Some of the interesting problems which were
raised by diaspora Palestinians, like
Edward Said, were critically about nation and nationalism. The Kashmiri Pandits were divested of a
home, by public announcements and
threats from Muslim militants, from 1988 onwards. However, in the late
1980s, the Kashmiri Muslims had begun their own intifada, which was
essentially geared to define their presence in their own home, against the overwhelming
presence of the army and police. The separatists, or militants, saw the Indian
army as a sign of Occupation, and in their web, the local populace, like people
caught in the cross fire, with concomitantly, continuous military and police
retaliation, longed for their freedom or azadi, to experience normalcy, as other Indians did.
The militants essentially believed that
they had a right to the homeland, which would be integrated with Pakistan
occupied Kashmir, as many of them were trained in Pakistani camps. They did not
, however, concretely want to be under the surveillance and statecraft of
either India or Pakistan. The
co-optation by extremists was
part of the process of destabilisation of the Indian subcontinent that the Pakistani state wanted, in revenge of the
support given to Bangladesh by India in 1971. Support to Kashmiri militants by
the Pakistani state, therefore, was seen to be a fitting response. Their “surgical removal” by army during the Modi regime, and the
simultaneous demonetisation, served to
distract the Indian population from the crores of losses incurred by the Indian banks by defaulters like Mallya, but it was
also one way of resolving the problem of armed dissent by militants,
allegedly funded by illegal currencies and Islamic State ideologies. The nation
still waits, but meanwhile the bluster of war between our two countries, using
Kashmir as a pretext, is not over. Hopefully, there will be a concerted return
to shared spaces of music, pilgrimages, relationships of cordiality and
friendship.
Martin Buber wrote substantially about the I Thou
relation, which was about the divinity in each of us, recognising the divinity
in the other. Mutual respect was therefore central to this dispensation. We
must remember however, that Buber essentially believed that it was possible for
two nations to live side by side, and this was supported by Hannah Arendt, although Said notes, she supported the Jewish Defense League with
money in 1968 and 1973, when Syria and Egypt attempted to take back the Golan
Heights. (Said 1995:89) The idea of
Nation presented itself as the presence
of shared values, which were not necessarily homogeneous. It is here that
Edward Said is at his most powerful, when he states in Critical Enquiry,
September 1985, that,
“If we reify the ideology of difference
that dominates views on either side, we either prolong what has been for nearly
two decades effective stagnation, or we authorise the inevitable annihilation
of one or the other antagonist. But if we strive toward a more creative sense
of “difference”, one that acknowledges the historical, cultural, and material
distinctions between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, while refusing to privilege
the experience or the contemporary situation of either, we shall it is hoped,
produce a whole new dynamic in this relationship. The choices are evident
enough. The difficult task is to realise them in the world, a task that must
begin with a new logic in which “difference” does not entail domination.” (
Said 1995:100)
The idea of peoples, state, territory, then
becomes delinked from the nation state. The map is read as a volatile space
incorporating the refugee. When we apply the
premise of mutual respect, separateness is actually a precondition of
dialogue. As Said wrote for Palestinians, “What is so difficult to accept in
the idea that Palestinians should, like
all other people, be free of the travail of deportations, curfews, exile,
bombardment and general misery?” (Said 1995: 47) He has also suggested, the Palestinians were very highly educated,
and considered to be elites in the Arab world, for the positions that many of
them came to occupy as consultants and intellectuals. (Said 1980:6)
The
dilemma in the Kashmir case lies in that Kashmiriyat cannot be limited to a
particular religion. The enmity that
divides them has taken on stereotypical connotations, and it is this that my
paper tries to contend. We cannot presume that thinking alike will bring us
peace. People, particularly governments do not think alike. It is peace
movements, popular protests that allow two “nations” (understood as
communities) to coexist on the same
territory, having subcontinental identities markedly different. (Oommen, 1997, Uberoi 1998) Much of Martin
Buber’s work focussed on how hierarchies were maintained, how people actually
used ideas politically to create cleavages and differences, where dialogue was
nullified by the impossibility of the situation. His essays on Palestine, which
he described as “a land of two peoples”
had both a historical connotation as well as all the logic of Sociological
reasoning where he marked out the dangers of artificially created
majoritarianism. ( Buber 1983, Visvanathan 1993 )
Let us, however, return to Edward Said, who
wrote impassioned responses to America’s state policy vis a vis the condition
of the Palestinians. Buber had stood for dialogue, versus the position of the Zionist State, that there were “no
Palestinians” and the Jews returned to an unpopulated desert, to make it bloom.
It was hard to stand against Golda Meir, or the Jews from Berlin or the Bronx.
(Said 1980:5). Said was very clear that the victims of Nazism were the
perpetuators of an immense violence, which was pushed forward by war, forced
migration, and by the escalation of daily violence and death. Said asked often
in journalistic essays, that if Europe and America were against apartheid, how
was it that they were not against the continual slaughter of the Palestinians,
where five million of them had been turned into wandering refugees constantly
looking for a home? Chomsky, very early on, had communicated that the wars in
the Middle East were due to the
imaginary oil crises, the covetousness of America, and that the Arab-
Israel conflict was located exactly for this reason in the backyard of these
very oil wells. (Said 1995:323) Said
reiterated that “Arab” was a homogenising term that took away
Palestinian identity. They were without a home, and by colonial decree, they
had settled in ghettos and refugee camps in many different countries.
