THIS essay has no claims to power or expertise. It is based on the experiences of some Kashmiri students who spent a few years in Delhi and then returned to Kashmir. It tries to evoke a language beyond policy, a language that has a sense of the everyday. It offers no solutions but tries to tell a story woven between two symbolic figures, Shujaat Bukhari and Burhan Wani. It is a fragment seeking the company of other fragments, hoping that one day the jigsaw called Kashmir will make sense not as a law and order problem but as a vision of a decent society.

The discourses and narrations on Kashmir are rather depressing. They reflect either the aridity of managerial thought, where problem solving and decision making become imperatives, or we pretend Kashmir is a problem in IR (international relations) where the machismo of the concept of security takes over. There is a bareness to the potential scenario built around the nation state, security, law and order.

When one reads the narratives of Kashmir, especially those that pursue the masochism of Amit Shah, one realizes that they have no sense of a lived Kashmir, or even of the subjectivities that haunt Kashmir. There is a tiredness about Kashmir that analysts do not consider. We turn. policy into an objective science, when it uses concepts that are indifferent to pain, hope or suffering. To the spurious objectivity of their policy science one must add the narcissism of the problem solver, who in the mirror sees himself and not Kashmir, enacting out a myth of control. Maybe one does not need the expert and consultant but the psychoanalyst and the shaman or even a trickster weaving a small gift of surprise. Policy does not understand time and everydayness. It only wants to create official history.

The story begins with a student of international relations reflecting on his return. Kashmir is home, but there is no sense of homecoming, a sense of being safe. Kashmir feels different as a lived reality. There is a positivity to Jammu but with Kashmir there is a sense of things gone wrong. Shujaat Bukhari’s death has only added to it. I even met him at the secretariat the evening before he died. I cannot imagine he is dead. Bukhari meant hope and the assassins shot hope. His death adds a sense of fear, where the imaginary becomes real. One interrogates things around one because one cannot take the world for granted. One looks around and wonders why that car is parked outside or how long the person has been standing there. It is sadness and mourning along with trauma. Labelling it as a fear psychoses does not unravel it. It took me four weeks to get out of the trauma of Shujaat’s death.

 

Kashmir now is perpetually liminal. It is in limbo, lost between India and Pakistan, unable to be itself. Shujaat was very focused, focused on being in Kashmir and being a Kashmiri, yet he was never parochial as he loved and lived his cosmopolitism; ever the exemplar. He was grounded in Kashmir, ran two newspapers, one in Urdu, the other in Kashmiri. He was a complex man who saw Kashmir as a whole and would not settle for less. He was not narrowly political or obsessed with security. He celebrated identity, language and culture. He taught one how to be a Kashmiri. But he is no longer there. With him around, things were hopeful. There was reason to be hopeful. We had waited a long time for a break. He is no longer there.

Things move on. Time is running out. Time is a casualty. We are already the third generation and can sense it in our bones that we won’t see peace in our lifetime. That is hard to take. Time is fundamental. Mothers and children know the cost of time. Yesterday a 16-year-old girl died, killed by a bullet. I don’t think she even knew why she was shot. Everybody is in a trance.

There are layers of emptiness. There is no future in Kashmir. No meaningful work. Few children can come back to a job. It is this loss as information that is not reaching outside. A connectivity is lost. Think of today, there is a hartal on and access to the internet is blocked.

Waiting has become normal. Kashmir has been abandoned. Violence is recurrent. There is a normalcy to killings and hartal. Nobody is walking the extra mile for us. We are where we are. Nobody is engaging constructively with us. Take the youth. Who cares to talk to the new generation. Picking up a gun is the end of childhood, of innocence of life. It is a rite of passage, which is impossible to reverse.

There is a sense of confusion and sadness about Kashmir. We need the solace of a wider debate. The whole is missing. Even the separatists are divided, and the different divides are contending with each other. Our energies have to come together. We have to integrate. Peace is a synergy. Pulling against each other, we remain stuck where we began.

