[Reader-list] The kind of Azadi we need but cannot imagine

[Vivek Narayanan]

Umair Muhajir mentions Rwanda, a state not explicitly premised on any 
ethnic or religious identity in its constitution, but does not mention 
South Africa.  I'm thinking about the intense (though taboo) paranoia 
that gripped liberal intellectuals inside and outside South Africa right 
up to 1994 elections, even afterwards.  What no one predicted, in the 
midst of worries about majorities and minorities, was that the target 
would be found elsewhere, that South Africa would establish itself as a 
liberal state with its own entirely homegrown anti-immigration discourse...

But that is all besides the point.  What I find really tragic is how all 
of us-- liberals and radicals, pro- and anti- Kashmiri Azadi alike-- 
yearn to think and articulate answers beyond the nation state but seem 
completely unable to.  Isn't it a profound failure of the imagination, 
the machiavellian sense that things cannot be otherwise?  I was thrilled 
to read Mujahir's opening paragraphs, but when I began to see where it 
was all going-- a strange argument about more and less reasonable, more 
and less preferable nation states, and a celebration, it would appear, 
of American democracy-- I felt a sickening sense of disappointment.  To 
a person in a middle class home in Delhi or Chennai or New York, it 
might make sense to see the Indian state or the American state as 
reasonable, tractable, open to change, secular-- but, to echo Sanjay's 
point, I don't think that's what the daily experience of life in 
Srinagar or Baghdad is like.

