That there’s a world outside that Kashmir must win over not just as a principled supporter but an active stakeholder is indeed the only option for the Hurriyat is beyond doubt. But its lack of a workable agenda currently points to the same old state of political coma it has suffered since it was formed.
The Core by Nawaz Gul Qanungo
Kashmir Times | December 28, 2010
Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Islamic scholar, in a context not completely removed, wrote in a recent work: “We have projections, but at the same time we have to admit that we have no projects.” He was talking about the present era of so called globalisation where people, in reality, seemed to be more trapped in the differences between them. It was a world where people defined and, worse still, identified themselves by their differences with the “other”. Ramadan spoke of a situation where people stood stationary, with viewpoints unchanging and deadlocks eternal.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in the very recent past travelled in India on some political missions of sorts, even though the initiatives were not really their own. While Geelani, after much speculation, has an FIR lodged against him and must be bracing to face the courts, perhaps even pleased with the prospect of quoting reams that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and others once wrote while addressing the British and facing the charges of sedition against them, the Mirwaiz, well, got physically bashed up to his horror.
There could hardly be a more shocking manner, especially in the case of the Mirwaiz, in which one could be jolted out of a deep slumber of indifference and inactivity. The point, however, is that the events clearly illustrated what extreme repulsion – both from the Indian state and its political establishment, specially the Hindu right – a real political activity for the campaigning of Kashmir’s own political future would entail. It also recalled the fact that even after all these years of turmoil and bloodshed, the Hurriyat does not have a genuine plan of political action. Worse still, it doesn’t even seem to be prepared for one.
The only factor that has been strengthening the Hurriyat in the recent times, though it didn’t truly deserve it, is the spectacular form of public protests in the valley, triggered each time there is a human rights violation or a similar lapse of governance. Unfortunately, for the Hurriyat, the only way it could capitalise on this change in the ground situation, if it truly means business, is mobilising public support outside the valley through vigorous campaigns at a grassroots level involving the common people and civil society who, though interested in Kashmir, have no clue about how to be of any help in resolving the impasse.
India has indeed to some extent been compelled recently to acknowledge the political reality of Kashmir, if not its disputed nature – be that the statements by the Indian home minister in its parliament or the various statements of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi or the statement of chief minister Omar Abdullah in the state assembly. The reality, however, remains that such acknowledgement doesn’t mean anything in absence of a sustained political pressure from within the valley for a resolution to get under way in whatever manner. It is precisely this pressure that the Hurriyat could create by campaigning outside the valley for the support of a process towards a pro-Kashmiri Kashmir resolution.
As noted above, such political activity is not a sport and involves huge political challenges and genuine risks. In such a situation, the logical thing to do is to look closer at the divide within and between the regions of Jammu and Ladakh, and the valley as well. Even as the Hurriyat asserts that it holds the key to the mood on the streets of the valley – which in this case is power flowing from the people to the Hurriyat rather than the other way round and something that the Hurriyat has appallingly wasted over the last three years – it could well look over the Peer Panjal and beyond the Zoji La to bring people on the other side of the political divide as active stake holders of a just resolution of the Kashmir dispute. This is not to suggest that the Hurriyat needs to campaign to influence and change the larger political goals of the people in the regions of Jammu and Ladakh. After all, trying to steer the political atmosphere in such regions that do not conform to the basic politics of the valley is not just unreasonable but impossible.
Rather, in order to help clear the path to a resolution, people in other parts of the state outside Kashmir need to be convinced about the different political realities of the valley. This process also involves invoking the support of the politically confluent areas surrounding the valley, like Poonch, and asserting that the areas outside the administrative divisions of Kashmir are no monolithic block either.
Importantly, it becomes essential here to emphasise that the Hurriyat, especially SAS Geelani groups, needs to recognise and accept that even the so called state of J&K is not a monolith, either in the political context or otherwise. Also – and this is what must follow naturally – the Hurriyat must work towards gaining acceptance of the people beyond the Peer Panjal and Zoji La in that that while the political goals of all the three major regions of the state may not be the same, they could still cooperate in pushing together for their respective political objectives. Since Kashmir is the one that has taken all the brunt of the ever-evasive resolution, the onus of creating such an atmosphere in the state is also on the Kashmiri leadership.
Sadly, leave alone the last 20 years, a deliberate move towards such a goal has perhaps never been made by any Kashmiri leadership, let alone the Hurriyat. To bring change, however, the Hurriyat has to act and come out of its comfort. Ramadan wrote, “Coming to terms with the very essence of the relativity of our gaze does not imply that we have to doubt everything and can be sure of nothing. It might mean quite the opposite, and the outcome might be a non-arrogant confidence, and a healthy, energetic and creative curiosity about the infinite number of windows from which we all observe the same world... What can the ego make out of egoisms?”
The visits of Geelani and the Mirwaiz perhaps did instil a certain sense of political vitality both within the Hurriyat and in the public perception of what the Hurriyat was doing in effect of the public agitations in the valley. Today, however, after three successive years of colossal public protests – colossal both in terms of their immensity and the human loss they have wrought, not to talk of the complexity they seem to have precipitated in the public discourse over freedom in the valley – the Hurriyat yet again seems set to break in to a much familiar strategic indecision and political standstill.
That there’s a world outside that Kashmir must win over not just as a principled supporter but an active stakeholder is indeed the only option for any pro-independence political structure of the valley is beyond doubt. But the Hurriyat’s lack of a workable agenda currently points to the same old state of political coma it has suffered since it was formed. Certainly, it must come out of both – the valley and the coma. The question that remains is not whether it needs to, but, gravely, whether it really wants to.
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