Kashmir Affairs - Security & Conflict Analysis of Kashmir

Jashn-e-Azadi - How We Celebrate Freedom - is about the social, human and moral consequences of violence. It follows the painstaking efforts by Jammu and Kashmir Civil Society to enumerate the deaths and disappearances of the past 18 years. How many in this village? How did they die? When did they disappear? The answers come with chilling and ritual predictability. Unknown assailants. Armed men. Masked strangers. Young men, bodies dumped in the jungle, on the highway, in the nallah. The word ‘encounter’ - that beautiful idea of a tryst or meeting-place for lovers - has been transformed in the military lexicon into a rendezvous of youth with death. Four young men, returning late at night from a wedding-party, are shot by soldiers. Mistaken identity. This might serve almost as an epitaph for Kashmir. The government offers compensation. A bereaved mother, gaunt with a terrible and passionate dignity, says she would rather see her family die of hunger than accept anything from those who killed her son.

An elderly man walks through a snow-covered graveyard, unable to trace, among so many new graves, the resting-place of his son who died ten years ago. These eloquent, haunting images require neither commentary nor explanation, penetrated as they are by the smouldering spiritual power of an unconquered spirit. A people colonized for almost half a millennium, accustomed to apparent compliance with their military overlords, go impassively about their disrupted daily business under military superintendence, faces lengthened by melancholy, eyes darkened by pain.

In a government hospital, a laconic psychiatrist chronicles the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. No modern accompaniment of warfare conducted against civilians is absent from this most ancient, and yet most modern, of struggles. Here is a warfare that escapes all the restraints of conventional conflict, war in which there are no non-combatants, and in which innocent bystanders has become an oxymoron. Wars, formerly declared by States against enemies, and played out between armies, have now become all-pervasive, without rules, without limits, without pity. And in the process, the people themselves are changed: they become militants, terrorists, miscreants, ultras, infiltrators. A whole new vocabulary has evolved to justify the indefensible.

With the declining ‘body-count’ (to use another dehumanising term now current in asymmetric warfare), the Indian government is keen to show that in Kashmir, ‘normality’ has returned. This also involves the re-introduction of tourists into the Valley. They pose for photographs in Kashmiri national costume, carrying a basket of artificial flowers, or play golf on courses designed to international standards with grass imported from America. Four lakh (400,000) pilgrims came to Amarnath last year. They were guarded by 20,000 soldiers. See, the official story goes, we have regained paradise; but this is a highly artificial version, in which any tree of knowledge certainly bears inedible fruit; for shame is unknown. Some tourists frolic on toboggans on the slopes of the hills. They whoop and yell with triumphal assertiveness, as they declare that ‘Kashmir is the heart of India.’ If it is, it is a heart broken by grief and loss.

Kashmir, the film states, is not a territorial dispute, despite efforts by both India and Pakistan to make it so. It has been, and remains, a cultural struggle over the conservation of an eclectic and lyrical sensibility, made simultaneously tough and tender by centuries of oppression. ‘When shall we see again the warmth of the winter nights?’ sings the poet, a theme that echoes through this film of extraordinary power and commitment.

As the son of an army family, and a Kashmiri Pandit himself, Sanjay Kak is the first to admit that the flight of Pandits represents a grievous loss to the cultural coherence of Kashmir. He insists he is not trying to tell ‘the’ story of Kashmir, but simply ‘a’ story, a story of the wounded spirit of a people; and he asks how healing is to take place under the grim auspices of victors. Freedom remains incomplete, unfinished, the baggage of an old independence struggle lost in transit between becoming and being. The peace of the graveyard is thin fare for reconciliation.

On August 15^th, the army gathers in Lal Chowk in Srinagar. The Indian flag is raised to the applause of the military attending the ceremony. The whole town is deserted, metal shutter down, a few smudged faces behind the windows: a freedom without people for a people without freedom.

The film contains numerous such paradoxes: the limits of power and the strength of the powerless; the internal exile of people who have become strangers in their own land; and most damagingly, the transformation of secular movements of liberation into sectarian, religious and other-worldly wars. Jashn-e-Azadi shows the consequences of these baleful developments, the ruined landscapes of the psyche and the heart, the charnel-house in which survivors must make their home. The supreme virtue of the film is, perhaps, that there is no ‘ultimate’ triumph over a people for whom domination has been for so long a familiar condition of existence.

April 2007

There is a poignant moment in Sanjay Kak’s new film about Kashmir, Jashn-e-Azadi, where in an army-run orphanage in Srinagar, the children perform a stylised version of Kashmiri folk-songs and dances; poignant, because these children have also been orphaned of their culture. The film does not dwell on images of violence - these have been sufficiently shown by news agencies, propagandists and ideologues of all kinds. It prefers to linger among the living, humanity scarred by the absence of its dead, communities made desolate by the flight of the young, whole towns of widows, the elderly amputated of the hope of a new generation, visiting wintry cemeteries and the sites without number of bones and ashes.

What new can be said of Kashmir, the most militarised place on earth, with one Indian soldier for every fifteen civilians? Novelty is not Sanjay Kak’s aim. The film is a meditation on a very ancient, but also vibrantly contemporary, theme: the difference between domination and victory, between the oppression of flesh and blood and the unvanquished spirit. It is also a metaphor for other troubled places on earth - Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Somalia. Indeed, the experience of Kashmir has astonishing parallels with other, ravaged lands. Only the landscapes are different: blood and snow, instead of blood and sand. Even the efforts by the military to win hearts and minds echo the maladroit attempts by the USA in Iraq; hearts and minds are rarely won by means of mutilated bodies and bullet-ridden corpses. At one point in the film, some village heads are assembled in Malangam. Sage, elderly, cowed, they observe an almost religious silence under the surveillance of the army. They are presented with Phillips radios in blue and white boxes. They sit, with the gifts in their lap, immobile, as though these were bombs waiting to explode.