“Rebels of the Streets” Violence, Protest, and Freedom in Kashmir
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IntrodUction “Rebels of the Streets” Violence, Protest, and Freedom in Kashmir MONA BHAN, HALEY DUSCHINSKI, AND ATHER ZIA I’m the rebel of the streets that been eulogized in blood Dramatized in politics duly hated with no love Demonized in the news with their fabricated tales While sodomized young kids are still screaming in their jails Lost and never found in this facade of peace Reflected in thoughts, that Dajjal1 now breathes He speaks to his puppets and silhoets now tremble ‘Cause the brave men are dead and all cowards resemble Satan’s evil empire is reaching out to hold thee Since money can buy out your political theory And your unborn child, is raised as a traitor Livin’ on blood money and he doubts his Creator Misleaded by his greed till his soul starts to blacken And he sees his own face in the signs of Armageddon And this earth will shake ‘cause of the crimes he did His bones will break holdin’ the coffin of his Kid They gave us blood and hate then wondered why we all are rebels In the Land of Saints each man raised is called a rebel —MC Kash, Why We Rebels 2 Introduction “Rebel of the streets”: These powerful lyrics by Kashmiri rapper MC Kash reflect a new phase in the politics of dissent in Kashmir, shaped by a long- standing popular struggle against India’s brutal military occupation that has dominated the cultural, social, and political landscape of the region for decades. Since India’s independence from British colonial rule and the sub- sequent partition in 1947, India and Pakistan, both of which claim sovereign control over the region, have fought four inconclusive wars over Kashmir. In Indian- administered Kashmir, a series of forced, rigged, and illegitimate elections have installed what MC Kash refers to as “puppet” regimes that have constrained expressions of people’s will for Kashmir’s political resolution while completely ignoring a series of United Nations (UN) resolutions for a free and fair plebiscite to settle the Kashmir dispute. Reinforced by Indian military’s ubiquitous presence in Kashmir, the locally elected governments have turned Kashmir into a “late modern colonial occupation” in which state violence is obscured and justified through claims of humanitarianism pre- mised on principles of democracy, good governance, development, and rule of law (Mbembe 2003, 25–30). In 1989 Kashmiris, long resistant to Indian rule in their homeland, launched a popular armed rebellion against the Indian state. India sought to crush the rebellion through a massive counterinsurgency assault against insur- gent and civilian populations, deploying more than 700,000 military and para- military forces in the region. More than 25 years later this counterinsurgency regime remains, producing a perpetual state of siege that subjects the entire population to everyday conditions of surveillance, punishment, and control. With a population of approximately 12.5 million, Jammu and Kashmir has 1 soldier for every 17 Kashmiris, making it one of the most densely milita- rized zones in the world (International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir and Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons 2015).2 Indian military, police, and paramilitary forces carry out extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, and sexual assault. These operations have been facilitated by emer- gency and national security laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which gives the military supreme powers to kill with impunity (Amnesty International 1999), and the J&K Public Safety Act, which provides for preventive detention without trial (Amnesty International 2001, 2011a, 2011b). International and Kashmiri human rights organizations document that more than 70,000 people have been killed and over 8,000 have been forc- ibly disappeared in counterinsurgency operations, and there are around 6,000 “Rebels of the Streets” 3 unknown and unmarked graves and mass graves in Kashmir (International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kash- mir and Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons 2015). The armed rebellion transformed into a new mode of resistance in the first decade of the twenty- first century, with widespread anti- India street pro- tests marking the beginning of a new intifada (Kak 2011). Clashes between youth protesters and state armed forces escalated in the summer of 2010, with Indian state armed forces killing 120 civilians, a period marked in Kashmiri consciousness as “the year of killing youth” (Bukhari 2010).3 These young men and women, also called “Kashmir’s new warriors” (Thottam 2010), con- tinued a long- standing struggle against what they viewed as the illegitimacy of