(Visvanathan 1993: 31)Said demanded a census of Palestinians, and a mapping of
the countries to which they had been forced to migrate, and are part of a large
exploited “guest” community. Said ( Said
1995: xiii) I quote from my book, “Friendship,
Interiority and Mysticism”,
“Buber feared that the Jews would do to the
Other what had been done to them: he foresaw a diaspora of Arabs, their
ghettoization in camps, their migrating from oppression, and finally becoming
exiles or refugees. Buber was never easy about this transformation. He was,
after all, a sociologist, and it was this inversion of categories, these mirror
images where living alongside the Arab became a living ‘against’ them which was
a betrayal of his philosophy. The Jew had become a migrant in the positive
sense, a refugee who had come home. Yet, the creation of a State, the creation
of an identity, made Buber ask the question:
“A normal nation needs a land, a language
and independence. Thus one must only go and acquire these commodities and the
rest will take care of itself. How will people live with each other in this
land? What will people say to each other in that language?” Buber
1983:221)(cited in Visvanathan 2007:31)
Said drew attention to how Europe and
America defined the politics of the Middle East. He commented that it was their
whims, ideas, and projects that made the Middle East constantly revolve around
the policies of the politicians of these countries. Iraq, with it’s anti Kurd
and anti Kuwait actions brought about the continual bombing by the Americans
and Europeans. Terrorism responded as an
Islamist call which then overtook the world, and made boundaries anachronistic
in the new forms of guerrilla warfare.
We presume that Islamist organisations are “successful” in the politics of
vituperative hate and mass killings, but ordinary people flee their homes from
the IS to the perilous seas, and arrive in Europe and America in search of
peace and livelihood, to be met with local intolerance. The migrants are not
thinking in theological or political terms, they only wish to survive.
The victim is one who believes that without
cause he has been pushed out from his or her home. The will to live is one of
the strongest blessings. Rahul Pandita’s
book, Our Moon has Blood Clots (2013)speaks of how memory is like a whip, it
lashes the Pandits in the new world they occupy, disenfranchised from their
janmbhumi (or birthplace). Jaya Sadhu, a follower of Ramana Maharshi, says that
they were forced to leave their homes, thirty years ago, and resettled in
different parts of Northern India, and their children became used to their new
surroundings. Education was their salve, and however difficult it was, they
made sure that their children received a good education, never mind the
conditions of penury and sorrow they found themselves in. “We will never
return. Once sent away, we cannot go back.” They are not for violence, and
abjure violence, but for them, migration has been one of the ways in which they
learned to live in new lands. “The Government supports the Muslims, by allowing
them to carry out acts of violence, and then sanctioning aid to them when it
snows!” she says bitterly. “Only one family
we know of, returned, from the mass migrations that followed the
violence of 1989 and the early 1990s. Why would they return? They have had to
give up their homes to Muslims, and they don’t believe that they can ever be
accommodated again. The Muslims have taken control of our temples and these are
now in ruins” (personal communication 9th January 2017)
Barthes communicated that to listen is
different from hearing, as our sensibilities are more totally involved in the
former. It is not merely a physiological act, it is something more dense. It is
methodologically similar to the Weberian concept of verstehen, which implies
that our scholarly selves enter a dramaturgical mode, when we recount stories,
or translate experiences. Palestine, then, becomes a geographical zone, where
the UN declarations are not merely words and rhetoric, but where the right to nation, citizenship and
freedom are a given. The wars, the colonisations, the fabricated cities, the
encroachments are always under scrutiny. While Said was writing in the 80s and
90s, of the last century, the theatre of
war was definitely the Middle East, and Israel’s encroachment on Lebanon one of
the most violent spaces of it’s forced
overlordship. Today, the scenario is that Palestine is a watch word for
ghettoization. CNN on February 2nd 2017, showed that Jewish
encroachment on Palestinian territory continues. The Palestinians fear that
Trump will use his Security veto at the UN to support the Jews, and to nullify
their protest.
All
attention, meanwhile is in the rehabilitation of the migrant/refugee in the
wars of displacement. First, as John Berger and
Jean Mohr’s team communicates in A
Seventh Man, (1975) migrants are
sent into camps, then they are redistributed, then respective Parliaments in
different countries debate their future. After a period of immense personal
loss, they are assimilated into working class culture of those cities that have
given them an abode, provided they learn the local language, and are willing
to work as manual labour in towns and
villages, whose populace sometimes never ever met or interacted with
foreigners.
What is the fate of the refugee? Said has
been very vocal about the condition of the majority of the Palestinians forced
to flee, and being treated with hostility by world governments, since their
identity became synonymous with terrorist activities in the 1990s. However, the
question that he asks is, what did the world expect, that colonial policies of
the 1950s would have no law of counter effect? Edward Said points out over and
over again, that lands were taken, that young men were killed in numbers much
larger than the years of apartheid in South Africa, and yet no one took any notice.
(Said 1995:194) It was as if Anti Semitism during the period of Hitler had been
replayed, with five million Palestinian
lives, and the “Philistine” was rendered insignificant as well as completely
absent. Golda Meir’s policy of “no Palestinians in previous existence in Israeli controlled
land” was the dominant metaphor of that
time, changed now in official rhetoric to the “so called Palestinians”. Why
should not we listen to the Palestinians as they head count in different
countries, asking why the return to the homeland was not a possibility for
their people? In this sense, the intifada, which began in 1986, for them,
became the popular voice of resistance.
The Kashmiri Pandits however, facing the lot of a miniscule minority in
India, continually pushed out of their homes by militants, lived in the most
terrible ghettos in New Delhi and the suburbs, and in Jammu, making do, if they
were middle class with the sombreness of rented housing. Ankur Datta’s Uncertain
Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir (2017) deals in great detail about what this
dislocation has meant in real terms.
Said, as a Palestinian Christian, returns
to his home, where he lived as a child. Jerusalem is now completely in the
hands of the tourists, and the mediators, who invent newer narratives are Jews.
