by Muneeb Yousuf 24 May 2020
The armed conflict in Kashmir entered into its 27th year this fall, at the time when this article was written in 2016. There are, to invoke Maya Angelou, so many layers and so many perspectives to talk about. Yet my mind drifts to something very miniature, a common man’s story in my village, a thing forgotten in the past, an event to be resurrected and in that resurrection a plea for justice. The justice may never come, but one must talk about justice. It is not the hangman’s noose that I am thinking about but the justice must be done the other way round, at least in our collective thinking that, more often than not, breeds injustice. The justice, I believe, could be done by resurrecting grim pasts of the common people who have never found a voice of their own, who were subjected to injustice not only by the perpetrators from the opposite barracks but by men from their own camp.
The masked men with guns and steel from the opposite barracks have wrought on the people an avalanche of cold-blooded killings, rapes, custodial murders, disappearances, etc. etc.—the horrendous of the crimes laden with unending suffering and unstoppable condemnation. It looks like the entire bone marrow has been ruptured and that dogs will keep gnawing on the bones that have remained of this body.
Yet, as the winter approaches, what will soothe this body are the hot embers inside the Kangri. But the relief would be ephemeral and the damage is certain: once it plunges under the winter quilt, the Kangri burns everything that comes in its contact, sparing not even the immediate matting underneath. Once again, it shall ruin the carpet of dreams with an ugly black hole.
But why mourn the carpet’s ruin? There is an even bigger, uglier mark on a heart, mind and soul. I believe I must talk about him, and his father who died dreaming of a world of calm. Why is it that I am not talking about his world that shrunk from a green, flowery garden to a hole in the carpet?
During the decades of political turmoil in Kashmir—where the life of a common man has been subservient to one narrative or the other weaved by elite bourgeoisie—so many lives have been ruined in an act of ‘false conscious’ by local Kashmiris who happened to be representatives and members of key socio-religious organizations at a particular moment of time.
Let me present to you Farooq, a man who embodies a madness of its own kind. Tall, slightly dusky in complexion, sharp minded in retrospect, Farooq had a sense of responsibility once upon a time. His father, Samad, was an elderly man in mid-sixties, suffering asthma and Cardiac disorders. In his heydays, Samad was a waza (traditional Kashmiri chef of Wazwan). As asthma girdled Samad, doctors advised him to quit his profession. It is hard for a person in mid-sixties to acquire new skills to earn the livelihood. So the responsibility came down to Farooq, who had recently joined college. As the family’s condition worsened, Farooq applied for many jobs but didn’t get one. He lastly applied in the Indian army and luckily got selected. The news of the job infused a new lease of life into Samad, for he had turned utterly ill in need of the medicines that he could not purchase. Samad could finally regain the hope of a new life.
This hope, nevertheless, was short-lived and the fate had different things in store for Samad and Farooq. Their life and hopes were cut short by a man who I would call Sultan. Sultan was no ordinary man. He was nazm-i-halqa (a key representative of Jamat-i-Islami [hereafter JI]). The position of nazm-i-halqa possessed discretionary powers within the organization and enjoyed greater acceptance within the Muslim-majority Kashmiri society. In a Foucauldian sense, they possessed both power as well as knowledge. In some instances, this power and knowledge was used for certain personal ends. On many occasions, this power-knowledge complex was also used to apply certain principles and standards on common people, regardless of humanitarian concerns. The fact of the matter is that these standards and principles didn’t apply to JI representatives and their families as I try to demonstrate here.
Days after Farooq was selected for the job, Sultan told Samad that his son’s decision to join the Indian army was “morally wrong” and that he must retreat. Normally, a Kashmiri joining Indian army is seen an act of treachery in relation with the main resistance discourse—something that would tarnish the larger cause of tehreek. Sultan’s words left Samad with a heavy heart.
Next day, Samad visited Sultan’s home again. “Can’t you protect my Farooq?” Samad asked him. “Our organization might forgive, but others won’t,” came the reply. This terse response shattered Samad who took it as a sign of danger, even if the threat didn’t come from Sultan. Finally he forced his son to quit.
