Hindi is the other name for Indianness’, declares a slogan
in Hindi on a board put up on the otherwise bare wall of a makeshift
chamber that one passes through as one makes one’s way out of Srinagar’s
heavily fortified airport. An odd way, surely, for the Indian state to
stress its claims to genuine respect for cultural and linguistic pluralism
and to seek to ‘win the hearts of the Kashmiris’ as the tired and trite
phrase goes – heavily Sanskritised Hindi of the Government of India
variety not only being a totally alien tongue in Kashmir but also being
seen as a potent symbol of Hindu chauvinism directed against Muslims. Is
it then any surprise that the hegemonic version of Indian nationalism that
this slogan represents has few, if any, takers in Kashmir?
Equally shrill slogans greet one as one drives out of the
airport through Srinagar’s suburbs and into the heart of town. ‘Bharat
Mata ki Jai’, ‘India is one, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari’, ‘Hindustan
Zindabad’, ‘Kashmir, the Crown of India’, ‘CRPF, the Keepers of
Peace’ and so on scream these slogans, painted on bunkers located at road
crossings, behind which stand gun toting soldiers guarding the
Indian flag. Few Kashmiris, needless to say, take these slogans at all
seriously and a visitor from Delhi is still referred to as having come
from India, for despite the obvious decline in violence in the region, for
many Kashmiris India is still a foreign country and its armed forces an
occupying power.
‘Thanks to Smt Sonia Gandhi for Nominating Jenab Ghulam
Nabi Azad as Chief Minister of J&K State’ announces a sprawling billboard
just down the street from the Tourist Reception Centre in the heart of
Srinagar. It was obviously hurriedly put up just in time for Sonia
Gandhi’s visit to Srinagar in March when she came to inaugurate a tulip
garden in town. Care was taken that Ms Gandhi be duly informed about the
man behind this outpouring of loyalty to her, his name, his picture and
his designation as the president of the Jammu and Kashmir Youth Congress
being prominently displayed in the centre of the board. Is one to
understand, as the board seems to suggest, that the chief minister of
Jammu and Kashmir owes his position not to the people of the state but
rather, to the munificence of a woman from outside who clearly has no
mandate to do so?
The tulip garden which Ms Gandhi flew in to inaugurate was
greeted with much indignation in large sections of the Kashmiri press
although obviously this was carefully left unmentioned by the Indian media
that reported on it, which exulted in the claim that this was yet another
sign of the conflict torn region returning to ‘normalcy’, with the flowers
back in bloom. The sprawling garden, extending over several dozen acres
and located in the lap of the thickly forested hills of Zabarwan on the
banks of the scenic Dal lake, was the brainchild of the chief minister and
has obviously cost the public exchequer an enormous amount of money.
Ghulam Nabi Azad, needless to say, strategically chose to name the garden
after the late Indira Gandhi and to invite her daughter-in-law to
inaugurate it. Obviously, the choice of the name found little or no
support among the denizens of Srinagar, most of whom, in any case, cannot
afford the hefty entrance fee and were also understandably upset over
newspaper reports that government officials were literally forcing
schoolchildren to visit the park.
‘Inaugurated by the Vice-Chancellor’, announces a granite
slab at the foot of a pillar that forms part of a new boundary wall that
has come up at the entrance of Kashmir University. The man who managed to
have his name inscribed therein is thankfully no longer in charge of the
university but before he left he obviously made it a point to commemorate
himself for the sake of posterity despite the fact that he was not known
for his academic achievements, my university friends describing him
charitably as even less than mediocre.
With elections in Kashmir around the corner, sloganeering
politicians have been seeking to make waves by raising issues that they
generally promptly forget once polls are over. So, as the Kashmiri press
reports, some have demanded that Pakistani currency be allowed to be used
in Kashmir, others have called for free trade across the Line of Control
and all of them are branding the others as having betrayed the Kashmir
cause and as allegedly working as Indian or Pakistani agents
or even both, as the case might be.
Heated sloganeering also shrouds the raging controversy
over a report recently released by the Srinagar-based Association of the
Parents of the Disappeared (APDP) which claims that over a thousand
unidentified graves located in the border tehsil of Uri in Kashmir’s
Baramulla district might be those of innocent civilians done to death by
the Indian armed forces and then branded as ‘terrorists’. The Indian
authorities, predictably, have sought to hush up the issue while human
rights defenders continue to insist that stern action be taken against the
perpetrators of these crimes.
The truth however seems to lie somewhere in between. On a
visit to the mountain village of Bijhama, located seven kilometres from
the Line of Control, I was informed that while the APDP report speaks of
some 200 unidentified graves in the village graveyard, just 13 of these
are of men labelled by the armed forces as ‘militants’, mostly intruders
from across the border, while the rest are actually of local inhabitants
who died natural deaths. That, of course, is not to deny the reality of
fake encounters in Kashmir involving the Indian armed forces but, as a
human rights activist pressed upon me, if the authors of the APDP report
are not to lose their carefully built up credibility they ought to have
done their research more carefully.
Two weeks in Srinagar and, as usual, I’ve been subjected
to a heavy overdose of sloganeering. We drive down to the airport although
I, as always, have mixed feelings about leaving a place that I love so
much. We stop at the Iqbal Park to take a photograph of the poet Iqbal
(adored by many Kashmiris particularly because he was of Kashmiri origin),
set against a strawberry pink board. Below his picture is a verse from him
in Persian which talks of Kashmir as being the rose in a garden. Below
that, in English, the board declares, ‘Make your own world from the clay
of India’. If that is meant to be a translation of the Persian verse, it
is obviously erroneous and misleading. But then the board has been put up
by the Central Reserve Police Force and so, presumably, no one can dare
question it.
The airport is abuzz with activity. Planeloads of tourists
and soldiers are heading back to Delhi. Srinagar airport is unique. In no
other airport in India is one forced to submit to lessons in Indian
nationalism. ‘We are Hindis and Hindustan is Ours’, ‘India is One’ and so
on scream slogans painted on little blue plastic boards placed haphazardly
all over the waiting hall.
Slogans galore, but then that is part of what the whole
war over Kashmir is really all about.