We need schemes of hope. Stipends, like doles, do not work. When one is young, one is hungry, ones mind is tender and open yet no one engages with you. Violence freezes all this. Kashmir is today a blackbox no one wants to engage with.

Worse, the prickly nationalism of India is difficult to handle. A touch me not nationalism does not allow for conversation. It eliminates dialogue. The sadness begins there. Peace is a long way off. To make a beginning you have to restore our everydayness. Stop calling the violence you bequeath as normalcy. We can heal our memory but give us back our everydayness.

 

The rituals of tyranny and rituals of cleanliness have much in common. They love to clean up, have a space, bare, empty because emptiness is tyranny’s great creation. Dirt and dissent have to be brushed aside, cleared up. Between the emptiness of silence and the deadness of catechism, there is little to choose.

A panopticon of tyranny is like a set of Chinese boxes. Each big box has a little box which in turn contains a littler box of tyranny. What the state does, the school and the college replicate on a smaller scale.

Death and hartal weave into the calendar of the university. Students protest against the killings and the university closes down. The teachers, however, have to report for work even though there is no student at the college. There are months with no classes. Then students protest about classes not happening. The syllabus is shortened but the whole situation gets more absurd.

Take our college, it is a women’s college, set up in 1950. It was led by a remarkable woman. She went to Lahore in the ’30s where she met Iqbal. She came back as the first Muslim woman principal. It was a wonderful place then, replete with theatre festivals and ideas ranging across cultures. An openness of ideas marked this world. Today every person is under scrutiny. There is no theatre, only CCTV.

 

The ruthless surveillance seeks to turn everyone into a conformist. Dissent has punitive consequences. The surveillance goes further. The government is considering a blanket ban on the use of social media by government servants. The freedom to think, express, imagine is over.

Protest is not disordered. It is the hope, the dream for a new order. Dissent is a scream for diversity, but a regime in marching uniform cannot see it. Burhan Wani is a symbol, a symbol that youth cannot be suppressed, that every new voice is a new act of storytelling. When I see my cousins gathering to debate, I sense this. These conversations tell you that there is hope for Kashmir. Burhan Wani is not a piece of journalism. He is the unconscious of the youth coming alive asking for freedom.

Today there is a hartal. It is Burhan Wani’s anniversary. It is an opening of a memory. You should see my younger cousins; they come together undeterred by the thought of going to jail. They want to talk, argue. Burhan Wani meant that. He is a symbol of breaking loose, thinking free, Protest and disagreement mean you can still dream a different world and think of hope. Life sparkles in these moments. There is intelligence, hope and community. An idea has warmth, it keeps a group alive. If they differ, they fuel hope that they can dream different worlds. Wani symbolized that. Today there is a hartal in his memory – what for the government becomes a festival of remembrance, an ode to Burhan Wani.

Policy has no memory, no sense that Kashmir has been waiting, that waiting is a marathon that tears one apart. A policy giver never asks for forgiveness that he got things wrong. His solution offers the next quick fix and asks us to celebrate. A tired Kashmir confronts an India with amnesia.

 

The first narrator takes over: One problem with a solution is that every group takes a part and insists it is the whole. So much energy is lost in confusions. Politics becomes more fragmentary, more ideological as the whole gets more elusive. We need an openness, where more debate enters, more ideas and more place for each other’s ideas. When you tyrannize ideas, don’t expect peace or democracy. Also, peace is never complete or fixed. It has a different tentativeness, a sense of jugaad. There are human improvizations, many outdated. As an academic I can see old concepts haunt the debate. We need not just an exorcism of hate but of concepts, a spring-cleaning of the mind opening up to new possibilities. Peace, even in a piecemeal sense, has to spring surprises. It is not a piece of plumbing or an electoral calculation as Amit Shah thinks. A tired Kashmir is being asked to invent itself. Peace means returning hope to Kashmir.