His father was a tour guide, and the house where he lived, near the Sepulchre,
now difficult to find. A legend that
comes to Said’s mind, was that his father’s house had an occupant in the late 1940s, no other than the saint
philosopher, Martin Buber. Said, too, essentially believes in the peace
process, and co-existence, and cannot fathom why the term terrorist is used for
those Palestinians who are under Israeli
occupation. Why should the term, “terrorist” encompass everyone equally, when
they have no part in militancy? He asserts that the Palestinians speak Arabic
and Hebrew, and are versatile in their skills. His stories of the cruelty of
Jewish encroachment in Gaza are horrendous. People of Jewish descent, just move
into these homes, destroying orchard and valuable property. He describes one
family, who lives in the basement of their house, which has been taken over,
and there is nowhere they can hang their clothes, so the daughter of the house
laboriously dries them with a hair dryer. Edward Said discusses the policies of
Government which feel that they have a legitimate right to impose world views
alien to the local community, which has been divested of all their powers, and
are rendered refugees in their own homes. He considers the fact that poets,
artists, writers, journalists, film makers are appropriated by the State, or
silenced or imprisoned. In a sliver of optimism, he mentions the work of
alternative educationists, such as Miriam Marei of the Acre Pedagogical
Centre, who are providing art materials
to children in ghetto towns, so that their independence can be fermented in
situations far removed from atrophying conditions in government schools, where
Palestinians may no longer own their past, or discuss it.(Said 1995:187)
“Her methods are improvisatory,
refreshingly unbureaucratic, puppet shows, cardboard models, folk poetry,
incredibly colourful displays, invigorating talk. Her center is located in a
nice old Arab house, and exudes a sense of discovery and optimism, totally
undeterred by the lack of funds and obstacles put in the way. The point she
made to me was that by training teachers who in turn taught young kids, “we”
would have a better alternative than those offered by Israel” (ibid: 187)
Mutual war between hostile communities
sharing the same space is not an option. War against one community by the
state, while impoverishing them is against human rights. Edward Said in an
interview in 1991, published as “The
Intellectuals and the War” states that,
“One of the lessons we have learned, in the
last twenty years as Palestinians, and I think many Israelis have learned, is
that we have no military option against each other. That leads to emphasising
persuasion as a modality of political action. We cannot credibly and
politically, with any serious or desirable result, fight each other militarily.
They could slaughter us, but they are not going to get rid of every
Palestinian, and they won’t snuff out the flame of Palestinian nationalism.
Conversely, we have no military option against the Israelis. What we do have is
a vision, a way of including them in the Middle East based on respect of
nationalists for each other, the right to live within secure and safe borders,
and to coexist in a profitable way with other peoples, with differences.” (
Said 1995: 313)
Jose,
a former resident of “Jews Street” in
Ernakulam, Kerala, informed me on
1st January, 2017, that the Jews who had migrated to Israel from Kerala, were treated as blacks by the
Zionists. “The consequence of continual encroachment of space, by moving border
fences and coercively manipulating populations and soldiers, is that the
Palestinians attack them like bees who have been disturbed.” The “absent present” Kashmiri Pandit in the
terms of Roland Barthes is in an analogous relation with the Palestinians. One
cannot wish away people by deploying majoritarianism as a legitimating force.
In Kashmir, this has a mirror effect. The Muslim militants kill all who stand
in their path for an Azad Kashmir wedged between the Indian subcontinent and
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet and China. The indian army kills all those who
support the militants or who break the curfew. The questions of hierarchy,
civilizational histories and majority and minority are foregrounded by Martin
Buber. I quote from my 1993 essay, published as an NMML Occasional paper.
“Buber was conscious of the differences
amongst the Jews themselves in their composition and history. There were the
indigenous Jews close to the Arabs and their culture; there were the emigres of
the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the Jews of the Holocaust, and the
Jews who came after the establishment of the state. There was opposition
between Oriental and Occidental Jews and also the problem of racism. Buber’s
theory of dialogue established the place and purpose of the individual by
creating first a notion of community rather than of race. It was in this
respect that he supported the satyagraha of the Bene-Israel. The Bene-Israel, a
community of Indian Jews, were refused racial recognition by the State of
Israel.” (Visvanathan (1993) 1997: 30,31)
In an essay, “Ignorant Armies Clash by
Night”, Said writes that linkages is an economic connotation, ( Said 1995:288) communicating mercenary
motives, and what they previously had as Palestinians, were associations and
relationships.
“People actually lived with each other,
rather than denying each other across fortified frontiers. In many schools you
would encounter Arabs from everywhere, Muslims, and Christians, plus Armenians,
Jews, Greeks, Italians, Indians, and Iranians, all mixed up, all under one or
another colonial regime, interacting as if it were natural to do so. Today, the
state nationalisms have a tendency to fragment and fracture. Lebanon and Israel
are perfect examples of what has happened. Apartheid of one form or another is
present nearly everywhere as a group feeling if not as a practice, and it is subsidised by the state with its
bureaucracies and secret police organisation. Rulers are clans, families and
closed circles of aging oligarchs, almost mythologically immune to change.”
(ibid 290, 291)
Further, Edward Said asserts that we should
put our ideologies behind us, the space that they have is to mortify us into a
state of non doing with it’s terms and vocabularies.
“Reengagement with intellectual processes
has very little to do with being politically correct, or citing fashionable
names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do with a return in a
way to a kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all,
intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and
women, make their own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade
and re-made. That sense of intellectual and political and citizenry empowerment
is what I think the intellectual class needs.
There’s only one way to anchor oneself, and
that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be
some identification, not with the powers that be, with the Secretary of State
or the great leading philosopher or sage; there has to be an affiliation with
matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. These don’t occur in a
laboratory or a library.” (317) In this
interview with Professor Harlow, published in The Middle Eastern Report in July August 1991, Edward Said asks for a move
away from modern imperialisms, and towards the coexistence of human communities “that can make and remake
their histories” (ibid 317)
Kashmir too has been besieged by this sense
of ‘otherness’ whereby India looks on it as an appendage that has not realised
it’s full potential in the nation state. It’s gardens, it’s lakes, it’s people
have all been seen to be ‘oriental’ in the way that Edward Said most despised.
