India’s Kashmir admission: too little, too late
Source: dawn blogs
The news that the Jammu & Kashmir State Human Rights Commission has officially acknowledged mass graves holding more than 2,000 bodies
– 574 of them now identified as local residents, i.e. not foreign
terrorists – is welcome but leaves a bitter taste. It’s good that the
Indian establishment can allow such an admission, but so what? That’s
surely little consolation to the many “half-widows” of Kashmiris “disappeared” by Indian forces.
We
could argue forever – and have been – about what Kashmir’s political
status should be, or who is most to blame for the massive death and
destruction wrought there over the past two decades. But morally honest
Indians can’t avoid India’s culpability.
Indian-held Kashmir was
the scene of an important early chapter in my political education. I
first went there in 1994, initially lured by the romance of seeing the
landscape, and meeting the people, that V.S. Naipaul had memorably
written about in the brilliant middle section of his 1964 book An Area
of Darkness. I spent many weeks in the Valley on several visits that
year and the next. I put much of what I learned in Kashmir into the
early chapters of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan because, while
Kashmir is no more clearly part of Pakistan than of India, I wanted to
show that, borders and Lines of Control notwithstanding, in truth the
subcontinent is a seamless whole. I also wanted to do justice to the way
my interest in Kashmir had led to my longstanding interest in Pakistan.
I
spent a lot of time on the ground in Kashmir with Kashmiris in 1994 and
‘95, and I listened not only to Kashmiris’ stories but also to their
opinions and to what they said they wanted. Maybe because of my own
provincial background, I’ve never appreciated the presumption that the
naïve or wishful perspectives of people from small, neglected places
should be considered somehow less valid than the views of people who
hold power – unless it’s true that might makes right, which it isn’t.
“We
are hungry for peace,” a young Kashmiri told me. “But at the same time,
we want to live with honor.” The Kashmir problem was “not a law and
order problem,” another insisted. “It is the deserved rights that we
want. No Kashmiri will believe any Indian, ever again.” Said the human
rights activist Jalil Andrabi: “We thought that if people of Romania can
go out on the streets and get rid of a dictator, why can’t we go out on
the streets in Kashmir?”
“We have to think about the future of
our country, the future of our children,” a businessman told me. “We
don’t want to become another Afghanistan. My son, he was three when
militancy started. Now he is almost in his eighth year. So good years
are passing by, they are not coming back.” That was more than 15 years
ago, so that man’s son – if he’s still alive – is now in his early
twenties.
Jalil Andrabi made a strong impression on me. He was a
likeable and impressive young lawyer who, with colleagues in the Kashmir
Bar Association, traveled to remote villages; painstakingly documented
atrocities committed by Indian forces, and filed usually fruitless writs
in the High Court. It broke one’s heart to think of the effort they put
into raw documentation, the naming of persons and putting on record of
events that otherwise would have been forgotten by all but the obscure
sufferers themselves.
“What we believe is that human rights are
guaranteed to every human being who is born on earth,” Andrabi told me.
“India recognizes this right, under Article 21 of the Constitution of
India.”
The last time I saw him was in his office, on the dingy
upper floor of a dusty building in Srinagar. I had come because he
wanted to give me some documents. He gave me a Pepsi and prevailed on me
to stay for a few minutes. I asked him why he did what he did. He felt
compelled to do it, he said; it had to be done; truth and justice had to
be served, however ineffectually. Otherwise, he said, he could not have
lived with himself.
I felt too tired to take notes – I was
leaving the next morning and had many things on my mind – and among my
many regrets is that I felt too distracted and rushed to stay longer
with Jalil Andrabi that day. His words brought to mind something the
American writer Wendell Berry once wrote: “Protest that endures, I
think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success:
namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit
that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
Jalil Andrabi was
kidnapped in murky circumstances on March 8, 1996. Later that month his
body was found floating in the River Jhelum, its eyes gouged out. I was
in Bangkok, where I was living at the time, when I heard the report of
his death on CNN.
Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com
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