandits will be rehabilitated in their original homes. This is a blatant lie, as there hasn't been any strategy for our rehabilitation since we have left the Valley. The past governments did built some residential houses at places like Tulmul, Budgam and Mattan, but I believe this was for electoral politics.

Q3) There are many examples of Pandits returning back. Could you perhaps follow the suit?

A:- No I am sorry. I don't hesitate to tell u a stark fact that I would feel emotionally insulted if I return back to my home this time because we left our mother land without any force from our fellow people. I believe that Kashmiri Pundits should have remained in the Valley and they must have fought the freedom struggle with their fellow Muslim citizens. Even we should have sacrificed in the similar fashion our Muslim brothers did for the Kashmir cause, but unfortunately we did not do that. Even I wouldn't mind if hundred thousand Kashmir Pundits would have been martyred for freedom struggle because Kashmir cause has no less a meaning for Kashmiri Pundits. It is bizarre when we "Kashmir Pundits" vociferously beat the drums, searching for "Panun Kashmir", ironically outside the Kashmir , therefore it has literally lost its spirit and meaning..

Q4) How do you view the Kashmir problem?

A:- Kashmir is a very old issue which has mutated into a monster now. But it can be solved by sincere and honest leadership in India , Pakistan and Kashmir . Gimmicks like holding elections cannot be used to fade the reality of Kashmir being an unresolved issue. Holding election in the presence of half a million troops shows the level of legitimacy and the feigned democratic nature in Kashmir .

My personal opinion is that Kashmir issue is the issue of those who speak Kashmiri language. It should not be hyphenated or related to the other parts like Jammu and Ladakh; they have never been a relative part of Kashmir and had never any cultural, ethnic or communication links with Kashmir . Kashmir has its own history and it should be recognized as an independent state. It had never been a part of India or British India .

Q5) Would the Kashmiri Pandits accept independent Kashmir?

A:- Well, not necessarily. I am expressing my opinion without any bias and duality. The opinions are never same even on a common issue. Let me tell you that majority of Pandits did not support Sheikh Abdullah but the Ahrar Party of Moulvi Yousuf Shah. Well know Pandit activists Prem Nath Bazaz and Prem Nath Yash were in favour of Kashmir's accession with Pakistan . I still remember that time when people were asked to opt between India and Pakistan . My late father Sarvanand Tikko who was the Post Master at Anantnag at that time and we used to live inside the Post Office, signed on the document favouring accession with Pakistan and his four collogues including Ghulam Muhammad Shah of Bijbehra and Jagan Nath Rayess. My late father unfurled the Pakistani flag on the top of the Post Office but the goons of National Conference which include Abdul Ahad Tak of Anantnag town made an assault on my father and his colleagues, beat them to pulp and put down the Pakistani flag. They also tried to set the Post Office on fire.

Q6) Many Kashmiris often refer to Sheikh Abdullah as 'Gaddar' or traitor. How do you view him?

A:- Well, It is easy to be wise after the event. Sheikh Abdullah should have not done the "Ilhaq" or accession with India . He did a very serious blunder for the reason that kashmiri people are suffering a lot. Sadly Sheikh Abdullah had no political vision. Prem Nath Bazaz observed that Sheikh Abdullah had no sense of history and he had never read any history on Kashmir . So one can understand the level of political maturity and sincerity of Sheikh Abdullah.

Q7) The Pandit argument is that Kashmir has always been part of India ?

A:- Kashmir has never been part of India and has no cultural, traditional, ethical and religious semblance with India . Even we Kashmiri Pundits have totally different religious ceremonial and ritual days than of the Indian Hindus and we practice a different mythology. We have no religious attachment with river Ganga ; we used to put the ashes of the dead into the "Naraan Nag Gangbal" near Sonamarg . We never celebrate Diwali but "Hearath". We celebrate a religious day which is called "Sheshar Shenkraat" which is celebrated in the winters in order to avoid demonic influence in winters and there is no example of celebrating such a day in the Indian Hindu mythology. Moreover, Kashmiri Pundits celebrate "Shiv Raatri" differently than Indian Hindus; we prepare a lot of non vegetarian food to break the fast, contrary to Hindus who abstain from meat on the day.

Similarly Kashmiri Muslims have a different culture with no relevance with that of Indian culture. Politically, the UN resolutions stand witness to the Kashmir dispute and promises the right to self determination. Had Kashmir not been a disputed state then why Kashmir has its own constitution and flag. And why Pundit Jawahar Lal Nehru took the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. It was only because of Indian political prejudice and insincerity that autonomy of Kashmir was eroded.

Q 8) How would you see the contours of its resolution?

A:- Well, Kashmir is a much political issue than a religious one. Kashmir has suffered because of a historical political mistake so the key to its resolution is strong political struggle which is possible only when we have strong political institutions with sincere leaders having unanimity on the common Kashmir cause.

So far we have failed on diplomatic and international level only because of the poor and corrupt leadership. It is imperative to coordinate the political groups and bring them under one banner and one single leader. I would suggest Sayed Sayed Ali Shah Geelani who has shown strength and resilience while others change their cloaks often. But there has to be inclusion of Pandits in the political leadership.

Q10) How would you place Article 370 in this jigsaw puzzle?

A:- The Article 370 has no future unless it does not get a permanent place in the Indian Constitution. Since the Article 370 is a temporary Article, it can be abrogated any time by the parliament of India and BJP has included the abrogation of Article 370 in its election manifesto. I think we Kashmiris should have fought vigorously for the permanence of the Article 370. Since the Article 370 is followed with the word "Temporary" has no meaning unless it does not get divorce from it. Moreover, the Indian leadership has always failed to give the due share to the Kashmiris in their democratic doctrines as established in 1950.

Q12) How do you see the future of Kashmir?

A: - We must pin hope against hope on the fourth generation after 1947 who can give respite to Kashmiris if they succeed to apply their brains properly.

When Sensation San Sensibility

2009-02-20T11:03:00.000+05:30

Yellow News and Sensationalism are the result of 24x7 media, overselling the news and when Kashmir is there, overselling becomes effortless. Here I evaluate the diverse treatment of the release of Indian prisoner form Pakistani Jail Kashmir Singh received in various media outlets.

World is flat. The neo-capitalist perception may not be true for the whole globe but the statement holds water in the context of Kashmir. To Kashmiris, their’s has been a real flat world which from time and again have been razed to ground along with centuries old aspirations and dreams.

Kashmiris who live in a small valley squeezed between nuclear armed Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have been killed whenever Indians perceive them as threat to their “territorial integrity”. Even Pakistan leaves them in the dock as a matter of exigency. Indians ridicule Muslim Kashmiris and back out from promises (Guys they are yet to carry out what their PM during a UN general Assembly in 1948 promised Kashmir- a full fledged plebiscite) whenever they get a feel of having consolidated their position on ground. Between these two extremes no effort is spared to hurt, demoralize and demonize Kashmiri people. Kashmir, in a way, has turned out to be a project for the India’s national consciousness of which army, politicians, media and intellectuals are just active contestants.

This is why when Kashmir Singh, a spy, was released from Pakistani jail after 35 years, headline experts of several news agencies in India, newspapers, radio and television invoked their ‘creative’ instincts to come up with something sensational—a dirty yellow.

Nationalistic venom, Journalistic freedom, or creativity—call it anything, but Kashmiris believe that, in a veiled reference 'Kashmir' was made a butt of jokes. Media men came up with sensational headlines, which apparently were directed more towards Pakistan but hit the ‘national pride’ of Kashmiris, consciously, in the process of news blitz.

‘Pakistan hands over Kashmir to India’ was how United News of India (UNI) broke the news. 'India gets Kashmir back from Pak' read The Times of India issue. Pak returns Kashmir to India—flashed CNN-IBN and many more news media organizations following suit. But apart from creativity, I believe that it was just another day of selling news while sensationalizing Kashmir, because Kashmir gets them TRP’s. Simple.

You might think that these headlines are quite catchy, but the headline writers have tried to add salt and pepper to sell their news—they have bartered Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The creativity is there, but the headlines are actually aimed to lampoon Kashmiris.

And again, if we try to draw out denotations from these headlines, these clearly indicate favoritism on the part of copy editors. Headline like ‘Freedom of Kashmir from Pakistan’ not only takes one aback but pushes a Kashmiri living under a thatched roof to curse his fate not the headline writer who is creative somewhere in New Delhi of Mumbai skyscrapers.

When was Kashmir the part of either of these two countries? I ask myself fiercely. And why didn’t they add 'Singh' with the initial name of prisoner. They rather chose to give it a definite slant as if Kashmir was their property.

Because Kashmir Singh's initial name is also the name of a region—Kashmir that is divided between India and Pakistan, and both of whom claim whole of it as their own part, media, mostly Indian had a good fun-time playing with the word.

Whenever the two countries have to settle their score, Kashmir always comes handy for both. And this is what we as Kashmiris have gone through form past 62 years, despite Kashmir subject to 14 UN resolutions.

'Kashmir back from Pakistan after 35 years', NDTV ran as Breaking News, while other channels flashed 'India gets Kashmir from Pakistan after 35 years' as headline. Then there is a web portal news www. webindia123.com that pasted 'Pakistan returns Kashmir to India' on its home page. Daily News and Analysis (DNA) wrote 'Cheers & tears as Pak hands over Kashmir'.

From such ‘creativity’ it again proves that Kashmir is a scoop for news makers in both the countries—but the irony is news makers played with the sentiments of more than 7 million souls of J&K.

These titles don't suggest Kashmir Singh as a free person, rather, in the present context it is clearly referred to the Kashmir region being ‘handover’ by Pakistan to India. The name Kashmir Singh seems to have been deliberately confused with the Kashmir only to get attention and improve audience attendance.

"What if tomorrow any person with the name Bharat dies—shall they run, 'Bharat is no more’ as a headline," my friend asked me when I was writing this piece. Though a fan of NDTV and Times of India, he believes that the local Kashmiri press has been successful in upholding all the ethics of report writing.

