BY SANJAY KAK
On a summer morning this July in Srinagar, tear gas from
the troubled streets of Batmaloo began to roll into the first-floor home
of Fancy Jan. The 24-year-old went to draw the curtains to screen the room
from the acrid smoke, her mother told a reporter later, then turned away
from the window and said: “Mummy, maey aaw heartas fire (my heart’s
taken fire, mummy)”. Then she dropped dead, a bullet in her chest, the
casual target of an anonymous soldier’s rifle. Fancy Jan was not a ‘stone-pelter’.
She was a bystander, like many of the 50 people killed in the last two
months. She is not the first woman to be shot by the security forces in 20
years of the troubles. But her random death, almost incomprehensible in
the presumed safety of her family’s modest home, coincides with a vigorous
unsettling of the way women have been represented in this conflict.
Until the other day, Kashmiri women were little more than
a convenient set of clichés, shown as perpetual bystanders in houses that
overlook the streets of protest. When seen outside of that protected zone,
they were cast as victims, wailing mourners, keening at the endless
funeral processions. For an occasional frisson there is the daunting image
of the severely veiled Asiya Andrabi, chief of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a
women’s group whose high media visibility seems inversely proportional to
the modest numbers who adhere to their militant Islamic sisterhood. In
black from head to toe, Andrabi always makes for good television, her arms
and hands concealed in immaculate gloves, only her eyes showing through a
slit. For the Indian media her persona insinuates the dark penumbra of
Kashmiri protest, signalling the threat of ‘hard-line’ Islam, a ready
metaphor for ‘what-awaits-Kashmir-if…’
But now an unfamiliar new photograph of the Kashmiri woman
has begun to take its place on newspaper front pages. She is dressed in
ordinary shalwar kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow. Her
head is casually covered with a dupatta and she seems unconcerned about
being recognised. She is often middle-aged and could even be middle-class.
And she is carrying a stone. A weapon directed at the security forces.
Last week, in a vastly underreported story, a massive crowd stopped two
Indian Air Force vehicles on the highway near Srinagar. At the forefront
were hundreds of women. The airmen and their families were asked to
dismount and move to the safety of a nearby building. Then the buses were
torched. This is not a rare incident: women are everywhere in these
troubled times in Kashmir, and not in the places traditionally assigned to
them. They are collecting stones and throwing them and assisting the young
men in the front ranks of the protesters to disguise themselves, even
helping them escape when the situation gets tough.
The government’s narrative of ‘miscreants’, of anomie and
drug-fuelled teenagers working as Rs 200 mercenaries for the
Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, has meanwhile started to appear faintly ridiculous. A
more reasonable explanation is being proffered to us now: it is anger, we
are told, the people of Kashmir are angry at the recent killings and
that’s why the women are being drawn in. That is true but only partially.
For this is no ordinary anger but an old, bottled-up rage, gathered over
so many years that it has settled and turned rock-hard. That accumulated
fury is the stone in her hand. To not understand this, to fail to reach
its source – or fathom its depth – is to be doomed to not understand the
character of Kashmir’s troubles.
Two events will provide useful bookends for this exercise.
In February 1991 there was an assault on Kunan Poshpora village in North
Kashmir, where a unit of the Indian army was accused of raping somewhere
between 23 and a hundred women. And then, a troubled 18 years later, the
June 2009 rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, South Kashmir. In
the case of Kunan Poshpora, bypassing a judicial inquiry, the government
called in the Press Council of India to whitewash the incident, allowing
its inadequate and ill equipped two-member team to summarily conclude that
the charges against the army were “a massive hoax orchestrated by militant
groups and their sympathisers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad”.
The travesty of the investigations into last year’s
Shopian incident involved innumerable bungled procedures and threw up many
glaring contradictions till the government of India roped in the Central
Bureau of Investigation to put a lid on it. They promptly concluded that
it was a case of death by drowning. (In a stream with less than a foot of
water.) The case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have
been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the
lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a
possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had
visibly botched up the investigations.
In the absence of justice, the space between Kunan
Poshpora and Shopian can only be filled with the stories of nearly 7,000
people gone missing, of the 60,000 killed and the several-hundred-thousand
injured and maimed and tortured and psychologically damaged. The men of
this society took the brunt of this brutalisation. What of the price paid
by the women? It is when we begin to come to terms with their decades-long
accretion of grief and sorrow, of fear and shame, that we will begin to
understand the anger of that woman with the stone in her hand.
The current round of protests will probably die down soon.
The mandarins of New Delhi will heave a sigh of relief, tell us that
everything is normal and turn their attentions to something else. But only
their hubris could blind them from noticing what we have all seen this
summer in Kashmir. This is not ordinary anger. It is an incandescent fury
that effaces fear. That should worry those who seek to control Kashmir.
(Sanjay Kak is the maker of Jashn-e-Azadi, a
documentary about Kashmir. This article was published in The Times of
India on August 8, 2010.)
Courtesy: The Times of India; http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com