Their trades and crafts have been necessary to the sense of India’s heritage,
Kashmir is loved, but Kashmiris think themselves as despised. The truth claim
of belonging however, has recently been asserted by the school children of Kashmir, who after two
months of siege and battle on the streets between extremists and armed forces
and police, unerringly and heroically sat for their exams. Their schools and
books had been burnt by militants, but they turned up in massive numbers. The
Himalayas have always been part of India before the Muslims arrived, mountain
kingdoms however have rapidly changing histories, and either by migration or
war, their composition undergoes change at frequent intervals. Tourism comes
with it’s allied vocabularies, which is food and transport. The “Oriental” is
besieged with the images of carpets, hookas, jewels, saffron, beautiful women.
Kashmir thus becomes an opiate to the Indian imagination. In reality, the
people and the police/army bypass each
other, in fatal acts of non-recognition. Just as the Israelis have never
recognised the Arabs in Palestine, so also the Indian army sees terrorists in
the faces of the Kashmiri people. The co-existence of Hindus and Muslims for
generations is now not even remembered, because where ideologies are supreme,
history is forgotten. Islamic revivalism has further radicalised the people,
and the appearance of young militants who were born in the mid 1980s has
generated an age set which has known only stone pelting. In Martin Buber’s
words, it is the I-it relationship which predominates, which extinguishes the
I-Thou relationship entirely. Those who remember the rich Hindu traditions of
Abhinavagupta , or the mysticism of Lal Ded are now placed in a vocabulary
which refuses to expand. It is the singular refusal that makes all inhabitants
stone deaf to the will to live. Yet, where the ray of light shines most is in
extolling the virtues of the past, where the possibility of brutal kingship,
the reign of the Dogras, is replaced by the syncretism of the past, where
Muslims and Hindus knew their land and their pastures in such a way, that the
pilgrims benefitted from this common knowledge.
According to a Kashmiri Pandit informant, living in Jammu,( personal
communication 11th January 2017) “The temples are still in the hands
of the Dogra raja, Karan Singh, who has
not disturbed the status quo of loss incurred by the death of his father. Their
neglect is something the Pandits cannot resolve, because for them, this is the
only legacy they have, which they remember from the days of their youth.
Martanda temple, with its free flow of icy water, with fish which are sacred is
remembered with a poignancy. Jammu cannot carry for them, the weight of their
longing and loss.” On the other hand,
the Kashmiri merchants who travel all
over India, believe that when there is peace, there is prosperity, trade is
good. When the army is out, and curfew is on, the losses for them are huge.
According to one merchant, “Normal” people are afraid to come out, while those
who are ‘azad’ are freely roaming all the time. The possibility of “azadi” for
a border state which is embedded in
terms of boundaries with Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan is surreal. Last
year, 2016, saw police action and curfew for five months. It began during Eid
and the shooting was unbearable. Things are quiet now, and some hope for
normalcy is restored.
Tourism and the Universities provide a
common ground for our understanding of shared cultures. These give young people
a sense of belonging, of pride and of intellectual investment. The knowledge of
the past also brings with it new rewards, for Kashmir is then not understood
only in terms of the Muslim vs army/police position. Buddhists in Leh have
provided with their view of the monasteries a new disposition towards our
understanding of Kashmir, as have the Hindus in Jammu. The problematic of
Chinese interference has led to the support of the military in Ladakh, where
the placement of sixty percent of the army has not created any disfavour. The Ladakh Autonomous Council has had a substantial
role in playing out the significance of democracy and federal structures. Every
last detail pertaining to the land under military or pastoralism has been spelt
out by them. It is this ethnographic specificity that leads us to engage with
knowledge production for practical use, for the benefit of people residing
there. Local communities feel the need to fan out, they feel the requirements
of being part of globalised economies. In the same way, they do believe that
their participation in these spaces is made possible by the nature of
habitation in relationship to travel, and the merchandise of ideas and
artifacts.
Said believes that the ethnographer in
constructing the discourse of the other then fabricates a society, a
community and a world view, which he/she
then authors and copyrights as a work to be read by other anthropologists. He
suggests that terrorism is also such a construct which is represented by an
army of journalists, social scientists and policy makers, who suggest that
terrorists should not be given any legitimating factors, or explanations about
why they take to terror. Since “the disproportion between state violence and
(so to speak) private violence is and always has been vast “ (347) there is a
marked degree of constructedness of the detachment, objectivity and scientific
perspective on the matter of the existence of terrorism. He draws from the work
of Eqbal Ahmed in the May June issue of MERIP reports, where Ahmed suggests
that terrorism has a source, the victim turns violent, he stops hitting his
head against the wall, and shoots whoever stands between him/her and the goal.
These acts of intimidation of innocent civilian populations happen because of
the role of the state, religion, protest/revolution, crime, pathology(346). Ahmed
says that people when they are not heard, and when there are no legal and
institutional means to recourse, turn to violence. (346)
One of the things we need to understand is
that people see their mode of hitting out against the State as a way of
expressing their grief. The problem does not go away, but it can be resolved
through dialogue. And much of dialogue theory is dependent on the art of
listening.
