Kashmir - Armi e minacce, così muore la valle incantata - Arundhati Roy
L'India festeggia il suo 73° anno di indipendenza dal dominio britannico e
bambini vestiti di stracci si fanno largo nel traffico di Delhi per vendere
bandiere e souvenir con la scritta: "Mera Bharat Mahan".
La mia India è grande. Onestamente, è difficile sentirsi grandi in questo
momento, perché sembra proprio che il nostro governo abbia perso ogni scrupolo.
La settimana scorsa ha violato lo Statuto speciale con cui l'ex Stato principesco
di Jammu e Kashmir aderì all'India ne11947. Prima, però, a mezzanotte del 4
agosto, ha trasformato l'intero Kashmir in un gigantesco campo di prigionia: 7
milioni di kashmiri sono stati costretti a barricarsi in casa, le connessioni
internet sono state interrotte e i telefoni isolati.
Il 5 agosto, il ministro dell'Interno ha proposto in Parlamento di revocare
l'articolo 370 della Costituzione, che stabilisce gli obblighi derivanti dallo
Statuto speciale. La sera dopo, la Legge di Riorganizzazione di Jammu e Kashmir
è stata approvata. La legge priva lo Stato di Jammu e Kashmir del suo status
speciale. Lo priva anche della sua qualità di Stato e lo divide in due
territori dell'Unione. Il primo, Jammu e Kashmir, sarà amministrato
direttamente da New Delhi, anche se continuerà ad avere un'assemblea
legislativa locale.
Il secondo, il Ladakh, sarà amministrato da Delhi e non avrà un'assemblea
legislativa. I cittadini indiani potranno acquistare dei terreni e stabilirsi
nella loro nuova proprietà. I nuovi territori, sostiene il governo, sono
"aperti al mercato". Che cosa questo possa significare per la fragile
ecologia himalayana del Ladakh e del Kashmir, terre dei grandi ghiacciai, dei
laghi d'alta quota e dei cinque grandi fiumi, non è preso in considerazione.
Di fatto, "aperti al mercato" può significare anche insediamenti
in stile israeliano e trasferimenti di popolazione, come è accaduto in Tibet.
Per i kashmiri questa è un'antica paura: il loro incubo ricorrente di essere
spazzati via da un'ondata di indiani che vogliono una casetta nella loro valle
silvestre potrebbe facilmente avverarsi. In mezzo a queste volgari
celebrazioni, tuttavia, ciò che risuona più forte è il silenzio mortale delle
strade pattugliate e bloccate del Kashmir e dei suoi abitanti intrappolati e
umiliati, circondati dal filo spinato, spiati dai droni, costretti a un totale
blackout delle comunicazioni.
Che in quest'era dell'informazione un governo possa con tanta facilità
isolare un'intera popolazione per giorni e giorni ci fa comprendere quanto sia
grave il momento. Il Kashmir, dicono spesso, è il lavoro incompiuto della
"Partizione". Se la Partizione, con l'orribile violenza che provocò,
è una profonda ferita aperta nella memoria, la violenza di quei tempi, e degli
anni successivi, sia in India che in Pakistan, è dovuta tanto all'assimilazione
che alla Partizione. In India, il progetto di assimilazione, definito
"costruzione della nazione", ha significato che tutti gli anni dal
1947, l'esercito indiano è stato schierato all'interno dei confini dell'India
contro il "suo popolo". In Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur,
Hyderabad e Assam.
Il processo di assimilazione è costato la vita a decine di migliaia di
persone. Quello che si sta realizzando oggi, su entrambi i lati del confine
dell'ex Stato di Jammu e Kashmir, è l'incompiuto processo dell'assimilazione.
Oggi il Kashmir è forse una delle zone più densamente militarizzate del mondo,
se non la più militarizzata in assoluto. Più di mezzo milione di soldati sono
stati schierati contro ciò che lo stesso esercito ora ammette essere solo un
manipolo di "terroristi".
Ciò che l'India ha fatto in Kashmir negli ultimi trent'anni è
imperdonabile. Si ritiene che nel conflitto siano state uccise circa 70.000
persone, tra civili, militanti e militari. Migliaia di persone sono
"scomparse" e altre decine di migliaia sono passate nelle camere di
tortura disseminate nella valle come una rete di piccole Abu Ghraib. Negli
ultimi anni, centinaia di adolescenti sono stati accecati dall'uso di fucili a
pallini, la nuova arma preferita dalle forze di sicurezza.