Surely such organizations have undermined the journalism ethics and cannons and these titles are nothing but a part of "perverse journalism" intended to oversell news.

Tail Tale: “It’s not Murdochisation. It is Bharkhanisation of media. We may soon witness another –isation.”

AND THE CREATIVITY:

Pakistan hands over Kashmir to India’------UNI

Kashmir back from Pakistan after 35 years'--- NDTV

Cheers & tears as Pak hands over Kashmir---DNA

Pak returns Kashmir to India, raises hopes----CNN-IBN

Pakistan returns Kashmir to India----www.news.webindia123.com

India gets Kashmir from Pakistan after 35 years----- CNN IBN

India gets Kashmir back from Pak' ---- The Times of India

Stallion Is Free Now

2009-01-29T11:24:00.020+05:30

Bodies can be leashed not the souls. For freedom is the song of souls. Liberty is to souls as flight is to birds. This is exactly what Dream work's Spirit: The Stallion of Cimarron is all about. Employing the daring struggle of a wild horse, who loves freedom more than his life, as the metaphor of liberty and freedom; the animation film has wonderfully portrayed the essence of life that is instinctive in its origin and appeal across species inhabiting this wonderful planet.

The horse in action we come to see is Spirit, who right from birth challenges his seniors while racing down the meadows. He loves to drink water from a water body beside the herd of giant wild Bison. And when he grows up, he leads the Cimarron herd against all odds.

Spirit becomes a prey of his own inquisitiveness, when a needless exploration, miles down the American cowboy campfire, earns him a lariat around his neck and the riders take the unwilling animal over the army camp for labor. He loses his freedom for inquisitiveness. The alien people and place shocks Spirit. He regrets his decision to have come down from green slopes. And after seeing thousands of his likes roped and obeying their riders; his remorse deepens.

Man, as usual is known to be mean to horses. Likewise, the army's immediate reaction is to break down Spirit’s toughness. They starve him, accuse him of being disruptive when the defiant, determined Spirit bucks, kicks and throws rider after rider out of the square field where horses are beaten and rode by force. Apparently, they must have been erring for taking spirit as a novice.

However, the cavalry's leader (voice of James Cromwell) is a tough nut. But his order that a detained Red Indian be tied to a post with Spirit and kept without any food or water for three days turn into a bad scheme. The caged join forces and manage their escape thudding across the prairie grasslands while the cavalrymen bite their dust.

The Red Indian (voice of Daniel Studi), is the Spirit's new captor. Giving the name Spirit to his new animal, he teaches the stallion the doctrine of compromise and the power of love. Not with a man, but with a foxy blonde, blue-eyed mare —the Red Indian's friend.

While the love between two animals starts to germinate, Spirit longs to go back to his herd. However, an attack on the village by the cavalrymen puts the stallion to run again. The troops ransack through the village and leave Spirit's new girl dying in the roaring stream. Spirit manages to save his mate, but again finds himself caught up.

Next day, he is sent by train far away from his homeland to a countryside mountain where thousands of other horses are slogging with government laborers to construct a transcontinental railroad. Spirit is forced to join the band.

A time in the plot for exaggeration comes. With 'Rambo' style, Spirit dodges a bomb; neutralize a section of soldiers and gets away from a locomotive engine he just toppled. Not only he frees himself but also the horses, who had been forced to toil, escape in the jungles. Little red Indian also appears in the scene and helps him run away from the place.

All the shots are rousing, packed with action and amazingly animated.

However, the cavalry leader chases the fugitives atop a mountain where on one side a wide stream parts the two ridges and on the other side cavalrymen draw closer the duo. Spirit's perseverance filled with freedom to ramble again on the prairies takes him to the other ridge of the mountain with a mid air long jump along with the red Indian (the scene, which would later, become the cover picture of the film DVD's).

While one of the cavalrymen aims his gun on the escapees, the team leader stops him. He has realized the power of those who want to remain free of shackles. He nods towards the Spirit from this side to show that by coercion nothing can be tamed for long.

Stunningly tinted in picturesque sunset and columbine countryside watercolors, both the directors, Lorna Cook and Kelly Asbury had tried to explore a lyrical style of story written by John Fusco, utilizing music of Bryan Adams (Here I am kind of a) and a bare narration by Matt Damon to take on the plot.

It is a real treat to watch the juxtaposition of narrative with the cutting edge technology of visual medium that sparks a creative synergy between the story and its expression. And the mesmerizing special effects add proverbial icing to the visual cake of Spirit’s animation.

The animation film, which has performed exceptionally well across the Hollywood, is really an elegant, enjoyable film for movie lovers. However, this telling-tale of freedom and its costs holds a special charm for all those who dream about freedom very often but are yet to taste it and experience its spirit.

Israel and Gaza--The Big Picture

2009-01-20T11:49:00.002+05:30

Date: December 26

Venue: Gaza Strip

Occasion: Israeli bombardment of Gaza Strip

Results: Over 1200 killed and more than 5500 injured

Mahmoud Dervish’s land has blown up again. How? As the US-supplied F-16s pounded Gaza for over 22 consecutive days, the New York Times headline howled ‘Israel Deepens Gaza Incursion as Toll Mounts’. Definitely Israel will penetrate deeper into Gaza because the world is not watching. UN is sitting at leisure to witness Gaza’s isolation from the outside world with the helpless people brave carpet bombing and no corner to escape, the highways and lanes littered with charred bodies of burnt children, barrage of missiles crumbling building and setting fire on hospitals and schools.

In UN, the members failed to release report on Gaza humanitarian crisis because US vetoed. It thwarted an effort by Muslim Libya to persuade the U.N. Security Council to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza after Israel launched a ground invasion. US vetoed because it believes Hamas broke the six-month long ceasefire with Israel by firing projectiles that have killed 15 Israeli’s in 15 years. Sheer lie. US says nothing on the 5000 Palestinians who were killed by Israelis during the same time. It ignores the November 5 and November 17 Israeli assaults on Gaza when the truce was in effect. Everything is shocking. And so is US’s doublespeak.

Israel won’t cave in because it has the influential US beside it whose tax payers continuously find their money drained off to manufacture war machines for the illegitimate child. And interestingly Israeli President Shimon Peres, who is also the 1994 Nobel Peace prize winner believes that all those killed, were terrorists or their sympathesizers.

Peres, I suppose the Jews struggling for their lives in the Poland ghettos and German shanties were never dismissed as militants by Hitler or his ‘Mein Kemp’.

Hitler did call Jews ‘Untermenchen’ (Sub Humans) which you proved to be again by stroking hell fire on the innocent Gazans who have already been battered by six-month long blockade imposed from sea, air and land.

And still on.

Because Muslims blood is white, it mismatches with theirs. So the jungle law should prevail for the world belongs to powerful only. It’s only parasites that have full rights to exist and survive. Being minnow is unethical and unacceptable. So the rot should get out of the planet. The fall of Babylon should follow the fall of Beit Hanoun. Abu Gharaib and Guantanamo are the things of past. Fairy tales are they. So the devil duo (US and Israel) would carve out the new ones from Palestine. Blast the Gaza. Plunder it of its souls. This is their priority. This is the prerequisite. Condel will keep on counting civilian causalities, but the green signal for Israel will remain on.

Time and again, it has been made clear by United States that it stands by Israel and approves of its horrendous foreign policy in the mid east, especially in Palestine. Its double standards are quite visible, inevitable too. W are told that US is ready to send millions as aid, but it also needs Palestinian blood on quid pro quo basis. Applauds are aired for the puppet Mahmud Abbas government for condemning Hamas. At the same time sonic booms from US made precision missiles are wrecking havoc on Gazans. Cut the Palestinian melon is the theme Israel and US are working on.

And what is more shocking is the idiocy of Arabs. They prefer remain silent to see Palestinian streets painted with blood of innocent human souls, annihilated roads and bridges, maimed bodies, scattered human flesh, children in their mothers’ lap buried under the rubble and carpenters running short of wood to make cots.

While digging mass graves is the routine of survivors in Palestinians, King Abdullah is undisturbed in his fortress and Husseni Mubarak is breaking bread with Israelis. Notwithstanding the fact that streets of Arab also protested against Zionist Israel aggression, but the view to Gaza from Arab streets is quite different from Arab palaces.

An Arab analyst on the Press TV show cried ‘I am embarrassed to call myself as an Arab’. Even someone on the same show proposed that Arab league which saw three absentees , Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt in their latest meet, should be moved to Venezuela, which was the first country to kick out Israeli Ambassador from it soil followed by Bolivia.

Interestingly, President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez called the Gaza attacks as “Palestinian holocaust”, the Arab troika are yet to give it a name. He had in 2006 also threatened to break ties with Israel over its military campaign in Lebanon in a war of words that led both nations to withdraw their envoys. The Arab league which aims at protecting interests of all Arab nations has failed once again and its reallocation to Caracas seems a better idea.

Khalil Jibran’s lines, ‘Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking’ gels with the attitude of Arab governments.

In Israel, President Olmert may say that he has reached all the goals of the Gaza war, and beyond. Surely he has reached, because the value of human life is less in Gaza than that of citizens elsewhere in Israel. The Gazans are the children of lesser God and an Israeli teardrop is worth more than a million drops of Gazans’ blood.

UN is calling both the factions to restrain. Both sides? Do Hamas and the Israelis both have F-16s and F-18’s? Are Hamas’ home-made rockets (firecrackers) and Israeli military and air power comparable? Have you seen Hamas fighters in Haifa or Tel Aviv? Or have you seen Israeli women and children taking refuge in schools?

And where is the peace envoy to mid east. Tony Blair has gone dumb. So much dumb that he cannot at least say that when IRA fired mortars into Northern Ireland, London didn’t respond by pounding Irish Republic with white phosphorous and pressure bombs, it was not sending tanks and naval ships to demolish churches and hospitals to teach the Irish a lesson.

Some one argued that Hamas should have acted smart but instead it provoked Israel by firing rockets. Alright! When Israel was preparing its soldiers for war six months prior besides strangling Gaza from every direction, the question of provoking doesn’t really matter at all. Even if Hamas would have stopped sending its firecrackers beyond Gaza, who would have gambled that Israel wouldn’t invade Gaza. A slave mind set, in fact.