Many of the people who have participated in
movements that support Kashmiri Muslims, represent those who believe that where
there is no dialogue, let rupture occur. However, Kashmiri Pandits appear like
Banquo’s ghosts, and will not be lost in the sands of time. Some of the most
moving memoirs have described the way their childhood friends turned against them,
or conversely, neighbours helped them
when they were hunted. The large vocabulary of prose about the displaced cannot
be represented as a case of a minority within a majority community in Kashmir,
which has lost a battle. B.N Sadhu argues that the Kashmiri Pandits cannot
return, because they have lost everything, and will be treated as refugees and
be even more vulnerable. He had to lose his house when the panic sales were
forced on them as a community in 1989. A house of four storeys, opposite Medical
College in Srinagar, which was worth a crore was summarily sold for fifteen
lakhs, so that they could buy a house in Jammu. Ten percent of the population
in Kashmir was Kashmiri Pandit, and forced to migrate, as an educated class,
having no land or trade. Sadhu says that
they collectively spend 250 crore, a
month, which if it had contributed to Kashmiri merchants, as it had done
previously, Kashmir would have been prosperous. Ankur Dutta describes the shops
that come up in the new suburbs, where middle class and upper class Kashmiri
Pandits have settled and shops sprout
providing them with the things they are
used to such as handicrafts, kangris, bakery products and specialised
vegetables from their cuisine. (Datta 2017:125)
Sadhu offers the well known sterotype that Kashmiri Muslims are majorly
involved in militancy, that they wander all over India, and present themselves
as migrants, keeping the profits of their trade, and bringing in millions of
rupees into their accounts, after every winter season. The government gives
them aid and benefits, while the Kashmiri Pandits as a salaried class, receive
no benefits. There is no documentation of their losses, the State has never
compensated them, the State has left them to suffer in the most decrepit condition
in rehabilitation camps and surburbs of cities. If resettlement of Kashmiri
Pandits is to occur, he asserts, then it
would have to be refugees from West Pakistan, or from Khistiwar, where too,
they have been summarily pushed out.
Ethnic cleansing is a phenomenon where the victims make new lives elsewhere,
and their memories are so painful, that they cannot return to their original
homes. By travelling across the subcontinent, and making their homes in various
parts of the country or abroad, the
Kashmiri Muslims are keeping safe houses and becoming entrenched in religious
places. Sadhu sees no possibility of reconciliation, as his personal losses
have been huge.
Yet,
we must remember Edward Said’s caution that the term terrorist is applied too
loosely and too often, without proof or cause. In an essay titled “The
Other Arab Muslims” he describes how men
and women adopt prescribed dress,
the reciting of Koranic verses, and
going to prayers, as ways by which they find comfort. To confuse them with Islamic
militants who throw bombs and kill people would indeed be unfair. ( Said 1995:
390-391)
“These comforts have always been available,
but now they are part of a more general and ambitious process of intellectual
and political self questioning. What is modernity for a Muslim? What is our
heritage (turath)? Who has and ought to have authority? These are major
epistemological problems that occupy a lot of intellectuals and scholars, even
though their equivalent among the populace are a much less finicky and more
obvious sort of behaviour.” ( ibid :391)
The Himalayas have always been the marker for subcontinental
identity. Varieties of races and people have lived in its hinterlands, and
their regenerative dispositions have coloured the debates on rivers, forests
and modes of livelihood. As the nation state becomes reified, regardless of
political party, the impetus is towards industrialisation and consumer culture.
Local communities find that their holy mountains are punctured by dams which
then become an electricity generating resource. The people become increasingly
impoverished as the resources are taken down to the plains. This estrangement
from their own rivers and mountains becomes a source of anxiety. Artisanal
communities are represented as proletarianised. As in Palestine, the cannon ball State now demands recognition of
its priorities. Religious fundamentalism is one response to the forms of
alienation that arise. As the poem, by Aga Shahid, Country Without A Post Office, represents, the voices of intellectuals
become symptomatic of the freedoms that are taken away from people. In the
Universities, discourses on freedom and rights become primary. This too becomes
a constellation of duties towards protecting human rights and civil liberties.
As a result, the coercive arm of the state becomes ever present as the year
long struggle in JNU and Hyderabad showed in 2016. Said argues that we have to
look at the scale of violence by the state, and the protest movements that
arise in response to that violence. To confuse the two as equivalent would be
immensely strategic, and the role of the crowd in revolution has to be
analysed. What constitutes a crowd, and is revolution born from the coming
together of people in dramatic situations of conflict which are governed by the
values that they see as being destroyed without explanation or method? A
Kashmiri merchant said, (personal communication 15th January 2017)
“I was in class 2 in 1989. Though Muslim,
by birth, I was immensely close to the Pandits. We were Pandits ourselves,
converted to Islam by a Muslim saint who came from Hamdan in Iran, four hundred
years ago. We lived with Pandit families, my school was run by a Panditji. We
sang Vande Mantram in school, without difficulty. I am an Indian. When the
troubles started, both Muslims and Hindus were killed in ’89. The gun does not
distinguish between religions or communities.
I went to school one morning, and found it
was locked. I went to my friends houses, Rakesh and Ankush, and found their
doors locked too. I could not understand it. My father put me in a good school,
but the year was almost done. I was allowed to sit for the exams, but told
whatever the result I would have to repeat a year. So I lost a year. In every
class, I would find myself older than the other children. There was so much
cross fire on the way to school, that my father put me in a school across the
road. Then, when I passed class 9, I left
my studies and joined my father’s business.
We are Muslims, but we are Pandits too. So
we cannot be separated from our past. We want to see our neighbours again, when
they say that they will repatriate people, they bring in people we do not know.
We want to see the families we knew so well again, the people whom we shared
festivals with. Even today, there are communities of Hindus, Muslims,
Christians, Buddhists, living side by side. Those who want to kill do so
because they are illiterate, or because they have been given money. Or because
they have been brainwashed by Pakistan. They are visible, we are not, because
we don’t come out into the street. We live with teachers, professors,
philosophers…because we are not activists for Islamists, the radicals call us
police informers. It is very painful for us, because to be told that we are
separate is hard, and then to be told that we are equal to them, separatists
and militants is unbearable. We suffer a lot, there are many like us. I don’t
know what the solution is, but I do believe that if we can live peacefully
together we can progress a lot. Perhaps what has changed most since I was a
child, was the working months outside Kashmir extended from two months to seven
months, for the plain reason that there was no work in Kashmir. If tourism
returns with peace, we would have the chance to move out of our houses after
dark, which is now no longer possible in Kashmir, we would be able to go to see
films, have some kind of recreation after a hard day’s work.”
