We suffer from a significant contradiction in the political condition of our state today. On the one hand, there is an animated societal resistance against coercive domination and, on the other, a politically stalled movement against it. The difference between them is that resistance says no to raw power domination, oppression and occupation. A political movement finds a way around these structures of state power. Resistance rejects human indignity, political injustice and social inequity. A movement responds with transparent strategy, discernible roadmap and actionable tactics.
Similar contradictions have festered in resistances against states around the world after the collapse of the Cold War regime between 1989 and 1991. It is as if the breakdown of that “old world order” gave a fillip to peoples’ resistances, animating (or “giving life to”, for that is what “to animate” means) marginalized peoples in Europe, Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and the post-Arab Spring Middle East for three decades, as they all search for a “new world order”. Such searches for equality and equity among peoples have taken place before of course, but they have been quickly converted into battles between states as the French revolution of 1789, the Russian one of 1917 and the Chinese one of 1949 have shown us.
The twenty-first century search for “world order”, however, is proving to be more complicated than the earlier ones. The new edition, largely due to the communications and technological revolution, is proving to be a struggle of peoples versus states. In that frame, societal resistance is more resilient than political movement because oppression in any form will always be resisted in ways old and new, overt and covert. A political movement will take more organizational skills, because it has not taken states long to convert the use the communications revolution to their advantage. The rise of the surveillance state – the most overt examples of which are China, India and Russia – is evidence of this. It has stalled political movements by depoliticizing citizens, encouraging opinion on pre-framed “issues” rather than substantive problems to introduce a politics of the inconsequential.
A Complicated Contradiction
It is this usurpation of technology by the state that explains the contradiction between societal resistance and political movement that we have in Kashmir. While there is ample societal resistance, the political movement has stagnated so that even mere statements of opinion are often regarded as political action. There are also historical and political reasons, apart from the technological, for the stalled political movement in J&K.
In history, the reason for the stalled political movement for resolution of the dispute over the State of J&K is that the domination has been asymmetrical between the various parts of the state. Kashmir has been resisting territorial occupation and political domination for over four hundred years; Ladakh and Baltistan have resisted some political domination for more than a hundred and fifty years; and Gilgit and parts of Jammu Province have resisted the same for less than a hundred years. The modern story of all these constituent parts of the state began in 1846 when these states and toparchies merged to become the State of J&K in a Westphalian meaning, spawned in part by native imitation of colonial rule and in part for the convenience of empire in the inter-state “Great Game” which was at its height in South Asia and Central Asia in the mid-nineteenth century. The end of the British empire in South Asia was an opportunity to re-formulate these territorial and political alignments (and, to be sure, others on the subcontinent) in way that would have been an equitable balance between the traditional and the modern. But the opportunity was squandered.
Politically, too there has been asymmetry in the treatment of Kashmir and the other constituent parts of the State of J&K. To explain briefly: Gilgit, Baltistan and Ladakh were raided and re-raided over four hundred years by the successors of the Mughals in the valley of Kashmir. However, they were never colonized and none of the conquering monarchs ever visited these trans-Himalayan states. There was no occupation, only nominal sovereignty, defined largely by Eurasian (as opposed to European) inter-state relations. Similarly, the rule of toparchs in closer proximity to Jammu, the center of Dogra power, were also encroached upon and had their own consequences in 1947, albeit different from the ones in the trans-Himalayan parts of the state or in Kashmir.
L’ Affaire Shah Faesal
As we just noted, 1947 was an opportunity to address the historical idiosyncrasies of a dilemma of the Westphalian state system with some innovative solutions. However, they were left to fester, in the hope that a territorially covetous statist imposition on the people would prevail. However, that intended resolution has cracked periodically and, off late, with greater intensity. During the Brutal Kashmir Summer of 2016, the people of Kargil in Ladakh overtly announced their solidarity with the people of Kashmir for reasons of the fundamental human right to life. It was a significantly partisan declaration in a toxic atmosphere which educed the emotions of being “anti-national” so ubiquitously and threateningly. Towards the end of 2018, Ladakh’s BJP Member of Parliament, Thubstan Chhewang, resigned from both party and Lok Sabha membership. He attributed this dramatic action to the aspirations of the peoples of Leh in Ladakh not being taken seriously by the party he joined in 2014.
In this context, the well-publicized resignation (with others rumored to follow) of Shah Faesal, the former Kashmiri bureaucrat, from government service is evidence of the severity of the uptick in the resistance. Faesal’s resignation triggered some hope in the valley, but early indications are that it is less a storm and more a blip in the graph of resistance, hollow of any political action. Faesal’s own words indicate as much, given his stated aim to ignore the word azaadi (“freedom”) in the resistance and be content with doing “social work” by fighting corruption and providing jobs for the people. Arguably, he would have been much better off doing this by staying in the “service” of government. It will not provide “movement”, as he has indicated is his wish, for the politics of the state.
The contradiction between movement and resistance in our political condition requires that we articulate our cause supported by scholarship and reason but, more importantly, defined by the lived experience of fellow citizens who are passionate in claiming their rights and dissentious towards rulers who deprive us of them. To introduce such a politics successfully we need to evict the politics in which people are asked to “support leaders”. Instead, wannabe leaders must join and articulate the political movement reflected in the resistance which demands a participatory and continuous, rather than a populist (“democracy”) jingle and punctuating (“elections”) function in the distribution, and the assertion, of peoples’ power.
Until then, the resistance will continue.