Kashmir Observer
July 19 2009

Is There Life After Democracy?

By Arundhati Roy

[Adapted from Roy’s Introduction to her new book of collected essays,
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, published last
month by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) we reproduce an excerpt giving the
authors assessment of the democratic exercise in the troubled state of
Kashmir]

..Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of
Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is
hard-core. It cuts across every section of the establishment’including
the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost twenty years old now, and has
claimed about seventy thousand lives. Tens of thousands have been
tortured, several thousand have `disappeared’, women have been raped
and many thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the
Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The
United States had about one hundred and sixty-five thousand
active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The
Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed
militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military
domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military
occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in
Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged
state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed
uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely
honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for
India’s Deep State. Intelligence Agencies have created political
parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed
political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide
what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the
Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate
from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the
Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent
uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied
soldiers and policemen ‘ who fired straight into the crowds, killing
scores of people ‘ and thronged the streets. From early morning to
late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of `Azadi! Azadi!’
(`Freedom! Freedom!’). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting, `Azadi!
Azadi!’ Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers,
carpet sellers ‘ everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted
`Azadi! Azadi!’ The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were
nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in
mainstream public opinion in India. [23] 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-at-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 arrest of hundreds of people. The Jama
Masjid was closed for Friday prayers for an unprecedented seven weeks
at a stretch.

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 was 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 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-at-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their
minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of
democracy ‘ who practically live in TV studios when there are
elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast, exit poll
and minor percentile swing in the vote share’talked about what
elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop
deployment. (An armed soldier for every twenty 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 poll. 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. [24]

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 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.

But only weeks after the elections it was back to business as
usual. The protests and demands for Azadi and the summary killings by
security forces have begun again. Newspapers report that militancy is
on the rise.

Unsurprisingly, the poor turnout in the subsequent general elections
did not elicit much comment.

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, re-incarnated Russia, 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 one hundred and fifty million Muslims who have been
brutalized, humiliated and marginalised. 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. Its economy is still ticking
over, and while its neighbours 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. ~ 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 Celsius. Of the hundreds who have
died there, many have died just from the cold’from frostbite and
sunburn. 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 human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose
governments sit on the UN 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 in the subcontinent, and eventually severe
drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. [25] 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. ~ While I read `Listening to Grasshoppers’ to a tense
audience packed into a university auditorium in Istanbul (tense
because words like unity, progress, genocide and Armenian tend to
anger the Turkish authorities when they are uttered close together), I
could see Rakel Dink, Hrant Dink’s widow, sitting in the front row,
crying the whole way through. When I finished, she hugged me and said,
`We keep hoping. Why do we keep hoping?’

We, she said. Not you.
The words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, sung so hauntingly by Abida Parveen,
came to me: nahin nigah main manzil to justaju hi sahinahin wisaal
mayassar to arzu hi sahi
I tried to translate them for her (sort of):
If dreams are thwarted, then yearning must take their place
If reunion is impossible, then longing must take its place
You see what I meant about poetry?

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