India’s “evil empire” through new modes of protest and resistance, mar- shaling strategies of artistic and literary representation, documentary film production, music, sit- ins, candlelight vigils, street marches, and stone pelt- ing, in an effort to secure their aspiration for a free (azad) Kashmir. These popular modes of protest—in which music and literature as well as jokes, rumors, and stone- pelting become potent forms of political dissent—are derived from, not a departure from, the armed struggle of the 1990s; they are part of a longer continuum of antioccupation struggles that can be traced to India’s historic denial of the Kashmiri right to self- determination, traced even to the violent repression of Kashmiri uprisings against the tyranny of the princely ruler in 1931 (Faheem, this volume). Viewed along this continuum, the protests of the 2000s resist any attempt to draw easy distinctions between violent and nonviolent forms of resistance. MC Kash burst onto the cultural scene during this critical time as a popular and powerful voice of defiance, giving expression to the cumulative rage of these “rebels of the streets” who came of age during the armed rebellion of the 1990s. Building on new social media and solidarity networks, MC Kash rose to prominence early in the summer months of 2010 with his song I Protest (Remembrance), which bears witness to the indiscriminate killings of teenagers by the state’s armed forces: “Don’t talk restitution / ‘Cuz the only solution / Is the resolution of freedom.” Drawing links with other occupied and oppressed populations in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, MC Kash’s rap music has given voice to a new generation that has pursued the freedom movement through hybrid forms of opposition, combining local poetry, art, fiction, and literature with global models of cultural production and resistance.4 Kashmiris have consistently challenged—both through armed and unarmed resistance—widespread attempts by sections of the Indian media, 4 Introduction academia, and civil society to frame India’s brutal military occupation as a democracy. In one example, in 2013 the state government hosted the Zubin- Mehta- led Bavarian State Orchestra for a program titled Ehsaas- e- Kashmir (Feeling for Kashmir). Organized by the German embassy, this event aimed to reach “the hearts of the Kashmiris with a message of hope and encour- agement” (see Bukhari 2013). Kashmiri civil society and profreedom groups opposed the event on the grounds that it provided a platform for the state to obfuscate the occupation and appropriate the traumatic narrative of violent tragedies that had befallen Kashmiris. In protest, civil society groups orga- nized a street concert called Haqeeqat- e- Kashmir (Reality of Kashmir) to showcase people’s memories of the occupation through art and music. Cultural productions such as MC Kash’s music, Haqeeqat- e- Kashmir, and the many forms of literary and artistic expression emerging from Kash- mir today perform important political and historic work.5 They build critical consciousness among Kashmiris about radically new approaches to writing history so that the state’s efforts to silence alternative narratives of Kashmir’s long and complex history of occupation, in which only hegemonic forms of history and memory were allowed to thrive, can be countered. Such “popular and expressive culture(s)” of resistance are deeply political and provide a rich ethnographic window to track and understand the multiple “logics of occupa- tion” (Visweswaran 2013, 3). At the same time, new forms of protest in Kash- mir exceed their political framing and outcomes and force consideration of the ways in which cultural expressions work as forms of memory making, enabling a reclamation of lost histories while also empowering a younger generation of Kashmiris to defy state-scripted formations of Kashmiri political and cultural identities. At once creative and generative, cultural productions, which com- bine local and nonlocal elements from music, art, film, and literature, forge a larger culture of resistance in which poetry as much as politics provides tools to mourn death, celebrate Kashmiri martyrdom, and energize the fight against India’s occupation of Kashmir (see Faheem, this volume; Kaul 2015). Despite such dramatic transformations in the cultural and political land- scape of Kashmir in which new articulations of protest and resistance became commonplace, no serious scholarship exists on this critical period and its implications for Kashmiris on either side of the heavily militarized Line of Control between India and Pakistan. Located at this critical juncture in the Kashmiri struggle, this volume engages with the current collective work of creativity and witnessing enacted by a young generation of Kashmiris who