How memory oppresses Kashmir

Voters stand in a queue to cast votes at a polling station during the final phase of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election, at Handwara in Kupwara district of North Kashmir on October 1. Pic/PTI

Memory began its whisper on the flight to Srinagar. Two non-resident Kashmiris, in their 30s, were seated next to me. Isn't the high turnout in the Assembly elections in Kashmir a sign of normalcy returning to it, I asked them. "Normalcy!" scoffed the man who is now a resident of Canada. Last year, during a short stay in the Valley, the security forces handpicked him and two others to enter houses to check whether there were gunmen hiding in them. "They wanted me to be their human shield in the search operation. I refused," he said. Refused? "I made it a point to tell them that I am a Canadian resident."

The other Kashmiri, who works with a media outlet in Dubai, too had a story to narrate: In the spring of 2002, when he was in high school, the Army announced a search operation in his neighbourhood. All the men were ordered to assemble in an open area, with women and children left behind in their homes. From the assembly of men, the young, including the man from Dubai, were chosen to accompany the soldiers for the search.

He was assigned a house to enter alone. The instruction to him was that if he were to see a militant, he was to come out and wave at the soldiers. The courtyard of the house he walked into had a mound of husk, from the top of which he espied a pair of flip-flops popping out. He shuffled out, and waved at the soldiers. In a 2019 piece for a newspaper, he wrote, "When I look back at this incident, I always have this ghostly feeling that there was somebody hiding inside the mound of husk."

I thought their candour was typical of those besotted with "long-distance nationalism." But no; wherever I went and whoever I spoke with, memories always cast their shadow upon me. Memory torments and oppresses Kashmiris. Memory defines them. Memories of relatives or friends who never returned home, of boys blinded by pellets.

I ran into a person whose nephew was among the five shot dead by the Army, which claimed they were the militants who had, in 2000, gunned down 35 Sikhs in Chattisinghpora, Anantnag district. It was subsequently proved to have been cold-blooded murders. "His mother…," he left it to me to imagine her sorrow. An entire generation's first interaction with India was with its Army. It scarred them. They vividly remember soldiers slapping and cursing them when they were schoolboys, making them kneel down on the road; or spending weeks locked inside homes because of interminable curfews.

The militants wreaked havoc, didn't they? "For us, they were freedom fighters, not militants or terrorists," a lady, in her 50s, corrected me.

But surely, they now appreciate the incidence of militancy dipping, and markets remaining open until late in the evening? There are roads taken at night that were not possible to take, say, a decade or two earlier.
Tourists are visiting the Valley in substantial numbers. There are contracts to grab for undertaking development projects. A class of Kashmiris smells the opportunity to become wealthy. It is they who constitute the nucleus of the supporters of the Indian State.

Some nod, even smile. For most others, memory is the touchstone for judging normalcy, whether it is of a degree that justifies their past suffering and those who died fighting the State. This test Kashmir's normalcy fails, for there are those who, after Article 370 was abrogated, were imprisoned under draconian laws. Newspapers have become government rags.

By the Lidder river gurgling through Pahalgam, a 21-year-old said he dared not criticise the government on social media. Why? "The police will come to my door. It happened to a friend of mine," he said, showing me his inked finger to convey he had voted. He felt hurt that Pahalgam is virtually closed down during the annual Amarnath Yatra. I thought his memory had started taking a definite form.

Even those who voted warn against mistaking the silence in Kashmir for normalcy, claiming a simmering discontent is waiting to explode, for the lava of anguish to flow out. To what avail, I countered, for the independence they pine for cannot be theirs, for India is just too strong for them to vanquish. Acquiescence to repression cannot be an option, nor can a flawed democracy be accepted, they shot back. Those with a sense of history gave voice to their memory, with intricate details, of Delhi manipulating Kashmiri politics from the time Sheikh Abdullah was imprisoned in 1953 to the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.

All Kashmiris will view tomorrow's election results through the prism of memory. It will be some recompense for them in case the Bharatiya Janata Party is unable to form the government, for a Hindu chief minister in Jammu and Kashmir, where Muslims constitute 68 per cent of the population, will, to their memory, seem a return of the Dogra rule banished seven decades ago, a phenomenon brilliantly captured in the title of Mridu Rai's book, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects. A new register for recording memory will then be opened.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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