La maggior parte dei militanti che oggi opera nella valle sono giovani
kashmiri, armati e addestrati sul posto. Fanno quello che fanno sapendo che dal
momento in cui prendono in mano un fucile è improbabile che la loro
"durata di conservazione" sia superiore a sei mesi. Ogni volta che un
"terrorista" viene ucciso, i kashmiri si presentano a decine di
migliaia per seppellire un giovane che venerano come uno shahid, un martire.
Nel primo mandato di Narendra Modi come premier, la durezza del suo
approccio ha esacerbato la violenza in Kashmir. Ma ora, a due mesi dal secondo
mandato, il governo Modi ha giocato la carta più pericolosa di tutte. Ha
gettato un fiammifero acceso in una polveriera. Se questo non bastasse, il modo
vile e disonesto in cui l'ha fatto è vergognoso.
Nell'ultima settimana di luglio, con vari pretesti, sono stati trasferiti
in Kashmir altri 45.000 militari. Il pretesto più grande è stato che c'era una
minaccia "terrorista" pachistana per l'Amarnath Yatra, il
pellegrinaggio annuale durante il quale centinaia di migliaia di devoti indù si
recano in Kashmir. Il E di agosto, alcune reti televisive indiane hanno
annunciato di aver trovato lungo il percorso del pellegrinaggio una mina con il
marchio dell'esercito pachistano. I12 agosto, il governo ha chiesto a tutti i
pellegrini di lasciare la valle. Sabato 3 agosto i militari avevano occupato
l'intera valle. A mezzanotte di domenica, i kashmiri erano costretti a
chiudersi in casa e tutte le reti di comunicazione avevano smesso di
funzionare.
L'8 agosto, quattro giorni dopo l'inizio del coprifuoco, Narendra Modi è
apparso in televisione. Sembrava un'altra persona. Era scomparsa l'abituale
aggressività e il tono irritante e accusatorio. Parlava, invece, con la
tenerezza di una giovane madre. La voce gli tremava e gli occhi gli brillavano
di lacrime mentre elencava gli innumerevoli benefici che sarebbero piovuti sul
popolo dell'ex Stato di Jammu e Kashmir, adesso governato direttamente da Nuova
Delhi. Ha evocato le meraviglie della modernità indiana come se stesse educando
dei contadini dei tempi feudali usciti da una macchina del tempo. Ha parlato di
come i film di Bollywood sarebbero stati nuovamente girati nella loro valle
verdeggiante.
Non ha spiegato però perché ai kashmiri fosse imposto il coprifuoco e il
blocco delle comunicazioni. Non ha spiegato perché questa decisione sia stata
presa senza consultarli. Non ha detto come un popolo che vive sotto
un'occupazione militare possa godere dei grandi doni della democrazia indiana.
Quando tutta questa farsa finirà, perché deve finire, la violenza si riverserà
inevitabilmente dal Kashmir in India. Sarà usata per infiammare l'ostilità
contro i musulmani, che sono già demonizzati, ghettizzati, spinti nei gradini
inferiori della scala economica e, con terrificante regolarità, linciati.
Lo Stato ne approfitterà per stringere il cerchio anche su altri -
attivisti, avvocati, artisti, studenti, intellettuali, giornalisti - che hanno
protestato. Il pericolo arriverà da molte direzioni. L'organizzazione più
potente dell'India, l'estrema destra nazionalista indù Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, o R.S.S.S., con più di 600.000 membri tra cui Modi e molti dei suoi
ministri, ha una milizia "volontaria" addestrata, ispirata alle
Camicie Nere di Mussolini.
Ogni giorno che passa, la R.S.S.S. avanza in ogni istituzione dello Stato:
ha già raggiunto un punto in cui più o meno è lo Stato stesso. Intellettuali e
accademici sono una delle loro maggiori preoccupazioni. A maggio, la mattina
dopo che il partito Bharatiya Janata aveva vinto le elezioni generali, Ram
Madhav, segretario generale del partito ed ex portavoce del R.S.S.S., ha
scritto che gli "avanzi" dei "cartelli pseudo-secolar/liberali
che avevano un'influenza e una presa sproporzionate sull'establishment
intellettuale e politico del Paese... devono essere eliminati dal panorama
accademico, culturale e intellettuale del Paese".