Though western governments may decline to subscribe it, here in Gaza, the SP Huntington’s theory ‘ The clash of civilizations’ is becoming valid. Fukuyama’s assessment might differ again because he thinks that it’s resources that are being targeted but not Muslims, but Gazan’s or Lebanese aren’t sitting on any oil wealth. Are they?

Now that Bush is gone but Olmert must remember that when an Arab has nothing else to toss at you, he hurls a shoe. And till the Arab world run out of shoes, you will have to allow running riot and a lot more fatalities from the skies till they have no more legs to stand on. The ad hoc states can’t kill all the Arabs and watch out they still have a pair of shoes to fling at them and their bosses.

Stop War Hysteria

2009-01-02T11:26:00.000+05:30

And Please Take them Off Air!!!

Immediately after Indian parliament attack in 2002, that followed military mobilization by India and Pakistan along the international border, I remember, a special radio package was aired by BBC Urdu service. A cigarette seller in a village tucked close on the Radcliff line in Rajasthan was asked why he had not migrated to a safer place if the war was imminent.

"I believe there will be no full-fledged war. Because both the countries are nuclear-armed," he said, affirming that those who left the village in haste will come back soon.

Six years have passed, and November 26 attacks on India's financial capital Mumbai have escalated the war of words between the two countries similar to the point of 2002. However, media in India doesn't seem to understand what the poor Baniya observed then.

Indian media appears hell bent upon dragging India to invade Pakistan, which has denied have orchestrated or abetted Mumbai attacks. It doesn't realize the war-affects on the people of twin nations who were born to same mother between 24 hours in August 1947 after a line daggered between them.

In a show of a terrible reporting during Mumbai siege, Indian media risked lives of hundreds of hostages inside the hotels by airing details about what the security agencies were up to, exact location of the trapped who were until out of sight to heavily armed assailants, and a mediocre telephone talks with one of the assailants beseeching his mission scripts and location in the hotel.

Nothing could be more dangerous and mischievous than this.

To increase the TRPs, the chicks with lipsticks continued to hold the logo Mics straight and blabber the hurriedly thought-over 'Piece –to-Camera', but little did they bothered about the gleam of television screens that must have startled the hostages and simultaneously sparkled the faces of assailants who had the television sets kept on.

Take few instances for example:

As the world watched the news of Mumbai attacks, it was shocking to see NDTV’s Barkha Dutt breaking every canon of fair journalism. At one instance she asked a husband about his wife being trapped or seized as a hostage. The poor man fell in line and revealed where exactly his wife was hiding when he last saw her.

In another instance, the Reporter called the head of Oberoi Hotel, who confirmed that there were possibly more than 100 people in the building.

In short, the media acted too speedy and horribly when slow action was needed.

Then the mantra that propels these channels is the borrowed but unabated denouncement. Few days after the event, to condemn the attacks, which India blamed to Muslim Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan, top Bollywood stars, Shahrukh Khan, Amir Khan and Salman Khan were chosen. Though the threesome love to love reel life dance and drink with half-bare actresses, they were there, invited every evening in news studios, to accentuate on what the correct form of Islam is in real life.

"There are two forms of Islam, one the Allahwalaand second the Mullahwala," Sharukh Khan told an English news channel.

All aired!

Now the non-stop but raucous news shows continue make prognosis about the future of India beside defiant Pakistan. An impression is being created among masses especially the political leadership of India, who until recently had not directly held Pakistan responsible for the attacks, about more possible attacks from Pakistan-based groups.

A consensus is being formed to belittle efforts of Pakistan in cracking down the militants in its region, who according to India had perpetrated the attacks in Mumbai. Attempts are being made to establish that Pakistan failed in tracing down the mastermind of Mumbai attacks and India must step in urgently with its huge army and artillery to twist the enemy's arm and dislodge it.

Though few could be spared, the truth of the matter is that most of the Indian media persons are sick. In fever. Contaminated by huge salary packages. Infected with the extravagant lifestyle which is not sustainable by the ordinary poor. The infecundity of the infected organism is going to plague the whole sub-continent, if at all war erupts.

While the growing influence of India in Pakistan's decade-long strategic depth-- Afghanistan and its dogmatic attitude on Kashmir is simply overlooked, hours-long debates and chat shows deliberate upon Pakistan's attempts in subverting India.

Arnab Goswami of Times Now (of late christened as General Arnab in Kashmir) in his voice gives the notion of a dictator. All civilized Indians will be appalled at his judgmental news presenting. He seems to be a rabble-rouser and a person technically at war with Pakistan when he seeks comments with ferocity and asks war experts whether precision guided missiles will be fired on Pakistan administered Kashmir or the war will be rather of more unconventional nature.

Goswami and his likes sideline the composition of the India-Pakistan geography and their military might, given the fact, that the primary conflict, if ever ensues, will be fought in the area close to both India and Pakistan with the air conditioned news studios bound to get caught in the crossfire, both in New Delhi and Mumbai, if India, incase of war, penetrates deeper into Islamabad and Karachi.

And same has been voiced by India's Minister of State for Power Jairam Ramesh, a former journalist, who slammed the television channels and newspapers for "ridiculously" talking about war and creating "unnecessary war hysteria" among the people.

Now that the war clouds were allowed to gather, a serious media at this particular juncture needs to give hype at how much people of both countries are going to lose if the war erupted.

According to Strategic Foresight Group, if a nuclear bomb of 15 kilotons (Highly Enriched Uranium) was dropped in the Fort area of Mumbai on any weekday, the immediate death toll would be 23 lakh and would destroy the entire financial, intellectual and governing elite of Mumbai, leading to a financial collapse hard to recover from.

Likewise, it says, if India retaliated with a 50 kiloton (Plutonium) bomb on Karachi's Cantt Railway Station, the immediate death toll would be close to 18 lakh with all the financial and services infrastructure destroyed and life crippled.

The group believes that the troop mobilisation on the pattern of 2002 for a year will cost India 0.46 percent of GDP and Pakistan 2.25 percent of GDP.

Since both countries have been claiming victories in all of their fights against each other, the figures released by the group prove the assertion is wrong as both countries have suffered almost matching fatalities and same balance of power between the two countries still exist.

Like a child having a tantrum and an adult with disturbed childhood, the Indian media has been coming up with so much 'twisty tales' about Pakistan without any evidence (but their sources). And the irony is that there is no criticism coming up. The Pakistani media's stance is no different from the stance of its people. We have witnessed so many times, when people in Pakistan criticized their media for exaggeration and the useless panicky stuff but one must have to confess in this instance that Pakistani media has shown some restraint and acted sensibly contrasting the Indian media that has come up with the most idiotic stories and the usual melodrama that one would have had a chance to watch.

'Bombard Pakistan', 'How India should hit back Pakistan' and 'Wake-up India' is what we have been barraged with from the past several weeks through papers, web and news channels..

It's a shame that the Indian media is inciting anger amongst the Indian people when people in the sub-continent were thinking that both countries could at last get over their differences, with the non-interference of Pakistan in the J&K Assembly elections being the greatest CBM offered to India as a starter.

Keeping these things in view, it will be prudent on the part of Indian media neither to sketch state policies nor be the voice of a particular politician and surely not activate wars but help diffuse tensions between India and Pakistan.

And about the great generosity and compassion from the people and journalists of Pakistan, a piece that appeared in the Indian Express on December 20—The Microphone Wars and the National Interest by Shekhar Gupta fits in the current situation where the author called on the senior Indian media people particularly editors to intervene before the great professional decade-long bond between India and Pakistani journalists starts to morsel.

Umarblogs is an irregular blogger. He spends a lot of his time either at city saloons or at press colony among gossipers. Srinagar is where his taste for black tea grows stronger as his taste for Kashmir politics is eroded everyday. Feel free to reach him at www.umarblogs.blogspot.com

Ban ki Moon in Kashmir

2008-12-18T11:18:00.000+05:30

Last night I had a dream. I saw UN General Secretary Ban ki Moon has come to visit Kashmir. He is flanked by Indian Prime Minster Manmohan Singh and former CM of the State Ghulam Nabi Azad prompting an estimated 1 million people to take to streets to protest against Indian policies in Kashmir.

Many carried banners and placards calling the latter duo with some really bad names in Kashmiri.

"Welcome to Kashmir, Mr. General Secretary," Azad said, shaking Moon’s hand in Srinagar. "You are going to love it to be here. Your appreciation rating is much higher here than us. Kashmiris completely love you."

“Oh Yeah," Moon said.

The UN bigwig saw some placards reading ‘Ban Ki Moon didn’t come soon but his eye caught an old torn placard, probably used in several protests earlier that read: ‘No ban on Ban—Let Him Come.’

“May I know what has happened here before?” he asked Azad.

The General Secretary also sought the reason over why 1 million of people are rioting and calling Sing and Azad with bad names.

“I am afraid to see what they would do to you two if they loathed you so much," he said to his hosts.

"Don't take it the wrong way," Azad replied. "It's only 1 million Kashmiris. Rest of all love us absolutely. They are also going to vote for us to power. "

Another thing Moon realized was that most of the troopers have crossed their service ages as compared to protesters who are mostly young to which Azad explained that life expectancy rate of Kashmiris have gone down over the years, except for politicians. “Since we spend most of the time in New Delhi. And security forces in the valley rest assure things,” he said.

“Oh I see, Poor Kashmiris,” Moon shrugged.

Seeing the protesters getting angry, Moon said, “So you think you are safer in your own backyard and no one will harm you. Ha?"

"Very safe Mr Moon," Singh chipped in. "As long as we have two guns for every rioter."

Between the conversations, the visiting dignitary heard some loud chants in native language.

“Could you please interpret it for me” Moon said when he heard ‘Kathi Chue Sani Gobrau’.

“They are saying ‘where have all the sons gone’,” Azad replied.

“But where have all the sons gone?” Moon sought the answers.

