While India lulls in a long (because it has neverexperienced one before) lockdown due to the scary novel Coronavirus pandemic,there is time and space for its conscious people – intellectuals, activists, academicians,politicians, educationists, Bollywood stars etc – to look back, and with somerealisation attempt to retrospectively measure the pain Kashmir Valley wouldhave undergone amid the enforced lockdown from August 5, last year. However, itwould be gross miscalculation to equate Kashmir’s lock down after August 5,2019, with the present country-wide lock down amid covid19. Because the formerhas become a foundational trauma of Kashmir’s new generation that was stilltrying to understand the facts of an unfulfilled promise made to their forefathers seventy years back.The Kashmir lockdown was essentially unlike the present one; it was a stratagemto mute a people that was already a homo sacer.
I remember the pre and post-August 5 scenario in the Valley.In its pre scenario, Kashmir was relatively stable. Things were going fine.Tourists and Amaranth yatris were enjoying the beauty of Mughal gardens anddazzling view of mountain ranges. Daily wagers had started to earn. Schoolchildren and college going youths were busy in knowing the secrets of universeand beyond. The post-era changed everything. On August 5, people woke up into alockdown that would then be uncertain to tell about for how much time it wasgoing to last; which of course we now know took India the long seven and moremonths to lift back (Although, that is another story that New Delhi is still todecide, whether 4G mobile internet should be restored in the valley or not,even among a deadly pandemic like Covid19?). Not to talk about busiest city,Srinagar and major towns of the valley, I remember how every village wore adeserted look. Inmates of every Kashmiri household, elders and children, stoodaround a TV set to watch not only how Kashmir’s autonomy, which had alreadybeen weakened by different political regimes in the past, was receiving a finaldeath blow, but also how Kashmir’s identity itself was being murdered,literally. And people could do nothing but shiver around an idiot box whichrelayed jubilant Indian mobs celebrating the conquering of a new people andterritory, a ‘territory of desire’ as Ananya J Kabir calls it. The followingevent of the Eid (Eid ul-Adha that was on 12th of the same month), whichliterally means Khushi (joy), turned into a tragedy, with people having nothingto celebrate but everything to mourn about – the loss of honour – as Kashmiriswould chant among themselves chun ezath myoun ezath ….
However, this was not all; Kashmir had to fight more forlife to survive. Life was reduced to ‘bare life’. Troops were everywhere. Noone could dare to step out. People whispered indoors. Bleak and desolatestreets; as if after grinding her teeth ghula, a female human-eating monster inJordonian (Arabic) folklore, had been roaming to feast on anyone that was out.Leaders were detained. All of this was traumatic. And the sadder part of thestory is that all channels of communication had been snapped. No mobile phoneservices. No landline telephone. No broadband and mobile internet to join avirtual classroom as there is now. College and university goers lost a preciousacademic year and no one seemed to care about that.
And above all unlike the present lockdown country wide,where every step is taken to save the human lives in the first place, it waslife itself that was cheapest in the auction back then in Kashmir. Patientscould not reach to hospitals. Scarcity of medicines and doctors. Precariouslife. Judith Butler says rightly, “specific lives cannot be apprehended asinjured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living. If certain livesdo not qualify as lives, or are from the start, not conceivable as lives withcertain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost inthe full sense.” With the addition of an ’embedded reporting’ wherebyjournalists agree to report only from the perspective established byauthorities, it is this framing of violence that has had made life miserable inKashmir. Due to the incessant lockdowns and curfews what became of Kashmir isdifficult to realise for Indian intelligentsia with a mere twenty-one days, nowextended by another two weeks, lockdown. But it seems probable they mightthink, in their heart of hearts, what Kashmir went through post-August 5, amoment in time that would pass on as generational trauma through the phenomenaof memory and post memory.
Shabeer Ahmad Khan is a PhD Research Scholar at AMU, Aligarh.