Il 1° di agosto, in vista di questa "eliminazione", la già
draconiana Legge sulla prevenzione degli atti illegali è stata modificata. Un
emendamento ora consente al governo di definire qualsiasi individuo come
terrorista senza seguire la procedura legale di una denuncia, di un atto
d'accusa, di un processo e di una condanna. Mentre il mondo sta a guardare,
prende forma l'architettura del fascismo indiano.
(La Repubblica, 17 agosto 2019 - Traduzione di Luis E. Moriones)
The Silence Is the Loudest
Sound - Arundhati Roy
As India celebrates her 73rd year of independence from
British rule, ragged children thread their way through traffic in Delhi,
selling outsized national flags and souvenirs that say, “Mera Bharat Mahan.” My
India is Great. Quite honestly, it’s hard to feel that way right now, because
it looks very much as though our government has gone rogue.
Last week it unilaterally breached the
fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession, by which the former
Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947. In preparation
for this, at midnight on Aug. 4, it turned all of Kashmir into a giant prison camp.
Seven million Kashmiris were barricaded in their homes, internet connections
were cut and their phones went dead.
On Aug. 5,
India’s home minister proposed in Parliament that Article 370 of the Indian Constitution (the
article that outlines the legal
obligations that arise from the Instrument of
Accession) be overturned. The opposition parties rolled over. By the
next evening the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act, 2019 had been passed by
the upper as well as the lower house.
The act
strips the State of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status — which includes
its right to have its own constitution and its own flag. It also strips it of
statehood and partitions it into two Union territories. The first, Jammu and
Kashmir, will be administered directly by the central government in New Delhi,
although it will continue to have a locally elected legislative assembly but
one with drastically reduced powers. The second, Ladakh, will be administered directly from New Delhi and
will not have a legislative assembly.
The passing of the act was welcomed in Parliament by
the very British tradition of desk-thumping. There was a distinct whiff of
colonialism in the air. The masters were pleased that a recalcitrant colony had
finally, formally, been brought under the crown. For its own good. Of course.
Indian citizens can now buy land and settle in their
new domain. The new territories are open for business. Already India’s richest
industrialist, Mukesh Ambani, of Reliance Industries, has promised several
“announcements.” What this might mean to the fragile Himalayan ecology of
Ladakh and Kashmir, the land of vast glaciers, high-altitude lakes and five
major rivers, barely bears consideration.
The dissolution of the legal entity of the state also
means the dissolution of Article 35A, which granted residents rights and privileges that
made them stewards of their own territory. So, “being open for business,” it
must be clarified, can also include Israeli-style settlements and Tibet-style
population transfers.
For
Kashmiris, in particular, this has been an old, primal fear. Their recurring
nightmare (an inversion of the one being peddled by Donald Trump) of being swept
away by a tidal wave of triumphant Indians wanting a little home in their
sylvan valley could easily come true.
As news of the new act spread, Indian nationalists of
all stripes cheered. The mainstream media, for the most part, made a low,
sweeping bow. There was dancing in the streets and horrifying misogyny on the
internet. Manohar Lal Khattar, chief minister of the state of Haryana,
bordering Delhi, while speaking about the improvement he had brought about in
the skewed gender ratio in his state, joked: “Our Dhakarji used to say
we will bring in girls from Bihar. Now they say Kashmir is open, we can bring
girls from there.”
Amid these vulgar celebrations the loudest sound,
however, is the deathly silence from Kashmir’s patrolled,
barricaded streets and its approximately seven million caged,
humiliated people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by drones, living
under a complete communications blackout. That in this age of information, a
government can so easily cut off a whole population from the rest of the world
for days at a time, says something serious about the times we are heading
toward.
Kashmir, they often say, is the unfinished business of
the “Partition.” That word suggests that in 1947, when the British drew their famously careless
border through the subcontinent, there was a “whole” that was
then partitioned. In truth, there was no “whole.” Apart from the territory of
British India, there were hundreds of sovereign principalities, each of which
individually negotiated the terms on which it would merge with either India or
Pakistan. Many that did not wish to merge were
forced to.
While Partition and the horrifying violence that it
caused is a deep, unhealed wound in the memory of the subcontinent, the
violence of those times, as well as in the years since, in India and Pakistan,
has as much to do with assimilation as it does with partition. In India the
project of assimilation, which goes under the banner of nation-building, has
meant that there has not been a single year since 1947 when the Indian Army has
not been deployed within India’s borders against its “own people.” The list is
long — Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Hyderabad, Assam.
The business of assimilation has been complicated and
painful and has cost tens of thousands of lives. What is unfolding today on
both sides of the border of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is the
unfinished business of assimilation.