Azad explained that most of them have crossed over LoC before the cross-LoC trade started and rest of them are seeking jobs in the Indian cities, without telling their parents.

“But our state police is quite active. All the youngmen would be chased up very soon,” Azad said.

The tallest among the troika scratched his skull as Azad winked his right eye towards the calm Turbanator.

After two days, in New Delhi, speaking to some Hindi news channels, Singh said that the reports of 1 million protestors were largely exaggerated.

"I am contradicting that 1 million people were on Srinagar streets," he said. “But it was a smaller section of youth who had some resentment.”

“Mr Singh, they were 1 million souls,” Moon tried to correct the Indian PM.

Azad replied quickly, “Mr Moon what looks like a million march to you is just a usual thing there. In an hour, two or three miscreants can assemble million-strong crowd in valley. You know what I mean, No?"

“O, that way every Kashmiri is a greatest convincer living. Isn’t it,” Moon replied, while Azad pulled back his chair feeling sullied, but he kept his smile till the end of press conference.

Among the protestors a 25-year-old resident of inner city, Nike Koatur, who had helped organize the rally was seemingly unhappy after the protest march.

He said that the protests would have been more successful if all banners and placards had been spellchecked.

Infact, one protestor, shown on a news channel, carried a sign that said, "We want Azad,”. And another displayed, "In Dependence-- only solution”. Also, one of the placards read,” Pebble site”.

“You see what they really intended to mean Mr Moon,” Singh said to the visiting personality.

And inspite the huge protests in valley, Moon's visit was framed as a big success that will consolidated India’s position at the international level.

“In honour of your last name, we have sent a mission to Moon,” Singh told Moon.

And after biding him the final good bye, Singh whispered in Azad’s ears, “Mission ‘Moon’ accomplished” while both guffawed to the top of their lungs.

Umarblogs is an irregular blogger. He writes a bimonthly humor column for his blog. He spends a lot of his time either at city saloons or at press colony among gossipers. Srinagar is where his taste for black tea grows stronger as his taste for Kashmir politics is eroded everyday. Feel free to reach him at www.umarblogs.blogspot.com

Kashmir Can Sustain Its Independence!!!

2008-11-26T10:53:00.000+05:30

Kashmir Can Sustain Its Independence!!!

I am not sowing a new idea. It was always there. I am just reacting to the fears and apprehensions expressed in several blog entries, newspapers, and discussion boards over the improbability of Kashmir sustaining its independence from India.

Now that Indian literati have realized that Kashmir is serious about its independence from India, what they try is to baffle rather swank that Independent Kashmir would survive for just 15 minutes. Since they are ‘worried’ more than Kashmiris about how it can sustain its sovereignty especially without the tax payers of India, a clarification as a Kashmiri becomes urgent.

When some of the Balkans, Central Asian countries, Caucasus, Eastern European and all of the Baltic countries could survive after gaining independence from former Russia, why can’t Kashmir. Right now, most all of these countries, have their GDP per capita tremendously increasing and six times more than India or for that matter Pakistan.

Baltic countries like Estonia Latvia and Lithuania were not much developed than what Kashmir is now, but after liberation, things changed. Even Caucasus countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have become more developed and industrial than they were with second world power of those days (USSR).

Notice the eastern European states Belarus Moldova and Ukraine; they are happier than they were ever before. And sustaining their independence!!

Disintegration never ever means economic deprivation and collapse, and in case of Kashmir, it will prosper like anything. Things would be difficult in first three-four years, but after that, Kashmir would come into flower.

Only its hydro electricity can turn it into a Singapore. Its wildlife, forests and diverse landscape can open floodgates of money.

Kashmir’s climate and fresh atmosphere is exactly what BPOs and MNCs need. In Baltic countries, many MNCs are opening their offices—and that has reduced the number of its unemployed youth moving in to UK or US for jobs.

Kashmir’s pastures can turn it into a heaven for milk production and cattle rearing. Currently 70 percent of all pastures are under the activity of army. And 80 lakh sheep are imported from outside states. With its own pastures, it would save 1600 crores of money spent on importing livestock.

Kashmir’ soil is very much fertile, and the sectors of agriculture, horticulture, floriculture are yet to be fully exploited.

In the Agriculture and Horticulture sectors, Kashmir can base a big industry. Even processing of fruits could be a separate industry. For example, in foreign nations, apple is grown at 50 metric ton on a hectare of land. However, here in Kashmir, it is just lingering on 10.5 metric ton per hectare. If Kashmir starts to produce 50 metric tons; there will be huge exports. Right now the apple industry is worth Rs 2500 crores and if technology is involved apples can produced 5 times more than this figure. And a part of it can be used for processing.

Likewise Kashmir’s vegetables industry is going great. From the last three years, vegetables are being grown at large scale, so much, that a huge quantity is being exporting it .Kashmir can produce more than what it is producing now and can flood its immediate regions with fresh vegetables.

Recently florists’ organization in Kashmir said that the valley can overtake countries like Holland which is sitting on the world’s 93 percent of the commercial flowers revenue. They said that the climate, fertile soil and geography is fit for producing fresh flowers thereby ending the hegemony of Holland in this sector. Commercial flowers contribute to Holland’s 95 percent of economy. And Kashmir could become the next Holland. There is a season in Holland when they don’t grow some flowers while as in Kashmir those are grown and are in demand across European and US markets. These flowers are quite expensive and Kashmir can replace Holland by chipping in and exploiting the timing.

The horticulture department, few months back, released figures about walnut production saying that 1 lakh metric ton walnuts are being produced every year. But it can be increased. By planting walnut trees on the forest land where there are no trees, Kashmir can have promising harvests. Of 22,000 sq Km of forest land, 11 percent area is lush while as rest of the area is barren where walnuts can be grown. Estimates say that Kashmir can raise the existing figure of walnut production to 10 lakh metric tons. Kashmiri walnuts, no doubt, have a competition from Chinese walnuts. But Kashmir walnuts are preferred in foreign markets.

Then Kashmir has a huge mineral-based potential resource sectors. You name any mineral, it is available here. Kashmir has a got a huge limestone deposits. Right now only 0.03 percent of these deposits are being exploited and only from that 8 lakh metric tons of cement is being produced. Just raising that level to 0.5 percent would mean generating revenue of 2500 crores.

Likewise huge deposits of gypsum, bauxite and quartzite have not been explored. In Kashmir’s Kupwara we have a marble mine of 45 million cubic meter. And that marble is considered best than its Italian counterpart. Kashmir has 50 million cubic metres of granite mines in bountiful Sonamarg and beyond. Borax, blue sapphire-- which is priceless and several other minerals are yet to be prospected. Currently only 0.05 percent of Kashmir’s total mineral wealth is being utilized, if the level is raised to only 2 percent, Kashmir would witness a renaissance.

Talking about huge Knowledge-based potential sectors, it is crucial to mention that when the IT boom was going across India, Kashmir was in turmoil. All European and US companies had first agreed to establish their bases in the Valley because of the suitable climate, but then, conflict pushed them for other options in South India. But still there is a big space available and we can exploit it fully. Financial service centre is the evolving concept. Here Kashmir cannot afford to miss that as it had come in the same way as IT did.

Remember 1 lakh crore industry within next 20 years is waiting for Kashmir. But it all depends how things are allowed to happen.

Kashmir is best known for its silk, saffron, honey, medicinal herbs that are to be explored. Leave aside, handicraft, woodcarving and other sectors, imagine what if Kashmir explores all of its mountains, harvest rainwater, start mountaineering expeditions, and water boat safaris ( just like Sweden, Norway, Austria, Hungary) at large scale levels, export timber, initiate wildlife safaris, and improve fish nurturing.

The world knows what sort of potential Kashmir has in Tourism sector. Despite conflict, tourist economy has been incredible and once the conflict ends, one can calculate the economy of state and 1/3 of Kashmiri population that is directly or indirectly linked with tourism trade.

Kashmir’s water resources are its biggest possessions. And because the 1960 India-Pakistan Indus Waters Treaty is regarded as "the worst thing to have happened to the state of Jammu and Kashmiri, under which, India has all the rights of water utilization of three rivers - Ravi, Beas and Satluj - while Pakistan has rights over three other rivers - Chenab, Jhelum and Indus - all of which flow through Jammu and Kashmir, Kashmir would certainly charge both the countries for its waters and again millions of dollars it can bank.

Kashmir would also like to seek compensation for water and electricity all these decades India and Pakistan have used. Probably at the later stages, it will be exactly the replica of how Israel drew reparations from present Germany for the atrocities their ancestors suffered from the Hitler’s era Germany. However, Kashmir can also absolve them both.

Now that every independence sustaining efforts mentioned, what actually is needed is the sincerity on the part of India that is forcibly ruling Kashmir. Remember former Pakistan President Mushraff had offered in 2007 to pull back its troops from its controlled Kashmir provided India follow suit. However, India, which is now stressing on the conditions of plebiscite, did not respond to Mushraff’s calls. It could have simply turned Kashmir as a link not only between Pak and India, but also with China and Afghanistan.

Before or immediately after the 1990’s, Kashmir never ever witnessed million strong protest rallies. Which indicates that despite pumping huge money into the valley, raising education standards, so-called globalizing it and all that, the aspirations have remained same; rather Kashmiris have realized where they have to head for. India has been simply abortive in buying the common aspirations.

Suggestions:

The tax payers should rather ask their leaders, whom they select in elections, to channelize their money in the care of farmers and weavers who are committing suicide in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, on illiteracy, disaster hit areas and road building across India. They can ask them to reduce India’s defense budgets by solving Kashmir imbroglio. A Chapaati costs Rs 500 at Siachen peaks. No doubt an Indian taxpayer can afford it who sleeps in the airconditioned room somewhere in Mumbai skyscrapers, but there are millions in India who have only one time meal to eat and rat- packed streets to sleep.

