Hartals have to be viewed in two separate contexts – as a reaction to atrocities, and as the only visible manifestation of waging a movement. And both have their reference points embedded deep in history and the concurrent colossal failure of the Kashmiri leadership of all hues.
In Kashmir, hartals as a purported statement of the public will gained overwhelming currency after the onset of militancy, and were the stock response to the numerous massacres of innocent people and casualties in encounters, apart from featuring as a permanent fixture on events of a specific nature and particular dates of the political calendar. In asking for suggestions for alternatives to hartal which it has almost turned into an exclusive preserve of its own, the Hurriyat faction led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani blurs an important distinction. Wittingly or unwittingly, it clubs legitimate reaction to killings and atrocities with ways to articulate the aspirations of the masses. It is here that Mr. Geelani confounds the confusion and glosses over unpalatable realities in a subtle, insidious way so that the public have no clue of having been hoodwinked. Howsoever offended the separatists may feel at being reminded of it, the fact is that the present unconscionably massive presence of the armed forces on Kashmiri soil has its origins directly in the eruption of militancy. The siege, or occupation, as Mr. Geelani would like to call it, by the Indian military had not been so intensely palpable at the general level in the preceding decades. (Indeed, the very ingress of the Indian military machine into Kashmir was the fallout of an earlier Pakistani misadventure involving the so-called tribal militias, but that is another subject, and debate.) And no oversees “moral and diplomatic” support, no inflow of deadly arms, no thundering rhetoric, no religious cant, would have given, post-1989, the separatists’ slogan the massive boost that it received from the bloody blundering of the Indian troops. The separatists’ campaign has not been sustained so much by soundness of political vision and rational thinking as by the brutal, savage and mindless onslaught on civilians by the Indian military. But for New Delhi’s repeated gross and violent abuse of Kashmiris, separatism would not have been even a footnote in history. Mr. Geelani and his ilk must dread the day that India finally sees sense and begins to recompense Kashmiris for the terrible wounds inflicted on them and call to account the criminals and murderers responsible.
In the meantime, however, the bloody footprints of the Indian troops over every inch of Kashmir serve admirably as a rallying point in place of a cogent, sensible and coherent response to a highly complex political circumstance and question. To Mr. Geelani’s great relief, no one seems to question the self-destructive impulse of building political philosophies around an intellectual and moral void. Intellectual, because an understanding and acceptance of the role of international power play cannot be discounted in Kashmir; and moral, because any response to this challenge cannot be devoid of taking responsibility for the impact it has on the present and future generations – the tens of thousands of lives lost being just one feature. Any response that fails to neutralize the crippling foreign power influence in the region and to foster generations of Kashmiris capable of asserting their self-reliant identity by force of their character is intellectually and morally bankrupt. In this context, the armed uprising and the ensuing political campaign, with their overriding emotive content, were bound to fall far short of the exacting demands of a drive towards liberation in the true sense.
Mr. Geelani may claim to have a divine mandate in pursuing and supporting a course where people are inevitable to be sent to their deaths, but individuals with less presumptuous credentials are liable to argue for a far more benign and constructive mode with not so permanently fatal consequences. That such forces were never allowed to have the upper hand here is Kashmir’s abiding tragedy wherein is rooted the bloodshed of the past twenty years and more.
Given the peculiar circumstances it is in, Kashmir’s tryst with liberation has to be more in the philosophical sense than the commonly-understood political sense. It is a great pity that despite the elaborate documentation of conflicts and their results worldwide, the leadership here confines the immense human possibilities of Kashmiris within narrow parochial boundaries. A greater sin than defining the human spirit in colours of nations and borders cannot be imagined. Had the seeds of Kashmiri emancipation been sown with this lesson of the thousands of years of recorded human history, the dead would not litter our streets, nor hartals be needed to make ourselves heard.
Postscript: It is too late in the day to turn the clock back– the deadly momentum gained over the past twenty years cannot be easily arrested, unless a messiah unafraid of self-righteous constructs dares to rise and lead.
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