What
happened in the Indian Parliament last week was tantamount to cremating
the Instrument of Accession.
It was a document with a complicated provenance that had been signed by a
discredited king, the Dogra Hindu King, Maharaja Hari Singh. His unstable,
tattered kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir lay on the fault lines of the new border
between India and Pakistan.
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The rebellions that had broken out against him in 1945
had been aggravated and subsumed by the spreading bush fires of Partition. In
the western mountain district of Poonch, Muslims, who were the majority, turned
on the Maharaja’s forces and on Hindu civilians. In Jammu, to the south, the
Maharaja’s forces assisted by troops borrowed from other princely states,
massacred Muslims. Historians and news reports of the time estimated that
somewhere between 70,000 and 200,000 were murdered in
the streets of the city, and in its neighboring districts.
Inflamed by
the news of the Jammu massacre, Pakistani “irregulars” swooped down from the
mountains of the North Western Frontier Province, burning and pillaging their
way across the Kashmir Valley. Hari Singh fled from Kashmir to Jammu from where
he appealed to Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister, for help. The
document that provided legal cover for the Indian Army to enter Kashmir was
the Instrument of Accession.
The Indian Army, with some help from local people,
pushed back the Pakistani “irregulars,” but only as far as the ring of
mountains on the edge of the valley. The former Dogra kingdom now lay divided
between India and Pakistan. The Instrument of Accession was meant to be ratified by a referendum to ascertain the will of
the people of Jammu and Kashmir. That promised referendum never took place. So
was born the subcontinent’s most intractable and dangerous political problem.
In the 72 years since then, successive Indian
governments have undermined terms of the Instrument of Accession until all that
was left of it was the skeletal structure. Now even that has been shot to hell.
It would be foolhardy to try to summarize the twists
and turns of how things have come to this. Let’s just say that it’s as
complicated and as dangerous as the games the United States played with its
puppet regimes in South Vietnam all through the 50s and 60s.
After a long
history of electoral manipulation, the watershed moment came in 1987 when New
Delhi flagrantly rigged the state elections. By 1989, the thus far mostly
nonviolent demand for self-determination grew into a full-throated freedom struggle.
Hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the streets only to be cut down in
massacre after massacre.
The Kashmir
valley soon thronged with militants, Kashmiri men from both sides of the
border, as well as foreign fighters, trained and armed by Pakistan and
embraced, for the most part, by the Kashmiri people. Once again, Kashmir was
caught up in the political winds that were blowing across the subcontinent — an
increasingly radicalized Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, quite foreign to
Kashmiri culture, and the fanatical Hindu nationalism that was on the rise in
India.
The first casualty of the uprising was the age-old
bond between Kashmir’s Muslims and its tiny minority of Hindus, known locally
as Pandits. When the violence began, according to the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh
Samiti, or the K.P.S.S., an organization run by Kashmiri Pandits, about 400
Pandits were targeted and murdered by militants. By the end of 1990,
according to a government estimate, 25,000 Pandit families had left the valley.
They lost their homes, their homeland and everything
they had. Over the years thousands more left — almost the entire population.
As the conflict continued, in addition to tens of thousands of Muslims, the
K.P.S.S. says 650 Pandits have been
killed in the conflict.
Since then,
great numbers of Pandits have lived in miserable refugee camps in Jammu city.
Thirty years have gone by, yet successive governments in New Delhi have not
tried to help them return home. They have preferred instead to keep them in
limbo, and stir their anger and understandable bitterness into a mephitic brew
with which to fuel India’s dangerous and extremely effective nationalistic
narrative about Kashmir. In this version, a single aspect of an epic tragedy is
cannily and noisily used to draw a curtain across the rest of the horror.
Today
Kashmir is one of the most or perhaps the most densely militarized zone in the world. More
than a half-million soldiers have been deployed to counter what the army itself
admits is now just a handful of “terrorists.” If there were any doubt earlier
it should be abundantly clear by now that their real enemy is the Kashmiri
people. What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is unforgivable.
An estimated 70,000 people, civilians, militants and security forces have been
killed in the conflict. Thousands have been
“disappeared,” and tens of thousands have passed through
torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu
Ghraibs.
Over the
last few years, hundreds of teenagers have been blinded by
the use of pellet-firing shotguns, the security establishment’s new weapon of
choice for crowd control. Most militants operating in the valley today are
young Kashmiris, armed and trained locally. They do what they do knowing full
well that the minute they pick up a gun, their “shelf life” is unlikely to be
more than six months. Each time a “terrorist” is killed, Kashmiris turn up in
their tens of thousands to bury a young man whom they revere as a shaheed, a martyr.
