Page 2 of 2 A new cold war in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy
The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were non-violent. For
the first time in decades, fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in
India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil
disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent
memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually
caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house
arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the
arrests of hundreds of people.
Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something
extraordinary - it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders
called for a boycott. They were re-arrested. Almost everybody believed the
elections would become
a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment
convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and
embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken.
(Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under
house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)
Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned
out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed
struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first
districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir
Valley.
None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why
people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and
shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the
high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy - who practically live
in television studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart
every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count
- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive,
year-round troop deployment (one armed soldier for every 20 civilians).
No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who
materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous
presence in the Kashmir Valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing
them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the
lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.
Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their
way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they
insisted were only about municipal issues - roads, water, electricity. No one
talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades
- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of
the day or night - might need someone to listen to them, to take up their
cases, to represent them.
The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press
declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in
Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a
somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri,"
several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological
warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official
policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades - its attempt to destroy
people's self-esteem - are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's
enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between
elections and democracy.
The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash
in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its
crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several
dangerous and conflicting ideologies - Indian nationalism (corporate as well as
"Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under
the burden of its own contradictions), US imperialism (made impatient by a
tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining
legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an
occupation).
Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from
genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive,
reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region
and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir
and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new cold war (which, like the last
one, is cold for some and hot for others).
In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which
the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it
will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims
who have been brutalized, humiliated and marginalized. Notice has been given by
the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with
Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That
does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be
completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology.
Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."
Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is
even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution.
Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And
while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps,
refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election.
However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's
temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have
magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the
aquifers.
Is democracy melting?
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world,
is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of
Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds
and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have
died there, many have died just from the elements.
The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -
thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots,
tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings
generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy
temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.
While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons
and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt.
Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do
with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the
world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free
speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose
governments sit on the United Nations Security Council and whose economies
depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like
India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq,
Afghanistan ... it's a long list.)
The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually
severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give
us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of
consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current
recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better
life - and the glaciers will melt even faster.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied
architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film
designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel
The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new
book, just published by Haymarket Books, is
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is
adapted from the introduction to that book.
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