Nothing to celebrate

The Czech writer, Milan Kundera, talks about a small moment in the history of his country as the communists took it over in 1948. He describes the famous leftist poet, Paul Eluard, visiting from Paris and linking arms with local young people to dance in a circle, celebrating the ‘freedom’ of the new-born socialist republic. The poet dances and recites his revolutionary poetry as he circles, refusing to condemn the executions, the day before, of a socialist activist and a surrealist artist who were both deemed counter-revolutionary. Kundera sees this dancing circle as a floating wreath and he knows the cause of freedom in Czechoslovakia is lost. Paul Eluard would go back to Paris and his Left circles, and laud the ‘revolution’ he had just witnessed, deliberately ignoring the fact that the Soviets had rolled their brutal, dark grey power over yet another central European country. Using that circle as a metaphor, Kundera sounds a warning against all closed, exclusionary systems of political organization, whether that be a State or a revolution bent upon overthrowing a State.

Despite all the failed and tragic examples that litter history, I still look forward to seeing my first proper revolution. I hope it will come soon, while my knees can still hold up some (non-circular) dancing. Even though I’ve reached what is supposed to be an anti-revolutionary-devolutionary age, I have nothing against revolutions per se. I crave transformation for my society, I dream of radical change for the better that’s brought about quickly and dramatically, but preferably without blood being shed. The thing is, having lived in this West Bengal, in a state of constant ‘People’s Anti-Fascist Revolution’ for over thirty years, I tend to be suspicious of things that look like revolutions but might not be them.

Equally, having lived under the Central Indian Imperium, I am not very fond of States, or countries, or flags, or the national anthem that Indian soldiers make you get out of the car and sing if you happen to be a Kashmiri taxi-driver on a suspicious route. If guns were pointing at me, I too might forget the words. And I really don’t want to be shot if I mix up the order of Gujarat, Banga, Utkal, Dravid, Tendulkar etc. Given this allergy, I get confused when friends, People Like Me, (PLM: writers, film-makers, artists, that ilk), people who’ve detested ‘Statism’ and all its toxic derivatives as much as I have, suddenly start singing birthing songs for yet another new country.

“How do you know what kind of a state the Kashmiris will create for themselves?” some PLM ask, “To project failure upon a yet-to-be-formed Kashmir is using the same argument the British deployed when trying to deny us independence.” Others throw down rhetorical challenges to the nascent Azad Kashmir “Will you create yet another Islamic state? Will you hang people like me? Will you stone adulterers? Will you chop off my hand?” These are very good questions indeed, but the PLM don’t seem to be really asking them, they seem to be intoning them like poetry while dancing in a celebratory circle. The effect is that the questions look like they’ve been addressed whereas, actually, they’ve been chopped off at the elbow, with a quick tourniquet of mellifluous prose put around the stumps.

I’m not doubting the motives of PLM: the starting place of this impulse is a place I share. Jana, gana, mana as the adhinayaka — yes, but no Bharat as bhagya vidhaata — not, if that leads to the regular slaughtering of 13-year-olds for throwing stones. I’m not questioning what the PLM have witnessed. If, as a father of a teenage daughter, you’re filming a man weeping over the grave of his murdered teenage son, natural identification can mean that those army bullets go into your own child and not the dead boy. That then becomes your frame, and the grieving father’s tears the non-neutral filter affixed in front of your lens. I’m not questioning the PLM’s feelings, their sentiments or their emotions; I’m deeply sceptical and anxious about their analyses.

I remember a quiet and intense Iranian called Manouche I knew in New York City, in 1982. One day I made some flippant comment about Ayatollah Khomeini, who was by then well-installed as the Supreme Leader of Iran. Manouche sat me down, slammed two beers on the table, and proceeded to tell me what he and his comrades in the Iranian Communist Party had been through, first at the hands of the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, and then, after the revolution, at the hands of Khomeini’s butchers. He described in detail the torture he suffered under the Shah and the executions of his friends under Khomeini’s regime, he mapped out for me how the dawn of the longed for Iranian azadi had turned into the darkest night of repression and terror for a majority of Iranians. I also remember an Irish friend once explaining how the IRA destroyed the non-violent women’s peace movement in Northern Ireland. Those Provos may not have chopped off hands, but they certainly had a habit of shooting off people’s knee-caps for the smallest offenses.

There was never any doubt over the British army’s brutality in Northern Ireland. There was never any question that the SAVAK needed to go. There is no question that the Indian security forces in Kashmir need to be stopped from operating the way they have been. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act is a criminal act worthy of a Niazi or an Idi Amin, and the Indian military has used it for fifty years, committing the worst crimes against people we like to call our own. But, just as Kashmir is not East Pakistan, Iran, Palestine or Northern Ireland, we are not now in ’71, ’89 or ’95, we are in 2008. The old solutions are dead; mid-wifing yet another potentially fascist state should not be an option that seduces us. If we link an arm and dance in a circle with a man like Ahmad Shah Geelani, we might as well entwine our other arm with Geelani’s ideological twin-brother, Pravin Togadia.

Looking at Kashmir from where I am, other places barge into the foreground, Singur gets in the way of the sight-line to Srinagar, as do Orissa and Karnataka, as does Gujarat. Just as I don’t think the bringing of Narendra Modi to justice for 2002 should be held hostage to the un-prosecuted Congress goons of 1984, I don’t think there can be a queuing and privileging of azadi for one area of this sub-continent: Singur and Nandigram need freedom from both Buddhadeb and Mamata just as much as the people of the Kasmir Valley need freedom from the Indian army, the Salafi-Jihadi butchers, the ISI and the machinations of the CIA, just as much as the people of Chhattisgarh need to be free of the Maoists, the Salwa Judum and the ‘crack’, jungle-trained security forces. India and Kashmir can azadofy from each other about as much as Ripon Street can from Rajarhat. Looking at all these different, seething struggles, reality becomes very clear: it’s not what we do now as a country but as a jana and gana, not as Indians or Pakistanis, Kashmiris or Bengalis, but as South Asians, that may one day allow all of us to dance in the free formation of a genuine freedom.