These are only the rough coordinates of a 30-year-old
military occupation. The most cruel effects of an occupation that has lasted
decades are impossible to describe in an account as short as this.
In Narendra Modi’s first term as India’s prime
minister, his hard-line approach exacerbated the violence in Kashmir. In
February, after a Kashmiri suicide bomber killed
40 Indian security personnel, India launched an airstrike against Pakistan.
Pakistan retaliated. They became the first two nuclear powers in history to
actually launch airstrikes against each other. Now two months into Narendra
Modi’s second term, his government has played its most dangerous card of all.
It has tossed a lit match into a powder keg.
If that were not bad enough, the cheap, deceitful way
in which it did it is disgraceful. In the last week of July, 45,000 extra
troops were rushed into Kashmir on
various pretexts. The one that got the most traction was that there was a
Pakistani “terror” threat to the Amarnath Yatra —
the annual pilgrimage in which hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees trek (or
are carried by Kashmiri porters) through high mountains to visit the Amarnath
cave and pay their respects to a natural ice formation that they believe is an
avatar of Shiva.
On Aug. 1,
some Indian television networks announced that
a land mine with Pakistani Army markings on it had been found on the pilgrimage
route. On Aug. 2, the government published a notice asking all pilgrims (and
even tourists who were miles from the pilgrimage route) to leave the valley immediately.
That set off a panicky exodus. The approximately 200,000 Indian migrant day
laborers in Kashmir were clearly not a concern to those supervising the
evacuation. Too poor to matter, I’m guessing. By Saturday, Aug. 3, tourists and
pilgrims had left and the security forces had taken up position across the
valley.
By midnight Sunday, Kashmiris were barricaded in their
homes, and all communication networks went down. The next morning, we learned
that, along with several hundred others, three former chief ministers, Farooq
Abdullah, his son, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference and Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s
Democratic Party, had been arrested. Those are the mainstream
pro-India politicians who have carried India’s water through the years of
insurrection.
Newspapers report that the Jammu & Kashmir police
force has been disarmed.
More than anybody else, these local police men have put their bodies on the
front line, have done the groundwork, provided the apparatus of the occupation
with the intelligence that it needs, done the brutal bidding of their masters
and, for their pains, earned the contempt of their own people. All to keep the
Indian flag flying in Kashmir. And now, when the situation is nothing short of
explosive, they are going to be fed to the furious mob like so much cannon
fodder.
The betrayal and public humiliation of India’s allies
by Narendra Modi’s government comes from a kind of hubris and ignorance that
has gutted the sly, elaborate structures painstakingly cultivated over decades
by cunning, but consummate, Indian statecraft. Now that that’s done — it is
down to the Street vs. the Soldier. Apart from what it does to the young
Kashmiris on the street, it is also a preposterous thing to do to soldiers.
The more militant sections of the Kashmiri population,
who have been demanding the right to self-determination or merger with
Pakistan, have little regard for India’s laws or constitution. They will no
doubt be pleased that those they see as collaborators have been sold down the
river and that the game of smoke and mirrors is finally over. It might be too
soon for them to rejoice. Because as sure as eggs are eggs and fish are fish,
there will be new smoke and new mirrors. And new political parties. And a new
game in town.
On Aug.
8, four days into the lockdown, Narendra Modi appeared on television to address an
ostensibly celebrating India and an incarcerated Kashmir. He sounded like a
changed man. Gone was his customary aggression and his jarring, accusatory
tone. Instead he spoke with the tenderness of a young mother. It’s his most
chilling avatar to date.
His voice
quivered and his eyes shone with unspilled tears as he listed the slew of
benefits that would rain down on the people of the former State of Jammu and Kashmir,
now that it was rid of its old, corrupt leaders, and was going to be ruled
directly from New Delhi. He evoked the marvels of Indian modernity as though he
were educating a bunch of feudal peasants who had emerged from a time capsule.
He spoke of how Bollywood films would once again be shot in their verdant
valley.
He didn’t explain why Kashmiris needed to be locked
down and put under a communications blockade while he delivered his stirring
speech. He didn’t explain why the decision that supposedly benefited them so
hugely was taken without consulting them. He didn’t say how the great gifts of
Indian democracy could be enjoyed by a people who live under a military
occupation. He remembered to greet them in advance for Eid, a few days away.