India tax payers might say that their sweat is being used for Kashmir’s welfare, but what about the sweat that has gone into the spendings on army for six long decades. The results are actually surprising to all which Indian authors too realized lately. Notwithstanding huge spendings on army, nowhere has been army successful in suppressing Kashmiris. Instead, their presence has fomented the lava of dissent that has been accruing in the vale since long. We have a 28-year-0ld Indian army Captian claiming it before BBC’s George Arney who recently traveled to Kashmir to speak to young people to find out what they want and how they view India.

Myths Exploded:

That Kashmir lives on these taxes is a fable always used to bully Kashmiris. Kashmir’s 88 percent of electricity is transported to outside states. Kashmir is using only 12 percent of its electricity that too on higher rates. Because the electricity is first guided out towards Northern grid. Then it is pumped back with additional charges lagaaned.

Kashmir lightens some parts of North India and if India spends something back here, it is doing no act of kindness. Because Kashmir too is spending billions in the form of electricity, that India squeeze’s out. Of Rs 1 India spends on Kashmir, it obtains Rs 14 as profit.

Kashmir rears almost two lakh migrant labourers, mostly from Bihar and UP. The money they make here in Kashmir can be consumed by the local work force who is sitting idle. While they are being killed in Maharashtra and elsewhere, Kashmir always proved Dubai for them.

Threats from other countries:

When the Kashmir issue will be resolved, there will be nothing to fear from Pak, India or China. Possibly, Kashmiri people could ask for UN troop presence and Kosovo-like support until Kashmir recover from the losses it has incurred from the past 62 years of turmoil.

So many small countries are living in the lap of other giants, but they act as buffer zones rather than colonies. Taiwan, East Timor, Bhutan, and again Balkans, Kosovo, Kuwait should serve as an example.

Even South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

It is a fairy-tale that independent Kashmir will not survive. Let believers of such theory ask questions to themselves and India show sincerity and give it a try.

Eyewitness account of Eidgah Chalo call

2008-11-04T10:20:00.001+05:30

It was August 21. At 1:00 pm, I arrived at the Farooq’s house to pick up everyone who was going to Eidgah to participate in the million man strong rally. I had to write on how strong the rally was and who participated.

At 1:30 pm we left Lal Chowk and arrived at Karan Nagar at 2:00pm. After we parked the SUMO we headed to the Eidgah. At the beginning, we got close to the gate of the ground, where we stood there for about one hour struggling to make our way through the crowd. And after about a half-hour there in this location, our group of 9 split up and we got involved with what was going on.

I knew by the volume of the crowd that we already, (and this was at 3:30PM) had more men in this area than the Pampore gathering and UN March at Sonawar. At exactly 4:00, I called up my photojournalist friend who was clinging by a tree to get the vista shot. He said Eidgah had a record-breaking crowd of 10,00,000 present.

Hurriyat leaders had called for the march, but it was people’s day, and even though they will try to milk it for all it is worth, people (1million home-crowd) took the March from them.

All the social, political, and religious leaders know that it was the people’s day. The problem that affect, is that leaders are out of touch with reality and their people.

Most of them might feel that it was a benefit for people to be around them, when in actuality they should feel more than privilege to be around their people. Leaders like Geelani, Mirvaiz, Shah, Malik, Mir and etcetera do not represent people...people represent them.

I was more than thankful to those who made it possible for me to be there, not representing the Hurriyat leaders, but writing on people who represented them here in Eidgah.

I feel this was something people needed to do several decades back. From the beginning I had a hunch that something different was going to happen in Srinagar.

The spirit of the march surprised me. People from across the valley had gathered. Everywhere one was sloganeering in favour of freedom and against “Indian suppression”. Some were talking about the problems that were affecting them today here in the valley.

However, people came together from all areas of this nation to witness and find out a solution about the “oppression” they face. Killings, Jails, Harassment, Custodial disappearances, Rapes, their roles as brothers and nation builders, and leaders in their neighborhoods. The oppressor’s media have defamed Kashmiri in this part of the globe so much but I feel that people are the solution to the problems someone else has created. Yes, the oppressor has done them many bad and will continue to do so, because ‘Big Bossism’ is so deep-rooted in ‘Big Country’ that it does not realize the things it say and does. It says that it is a good democracy, but whatever bad the world knows has been done to these people, I realize. It is their modus operandi, but people say that they cannot let this come on them. And they have realized that they cannot become like India. Because then they will become the wicked which they talk and battle against for the last 62 years.

There were people from all parts of Valley, enveloping everything under the sun. Political, social, economic and religious organizations. Lawyers, doctors, cops in civvies, white collar employees, blue-collar employees. Children’s gangs, Womens guild, Cart pushers, the destitute and even the differently able (Handicapped) were present.
From now, my friend says, “I will always hold my head high and be proud of the line of attack we opted against our oppressor. I have come out with the fear of men in uniform. I am happy to have presented ourselves on Friday. It was not only a historical event, but the event was a sacred one. No matter what happens in our future, I will always look back to this Friday and can say; that I stood among the proud, 1 million Kashmiris.”

And what a show of might it was.

People voiced their concerns for fellow Kashmiris. Yes, it was pro-kashmiri, but in all sincerity, nothing bad from mouths came against the people of India who have been left ignorant by the politicians they vote for.

Protesters talked about culture and history and the great men and women in valley who cared. They were not a serious and grim crowd. They sang the songs of freedom, and lauded martyrs to tribute them. They had green liberation flags fluttering over, while they were sloganeering for freedom and liberation. They prayed Allah and reaffirmed their stance.

I met a friend from Batamaloo who was annoyed at me because I did not bring members of my family with me. He didn’t know that I have become a writer after 5 years of our college days. It was quite motivating what he said. And I quote; "Brother, come Monday bring your family to Lal Chowk’s sit in, we need to show the world that people’s movements can turn the tables.”

But less he knew that I had come for something else. To write only.

Everyone who recognized me because of the green T-shirt, said; "Free Kashmir". One person who hugged me said; "the hug is for the colour of your shirt and not you,” before disappearing into a ring of youngsters who were set up for a “Raghda Dance”—Kashmir’s new protest jazz in which a group of youngsters huddle and stomp towards a common middle point while sloganeering, “Trample the oppressor, Trample the corroborators and so on…”

One of the elderly women prayed that all the positive things that happened reach the world body particularly United Nations. And that Kashmiris brave up and start building a powerful and peaceful resistance community.

But I feel they have a lot of hard work before them, but all they have to do is be busy and try becoming self-reliant.

I express thanks to all those who challenged them. Because otherwise they won’t have come out. Still it will be a stiff and long road, but I believe they are going to do it.

The thing is they called for hundreds, but one million strong showed up.

Even their sisters and toddlers were there, standing alongside, serving water and food to thirsty crowd. 1 million Kashmiris turned up and promised to start anew.

But it was a placard that I loved the most. A young boy of 14 was carrying it. It read, “You [to Indian troops] want to win our hearts, leave our homes first.”

BBC’s George Arney travels to Kashmir to speak to young people

2008-10-29T11:19:00.000+05:30

The View from Kashmir

Members of the Kashmiri rock band - Blood Rock

A series of protests against Indian rule in Kashmir has left more than 30 people dead since August. Thousands of people have died in the violence there since 1989.

The latest protests have been spear headed by the so-called children of conflict - those who have only ever known the troubles.

For Assignment George Arney travels to Kashmir to speak to young people to find out what they want and how they view India.

Arney also speaks to a 28-year-0ld Indian army Captian, who also speaks about letting Kashmir go to its people forever.

Listen to the programme here (22 mins)

Kashmir's Red Square

2008-10-20T23:16:00.001+05:30

Lal Chowk, Kashmir's Red Square has always entertained me. It is an important part of paradise. At least for a person like me, who frequent it thrice a day.

You can get lost in the labyrinth of its narrow lanes and by-lanes that all converge at Ghanta Gher (Clock Tower), encounter people who mirror each other in complexion, experience bliss amidst hundreds of lined shops and street vendors. However, the moment violence returns to this area one can't help but run home with a silent resolve not to visit this place again or at least take diversions.

But it is Lal Chowk's Clock Tower that pulls you back.

For years, it has stood tranquil, while time passed. From the scent of roses to the pungency of gunpowder, it has seen everything. So it is likely that anything related to Kashmir should be invoked under the auspices of Lal Chowk - the main square of Srinagar city.

When I was young, I would wonder if I could climb this tower. I would imagine how the city would look like while I being standing atop of it. But I would not come up to its base. I would not touch its pedestal. It was taken over by the soldiers. Just like as other parts of the valley. I would always see a hit man who would rest his gun on a small window of clock tower ready to pull the trigger from the pigeon hole. And I would feel unrestness on the face of every passer by who would stride out fastly near the tower.

During the first twenty years of my life, the clock never showed correct time. I don't know when it stopped working. Maybe it didn't need to. Its sheer existence felt as if some old member of your family was watching you. You could never do anything wrong before its presence. I remember, as a college student, watching my colleague extinguishing his cigarette and doing the top button of his shirt. Then, as we would pass past from the Lal Chowk, he would say, "Somehow, I cannot smoke in front of this tower. It reminds me of my old grandfather, who died of bullet wounds in Lal Chowk."

Lal Chowk always reminds me of a sea shore with Ghantagher a lighthouse. Guiding ships to safety. The two decades of tyranny saw the lighthouse intact, but ships going haywire. Soldiers had consolidated their position beneath, surrounded it with razor wires and sand bags, and would parade the children of Ghantagher before their grandfather.

It was exactly the same place where Kashmir’s PM Sheikh Abdullah and Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru would one day promise moon to Kashmiris. And it was the same place where ignominy would daily welcome the generations of Kashmiris for future.

Then something changed this year. The clocktower began to display correct time. And by that time, the needle that had stopped ticking got revitalized. Young men started raising their fists in the air. Demanding end of their ignominy. Bare chests asked for independence of Red Square or bullets.

The clock tower of Kashmir that withstood the assault of 62-year-old conflict and occupation saw a revolution. Every year it saw soldiers erecting their country's flag atop it. It would have hated it as much as Red Fort of Delhi would have hated a British flag atop it.
It would have felt Indian flag as a dagger drawn deeper into its head while troops fired bullets around its shadows.

