A Complex Dilemma

Kashmir is a contested state split between India and Pakistan. Before 1947 when the British India
partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, Kashmir enjoyed a princely status with an
autonomous government of her own. However, the situation turned chaotic soon, when Hari Singh
signed the Document of Accession with the Dominion of India, in strict violations of the rights of the
people of Kashmir. This turned out to be the genesis of a dispute between India and Pakistan in which
Kashmir became the casualty. More than sixty years from then and more importantly twenty three
years after the armed insurgency broke in Kashmir, the region has become one of the worst conflict
zones of the world where the rights of people are threatened and violated by nuclear armed India and
Pakistan. Kashmiris, as a people, attained certain characteristics which they would have loved last to
imbibe. Conflicts, critics believe, do bestow many characteristics to the oppressed like split-
personality traits, divided opinion etc. Also, a dilemma hangs over the people all the time,
backtracking even on vital issues. Not a single person is immune to such an order. From a common
man to a university teacher; from the head of a government to the spearheads of separatist leadership,
all fall prey to such an outbreak. This was evident a day before when the Chief Minister of Jammu
and Kashmir Omer Abdullah broke down in the Assembly saying; ‘I don’t see why they fired bullets.
I don’t believe the soldier who shot Tahir dead would be brought to book’ (paraphrase). Even though
the Chief Minister may have said so to show his helplessness or to gain public support, yet it marks a
very crucial ‘state of mind’ of the head of a government. A ‘state of mind’, where he identifies
himself as a native and interestingly as a common native! There is a subtle feeling that he is not happy
with himself for betraying his people many a time. He sees it very hard to ask for forgiveness once
more.

A Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, as of any State of India, is the head of the government and
owes his and his government’s allegiance to the constitution of India. In plain words he is a part of the
‘system’ that has been killing his fellow people in their own courtyard. However, this time his
sympathies- so far hidden or dormant- lie with his people who don’t identify with the Indian State or
Indians. This is a curious case of a man in power, supposed to quell any ‘antinational’ activities. He
suffers from a dilemma, a crisis of identity that is so visible in his speech in the legislative Assembly.
There is something that tickles the conscience of the most powerful man in the state and jolts him into
a ‘rebellion’ of sorts against the ‘system’ (“Do we hold the national flag for this”?). It is too early for
the Indian nationalists to brand him as an enemy of the ‘system’, which if proved could land him in
prison, just like they did with his grandfather. This rebellious character, it may be said, was actually
the feature of National Conference’s tallest ever leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who rebelled in
his prime days but was ‘tamed’ quite strategically in his old age that led him to make an accord with
the Union of India and broke his image for ever. The current Chief Minister has perhaps come to sorts
with himself by voicing the hitherto unvoiced. In fact for the past few years, whole National
Conference leadership has shown such a rebellious shade. A Mehboob Beig talks like a public
intellectual and so does a Rattanpuri, though very lately. Mustafa Kamal is prone to such speech, but
his consistent inconsistency does not weigh him in the same scale as the above.

Nothing can be concluded here about Omer Abdullah’s behavior but one is reminded by one’s
memory of a protagonist named Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians who
despite being part of the Empire, sympathizes with the tribespeople that the Empire is at war with. For
consorting with the enemy, the Magistrate is imprisoned, shamed but, ultimately, set free. He works
again for the Empire but his thoughts undergo a severe change. He develops a distaste for history, a
history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, a history that the Empire dooms itself for to live in.
He just wants to live outside this history. Omer Abdullah does a Magistrate act here but is he
courageous enough to live outside the history that the ‘system’ he works for imposes on its subjects,
even the lost subjects? The answer, so far, is a big ‘NO’ because had he been thinking on such lines,
we would have seen him resign at least and show to his people that he really is one among them, as
subjugated and oppressed as them. This could have set him free from the ‘history’ of murders and
probes, sins and hangings, and hardly would have he been responsible for the present, or at least of the
future, killings. This could have instilled in him a streak of resistance- in solidarity with his people-
and liberated him, because ‘considering oneself as belonging to a subject people is the founding
insight of anti-colonial nationalism’, as Fanon puts it so beautifully. This could have narrowed, or
even made obsolete, the gap between him and his fellow people. But so far there is no such liberation
for him, for he declined to resign soon after breaking down. This really is a dilemma of greater
complexity than is visible to the naked eye. Or is it, one wonders, again a political rhetoric, as his
opposition colleagues view it?

(Tanveer Habib)