In this narrative, (personal
conversation, conducted 12th to 15 January
2017) we see that the rupture is major, and that the possibilities of
healing lie in those who have experiences which are tactile and memorable of
shared lives. Hybridisation, therefore is one of the key ways in which we
understand social reality as providing us windows into survival. Homogenisation
is arid, since it creates boundaries and walls, not allowing for symbiosis and
breathing. Sometimes, the idea that people exist only in terms of their
labelling is difficult for sociologists to accept. It is when we actually
listen to people’s stories as individuals, that we can methodologically come to
terms with the generalising principle, which abstracts from these lives. The
nomad returns home, but it is for feasts, meeting relatives, for picnics and
outings, for merry making and rituals. The real world confronts him in its
patient unfolding, from day to day, a stranger in the midst of strangers in
temple towns, or in a street next to the
synagogue in Mattancherry, and the money made is returned to the boss,
sometimes a close kin, while the Kashmiri merchant returns to his home after
the long winter is over.
Exile, however, is much more cataclysmic.
Rahul Pandita (2013)in his autobiographical narrative, shows us how deep this
distress is, how dehumanising. Every day
is spent in remembrance of loss. Edward
Said remarks in The Question of Palestine
that the Palestinians never acquiesced to the loss of territory. He asserts
that the right to return to the homes from which they were pushed out from was
legitimate. By Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
everyone had a right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of
each state. Similarly, they have the right to leave any country, including
their own, and to return to their home country. (47) By the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) he argues, these rights have
“been accepted as a document carrying the unique force of a unanimous United
Nations General Assembly vote (with only five abstentions). Its Article 12
states
2. Everyone shall be free to leave any
country, including his own.
3. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of
the right to enter his own country. (Question, 48)
The first UN General Assembly resolution
_Number 194 – affirming the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and
property was passed on December 11, 1948. It has been repassed no less than twenty-eight times since that first date.” ( Said
1980:48)
Yet, in a compelling piece of prose, Said
shows us, that the good intentions of the UN not withstanding, the Palestinian-Zionist
conflict is embedded in their mutual and existentialist relations. ( ibid 49)
We may speak of the Kashmiri Pandits in the same breath, in their existing
relationship to Kashmiri Muslims, where they too have become a “present absent”
one must be able to discriminate between an invading, dispossessing, and
displacing political presence and the presence it invades, displaces and
dispossesses.
“The two are not equal, nor in the end is
one ever going to prevail over and definitively dominate the other. For Zionism
to perpetuate a political, juridical, and epistemological system whose
immediate and constantly renewed and ever even long-term goal is to keep
Palestine and the Palestinians out is therefore, something, I believe, to be
opposed and subject to serious
analyses.” (ibid 49)
The idea that Kashmir similarly will succumb to separatism and
militancy, or tribalism and martial domination of the nation state, is equally
devoid of reason, for if moderates and Pandits were subject to acts of
genocide, and chilling death, then the need for documentation becomes only more
necessary. In his Introductory essay, Edward Said shows us in “The Politics of
Dispossession” (1995), that in the end
of a short period of subjugation, the Palestinian became colonised wage labour
to Israeli production units. (1995 xxxix) After 1967, they became curiously
passive, indecisive, unsure about their goal (ibid 27) The cause existed, but
the vacillations came at a price, and the indistinction between foe and ally became
a threat to the quest for freedom, resulting in guerrilla warfare and the
brutality of the Israeli soldier. ( ibid 28) Buber’s call for a land of two
peoples was well intentioned, but it was Begin who was given the Peace Prize by the Nobel committee in 1978 for no known
reason. (ibid 44) The power of the US, it’s politicians, it’s scribes, it’s
armies in the fate of the Middle East was huge, deciding the futures of
millions of unknown people fending for themselves in the war torn middle east, with Noam Chomsky,
according to Said, being the single
vocal non partisan voice. ( ibid 41) The UN in the mid 1970s described Zionism
as a form of racism. Occupation by war
meant an engineered binationality, as the demographic proportion of Israelis
grew, and displacement increased. (ibid 45)
Digital activism that spills out into the
streets is one of the most interesting aspects of post modern societies. The
PLO, functioning from Tunis brought into play the most terrible circumstances
of its right to war, but in the end was domesticated by the peace processes,
it’s recognition by the UN, and the role of Yasser Arafat in explaining the
processes of it’s own constitution. Sometimes institutional measures legitimate
conditions of war and the humiliations of surrender. Jerusalem, the city with
it’s long chequered and violent past is a hybrid form of co-existence, and map
making has always depended on these mutual forms of understanding, regardless
of the coercive aspects of maintaining borders and boundaries. (Montefiori
2010)
Dialogue has no mediators, it exists in
dyadic form, with all the embarrassment of mutual failures, and the will to
praxis. It depends on memory, and on forgiveness, and constant interaction,
without hostility. The grammar of dialogue is dependent too, on the assertion
of errors and misconception which are duly acknowledged. The State has
professional mediators who in times of crises do extend their know how, but it
is the musicians, the artists, the novelists who are able to cross borders and define
how the peace process must take place. Buber’s notion of Dialogue draws
substantially from Theatre, and from the juxtaposition of historical and sacred
narratives.
In the essay On Polarity: Dialogue After The Theater Martin Buber discusses
opposition as a premise of dialogue. It is not the catatonic stance of Creon and Antigone, the premise of which is
continuing death. For Buber, poetry and drama together produce abstraction, and
the theatre creates a space, where delineation is marked, but osmosis occurs
“There they stood, the tragic pair, like Creon and Antigone and had neither
right nor wrong, neither guilt nor innocence, had nothing except their being,
their polarity, their destiny.” Buber in
Friedman ed 1969:57)
Buber explains the osmosis of actor and
audience, of perceiving and interpretation, as an act of continuous dialogue,
which is the essence of appearance and reality. As actors we put ourselves in
the place of the other, we perceive reality as it unfolds through action, we
cannot remain detached.
