Kashmir Is Nuclear flashpoint Banning Social Media Is No Answer

Punchline

 Word of Mouth: Language of Resistance  

By

Z.G. Muhammad

For the past ninety-three years, the political struggle of people of Jammu and Kashmir has evolved its own grammar. The grammar had enabled the people of the state to defend their narrative even when the “dominant discourse” had its sway in the state. Or when in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru had succeeded in carrying out “political PSYOPs” on our leaders and made them do what he wanted. Nevertheless, it was this political grammar that not only salvaged and strengthened the narrative of the people of the State. But,  time and again breathed a new life into it.

If   banning the Social Media networks can have any impact on the political narrative, and the political struggle of the people of the state reminded me of a quote from Edward Said’s essay ‘Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony.’ This long article was written by him when he was in hospital and death was at his doorstep.  Talking about the whirlwind tour to further the cause of Palestine after diagnosed with deadly cancer, he writes, “In the past six months I have lectured in four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian population which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.” Same holds true about Jammu and Kashmir, for past nine decades it has been the Kashmir and the struggle of the people of the land that has been bringing them together for furthering their political cause. Notwithstanding the resistance movement at times apparently sinking,  history testifies it always resurfaced with more vigor to attract the international attention.

For all these decades, the raison d’être for the political uprisings in the state has not been an emotional outburst over one or other happening.  Nevertheless, it is deeply grounded in the history of the struggle that found its first major expression in 1846, when people of the State (then called country) went up in arms against the ‘Amritsar Sale Deed.’

To understand, if banning all the social media networks, could be a tool in preventing people gathering for articulating their political demands there is a need for looking at the history of some major uprisings in the state.

Imagine,  1924, Kashmir, connected to the outside world only through the Jhelum Valley world. Eighty percent population from Skardu to Kishtiwar arriving into   Srinagar after crossing over arduous high mountain passes.  No modern transport system and no means of means of transmitting information other than word of mouth. During these times, the British Viceroy of India, Lord Reading arrived in Kashmir, and the Maharaja had made elaborate arrangments for a royal river procession reception through the city. For converting the royal procession into people’s protest, the message reached surreptitiously during the night through word of mouth to almost every home. In the morning people started gathering on the banks of the river Jhelum, hiding black flags inside their tunics. No sooner, the Viceroy and the Maharaja in the royal boats entered into the city, like a lighting people waived black flags from the two banks of the river and slogans for ending bigoted and brutal rule resounded all over the city. These protests did send a   signal to the colonial rulers in India that all was not well in Kashmir. These  impacted the Maharaja policy towards citizens.

The situation in 1931 was not different than that in the twenties. Then also no newspapers were published from Srinagar and telephones were a preserve of the Dogra Durbar. It was again the word of mouth that send the news about the terrible massacre of unarmed people by the Maharaja’s army at lightning speed all over the state, causing instantly massive protests in Shopian and Islamabad.  True, the news did travel to neighboring Punjab after three days. But, it stirred protests and demonstration against the Maharaja of Kashmir in many parts of the British India. That caused the British to intervene resulting in the appointment of the Glancy Commission. 

The history of the political struggle in Kashmir is full of instances when word of mouth has outsmarted the official policies of strangulating the media and other communication channels. The early  1990s Jagmohan rule in the state is one of the classical examples of word of mouth defeating his strategy of throttling the public voices to submission. His government, drawing support for his brutish policies from the V.P. Singh government, choked the media. Many a foreign journalist reporting from Srinagar were bundled out to New Delhi.  The newspapers published from Srinagar were ordered to stop publications and warrants issued against some editors. I remember, a newspaper editor friend always carrying an anticipatory bail from the court in his pocket. In those days, when there was no social media and telephone system had almost collapsed, people took to alternative media putting billboards inside the Mohallas announcing protest programs and circulating handbills sharing the news with the people. Jagmohan’s tactics did not help in preventing massive protest rallies instead made them bloody – leading from one bloodbath to another.

Such harsher policies of stifling the voices of dissent that almost became the bible for the successive governors and chief ministers seen in right perspective have proved counter-productive. These instead of easing the situation have made it more volatile. Since 1989, the political uprising in the state has not died down for a day, it only varied in its intensity and changed its forms- 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2016 uprisings are internationally now called as ‘Kashmir Intifada.’ Attributing some posts on the social networks as a cause for various manifestations of a political movement with such a vast history sounds naïve. Such thoughtless alibis are nothing but a cheap expression of denial of recognizing the harsher realities of the Kashmir Dispute. Let me conclude, this column with the  last   sentence in Sumantra Bose’s 2003 book, ‘Kashmir Roots of Conflict Path to Peace.’ “Kashmir will remain a flashpoint in a militarized and nuclearized sub-continent” till it is resolved peacefully.

Published in Greater Kashmir on 1-5-17