Negotiating Necrophilia: an Afterword Ashis Nandy

Negotiating Necrophilia: An Afterword Ashis Nandy Kashmir overwrites almost everything that is written about it. Not because of its unique culture, its geopolitical significance, or its breathtaking natural beauty but because of its pain. Like Palestine and Northern Ireland, Kashmir is a typically twentieth century problem that has gate-crashed into the twenty-first century. All three places are beneficiaries of partitions mindlessly implemented by a tired imperial power and all are associated with gory, repetitious, gratuitous violence that wear out outside observers and analysts, but not those who participate in the violence. State formation and nation building have an ugly record the world over. The subsequent humanization of many states and nations cannot wipe off that record, for the earlier memories are immortalized as part of a myth of origin that includes the idea of an unavoidable birth trauma. The sufferings experienced and the sufferings inflicted blend in that myth. Under the lofty rhetoric of today lie the persistent fears, bitterness, and anxieties of the past, even when the past has become distant. Every nation-state, thus, is permanently on guard. So are its detractors, enemies, and critics. That is because the myth of origin never fades or dates. Each generation rediscovers it, sometimes with even more passion than the earlier generation did. Sadly, Kashmir has been captive, during the past sixty years, in the making of the myths of origin of India and Pakistan. Even more sadly, it now seems unable to resist the birth of a new creation myth of its own, which promises to replicate the efforts of its tormentors faithfully. Once a community experiences the trauma of state formation at its expense, its capacity to envision a different kind of political arrangement weakens. Happily, the myth may not have yet gelled in Kashmir. This is where Nyla Ali Khan comes in. The main issues in Kashmir, as the officialdoms would have it, center around national interest, strategic significance, territorial con- test, and security implications. Only ordinary Kashmiris trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times—Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—sense that the problem of Kashmir has to do with survival, 170 Negotiating Necrophilia: An Afterword clash of death machines, and the collapse of social ethics, that the pain of communities and families, however unfashionable and out- dated the idea may sound in the security community and policy elite, is the central reality in the land. To the experts and professionals, who man higher rungs of a state apparatus, and increasingly to the mainstream media, things like trauma and suffering are artifacts that have little to do with realpolitik, diplomacy, and public policy. They want to solve the problem of Kashmir the way such problems are usually sought to be solved—very scientifically, very dispassionately, and very professionally—backed by the coercive machineries of the states involved. They would rather not solve the problem if the solu- tion involves going beyond their known world. In the meanwhile, Kashmir is becoming a haunted land where tens of thousands of dead haunt the landscape and question the living on the meaning and purpose of their deaths. The living cannot answer, because their melancholia has no place left anymore for lofty ideas and ideologies. At some level they know that the dead have died in vain, whether they have died resisting the Indian army or fighting militant Islam or Pakistan’s territorial ambitions. Because Kashmir’s own creation myth is not yet fully formed and functional, the rhetoric of martyrdom fails to compensate for the sense of loss. Kashmiris know that the death machines have done their job; that both sides can now only hope to say if they win, in the language of Yudhisthira in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, “This, our victory is inter- twined with defeat.” The high casualties of violence in a small community only three million strong leaves no one untouched. Neither the official figures nor the unofficial estimates of human rights groups include the permanently maimed, those whose lives have been cut short by the trauma of uprooting, bereavement, or psychosomatic ailments. Everyone is bereaved and everyone is a mourner. The casualties include not merely the official and unofficial dead and the incapacitated, but also those who have disappeared without a trace. Family and kinship ties are strong in South Asia and the death of a distant cousin or an aunt can be a shattering personal tragedy. There is in Kashmir a miasma of depression that touches everyone except the ubiquitous tourist deter- mined to consume Kashmir’s unearthly beauty. For decades, I am told, Srinagar’s only medical college has had two beds for psychi- atric patients. Sometimes they seemed insufficient but usually they sufficed. Now some psychiatrists and psychotherapists estimate that the college requires the facilities to treat at least fifteen thousand at a time. Negotiating Necrophilia: An Afterword 171 There are also