However, two months back, The Red square finally fell to its subjects.
The moment the land revocation order was made public, passions soared. Thousands of people danced to drumbeats, brandished torches and burst crackers in the Lal Chowk.

The ecstatic people from across the city chanted "Azadi, Azadi…" at the Ghanta Ghar pedestal before hoisting two green flags atop the tower and hanging a cable of fire crackers around it.
The grandfather would have enjoyed the welcome, felt elevated and honored with soldiers no more capturing its plinth.

The sounds of cheering and sloganeering near the Lal Chowk where people gathered mixed with those of firecrackers and torches that were followed by demonstrations to and fro around it.
The crowd booed the soldiers, pledged to spill blood for blood and promised to set Kashmir free from the chains of slavery.

Many were wrapped in the green flag; some wore the green and white shirts, and had their fingers forming 'V' meaning victory while they danced around a bonfire of crackers with the smoke and din of happiness enveloping the air.

"Change is in the air", Azadi, Azadi" they kept on repeating.

The clock tower was set free.

But two months after, it has again come under the slavery.

In the hindsight, a barbed wire again envelop its feet.

Back then, it wasn't numb.

'The terrorist is a social activist gone wrong'

2008-10-17T10:27:00.000+05:30

Stuart W Twemlow is a founding editor of 'The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies' and is president of The International Association for Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He spoke to Times of India on Oct 15 2008:

You spoke on the making of a terrorist in the recent conference on Hate and Violence and now we have a real-life situation of bomb blasts in Delhi. Do you have any suggestions which could be of help?

The first suggestion is manage your fear. I was in a restaurant (in Delhi) when news of the bomb blasts came and everyone panicked. If fear is not controlled then the mind does not work and one does stupid things. Some years back 30 people died in the US, not from the hurricane but because they ran out of gasoline fleeing and were not carrying their medication.

Do you think the terrorist is an individual with a pathological psyche?

I suggest that you never label the terrorist as mentally ill. The terrorist is not mentally ill. Jerald Post, MD, examined many terrorists in the US and did not find any signs of mental illness. Others have had similar results. If the terrorist is labelled as mentally ill, then you will not hear what the terrorist is trying to say. The terrorist is made by the social system. The suicide bomber is like the Kamikaze pilots of Japan who crashed into ships and considered it patriotic and honourable. In your freedom struggle, as they showed in the film 'Gandhi', column upon column of people marched up as the British soldiers fired. Would one consider them crazy? Is it so different from suicide bombers?

What approach would you advocate for prevention of terrorism?

It is stigmatising when a term is used whether it is terrorism or bipolar disorder. More humanity is brought in by doing away with the categorisation. I never use any label for patients and do not use the term terrorist in negotiations. The terrorist is essentially a social activist gone wrong. Also the term terrorist is influenced by political and social mores of the time. Yesterday's terrorists may be tomorrow's heroes. To prevent terrorism you have to understand that the terrorist is trying to say something which he believes in strongly just like you and me. If the bomb blasts were by SIMI then the reader should think what were they trying to say. If you treat them as a trouble maker or mentally ill it will not work. Treat them as human beings with a cause. I am not saying it is a solution but if you negotiate then the reign of terror will be over because there will be no need for it since one would be listening.

Ground Zero

2008-10-06T19:02:00.000+05:30

GLIMPSES OF VALLEY

The Kashmir Valley from the east

The Kashmir Valley is a broad mountain valley right south of the main ridge of the Himalayas (with the Nanga Parbat visible at the right side of this view). The Valley is the center of the Kashmir region divided and disputed between India, Pakistan and China.

The Kashmir Valley from the south

The Kashmir Valley with the western parts of the Himalayas, the Karakoram, Ladakh and parts of western Tibet in the background.

The View From Jantar Mantar

2008-10-06T13:12:00.001+05:30

On August 13, 1993, two days before India's forty-sixth Independence Day, I was traveling by train from Kashmir to a high school near New Delhi. A few hours into the journey, as the maroon Shalimar Express entered the north Indian plains in Punjab, two Indian soldiers entered my compartment. Like me, the soldiers had made a twelve-hour journey through the high mountains of the Kashmir Valley to the railway station in the state's southern province of Jammu. Ahead of us was a fourteen-hour train ride to New Delhi. The soldiers smiled and dropped their bags in the aisle. "Will you please make room for us?" one of them asked a middle-aged man reading a news magazine. "We are going home after a year in Kashmir and don't have any reservations." The man was unmoved. The soldier repeated his request, and as I squirmed in my seat another passenger pointed at the dirty aisle floor and said, "You may sit there." I was stunned. Unlike people in Kashmir, my north Indian co-passengers had no reason to be scared of the soldiers: they ordered them around and the soldiers obeyed. After a while the ticket examiner arrived. "What are you doing here?" he barked at the soldiers. "Sir, there is no room in other compartments. Sir! Please adjust us somewhere," they pleaded. He asked the soldiers to leave the coach and began to walk away. They followed him. A few minutes later they returned and installed themselves on the floor. "How much did he charge you?" someone asked. "Fifty rupees each." My co-passengers laughed and chatted about corruption. "This is India," declared the man with the newsmagazine.

The India I had seen in Kashmir was different. It was not a shining example of the world's largest democracy but instead the military arm of an occupying power whose rule we resented. Political discontent had been simmering in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir since the 1947 partition of British India and the birth of the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and more so in recent decades as India curtailed Kashmiri political rights and autonomy. A separatist rebellion against Indian rule broke out in 1989, and since then more than 70,000 people--mostly Kashmiri civilians and militants, but also Indian soldiers and Pakistani militants--have been killed. After 1990, gun battles, land mine blasts, identity checks, arrests, looting and torture became routine in Kashmir.

When, like thousands of other Kashmiri students escaping the war, I left Kashmir for my Indian school, I was well acquainted with power and fear. In the Shalimar Express, the look I saw on the soldiers' faces suggested they were as well. Outside Kashmir, without the authority enjoyed by soldiers in "disturbed zones" (granted by India's Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958) to shoot anyone they deem suspicious; without their armored vehicles and machine guns; surrounded by fellow Indians from the lower and middle classes; confronted by the ticket examiner, a small-time representative of the law--facing all this, the soldiers seemed helpless. And so they made their voyage home sitting on the dirty floor. In that crowded coach, India seemed a more benign place. I ended up spending nearly a decade and a half outside the coach. Living in different Indian cities and towns as a student and a journalist, I came to know Indian democracy as a crowded collage of disparate and often violently clashing realities.

Living in India means enduring endless and often heated discussions about India. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues that the richness of the tradition of argument is particularly relevant to the "development of democracy in India and the emergence of its secular priorities." The tradition was thriving in 1946, when the members of India's constituent assembly gathered in New Delhi to debate the drafts of the Constitution the new country was to adopt. The assembly, whose 300 members included socialists, Hindu nationalists, supporters of feudalism, upper-caste Brahmans, Muslims, women, untouchables and other lower castes, received public submissions ranging from demands to base the Constitution on "ancient Hindu works" to requests for "adequate representation" from members of the Central Jewish Board of Bombay. "These submissions testified to the baffling heterogeneity of India, but also to the precocious existence of a 'rights culture' among Indians," writes historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi, a lucid and engaging summary of independent India.

Guha, a well-known public intellectual in India, has also written on environmental history, the social history of cricket and many aspects of India's cultural and political history. The story told in India After Gandhi is not a revelation for South Asian readers, but it is certainly the first attempt by a historian to compress into a single book a story previously scattered in hundreds of books, newspapers, journals and other archival material. Guha was chosen by the remarkable former publisher of Picador UK turned literary agent, Peter Straus, to write this book. After reading an essay by Guha in the journal Past and Present, Straus tracked him down, visited his home in Bangalore and suggested that he write a history of independent India.

Freedom to argue about the constitutional character of an independent India came at a great price, as the bloody partition of the subcontinent killed and displaced millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs from both sides of the hastily drawn border between India and Pakistan. The border, known as the Radcliffe Line, was named after the British judge Cyril Radcliffe, who had finalized its jagged path. Radcliffe was a stranger to India. After arriving in New Delhi from London in early July 1947, he had just five weeks to complete his task. He knew his line would stir up strife. "There will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance looking for me. I do not want them to find me," he wrote to his nephew soon after his arrival. The Radcliffe Line divided the north Indian province of Punjab into Indian Punjab and Pakistani Punjab, and in the east it divided Bengal into West Bengal and Eastern Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971. It was these two divided provinces that saw the worst violence after the partition. In the late '90s, Intizar Hussain, the foremost short story writer of Pakistan, wrote in a collection of essays, Chiragoon Ka Dhoowan (The Flight of History), about traveling in a dark train coach from his hometown near Delhi to Lahore. He and his fellow Muslim passengers, paralyzed by the fear of an attack from a Sikh or Hindu mob outside, are quiet as the train rumbles toward the border. A flicker of light inside the coach startles them. It is only a young fellow traveler trying to light a cigarette. Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan have similar stories about the looming threat of fratricide.

One of the biggest administrative tasks confronting the new Indian government was to resettle millions of refugees. Guha evocatively describes the biggest refugee camp, erected in Kurukshetra, a town a few hours from Delhi, where around 300,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were housed in tents, provided rations and even shown screenings of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons. In stark contrast to today's mostly inefficient, corrupt and indifferent Indian bureaucracy, Guha explains, social workers and unnamed officials, led by London School of Economics graduate Tarlok Singh, had made 250,000 allotments of land by November 1949. The refugees set about "digging new wells, building new houses, planting new crops. By 1950 a depopulated countryside was alive once again."