“Being and counterbeing: but they were not
set in opposition to each other as the two in the drama who now appeared to be
enclosed in a unity; they did not carry out their polarity as those did. Each
persevered in its calling, the one in happening, the other in perservering. And this
perservering seemed to be no less notable than that happening. For it did not
behave with that well meaning neutrality that the observer commonly brings to the observed. Rather it bore its
oppositeness in itself, in some way expressed, confirmed it; and not just one
part of that which had been divided in two but the whole reality over against
it. Therefore it sided with no party; it as, as it were, itself a party which
met those two as a unity. But what a strange party which was nothing but
perception! Or perhaps still more than this? Yet, something else was there:
confirmation. And also lived through the happenings on the stage, but of the
contradiction, the destiny, the decision. There stood the two in the fury of their
nature; there the fate worked itself out between them; and here sat the
audience and confirmed strengthened, affirmed, perceiving the fate, it willed
what it experienced. This awareness was a proclamation. Where had I already
seen something like this? I recalled; it was a crude early Greek vase-picture
that shows the souls. Coarsely as it is painted, one sees; he does not take
sides but his will follows the decision of the scales; he wills what must
happen, and his will is a fanfare. “ (ibid 60)
Caught in the words of Daniel, the emissary
of the theatrical trope, Buber presents us identification and ananke, or the
destiny which is irrational and unresisting, as two ways of understanding how
history unfolds. Whose side are we on, as the battle proceeds? Objectivity lies in perception, but also the shifting
nature of action, will and reality. Within this imaginary frame, Buber also
delineates what is perception, and awareness. There is detachment and yet, a
sudden realisation, or a naming.
“And what sort of an appearance was that
there that so severely and totally admonished me? Which was the deeper reality,
the act or the intermission? And what sort of a power was that which drew the
men out of the broken, mediated, blunted polarity of the tragedy? And who were
they who ‘acted’ this essential reality? What did they do when they acted it? “
(ibid 62),
One only needs to remember the film Hyder,
where in the terms of Hamlet, we see the protagonist caught between the family,
the police, the informers, the puppet state, the players and the representative
forms of love both oedipal and obsessive. For Buber, action and representation
are conjoined languages, and it is love and respect that draws us into a mutual
existence, both solidary as much as it is epiphany. ( ibid 62-65)
It is in theatre, which reduplicates
existence, but in controlled conditions of space as abstract, and language that
is dialogic, that Buber states his aphorism,
“The polarity which man experiences in
himself wills unity. And unity is not now or ever something which is “there”;
unity is that which eternally becomes. Not out of the world; out of our action
comes unity. The poet finds it where
word and world engender in him: in his work; there he grounds all duality in
unity. But out of each work polarity arises for him anew, renewed. Rejuvenated,
sharpened, deepened, it summons him to new deed.” (ibid 74)
For Buber, this arises from self awareness
(ibid 62) from sexuality and love, which express one another, as Indra who
embraces everything. “He knows the pole of exuberant strength and that of
weakness, that of freedom and that of independence, that of concentration and
that of abandon, that of guilt and that of purity, that of form and that of
formlessness: he recognises them all in the whorl because he knows them in
himself.” It is this merging of microcosm and macrocosm then that makes the I
Thou relationship so utterly meaningful for the work of Dialogue. It is the
metaphor of creative light in the theatre, that makes the unity of polarity possible.
The light makes abstractions visible, and can manipulate density and opacity.(
ibid 82) Speech, or poetry, establishes a space unique in theatre, where the
dance or the action becomes transmuted and translateable, the I and Thou is
bridged as in totemism. ( ibid 84) The actors in becoming go beyond their
polarities, their distinctions,
“So the actors did not yet know themselves
as ‘looked at.’ They were players, but not players of a spectacle; they played
to benefit the staring crowd but not to please them. They were “in a state of
innocence,” just like the man who loves according to his impulse and not
according to the image he produces in the eyes of others”. ( ibid 85) Buber
then suggests that the spectator who knows the appearance as different from his
reality but is absorbed in it, while reading from it, or into it, for his own
purposes corresponds with the actor,
“who is no longer overcome by the transformation but is familiar with it and
knows how to make us of it.” ( ibid 85) Yet we know that homologies are based
on internal correspondences, but yet, we
recognise the distinction. As for the abstraction of love and sex, the two are
mutually and historically in relation, as theatre is to drama. However,
“One must understand, indeed, that though
love certainly appears later in the history of man, it cannot be derived from
sex. In the truth of being love is the cosmic and eternal power to which sex is
sent as a sign and a means it employs in order that out of it love may be
reborn on earth. This is the way of the spirit in all things. “ (ibid 86)
For us to understand how earth and people
cohabit, we need to understand both memory and loss. Within this parchment of
life and extinction, so readily brought to our attention, when ethnic cleansing
takes place, Hannah Arendt’s work on citizenship and autonomy is immensely
significant.