Poor Samad died within a year and Farooq became a wanderer of streets. A great sacrifice, indeed—one we must all salute.
Now here comes the drama. The principles and standards which applied to Farooq, a poor man’s son, didn’t apply to Sultan’s son who joined Indian Reserve Police Force, an extension of the Indian state. Sultan’s son has been in the service for the past eight years. In our locality, no one could muster courage to raise voice over such blatant hypocrisy.
I don’t intend to declare that there are problems with JI as an ideology. It has a regional-historical legacy of more than seven decades, first propounded in South Asia by philosopher-jurist Abul A’la Maududi. Its original roots are much deeper, in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, founded by the distinguished scholar Hassan al-Banna.
This article doesn’t interrogate the ideological foundations of JI but deals with the deployment of the JI ideology at a local societal level in a lonesome village in Kashmir. The aim here is not to investigate the operation of JI ideology at the level of state and politics but to study a miniature level at which the power has been, at a certain moment in time, exercised by the JI representatives. I acknowledge at the onset that I don’t have large-scale empirical material or data sets like researchers gather in formal studies. The empirical evidence for this article comes from a very local level that I have gathered informally through conversations with the local people on the margins of the urban life. Here I would like to call myself, following Richard Hoggart, a ‘reader of culture from inside.’
Nonetheless, I argue here that an ideology, same as religion, doesn’t live by it. Rather, it makes itself manifest in the lives of its professors and followers. It is a dialogical process that connects one end to the other along a fragile continuum of faith and belief. If any disjuncture, whatsoever, takes place along this continuum the very ideas of faith and belief falter and cease to exist. In a response to Bheem Rao Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste in Harijan (July 11, 1936), Mohan Das Karamchand Gandhi wrote, “One can only judge a system or an institution by the conduct of its representatives.” There is a larger degree of truth attached to this statement in that it holds humans responsible for the conduct within an institution or under the purview of an ideology. Theoretically, it lays emphasis on reason, and professes that those who advocate an ideology or submit to it must not only serve it but uphold its sanctity in the face of adversities posed by the modern world. Those who don’t adhere to are, in Gandhi’s words, wrong ‘specimens’ who ‘woefully misrepresent’ the faith. I argue, based on my observations, that many of these nazm-e-halqa were wrong ‘specimens’ out there to sabotage the faith.
I do not believe that one needs rims of empirical data to represent a certain kind of a phenomenon that takes places at a macro level, an unexplored landscape that doesn’t come under the microscope of researchers and intellectuals. Farooq’s and Samad’s life is a living testimony of utter disregard of humanity and subversion of sacrifice and justice by those who allegedly professed such notions.
Meanwhile, Farooq is silent and has lost the value of life.
The hypocrisy that I have tried to outline in this article has to be located in the fact that while the discourse of not joining the armed forces may be long dead, the person who once claimed to internalize its conceptual underpinnings should, owing to moral reasons, not have indulged in acts that directly contradict what they had once been fervently preaching.
In the case of Kashmir, the anti-army joining discourse might have been relevant at a particular moment of time and those preaching it may have been right in advocating it concurrently, but I wonder why do principles and standards of morality and sacrifice apply only to a poor man and not the one who wields power, despite the fact that both are from the same community. This is, I believe, a complete subversion of truth and justice which lies in the act of clothing bad in good and vice versa.
Epilogue: The latest uprising in Kashmir is running in its fourth month. So far, more than 100 unarmed civilians have been shot dead. Around 20,000 have been wounded since July and hundreds blinded by the use of pellet gun. It is a harrowing statistics card. For the children who were blinded, the light or color will not signify anything; they can only feel and visualize black.
And it’s this color black that I—and all of us—must be afraid of.
Note: This piece is dedicated to the resilience of common Kashmiris who have been targets of terror—hard or soft—this way or the other. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the people involved in the story.
The author is M.Phil. Scholar, MMAJ Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
The essay was originally published by Kashmir Monitor on 12 November, 2016 and is being reproduced here. It has been blocked from all media by Indian authorities.