 

One cannot have a Machiavellian peace like Amit Shah’s. His is a provincial mind best at electoral calculations. Peace is the readiness to be vulnerable, to experiment, to wager on somebody else’s hypothesis. The BJP does not have that ability. You need poets, not accountants of the electoral system. Peace is not a rocket science with formulas, it is a home science full of approximations, vaguely worded recipes. Your way of problem solving with its umbilical sense of security is a barrier. The BJP does not know how to create the carrying capacity for peace. Most parties think electorally, and electoral time and peacetime are radically different worlds. Amit Shah would be unemployed in peacetime, a roadside bully at best. The muddiness of peace needs debate and democratic politics. A pursuit of law and order is too arid a beginning or substitute for peace.

Sometimes one feels poets have a better sense of peace than politicians. The prose called politics does not take one far. Words like security, law and order, stability speak the language of systems. They are technocratic. One needs a different language of peace, a different sensorium. As the priest, Manley Hopkins once wrote, ‘piecemeal peace is poor peace’. One needs a vision for peace. One has to ask why if Ireland, Korea, Czechoslovakia, can heal, Kashmir cannot. Between envy and tiredness we escape into the numbness of silence.

Peace has to be a homecoming. Kashmir no longer feels like home, secure in people and memories. No one talks of the vulnerability of return where fear stalks you. It is unease, anxiety, suspicion. There are no rituals to be taken for granted. Peace as memory empties out and we have space as turf, and Kashmir is a set of turf wars between bigger foes. While we watch, our narratives gets marked by the immediacy of events. Shujaat Bukhari died a few weeks ago. Today is Burhan Wani’s anniversary. Last week BJP broke its alliance with Mehabooba Mufti. These are events that weave themselves like intrusive threads into the bigger robe we call peace. We are analysts, social science scholars and we feel that Kashmir needs to create a style we call ‘scream of consciousness’. You cannot hide the pain even in a simple story. Our routine smells different.

 

A third student continues: Beyond psychology, we need histories to explain how we feel. Going back home is bad. It reminds one of 2008. Things changed after the 2014 elections. The elections were a cynical act, if one looks at data one will realize that voting before that was minimal. In 2014, voting percentages went up to 65% or 75%. The reason was the PDP campaign warning that if you do not vote for us, the BJP will come in. The BJP was creating polling booths for migrants outside Kashmir. So the PDP got massive but not majority support. So PDP joined BJP, the second largest party. It was an act of betrayal portrayed like a forced gun marriage.

It was governments like these that made Burhan Wani a hero. He seeded a whole network of sentiments around him. Remember everyone in Kashmir has suffered. Everybody has somebody who has been raped, murdered, tortured. There was a connectivity of memory and pain, a symbolic bonfire of memories that Burhan Wani ignited.

Wani was a Rorschach, a collective symbol for the tacit pain of Kashmir. Burhan Wani, like Afzal Guru became a symbol triggered by government and army denial. Today whenever there are army controls, students challenge them saying we are students, kill us first before you kill the militants. Before 2014, one would not encounter such events. The support for militants is new and desperate. If militants were surrounded in a house, other family members would refuse to come out telling the army, ‘now kill all of us’. There is a new kind of celebration of militancy by youth.

 

If one looks at the earlier list of wanted militants, they would be outsiders. Today most of them are from Kashmir and about 20% would be outsiders. This has also changed the nature of training, which is shoddy. At the most it is a couple of days. Take the case of a sociology professor. He finished his PhD in 2017 and joined the department of sociology. He died within a few hours of joining the militants. Today militancy is popular among the youth. There are hardly any classes in schools. When schools are shut and education empty or meaningless, militancy does become naively romantic. It changes the atmosphere because every youth is suspect. Now my parents won’t let me go out in the evening. Kashmir has become a prison house not a home.

