The Fire of Chinars
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
The fall season has started in the US, with road trips already planned to enjoy the spectacular fall foliage when nature’s paintbrush turns the leaves from bright yellow to vibrant reds. In South Asia, nowhere is this splendor of color on better display than in the vale of Kashmir. The Kashmiris call this crimson tide the aatish-e-chinar (fire of the chinar trees).
However, autumn has historically also been when the Kashmir Valley was taken over by geopolitical firestorms. Whether it was the tribal incursion of 1947, the accession to India by Maharajah Hari Singh or several arrests of the late Sheikh Abdullah by the Indian government, it all happened between August and October. This year has seen the killings of at least 100 Kashmiris, in as many days. The chinars are on fire again.
The ruling coalition in New Delhi has been scrambling to cobble together a response to an apparently non-violent and indigenous uprising in the Kashmir Valley. However, the Indian response at best has been disjointed and at worst, deceitful and ruthless. The United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress Party, has gone from supporting the Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his call to repeal the notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), to gradually steering the media narrative towards an alleged trust and governance deficit between the Kashmiris and Mr Abdullah’s state government.
The Congress matriarch, Sonia Gandhi, who initially made an impassioned plea for “placing the anger, the pain and the aspirations of the (Kashmiri) youth” at the heart of the solution to the Kashmir issue, too has switched gears towards admonishing Omar Abdullah.
In face of the opposition by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the center, the People’s Democratic Party in Kashmir and the Indian Army Chief, General V K Singh, New Delhi has slowly backtracked on its offer to withdraw or dilute the AFSPA in at least some areas. Instead, a contingent of political leaders, strong in numbers but without any mandate, has descended upon Kashmir. Curfew was clamped down in Srinagar upon the arrival of this delegation and the irony is that even those Kashmiri leaders who were extended written invitations to meet this group were put under house arrest!
In New Delhi’s chaotic handling of the present situation, two things stand out. Firstly, this time around the Indian government and General V K Singh both found it extremely hard to pin the blame on Pakistan or its political and militant proxies in Kashmir. Secondly, and more importantly, the non-Kashmiris’ understanding of Kashmiri grievances remains poor. Especially a progressive, secular-liberal political narrative on Kashmir, beyond what Indo-Pakistani human rights groups have developed, simply does not exist.
It is pertinent to note that the late Dr Muhammad Din Taseer was one of the first few individuals to attempt negotiating a solution to the Kashmir issue, back in October 1947. In her book ‘The Kashmir of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’, Mrs C Bilqees Taseer has chronicled the efforts of her husband to work with his friend Sheikh Abdullah to help resolve the issue. Dr Taseer, a founding father of the Progressive Writers Movement, though at serious odds with the leftists by then, was still a leading light of liberal Pakistan. Since then, the progressives and liberals seemed to have ceded the Kashmir issue to the right-wing jingoism of the religious parties and establishment.
Writing on the national issue, Lenin had made a detailed case for a people’s right to self-determination, agitation and struggle towards that right, including secession. He concluded, however, that “this demand (secession), therefore, is not the equivalent of a demand for separation, fragmentation and the formation of small states. It implies only a consistent expression of struggle against all national oppression.”
Since the rise of the jihadist militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s, the secular-liberal forces have shied away from endorsing the right of self-determination for Kashmiris, reverting to the pre-1953 autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir or even the full implementation of guarantees provided in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. On occasion this discourse echoes the BJP stance that because there have been so many elections in Kashmir with significant participation of the people, the right of self-determination is redundant and the martial law-like AFSPA remains India’s internal matter.
What is being overlooked is that the elected state governments of Kashmir have been consistently demanding a larger quantum of autonomy and withdrawal of Indian troops from the Valley. It is pertinent to recall that the National Conference’s Autonomy Committee headed by the current Finance Minister, Abdul Rahim Rather, had submitted a detailed report in 2000 that was rejected by New Delhi. The conundrum of whether to condemn the jihadist menace or support Kashmiri autonomy must not paralyze the progressive intelligentsia. They have to do both.
Incidentally, one of the more reasonable proposals to resolve the Kashmir imbroglio came from Chakravarti ‘Rajaji’ Rajagopalachari — a right wing, anti-Nehru associate of Mahatma Gandhi. On the eve of his 1964 trip to meet General Ayub Khan, the late Sheikh Abdullah had sought Rajaji’s counsel, who had already written to a confidant: “Any plan should therefore leave the prizes of war (Jammu and Azad Kashmir) untouched. Probably the best procedure is for Sheikh to concentrate on the valley, leaving Jammu as a counterpoise to Azad Kashmir, to be presumed as integrated with India without question. This reduced shape of the problem is good enough, if solved as we desire, to bring about an improvement in the Indo-Pakistan relationship. And being of reduced size would be a fitting subject for UN trusteeship, partial or complete.” (Ramachandra Guha: Opening a Window in Kashmir — Economic and Political Weekly, August-September 2004).
In his autobiography Aatish-e-Chinar, the late Sheikh Abdullah, an arch-secularist himself, gave the outlines of a progressive solution to the dilemma of his beloved Kashmir. He had emphasized that the solution should not only be secular in character but must not undermine India’s secularism, not be a victory celebration for India or Pakistan, must not cause mass displacement of Kashmiris and must grant Kashmiris the right of self-determination.
While the fanaticism of Asiya Andrabi or Syed Ali Geelani’s hard line must be denounced, the National Conference and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s autonomy demands deserve at least a fair hearing. The Chinars have been on fire for far too long.
The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com
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