The princely states that resisted joining the Indian Union, especially Hyderabad, Junagadh and, foremost, Kashmir, required a different kind of cultivation. Guha tells a gripping story of the taming of princes through a mixture of coercion and persuasion, orchestrated by the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, a man who sought "practical proof" of loyalty from the millions of Indian Muslims who stayed in India instead of migrating to Pakistan. Patel, who believed that most of these Muslims had earlier supported the demand for an independent Pakistan, had his secretary direct the secretaries of all other departments to monitor Muslims working under them. Guha reproduces the chilling letter: "I would request you to prepare lists of Muslim employees in your Ministry and in the offices under your control, whose loyalty to the Dominion of India is suspected or who are likely to constitute a threat to security." Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru disapproved of such witch-hunt tactics, and according to Guha, "Whereas the home minister demanded that the Muslims prove their loyalty, the prime minister placed the onus on the Indian state, which had a constitutional obligation to make all its citizens, especially the Muslims, feel secure."

Patel's death in 1950 created an opportunity for Nehru to fashion the government and the nation according to his vision of a secular modern democracy. He overcame the Indian National Congress Party leaders sympathetic to the Hindu extremists and prepared for India's first general election in 1952. The Congress Party faced electoral opposition from the Socialists, the Hindu-right Jana Sangh, the Communists and even B.R. Ambedkar, the chief draftsman of the Indian Constitution and great leader of the untouchables, who felt that the Congress Party wasn't doing much to benefit his constituency. Yet Nehru led his party to victory by campaigning on the strength of personal charisma, the idea of national unity and the principle of secularism, which he established as the civil religion of India. Nehruvian secularism aspired to equal treatment of all religions by the state and insisted on the separation of political office and religious institutions. Nehru was very critical of Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, when Prasad presided over a reconstruction ceremony of Gujarat's Somnath temple, which had been destroyed by a medieval Muslim chief, Mahmud of Ghazni, a native of Ghazni in what is now Afghanistan. For Guha, one measure of Nehru's secular vision is the fact that the 1952 election was a successful civil engineering project: "Some 224,000 polling booths were constructed and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, requiring 8,200 tons of steel. About 380,000 reams of paper were used for printing the rolls." Nehru led India until his death in 1964. His achievements included largely democratic government institutions and an economic model called Nehruvian Socialism, which relied on high tariffs and other measures to protect national industries and promote economic self-sufficiency. He also made India a strong backer of decolonization movements in Asia and Africa. Nehru's succession by the veteran but uncharismatic Congress leader Lal Bahadur Shastri, and the emergence of Nehru's difficult daughter, Indira Gandhi, as head of the Congress Party and, eventually, the nation's prime minister, made many Western observers question the viability of Indian democracy. "There was a line of thinking, widely prevalent in the West, which held that only the personality and example of Jawaharlal Nehru had kept India united and democratic," Guha writes. He is obsessed with tracking down advocates of this line in publications like The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times and the Times of London, and in the writings of various social scientists, almost vindictively digging out the most obscure comment and refuting its "doomsday" proclamations with evidence that Indian democracy had survived. Yet such stern judgments are absent whenever Guha writes about how Nehru failed democracy, such as when he imprisoned the prime minister of Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who was also Nehru's personal friend, in 1953, after Sheikh Abdullah talked about the possibility of Kashmiri independence. Had Sheikh Abdullah not been arrested by Nehru, had Nehru and his Congress not promoted dubious puppet regimes in Kashmir and eroded its autonomy, we might not have lived to see the emergence of a regional conflict that nearly brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a nuclear war in 2002, a conflict that continues to brutalize millions of people in Kashmir and has given the region, controlled by half a million Indian soldiers, the distinction of being the most militarized area of the globe.

Strangely enough, in his telling of the reconstruction of Kashmir after its rebellion against Indian rule in 1989, Guha chooses not to cite Kashmiri accounts, not even the archives of the much-respected English-language newspaper the Kashmir Times--something that Indian scholar Sumantra Bose, who teaches at the London School of Economics, does very well in his two astute and non-nationalistic books, The Challenge in Kashmir (1997) and Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (2003). Indian writer Pankaj Mishra's essays on Kashmir, reproduced in his latest book, Temptations of the West (2006), are another important example of critical thinking and moral courage on the subject. Guha's narrative skills are also subdued when he describes the pro-independence protests in Kashmir that first occurred throughout 1990, when millions marched with memorandums to the UN offices and prayers to Sufi shrines. Instead, he offers a few newspaper headlines and discusses the separatist rebellion sparked by the denial of fair electoral democracy in terms of jihad. Similarly, while writing about the infamous massacre of thirty-five Sikhs in Kashmir on the eve of President Clinton's visit in March 2000, Guha again prefers the standard Delhi view and loses a chance to raise some important questions. The Indian government claimed to have arrested a "Pakistani militant" involved in the massacre. Why has there been no news of a trial, conviction or sentence? In a country where few calamities don't prompt a judicial inquiry, why was there no inquiry into the massacre of the Sikhs?

Yet Guha is passionate about the successes and failures of parliamentary democracy when he describes the spell of authoritarianism that Indira Gandhi engineered in 1975. Political opponents of Indira, led by veteran Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan, had mobilized the disenchanted population and cornered her government with demonstrations and sit-ins. Indira was further annoyed by an adverse judgment in a technically weak case against her own membership of the Parliament, which if upheld in the Supreme Court could have forced her to resign. She responded by declaring a state of emergency and ruling by decree. Her policies included press censorship, the jailing of political opponents, forced vasectomies under the guise of family planning and the demolition of slums and poor neighborhoods in the name of progress and development. Most of the Indian intellectual and media elite are passionate about that time, maybe because it was the only time the might of the state threatened their comfortable existence. To sum up his account of the era, Guha quotes an anonymous obituary in the Times of India, announcing "the death of D.E.M. O'Cracy, mourned by his wife T. Ruth, his son, L.I. Bertie, and his daughters Faith, Hope, and Justice."

Democracy's Indian daughters have continued to mourn him, or at least worry about his health, throughout the three decades since Indira's Emergency. When it is not the season of colorful electoral bunting, outlandish posters and stump speeches from candidates ranging from imprisoned mafia dons to New Age gurus to eunuchs, the battle for social and political rights rages on almost every day in small and big protests, often unnoticed. A few hundred yards from the Parliament in New Delhi, on the sidewalk near the medieval observatory Jantar Mantar, one sees groups of petitioners and protesters hoping to be heard by indifferent politicians or the fickle media. The Indian government recently celebrated the United Nations' adoption of Gandhi's birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence, but India's new Gandhis mostly go unheard, their voices often drowned out by the roaring engines of luxury cars speeding past and the sirens of police cruisers.

On a hot afternoon in April 2006, India's beautiful people were busy attending India Fashion Week at a five-star hotel in south Delhi, while across town at Jantar Mantar, activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Struggle to Save the Narmada) were staging a Gandhian sit-in and hunger strike against a major dam project on the Narmada River in central and western India. Since the mid-1980s, led by the much-respected activist Medha Patkar, the residents of the Narmada Valley have peacefully fought for the government to halt construction on dams along the course of the Narmada, whose swelling waters have submerged hundreds of villages and displaced thousands of people.

Nehru once called the dams "the temples of modern India." In 1954, as Guha reminds us, when Nehru inaugurated Bhakra Nangal, one of the first major dams in India, "he flicked on the switch of the powerhouse" as "Dakotas of the Indian air force dipped their wings overhead. Next he opened the sluice gates of the dam. Seeing the water coming toward them, the villagers downstream set off hundreds of home-made firecrackers." Nehru's temples of modern India, like those of ancient Hindu goddesses, now require human sacrifice. On the eighth day of the hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, hundreds of policemen attacked Patkar and the protesters, their batons drawing blood.

Among those also drawn to Jantar Mantar are the former untouchables who call themselves the Dalit, or Broken People. Dalits fashioned themselves into a potent force in Indian politics by forming their own political parties, tactically joining coalition governments. But the Broken People continue to be pounded upon--people like Bant Singh, a folk singer from Punjab who was maimed more than a year and a half ago for campaigning against the upper-caste men who raped his teenage daughter; or a journalist friend who was humiliated by the family of his Brahman girlfriend, despite his education and professional accomplishments, because he is a Dalit. Throughout his mammoth book Guha rightly laments the utter lack of biographies of various "provincial" political leaders, such as Kashmir's Sheikh Abdullah, Dalit leader Kanshi Ram and Sikh leader Master Tara Singh, who have affected the course of independent India. India might understand itself better if biographies of people like Bant Singh were available as well.

"They do not move to Chicago, they move to South Side; they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem," James Baldwin wrote in "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" of the final destinations of blacks migrating to New York City from the Deep South. When Muslims leave India's small towns and villages for New Delhi, they move to Okhla. New Delhi's largest Muslim ghetto, Okhla lies half an hour from Jantar Mantar, past shopping malls, international chain boutiques, banks, advertising offices and television studios. Life in Okhla is precarious, but after the destruction of the medieval Babri mosque by an extremist Hindu mob in December 1992 and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western Indian state of Gujarat, it's one of the few places in New Delhi where Muslims feel safe. In The Clash Within, a passionate look at the crisis of democracy and religious violence in India, Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed reconstruction of the genocide she says occurred in Gujarat. She shows that the violence had been planned well in advance, and she chronicles the failures of the state to prosecute the accused Hindu-right activists or their mentors in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which continues to control Gujarat under the rule of chief minister Narendra Modi. Religious tensions and the riots between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority are a sad, old story in India. But the mass murder of Sikhs in New Delhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination and the Gujarat genocide are among the starkest examples of organized violence against any minority in India, events that have also been supported by politicians in the ruling parties.

Nussbaum says the main purpose of her book is to inform European and American readers about a "complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." She does that well. She describes the Hindu right's admiration of Nazism and Fascism, noting the insertion in high school textbooks in Gujarat of passages like "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time, establishing a strong administrative set-up." Apart from the lack of critical thinking in schools, she also sees "the lack of political organization along class and economic lines," the "effective grassroots organization throughout the state by the Hindu right," the sense that Gujarat's relatively better-off Muslims were "seen to take positions that Hindus might otherwise hold" as factors behind the violence. Nussbaum does take care to differentiate the Hindu right from Hinduism; she writes that "it was violence done by people who have hijacked a noble tradition for their own political and cultural ends." Such attention to context and Nussbaum's knowledge of Indian history and culture protects her account of religious violence in Gujarat from a "clash of civilizations" alarmism.