Arendt believed that bureaucracy could be
totalising and conscienceless. She also foregrounded autonomy and choice as
basic human virtues. She writes of Eichmann in
Jerusalem (1964) that his crime was that of carrying out his orders as a
law abiding citizen of the Third Reich. Rationality which confuses means and
ends, which forgets the importance of ‘for the sake of’ to emphasise ‘in order
to’, degrades everything so that ends themselves no longer become safe. It is
this totalitarian idealism that Arendt is most afraid of:
“Whenever we hear of grandiose aims in
politics such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed
forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for
democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking (Arendt 1968:79)
Visvanathan 2007:15)
For Arendt, the fixity of roles becomes
frightening, and masks are the volatile spaces, where flexibility becomes
possible. (Kateb 1984:10) It is this which the Kashmiri Pandits, living as
refugees in their own country begin to experience. In the derelict Kashmiri
Pandit camp, in Delhi, a man speaks on behalf of 250 families from Uri and
Baramullah, (personal communication
January 21st 2017)
“The problem of Kashmir arises out of the
four types of politicians: the Separatist, the National politician representing
the Centre, the Local politican arising out of the region, and the Hurriyat. Each has opened a shop, and
that shop is the trade in the currency of death and war, from which a great deal of money can be
made. Their children study abroad, they have no stakes in the every day turmoil
that ordinary Kashmiris face. We are afraid to send our children out, for they
may die. So neither can they work in the fields with us, nor can they go to
school. For four months we were forced to stay inside our homes for fear of
army shoot outs. For every ten Kashmiri, Hindu or Muslim, there is one
terrorist, and yet everyone is punished equally. We have to leave our fields
unploughed. We were brought to Delhi by the Army in winter, and left in this
open field. We cannot survive in the dirt and degradation, our children cannot
go out. At night we are afraid because any one can enter the Relief Camp. The
Army has said we can return when the winter lessens in March. Here, they have
supplied us with tents, electric wiring for a single bulb, and handpumps for
water. We are farmers, we cannot live in such terrible conditions, and what
ever happens we will return to Kashmir. The wealthy can leave Kashmir, and buy
houses in Jammu or Delhi. We cannot do that. We live by our farming, of rice,
potatoes, apples. Here, the young men, twenty or so, go to Subzi Mandi, Old
Delhi, and pack apples in crates. They each make about 400 rupees or so, as
each crate fetches them twenty rupees. It is hard, slow work, and takes a lot
of time. Each apple has to be wrapped carefully in paper and then placed on a
bed of leaves and grass. With this the cereals and lentils are bought, and each
family in the camp, receives its share.
We are not used to living in this terrible condition, and don’t want publicity,
to be photographed or named, as our sons must return to college, and our
daughters must hope to marry, so if it becomes known that we have lived like
beggars in Delhi, then our humiliation would be hard to handle. We are educated
people, we know that we are human, that religions are sometimes divisive”
In delineating the difference between
political functionaries, the speaker from a camp in Delhi is communicating that
Kashmiri instability is a consequence of action, which is violating in nature
to the known co-existence of communities to which people wish to return. George
Kateb states.
“Arendt writes that plurality has a two
fold character-equality and distinction. If political actors were not equal,
they could not understand each other and work together. If they were not
distinct from each other, they would not need words or deeds to make themselves
understood; they would not have the inestimable opportunity for communicating themselves rather than merely messages.
There could be no political world if individuals were all of the same mind and
saw things from the same perspective. Reality is guaranteed by variety, whereas
when there is “prolongation or multiplication” of any one identity or
perspective, as in the household, reality is shadowy. “ (Kateb 1985: 14)
The public life of intellectuals thus
depends on their ability to speak out of an identity which is a play of
reality, uniqueness, and display of difference in opinions. Kateb again,
reinforces Arendt’s essentially lonely Philosophy of autonomy and choice,
“ He is real to himself only because he is
publicly real to others. Public life is a condition of both relation and
separation, it can be destroyed by too much closeness (unanimity or
brotherhood, for example) as well as by solitude, loneliness or isolation, or
by factional hostility or “pull and pressure and the tricks of cliques.” (ibid
15)
For Arendt, action and speech are closely
entwined. Political action can take many forms, once violence is excluded, of
which speech is the most dramatic form. Within the Barthesian mode, images are
as representative of narrative, and so Said’s work, The Question of Palestine
turns us to the graphic descriptions of how people view Zionism.
When we create parallels to explain
incidents or worldviews which are sharply different from one another, are
reasons are very simple: to make the unheard, the untold visible. Sometimes
acts of political violence are presented by individuals as fait accompli, but
the documentation of these lives is essential to our understanding of
secularism and democracy which are entailed in human rights charters. Faith and
longing inform the lives of ordinary people, and justice must serve them the
rights to life and livelihood regardless of their religion. Charity is not what
they seek, it is either compensation, rehabilitation or the return to order.
Whether border societies can be absorbed
in the platitudes of well wishers, hoping for co-existence, toleration, rights
and obligations, that is a problem that
each sociologist has to handle appropriately.
Inge Radford, in a handbook for the clergy
of oppositional denominations in Belfast, before the peace process argued that
community relations could be generated through interaction, and collective
responsibility. The first requirement is time, those who wish to enter into
dialogicity must have the time to interact and create spaces of mutual
understanding. The role of reservation is sometimes disputed, but
antisectarianism is thought to be one of the ways in which religious people can
actually confront one another with the premise that they will hear each other
out. A minority amongst a minority is possibly the most difficult of
circumstances, but the right to be an individual is fundamental. The right to
be human, is something worth fighting for. Inge communicates that anti
intimidation is a clause of great significance, particularly in the case of
mixed marriages. Similarly, those who work for the peace process, or actively
champion the rights of the ‘other’ often are threatened. Music, dancing and the
arts can provide a bridge building device, but contextually, where puritanical
fundamentalism prevails this may be hard to do. The question of justice and
rights is both a communitarian issue as well as an individual one. Where
moralities differ, justice and rights become interpreted through their
respective prism…. “implementation of justice and rights through their own
traditions’ point of view.” (Radford 1993: 39-42)
The hawks continually urge to war,
pacifists hope that citizens’ groups will reorganise their resources and draw
attention to the common human condition, where corporeality and spirit are simultaneously assuaged, by the common
platforms on which people converge. Sasanka Perera, in his “Violence and the
Burden of Memory” looks at architecture
and monuments in post civil war Sri Lanka
to remind us of the continual
losses that inform communities that once co-existed in the same environment. Is recognition of hierarchy, minoritarianism,
majoritarianism and conflict the only means to co-exist? The displaced farmers
from Uri and Barahmullah don’t think so. The first person to come out to greet
me was the Nihang, in his blue robes with beads and bracelets and the sheathed
kirpan. That long and detailed history of many religions, many sects is like a
hot breath on the present turbulence in a
beautiful valley, where traditions and crafts and agriculture are now
rendered nought by dams, punctured mountains and warring members who have been
socialised for seven decades in a particular way of thinking about Kashmiriyat.
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