Recently I had to do my exams. I borrowed my cousins bike. It was terrifying. I was stopped by armed forces everywhere. I had to show them my roll number and plead with them. Now my curfew time is 8.30 pm, my parents do not want the anxiety of waiting for me. The worry of waiting corrodes every parent.

The trauma of waiting is part of the contemporary folk wisdom of Kashmir but is never fed into the calculus of peace. Waiting corrodes and endless waiting corrodes endlessly. Waiting for your children, waiting for a hartal to be over, waiting for sanity is going to need a special ritual of narratives that slowly exorcize it. Waiting needs a separate psychoanalysis.

 

The IR student reflects: Peace has lost its sanctity. It does not mean much. It has lost that sense of sacrament because peace is seen as a non-deliverable. In fact, it creates apprehension. People are worried if it is a sell-out. In fact, every move to create peace becomes a breach of trust as whosoever talked peace failed to deliver. The repeated violence has made people sentimental about peace. There is no rationality. In fact, more than security which is a narrow word, it is peace that needs to be interrogated. Peace has to begin with the everydayness of democracy or with freedom. I should be able to step outside the house without fear. Schools should not close down. My internet should work. There must be no threat to life. Peace as a contract can emerge when this is taken for granted, is guaranteed. Only then will peace have substantial takers. You cannot give us order without freedom.

Word and world acquire or demand a new integrity in Kashmir after violence assaults them. Democracy and peace have to be returned to everydayness, an abstractness of rights will not do.

Another student adds: War, violence and conflict hides or reinforce old stereotypes, when peace comes, one has to raise uncomfortable questions. Let me begin professionally. We need a different view of the university. For example, philosophy as critical thinking does not appeal to the powerful. They will say a big no to it, but these questions have to be raised.

Another uncomfortable question. Militancy added to the mediocracy of the university. The militants would barge into the VC’s office and force recruitment at gunpoint. This gunpoint mediocrity has to be faced and a place has to be made for new minds. The central university could and should have been more cosmopolitan, instead it became a spillover of Kashmir University. People close to retirement ambled over.

 

But it is gender and the stereotypes of perception and conformity that creates great problems. Gender has segregated our world. If a girl student talks to a male teacher, it is seen with suspicion. The gender divide has been structurally instituted. Women are not taken seriously. All they seem eligible for is marriage. So education has become a tool for facilitating marriage. If you are a single woman with a different concept of the good, and you cannot conform, survival becomes difficult and creativity challenging. Men construct me, define me and define my normal.

Militancy adds a desperation to such stereotypes, I remember a father with four daughters, all he wanted to do was marry them off. Any man would do. I remember one of the daughters was incredibly beautiful, I asked her why she choose the man and she shrugged and said that there was no question of choice, just the urgency and inevitability of marriage. There is no way one can say no. Marriage was the only solution to being a woman. It was an assignment. It is these not so visible oppressions that one must challenge when peace returns.

I must confess I don’t regret coming back from Delhi. Delhi creates its own set of blinders – meeting my students I got a more internal sense of what it means to survive and to be a woman in Kashmir. One has to have a sense of how violence reinforces patriarchy. The woman is in the control of the father or brother. Ask her for a phone number and she gives one of theirs. They decide her fate, decide which days she will come to college, decide what friends she will have. One needs empathy to understand all this and Delhi blinded me to ground realities where oppressions reinforce each other. I have learnt not to judge, opened myself up to what they say and have to say. I understand the ruthlessness of conflict better.

For a woman, peace seems a permanent promissory note, a farce, a signifier without meaning. One needs a new language, new ways talking about peace without mentioning it, the statist ideas about terror, jobs, Islam, development or Pakistan. Peace that we are longing for cannot be addressed by the peace building initiatives today. We need a different way of talking about Kashmir.