Nussbaum argues that for all its sectarian qualities, the violence of the Hindu right has some secular roots. Nehru's disdain of religion in public life backfired, she claims, and inadvertently helped the Hindu nationalists consolidate their power: "Nehru's feeling that religion was an embarrassment led him to devote too little attention to molding the aspects of human life that he associated with religion--emotion, rhetoric, the imaginative undergirding of a pluralistic civic culture--in such a way that civic culture could become a grassroots force for pluralism and respect rather than for fear and hatred."

Nussbaum, like many other commentators, sees hope in the resounding defeat of the right-wing BJP in the 2004 elections, a verdict she describes as "repudiation of Hindu homogeneity." In fact, she admits that the foremost reason for the BJP's defeat was economics. BJP's pre-election proclamation of economic optimism--"India Shining"--had angered the rural and urban poor, and they voted the BJP out. But despite the BJP's replacement by an officially secular Congress Party, economic discontent continues to simmer, especially in the large parts of central and western India where Maoist guerrillas have found support from landless peasants, and also in the information-technology hub of Andhra Pradesh, where thousands of farmers have committed suicide after failing to pay their debts. Fault lines created by caste and development endure, and the troubling questions of Kashmir and India's northeastern states continue to affect millions of lives every day.

It is these troubles, some signs of which are often visible at Jantar Mantar, that make Guha temper his final verdict on Indian democracy. "Is India a proper or a sham democracy?" he asks. For an answer he borrows the response that the Bollywood comedian Johnny Walker offers again and again to many reel-life questions: Phipty-phipty. Yes, fifty-fifty.

Basharat Peer’s memoir of the Kashmir conflict, Curfewed Night, will be published by Scribner in the United States very soon. He is an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs.

Three days in Curfewistan

2008-09-23T15:50:00.000+05:30

On an early Sunday morning — August 24, 2008 — my father and uncle hurried home from the mosque. There was a din outside. Two army jeeps had rolled into our neighbourhood and a curfew was announced all across the Kashmir Valley by loudspeakers. Shoot-at-sight orders were put in place. So we turned on the television, called up our relatives, and waited for the newspapers.

The curfew, we soon realised, meant a ban on news. In an unwritten order, security forces beat up local journalists wherever they showed up. The purpose: to stop any flow of information. For the next six days, no local daily hit the stands in the Valley.

I called my friend, Bilal Bhat of Sahara News to check what was happening. To my shock, he was in hospital. “CRPF personnel did not consider my curfew pass and hit me on my head,” he said. In all, 21 journalists were thrashed in the crackdown.

Despite the pitch of protests, few in the Valley had foreseen the curfew. Even a few days back, I had taken a stroll around the TRC playground. This had been the venue for the separatists’ call for ‘UN chalo’ to submit a memorandum on atrocities meted out to Kashmiris by the security forces. Just outside the playground and in front of the Radio Kashmir building, I had walked past frenzied crowds chanting anti-India slogans. The Amarnath issue had, it seemed, given birth to poets; the demand for independence and reunion with the Kashmiris across the border was being taken up by a million tongues. A small group of boys stamped their feet on the ground while a shout went up: “Tuti hui dewaar ko, ek dhakka aur do; Bharat ka jhanda, de ragda; Bharat ka tiranga, de ragda; Bharat ka naqsha, de ragda; Bharat ko ragda de ragda (Just give one more push to the already broken wall; The Indian flag, just rub it out; the Indian map, just rub it out; India, just rub it out just rub it...).”

Anti-India was certainly the predominant sentiment. Pro-Pakistan cries were just a time-tested trigger. This was, however, just a sideshow. The Hurriyat had been told to be peaceful and their speeches that day certainly stayed on the calmer side. Over spontaneous protests by schoolboys, they had no control. I spotted my neighbour’s son documenting the rally on his mobile camera. We looked at each other. Then we looked away. Something had gone wrong again in Kashmir.

Boarded in, blacked out

On Friday, three days before the curfew, special prayers were organised at the Eidgah in downtown Srinagar. We called up relatives and discussed the news of the day. ‘What should we do?’ ‘How should the crowds behave?’ ‘Did we know a boy had been killed in downtown, just two streets away?’ Questions. That’s all we spoke about.

A policeman made an appearance in the lane outside our home one day. He started beating up people. Somebody, he said, had whistled at him from one of these houses. Conservative estimates say 15,000 people were beaten up across the 10 districts of Kashmir on that single day. “It could be higher,” said a doctor at the Bones and Joints Hospital, Srinagar. “My colleagues in district hospitals have been busy all day attending to the wounded.” He added that the hospital administration had been warned against revealing data about casualties and told not to allow pictures to be taken of the wounded.

On Saturday, I went with some friends to Erena, a popular icecream parlour at Lal Chowk. It was packed. It was as if no one had had icecreams before. There were long queues in front of ATMs. People were preparing for bad days. On Saturday, the administration also imposed one of the harshest crackdowns Kashmir had witnessed in a long time. “We want the writ of the State to go unchallenged,” Inspector General S.M. Sahai said. “Separatists have failed to organise peaceful rallies. There have been reports of violence. So we have to crack down.”

With no other place or means to exchange information, mosques became meeting grounds and centres for news. The curfew may have kept people away from the streets, but it provided a space to groom ideologies in people’s backyards. I, who rarely visit a mosque in Delhi, now found myself making my way to one in Srinagar. Prayers were, however, not allowed at the shrine of Dastgeer Sahib in downtown Srinagar, the hub of protests.

Yesterday once more

The curfew continued for three straight days. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. SMS services were stalled, TV news channels were blank. So people switched on that old and reliable mode of communication: the radio. Many were tuning into short and medium wave rather than FM after 15 years. “Yeh BBC London hai. Ab Wisatullah Khan se khabrain sune aur phir sherbeen Nayeema Mehjoor ke zubani (This is BBC London. Now hear the news being read by Wisatullah Khan to be followed by current affairs read by Nayeema Mehjoor).” These were the familiar lines heard inside many homes over the three days. “They are the same people who used to read the news in the early ’90s,” exclaimed my uncle. Even BBC Radio was telling us something that we were already feeling: it was the ’90s in Kashmir all over again.

At Lal Chowk, the administration put up quite a show. Lal Chowk and the Ghanta Ghar — both witnesses to the historic speeches of Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru — were turned into a tin box. Permanent barricades with iron bars were set up. Barbed wires encircled Ghanta Ghar, where the Indian flag fluttered on August 15 in the morning and green Pakistani flags at noon.

So what was the barricade for? Had the Hurriyat given a call to dismantle the Ghanta Ghar? No.

Nothing so dramatic. It was set up in panic. Plain and simple.

Three days in Curfewistan- Hindustan Times

Please, set Kashmir free

2008-09-12T11:01:00.001+05:30

As the daughter of a Kashmiri Hindu, whose family left its ancestral home in Srinagar during the turmoil that followed Partition, I would like to express a sentiment that I still haven’t heard in the rhetoric about Kashmir.

I speak for those for whom Kashmir is not a symbol of one-upman ship with Pakistan, not a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is intrinsic to the sovereignty of India and not a football to be kicked around by cynical politicians, but as the daughter of a family in whose very lifeblood Kashmir courses every moment.

Cut our hearts open and you will see Kashmir, put your ear to our sighs, and you will hear our yearning for the land where our family spent its last days intact and happy before Partition scattered us to the winds, rendering us refugees.

Growing up dislocated in Mumbai, as a child, it never failed to surprise me when people who often hadn’t so far stepped out of their suburb, would say:”Kashmir is ours! We will never give it up! Let them try and take Kashmir from us!”

Even at that early age, when I could have mistaken their jingoism for kindred sentiment, I realised that their virulence had nothing to do with my family’s love for Kashmir, but was misguided machismo.

And I would find myself seething with rage at the audacity of their presumption. “But Kashmir was never yours,” I’d say in my mind. And sometimes, when more provoked: “You don’t deserve Kashmir!” And then I’d go home to my mother, whose ever present, unshed tears for her homeland, were a leitmotif of our life in Mumbai.

Throughout my childhood, my family would go back to Srinagar (the ancestral home in Vazir Baugh had to be sold when my widower grandfather became too old to live alone) to stay with Muslim friends, with whom we shared a poignant empathy: we had lost Kashmir because we had moved away; they were losing it everyday, living there, witnessing its destruction. Over kawha, we would watch as the elders of our family weep for what had been.

Like a woman too beautiful for her own good, Kashmir was a tragedy even then. It produced an ache in our hearts when we heard its name and thought of its ill fate: and then, because you cannot sit weeping over lost Valleys all your life, when we returned home we put Kashmir on the backburner.

And on that backburner, Kashmir fermented Sheikh Abdullah, a man whose commitment to India was unquestionable, was humiliated, jailed, alienated. The most unimaginable genocide was committed on the people. Entire generations of its sons were mowed down by an army whose presence was as large as it was unpopular. And in its knee-jerk, misguided, ill-conceived approach to Kashmir the Indian polity revealed its shallowness.

But through this all, intrinsically, those of us who have Kashmir in our bloods, know that the Kashmiri Pandits who have been driven out of their homeland are not enemies of the Kashmiri Muslims, in fact they are both victims of the historic blundering of the Indian government’s Kashmir policy.

Take away Delhi’s political brinkmanship, take away the Hindutva sentiment that has played so neatly into the hands of Pakistan and its fishing-in-troubled-waters game and you may be surprised at how harmoniously Kashmir’s Hindus and Muslims can live.

So, on behalf of my mother, my family, and all those who have loved and lost Kashmir, I beg: Please. We have done enough damage to and in Kashmir. Enough to last many lifetimes. The chinars are tinged with too much blood. We have failed Kashmir and we don’t deserve her anymore. Leave Kashmir alone. Set her free.

Email: s_malavika@dnaindia.net