Flags flown in the Kashmir Valley on Friday and Saturday, after evening prayers and Eid prayers, have raised an alarm in Delhi once again. Many of these were Pakistan flags. Others seemed to bear the symbol of the Islamic State. The youth who carried them reportedly chanted “anti-India slogans”. The rallies were supposed to have taken place under the instructions of Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, currently under house arrest.
“We have taken cognisance of everything,” Union Minister Rajnath Singh said on Saturday. “I understand that no action is taken after making public statements.” Action would be taken this time, he seemed to assure. Security personnel had already identified the young people involved in the protests.
Amid continued firing across the Line of Control and reports of youth from the Valley entering militancy once again, the flags acquired a sinister import. It was pointed out that Pakistani flags had been hoisted several times over the last six months in Kashmir. Only in April, separatist leader Masarat Alam Bhat, freshly released from prison after five years, was hurried back into jail when he allegedly brandished a Pakistan flag at a rally.
It has become a habit for the government to blame protests on threatening external forces and chilling plots to overthrow the state. But maybe the government needs to take a closer look at the images that appeared over the weekend. According to a range of voices from the Valley, the angry flags say this above all: listen to us.
Two flags, one purpose
First, it is important to distinguish between the two flags that offended government. To those opening the paper or switching on the evening news in the country, the spectral black of the IS flag recalls the horrors unfolding in Syria and Iraq, the unsparing, medieval brand of Islam the wielders of the flag in those parts appear to subscribe to.
The IS flags raised in the Valley, however, may not mean the same thing. Security agencies have said there is little evidence to suggest the organisation had a base there, an assessment supported by civil society activists as well as Hurriyat leaders. The IS flag waved by the protester in Kashmir, they feel, is a symbol without the ideology.
“The people of Kashmir have no sympathy with the barbarity and primitive methods of the IS,” says Altaf Hussain, who is affiliated with the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and works with the Kashmir Centre for Social and Development Studies. “Please do not read any ideology into the flags.” Altaf Shah, a member of Geelani’s faction of the Hurriyat, would agree: “Many of those using the flag do not even know the ideology behind it.”
The other offending symbol was the Pakistan flag, which has its own history in the Valley – in local memory, it has been hoisted nearly every year for decades. It is a history which, at times, has little to do with Pakistan itself or with the secessionist instincts that favour a merger with that country. “The youth of Kashmir have always seen Pakistan as an ally to their cause,” says a researcher at Kashmir University who is also part of a banned student organisation.
Besides, in Kashmir, the distinction between pro-Pakistan separatists and those who want azadi has worn thin over time. “We realised that India was pitting the pro-azadi lobby against the pro-Pakistan,” says Khurram Parvez, convenor of the JKCCS. “At the grassroots level, people felt the fragility of this contradiction. Why worry about something that will happen post independence?”
But the protesters this weekend were probably not even thinking as far ahead as azadi. In their case, the student leader says, it was an act of resistance. Its point of reference was not a foreign power but the Indian state itself.
Indeed, the IS flag and Pakistan flag have one thing in common – they get a response from Delhi when nothing else does. The provocative symbols waved about by the protesters speak of concerns that “have got a cold-shoulder from Delhi”, according to Hussain. They speak of a flood-ravaged Valley where normality is yet to be restored, of insecurity, of unemployment, of an alienated and angry new generation.
“Any way to get our point of view across,” says Shah, “any way to get heard. When we talk of our problems, of the atrocities committed against the people, nobody listens.” When media and government bristle at “anti-national” symbols, at least Kashmir makes news.
Long disillusionment
Most troubling of all, the flags speak of a disillusionment with dialogue, that it can happen at all and that it can be meaningful when it does happen.
To begin with, the space for democratic dissent seems to have disappeared, Parvez says. The NDA, in its new term, has sent out the signal that it wants to keep separatist leaders out of the public discourse. While previous governments turned the other way when Hurriyat leaders met Pakistani representatives, this dispensation has shut down talks when separatist leaders met Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit. Then there is the old default of house arrest – lock up separatist leaders before every planned rally or protest march, no matter how peaceful. Currently, they’re doing time for trying to hold a Martyr’s Day rally on July 13.
This is only the latest phase of a disillusionment that has built up over the years, through the violence used by security forces to put down the armed uprising and through the many failed attempts at negotiation between government and separatists, even between Centre and state. Intermediate measures, such as greater independence within the rubric of the Indian Constitution, seemed off the table when the autonomy resolution passed by the Jammu and Kashmir assembly in 2000 was unceremoniously rejected by the Centre.
The optimism of the early 2000s, when negotiation seemed possible, has died a slow death. “In 2008, 2009, 2010, there was such a beautiful transition to non-violent protest,” says the student leader. “But the response of the state remained violent.” As the government bore down on protesters, it became clear that, in its eyes, the stone-throwers of 2010 were no different from the armed militants of the 1990s.
In recent weeks, dialogue was discredited further by former R&AW chief AS Dulat, who confesses in his new book that he was “sent to disrupt the J&K movement in the friendliest manner”. It projects a cynical, Machiavellian state, which seems to have had no intention of engaging in the genuine give and take of dialogue.
The only rhetoric that has survived this slow process of betrayal is extremist propaganda, says the student leader, “every other option has been neutralised by the state”.
Strangers to the state
So it is no surprise that distrust of the state has surged once again in the Valley, compounded by the polarising effect of the Bharatiya Janata Party, ruling in Delhi and a coalition partner in Jammu and Kashmir. A government perceived as communal and majoritarian by a large number of Muslim constituencies has heightened insecurities in Kashmir. The BJP could, of course, choose to fight this impression instead of indulging in its favourite paranoias. But that would involve wading into the messy business of democracy and dissent, the tedious duty of listening to people with a problem.
