More than seven decades after Independence, the nation-building project of postcolonial India and Pakistan appears far from complete. In Kashmir, the Indian elite is gripped with concerns about managing elections (after an arbitrary democratic suspension) in that state. Meanwhile, Pakistan is in the midst of its latest counterinsurgency campaign (Azm-e-Istehkam, meaning ‘resolve for stability’ in Urdu) in its Pashtun-dominated border areas. This comes in the wake of severe repression meted out to the democratic mass movement — the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement — protesting against the brutality of militarised rule.
What explains the inability of India and Pakistan to successfully carry out the ‘emotional integration’ of Kashmiris and Pashtuns, respectively? If one asks the ruling elites of both countries (or the metropolitan civil society mandarins in both), their explanations might come laced with stereotypes concerning the recalcitrant, pre-modern ‘Other’. The images of the Kashmiris and the Pashtuns have been constructed in their domestic mass-media with such stereotypes as religious extremism, masculine violence, social backwardness, and emotional immaturity.
Yet, one might remember the mass movements launched prior to Independence, headed by Sheikh Abdullah (‘Naya Kashmir’ agitations) and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the Khudai Khidmatgar movement), pledged to the progressive ideals of freedom, social justice and religious tolerance. The bulk of the Pathans and the Kashmiris (wedded to specific interpretations of harmonious Kashmir and Pashtun culture) abjured communal violence at a time when it was raging throughout the subcontinent.
The media’s election coverage in Kashmir echoes the conflicting tropes of romance and danger through which Kashmir has usually been portrayed in Hindi cinema. Grand pronouncements are being made alongside on the direction of Kashmiri society. As usual, the Kashmiri is said to be either ‘moving forward’ (towards progress and peace) or ‘turning back’ (towards violence and separatism). Similarly, Kashmiris are said to be either joining the ‘mainstream’ or staying alienated from it. But what is the mainstream and who defines its parameters? These questions are, of course, seldom addressed. Yet, it is these premises — the implicit construction of the Self and the Other — that filter our understanding of the ‘reality’ of Kashmir. They form a particular gaze through which we (the modern nationalist elite) view Kashmir, what the historian, Hafsa Kanjwal, characterises as a “colonial gaze” in her recent book, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation.
Kanjwal traces the formation of this colonial gaze to the earliest decades post-Independence. Indeed, the introductory passage of her book features a revealing excerpt from a letter written by the former prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to Sheikh Abdullah, the then prime minister of Kashmir. The purpose of the exchange was to convince the latter to affirm Kashmir’s contested accession to India. “It must be remembered that the people of the Kashmir Valley… are not what are called a virile people,” writes Nehru. He goes on to add: “They are soft and addicted to easy living… The common people are primarily interested in a few things — an honest administration and cheap and adequate food. If they get this, then they are more or less content.” Nehru thus implores Abdullah to leave alone the vexed question of political sovereignty because the simple-minded folks of Kashmir aren’t interested in those matters. And yet, seven decades later, the issue of sovereignty — control over the source of legitimate authority — remains a central political concern in the state. Why is that so?
In his study, “The Founding of India and Popular Sovereignty”, the political scientist, Ornit Shani, explores how India managed to consolidate a united “popular sovereignty” in the post-Independence period. The challenges were enormous: “multiple competing sovereignties” (different notions of self-rule), “deep pluralities” (caste, class, language) and so on. These challenges were most intense in the case of princely states, which had evolved their own peculiar institutions. How did India succeed? Shani makes the persuasive argument that “unified popular sovereignty in India was driven, in the main, by efforts to work through rather than to forcefully prevail over the competing visions of popular sovereignty that were asserted at the time”. In other words, the Indian Union engaged with different visions of self-rule and sought to integrate them in a unified popular project through a negotiated process, emphasising the theme of ‘people’s will’ legitimised with universal adult franchise.
Among the two exceptions to this process, Shani mentions Kashmir and Hyderabad where the force of arms, and not negotiated popular consent, drove the process of accession. The state unit of the Congress was also extremely weak in the Kashmir Valley, for here the popular mobilisation of the National Conference held sway. Thus, in hindsight, the settling of the sovereignty issue demanded a careful process of accommodation post-Independence. This might have been done by allowing the state government a measure of autonomy to integrate its vision of ‘Naya Kashmir’ (the socialist, secular roadmap enunciated by the National Conference in the 1930s) and the cultural idiom of ‘Kashmiriyat’ within the national framework.
Instead, the very opposite approach was taken by the new ruling elite in Delhi: a top-down governance vision of enforced modernisation, privileging political management over democratic inclusion. The historian, Faisal Devji, has written of the post-Independence Congress’s abandonment of the “revolutionary” ethic of Gandhian non-violence along with its “adoption of the old British ethic of responsibility, something that Congress had itself fought against.”
Such a spirit of hubristic, coercive control, disregarding the political claims of Kashmiri leaders, animated the Central government’s decision to undertake the ‘1953 coup’, removing Sheikh Abdullah from power and installing the pliable Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The heated debates on ‘special status’ and ‘Article 370’ obscure the severely curtailed nature of popular, democratic rule as it has existed in Kashmir. For example, Kashmir had to wait till 1977, after the Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah accord, for free and fair election for the legislature. After a decade-long interregnum of functioning democracy, the rigged assembly election of 1987 pushed the Valley towards armed militancy.
M.K. Gandhi, the Indian leader with the deepest understanding of the limits of power, could clearly perceive this shift. In late 1947, when Gandhi was challenged over military intervention in Kashmir and his equivocal support for it, he answered: “I have already stated that I am a nobody and no one listens to me.” Alluding to his protégés, Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, Gandhi observed that while non-violence was acceptable to them till Independence, “… now they wonder how they can rule with non-violence. And then there is the army and they have taken the help of the army. Now I am of no value at all.”
After an experience of failures stretching over three-quarters of a century, the nationalist elites of the subcontinent might do well to turn to Gandhi’s ethics. The historian, Ajay Skaria, wrote in the book Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance: “For him [Gandhi], sovereign power is not exemplified only in the state. Rather, every self is deeply fissured, and sovereignty is ubiquitous, always exercised everyday by the self.” Gandhi also understood that the concept of non-violence cannot be divorced from his insistence on recognising a deeply-fissured Self. The politically fabricated wholeness or boundedness accorded to the Self (whether the ‘Hindu Self’ or the ‘Muslim Self’ or the ‘Sinhala-Buddhist Self’), mirroring colonising Europe’s axioms of national sovereignty, has led to much bloodshed in the subcontinent in the last century.
Can the recognition of this deeply-fissured, imperfect Self allow us to turn our interrogation of the ‘Other’ back on to ourselves? Are we as modern, rational and progressive as we think? Are we moving forward or turning our back in our accommodation of Kashmiris? Are we ready to move away from violence and embrace peace in our dealings with Kashmir? Are we fashioning a mainstream that might be hospitable to the people of Kashmir?
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