the invisible victims of Kashmir, in Kashmir and outside. Thousands have died fighting for Kashmir; others have died in Kashmir, fighting for India or Pakistan. But there are even more humble victims, invisible and inaudible. I once met a few Kashmiri Muslim families, staying on the banks of Yamuna at Delhi in an impromptu slum. Someone took me to meet them because no one even wanted to listen to them. I listened to them but could not find out why they were there; they gave contradictory, often incoherent reasons for their plight. Were they simply looking for jobs in the plains pretending to be uprooted? Were they the victims of the militants for real or imaginary collaboration with security forces? Were they victims of suspicious security forces for their connections with the militants? I still do not know, but it seemed to me at the time that the political upheavals in the valley had created new kinds of refugees who had fallen through the black holes of the history of South Asia. They constitute parts of the flotsam and jetsam of our times. One tragic instance of such uprooting are the Kashmiri Pandits. Ancient inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley, almost all of them have been driven out of the Valley to become invisible refugees. Even human rights groups look at their uprooting either as a case of minor collat- eral damage or an instance of foolish, self-induced trauma. Was the community really seduced by Governor Jagmohan’s advice to them to leave their ancestral home? Do people leave a place where they have lived for centuries just because one bureaucrat, however important and powerful, single-handedly goads or invites them to implement the world’s only known case of self-induced ethnic cleansing? Were there no genuine reasons at all for them to fear for their security? After their ouster from the Valley, some of the Pandits in their bitterness have organized themselves into a cacophonous, Hindu national- ist political group, further arousing the disdain of most human rights activists trying to be politically correct. Indeed, militant Kashmiri leaders have spoken to me about the Pandits with more compassion than have most scions of progressivism and radicalism. During the last sixty years, Kashmir has emerged as the ultimate litmus test for the two largest South Asian states of their commitment to the ideas of a humane, democratic state and political imagination. Nyla Ali Khan spends much time in this book detailing the dishon- esty, chicanery, inhumanity, and sheer cruelty that have characterized the behavior of the Indian and Pakistani states, the former claiming to be the world’s largest democracy committed to global peace and Gandhian values, the latter continuously and noisily claiming to be an upholder of Islamic virtues. However well intentioned Khan’s 172 Negotiating Necrophilia: An Afterword efforts, she has probably wasted her time. For this part of the story is by now well known to all except rabid nationalists and the cocooned bureaucracies and foreign policy elite of the two countries. What is less known is how, in the process, the problem of Kashmir has strengthened some of the worst trends in the political cultures of the two countries that comprise nearly three-fourth of South Asia. The most noticeable of these trends is the growth of a culture of impunity around the two states. As they have intermittently unleashed their army, police, and paramilitary forces against the local popula- tions in Kashmir, Nagaland, Balochistan, and Manipur in the name of territorial nationalism or Islamic solidarity, strangely, they have succeeded in debasing both the languages of nationalism and political Islam and discrediting the armies and the police. Indeed, many of the technologies South Asian states have deployed to fight secession and armed dissent are now being routinely deployed to crush dissent and abridge freedom, even in normal situations and normal times— such as state-sanctioned, fake-encounter deaths sometimes for reasons as trivial as bravery medals or businessmen facing threats from local thugs; large-scale use of third-degree methods during interroga- tion, an official euphemism for torture; and proliferating cults of violence. People have been subjected to aerial bombing in South Asia for aggressively articulating their grievances against the state. Entire vil- lages have been burned down and women raped in the wake of army operations against secessionist movements. The large-scale degenera- tion and dehumanization in the state sector in the region finds expres- sion not merely in normal pathologies of the security sector such as multimillion dollar scams in defense deals and the emergence of the region’s own arms dealers with vested interest in war and conflict, but also in the triumph of the culture of nuclearization (which encourages the Left in India, backed by the silence of the First-World Left, to demand not the denuclearization of the country, but the full sover- eignty for India’s nuclear weapons program), and the growing culture of secrecy, censorship, and surveillance.

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