Vivek

mahmood farooqui wrote:
> Sanjay, I share your concern about Umair's casal disengagement with the
> oppression in kashmir and with the liberationist impulse implicit in the
> kasmiri uprising.
>
> Yes, Azadi may take a form that we cannot anticipate. But as Mukul Kesavan
> pointed out to Shuddha we have to extrapolate on the outcomes from the gamut
> of the existing pointers. And it is the Azadi seekers who need to deliberate
> more on what they are going to do. Not just that we will do it better.
>
> We have heard his before from Jinnah--we will protect our minorities
> (better).
>
> 2008/9/13 Sanjay Kak <kaksanjay at gmail.com>
>
>   
>> Thanks, Jeebesh, for posting Umair Ahmed Muhajir's piece "The Azadi We
>> Need"
>> http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080904&fname=umair&sid=1
>>
>> The Sarai list has robustly reflected the recent revival of interest in the
>> idea of Kashmir's Azadi, and I think many of us would be in synch with the
>> despair reflected in Muhajir's understanding of the monstrous contours of
>> the modern nation state, especially as it has unfolded in our part of the
>> world–India, Pakistan, Bangladesh...
>>
>> What I do not share is the certainity with which he–like many writers in
>> recent weeks both here and in other public forums in India–have visualised
>> a
>> possible Azad Kashmir. Perhaps because few in Kashmir have been able to
>> spell out their vision, our assumptions have flooded in and filled the
>> space. One of these is that Azadi necessarily means an Islamic Nation.
>> Certainly there are pointers from some of the political leaders of the
>> movement that this may be the idea. Syed Ali Shah Geelani has spoken of the
>> centrality of Islam in his vision, and no doubt there are other elements in
>> the Hurriyat that would concur. (Although even here it is an open question
>> what their Islamic role model is: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Syria,
>> Qatar? Or another: Kashmir,) But surely it cannot be the case that what
>> Geelani says, or what elements of the Hurriyat hint at can be taken as
>> conclusive in our understanding of the aspirations for Azadi? (Especially
>> when most people who draw these conclusions are also the first to question
>> the representative character of Geelani or the Hurriyat!)
>>
>> Our discussions of where Kashmir is headed is already moving so giddily
>> ahead of the state of play, that sometimes I get the sensation that these
>> are not really conversations about Kashmir, and the abominable situation
>> there, but really about our anxieties about ourselves. (Here I use "our"
>> for
>> those of whose of us who do not see ourselves as Kashmiris–so Indians,
>> Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, whoever.)
>>
>> Let us for a moment ignore the hardliners in the public discourse, the G
>> Parthasarathy, K Subrahmanyam, Harish Khare (and for comic relief,
>> Jaitirath
>> Rao) line on Kashmir. (In a nutshell: fry them).
>> Let's turn to the liberal discourse, where however sophisticated the
>> language, and however much sympathy for the "ordinary Kashmiri" is evoked,
>> the main preoccupation seems to be around what a possible Azad Kashmir–one
>> which wears it Muslim majority and its Islamic character on its sleeve–will
>> do to the idea of Indian secularism, to Indian democracy, and to India's
>> Muslims. In India, for example, the failure to fulfill the aspirations of a
>> Secular, Socialist, Democratic Republic that We The People were promised,
>> seem to hinge entirely on whether or not Kashmir continues to be part of
>> India... How fragile is this notion of the Secular Socialist Democracy that
>> it hinges entirely on a part of the map that has never enthusiastically
>> embraced the geographical entity that bounds that ideal!
>>
>> So too in Muhajir's otherwise excellent discussion of the Nation State,
>> Kashmir is only the peg upon which the larger anxiety hangs. I tended to
>> read his piece as a lament about the failure of our nations to meet the
>> aspirations of our decolonising imaginations. About what he calls the Azadi
>> We Need.
>>
>> To say, as Muhajir does, that "the idea of an independent Kashmir for
>> Kashmiris must be resisted precisely because, as the experience of the
>> once-colonised has amply illustrated, nation-states are appallingly
>> inhuman"
>> is a suggestion of some casual brutality. And when he says that "nothing in
>> the Kashmiri independence movement suggests that it will throw up anything
>> different; indeed given that the movement aims at a traditional
>> nation-state
>> just like all the others, I submit that it cannot yield a different
>> result",
>> I can only wonder at his certainity of what the movement aims at. He is
>> asking us not just to doubt, or raise a red-flag of warning, but to
>> "resist"
>> because he believes that an Independent Kashmir may turn into the monster
>> with the big floppy ears and the sharp tusks? Remember the Six Blind Men of
>> Hindustan, and the Elephant?
>>
>> Because in the absence of democracy, in the absence of free and fearless
>> politics, and in the presence of a quite monstrous apparatus of occupation,
>> none of us can as yet lay claim to saying that we know what the movement
>> aims at.
>>
>> The discomfort with the Nation State is a valid one. If indeed there are
>> those within the movement who casually think of such an entity, then they
>> would do well to make themselves familiar with the arguments Mohajir
>> assembles against it. But for the vast majority of people in the valley,
>> the
>> idea of Azadi does not as yet have such elaborate contours. It still means
>> removing the Army, bringing back some elementary dignity into everyday
>> life.
>> We can lay the charge at the door of the Separatist leadership that they
>> have failed to start that conversation about what Kashmir could be like.
>> But
>> before we "resist" the idea of Azadi we–and here I speak of Indians–must
>> also take on board our complicity in a system that has not allowed any form
>> of genuine democratic process to emerge in Kashmir, not just since 1989
>> when
>> the armed conflict broke out, but for at least three decades before that.
>>
>> And what if, in the absence of another workable alternative that they can
>> come up with, or indeed we can offer them, they still choose the tattered
>> and torn robes of the Nation State? Will we say to them that their struggle
>> is meaningless, their suffering inconsequential, the repression they have
>> dealt with somehow appropriate? Because they don't understand the perils of
>> the Nation State they must cease to resist?
>>
>> In recent weeks, one can see the furry edges of the Establishment fluffing
>> up in defence of old atrophied positions. Forget the Intelligence Bureau
>> plants and the Home Ministry hand-outs. Academics Sumit Ganguly and Kanti
>> Bajpai, separately and together, placed a series of articles all over the
>> national and international media that set up a sort of Qualifying Standard
>> to Permit Secession. Minimally you are required to say Yes to the
>> following:
>> Genocide? Ethnic flooding? Major human rights violations? Since India has
>> fallen short on all counts, they aver, with only 70,000 dead, and No Major
>> human rights violations, the Standard is not met . Sorry then. No case for
>> Azadi.
>> Who set up this Gold Standard, and who calibrates it?
>>
>> While it is not my intention to place Muhajir's arguments on the same shelf
>> as the Hawks and the Hawks-in-Dove-feathers, I bring them together because
>> collectively they serve the same end-result: "This may not end up the way
>> WE
>> want it, so lets just wait and watch".
>>
>> That was the position that British Liberals could well have taken in the
>> years before Independence: hand over India to the Hindu Mahasabha? The
>> Muslim League? To Gandhi?.
>> Better a part of Empire than to allow India to destroy itself under the
>> weight of its own contradictions.
>>
>> That has been the position of liberal Indians for at least twenty–if not
>> sixty–years. Frozen in a rigor mortis of wilful ignorance, political
>> correctness, and theoretical purity.
>>
>> This may not be The Azadi They Need.
>>
>> Sanjay Kak
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