Kashmir needs a web of listeners, a sensorium of understanding not a gaze or a panopticon. Solutions cannot be abstracted formula or frozen history. It needs a new phenomenology of everydayness.

 

The IR student wraps up: Let me tell you two stories. The first one is about me; about the day I was born in 1990. It was a day of bitter anxiety. My mother was in her maternal home. There was a curfew as militants and the army were retaliating against each other. We were locked up in our houses. There was no access to the hospital as shoot at sight orders had been declared. My mother panicked, and I arrived two weeks earlier. My mothers sister helped her deliver me at home. The sound of guns, the sense of conflict and I was born together. We share a bond, a brotherhood, as if I have an umbilical cord to violence.

The second story is about Manzoor. He was caught by the army, stripped naked, they shoved a rod up his anus and interrogated him, repeatedly asking him about his connection to the militants. He was a shopkeeper and had no connection, but they kept on beating him. They took him to another torture house where many people had died. When Manzoor recovered, his colon was removed. He has a huge hole in his stomach. He has to excrete from this hole.

Memory, memory haunts and burdens Kashmir. Yet one has to forget. It is difficult. We have only seen suffering. Our history has so much pain in it. Yet as we stand at the crossroads, we have to forget. One can go the Burhan way, but the gun is not the solution. Only by going beyond memory can we stay afresh. Burhan is a sentimental way when what is clear is that the gun cannot bring about a revolution. When memory overcomes rationality, the political ferment curdles. Shujaat Bukhari understood it. He wanted a Kashmiri dialogue and discourse, not a discussion in Delhi which saw Kashmir as a mere laboratory. He wanted an ethics of narrative, of analysis, where listening, talking, recognizing that we are part of the problem creates a different frame. Shujaat wanted a frame where there was listening, a modesty, a sense of experiment and therapy. Where the new could be adopted. I think that is why they shot him. Only the gun is no substitute for dialogue or discourse.

 

The philosophy student responds: Burhan Wani, the one good thing he did was he invented a new way of looking at things. I remember reading a piece on Burhan after his death which contextualized him, removed the skin of naiveté that surrounded him. Burhan was intelligent, he knew about the political history of Kashmir. He inaugurated a new militancy, an exuberant militancy drawn by solidarity, not by forces of Islam, driven by independent thinking, creating a new stage in the political history of Kashmir.

Symbolically, he represented the figure of joyous rebellion, a picture of a new Kashmir, as educated and brilliant. He challenged the old myth of militancy, the stereotyped causes which were patronizing, infantilizing militancy. Burhan emphasized political maturity and agency.

I remember a conversation enacted between a new militant and his father. It was time to leave and the young man goes to the father and says it is time to go. He asks forgiveness for leaving home even though he loves home. The father replies, ‘Remember you are one of life’s gifts to us. You do not belong only to us. Your life stands for a new kind of history. You belong to a bigger family. I will not stop you.’ The father understands the maturity of his sons’ action, which would have been denied by the media, and drowned in psychological stereotypes.

 

Burhan underlines the right to think for ourselves. The emphasis is not in the gun but on the privacy of thought or speech. One has to grasp this. Yesterday was his second anniversary. Anniversaries are important moments in Kashmir. Yet they become replete with restrictions. There is no way one can do anything as the army and police cordon off his home; letting no one enter or come out. Anniversaries are not just a moment to remember death, but enact a mourning, a memorial. These are subtle moments. We memorialize a person. We recite the Quran. It is cathartic, yet the sadness is we are denied the right to mourn. Delhi does not understand what even BBC understands that India `draws a straight line from 1947 to AK47. But when a society is refused the right to mourn, then security has lost all perspective.

We hope the rawness of our memories adds something to understanding. A peace based on abstract concepts adds little to lived peace.

 

* The Kashmir Collective is a group of researchers seeking to provide an interdisciplinary and self-reflective narrative of Kashmir today. The initial founders include Mohammed Tabish and Peerzada Mukim.