But he didn’t promise that the lockdown would be lifted for the festival. It
wasn’t.
The next morning, the Indian newspapers and several
liberal commentators, including some of Narendra Modi’s most trenchant critics
gushed over his moving speech. Like true colonials, many in India who are so
alert to infringements of their own rights and liberties, have a completely
different standard for Kashmiris.
On Thursday, Aug. 15, in his Independence Day speech,
Narendra Modi boasted from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort that his government
finally had achieved India’s dream of “One Nation, One Constitution,”
with his Kashmir move. But just the previous evening, rebel groups in several
troubled states in the north east of India, many of which have
Special Status like the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir, announced a
boycott of Independence Day. While Narendra Modi’s Red Fort audience cheered,
about seven million Kashmiris remained locked down. The communication shutdown,
we now hear, could be extended for some time to come.
When it ends, as it must, the violence that will
spiral out of Kashmir will inevitably spill into India. It will be used to
further inflame the hostility against Indian Muslims who
are already being demonized, ghettoized, pushed down the economic ladder, and,
with terrifying regularity, lynched. The state will use it as an opportunity to
close in on others, too — the activists, lawyers, artists, students,
intellectuals, journalists — who have protested courageously and openly.
The danger will come from many directions. The most
powerful organization in India, the far-right Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the R.S.S.,
with more than 600,000 members including Narendra Modi and many of his
ministers, has a trained “volunteer” militia, inspired by Mussolini’s Black
Shirts. With each passing day, the R.S.S. tightens its grip on every
institution of the Indian state. In truth, it has reached a point when it more
or less is the state.
In the benevolent shadow of such a state, numerous
smaller Hindu vigilante organizations,
the storm troopers of the Hindu Nation, have mushroomed across the country, and
are conscientiously going about their deadly business.
Intellectuals and academics are
a major preoccupation. In May, the morning after the Bharatiya Janata Party won
the general elections, Ram Madhav, a general secretary of the party and a
former spokesman for the R.S.S., wrote that the “remnants” of the
“pseudo-secular/liberal cartels that held a disproportionate sway and
stranglehold over the intellectual and policy establishment of the country
… need to be discarded from
the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual landscape.”
On Aug. 1,
in preparation for that “discarding,” the already draconian Unlawful
Activities Prevention Act was amended to expand the definition of “terrorist”
to include individuals, not just organizations. The amendment allows the
government to designate any individual as
a terrorist without following the due process of a First
Information Report, charge sheet, trial and conviction. Just who — just what
kind of individuals it means — was clear when in Parliament, Amit Shah, our
chilling home minister, said:
“Sir, guns do not give rise to terrorism, the root of terrorism is the
propaganda that is done to spread it … And if all such
individuals are designated terrorists, I don’t think any member of Parliament
should have any objection.”
Several of us felt his cold eyes staring straight at
us. It didn’t help to know that he has done time as the main accused
in a series of murders in his home state, Gujarat. His trial judge, Justice Brijgopal Harkishen Loya, died mysteriously during the
trial and was replaced by another who acquitted him speedily. Emboldened by all
this, far-right television anchors on hundreds of India’s news networks, now
openly denounce dissidents, make wild allegations about them and call for their
arrest, or worse. “Lynched by TV,” is likely to be the new political phenomenon
in India.
As the world looks on, the architecture of Indian
fascism is quickly being put into place.
I was booked to fly to Kashmir to see some friends on
July 28. The whispers about trouble, and troops being flown in, had already
begun. I was of two minds about going. A friend of mine and I were chatting
about it at my home. He is a senior doctor at a government hospital who has
dedicated his life to public service, and happens to be Muslim. We started
talking about the new phenomenon of mobs surrounding people, Muslims in
particular, and forcing them to chant “Jai Shri Ram!” (“Victory to Lord
Ram!”)
If Kashmir is occupied by security forces, India is
occupied by the mob.
He said he had been thinking about that, too, because
he often drove on the highways out of Delhi to visit his family who live some
hours away.
“I could easily be stopped,” he said.
“You must say it then,” I said. “You must survive.”
“I won’t,” he said, “because they’ll kill me either
way. That’s what they did to Tabrez Ansari.”
These are the conversations we are having in India
while we wait for Kashmir to speak. And speak it surely will.
India: Kashmir, le facce della rivolta - Clément Gargoullaud, Shafat Farooq
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