Kashmiris’ disapproval of the Baisaran massacre could have been used to forge a new reality in the Valley, but their commiserations were lost in the din of warmongering and their sorrow met with cynicism
A protest is held against the Pahalgam terror attack, in which 26 lives were lost, in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, on April 27. Pic/PTI
The massacre at Baisaran, in Pahalgam, shattered the cliché that violent death had become in Kashmir, prompting its people to observe a shutdown to express their sorrow. Their prolonged experience of violence, as much perpetrated by some of their own as by the Indian State and Pakistan, didn’t inure them to the militants asking the tourists to identify their religion before shooting them dead, even though this form of killing has a long history in India.
Yet the humane response of Kashmiris was lost in the din of warmongering, or portrayed as their lament over the setback Baisaran will inflict on their tourism industry. Tourism, according to former finance minister Haseeb Drabu, accounts for only seven per cent of Jammu and Kashmir’s GDP, and hotels and restaurants less than one per cent. Kashmiris, in other words, can survive without tourism. The misrecognition of their sorrow commodifies their emotions, a subliminal step towards dehumanising them.
It’s significant that violent death stopped being a cliché in Kashmir last week. Clichés numb human sensibilities because of their repetitive nature, and raise the threshold for society to experience shock, sorrow and catharsis. Kashmir is indeed the graveyard of clichés—of terms such as normalcy and security, and actions pertaining to militancy, State reprisal and diplomacy. State and non-State actors resort to higher, more intense forms of action to overcome the dulling quality of clichés.
An example of this is the India-Pakistan spat, which follows every horrendous incident of terror. This too had become a cliché until, in 2016, India struck in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir in retaliation against a terrorist attack in Uri. Three years later, the Pulwama bombing saw India call for an air strike in Balakot. In both instances, the impact of India’s retaliation came wrapped in ambiguity.
India’s threat over Baisaran will appear as a cliché unless the Modi government hurts Pakistan in a visible, verifiable way. Nothing less will do for the outraged public baying for vengeance. The government’s choices are complicated because of Pakistan’s presumed readiness to counter India’s expected retaliation.
India’s decision to put the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance is not a clichéd response, even though its impact is unlikely to be visible immediately. Under the treaty, India could use the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers for hydropower and limited irrigation purposes but was not allowed to store or divert their flow away from Pakistan. These obligations India no longer has to meet.
The discharge from the melting of snow in the three rivers, between May and September, is too large in volume for India to store and, therefore, skew the flow of water to Pakistan. It will take a few years for India to augment its storage capacity. In winter, though, Pakistanis fear that India could even now, by regulating the timing of the water release, throw their schedule of sowing crops and energy generation in disarray.
Delhi’s tactic, however, will set a precedent for China to emulate on the sharing of the Brahmaputra river with India. The tactic is also desultory, unlikely to satisfy the public weaned on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rhetoric of its extraordinary willingness to take immediate military action against Pakistan’s abominable deeds. Yet any measure less than the Balakot air strike will be seen as a clichéd response, besides spawning the claim that it was undertaken merely because the BJP wanted to harvest votes in the 2019 elections.
As for Pakistan, it sponsors ghastlier action every passing incident because it too must overcome the factor of cliché to shock, make global powers nervous and persuade them to bring Islamabad and Delhi to the negotiating table. Pakistan misdiagnoses its existential crisis.
A cliché buried in Baisaran was normalcy, which the BJP trumpeted by citing the rising inflow of tourists into Kashmir. Tourism in Kashmir became politicised as pilgrimage there had been after 2000, when the Amarnath yatra’s duration was extended from 15 days to two months. Journalist Anuradha Bhasin has shown that, unlike pilgrims, holiday tourists rarely came under militant attack, not least because hospitality holds almost a religious value for Kashmiris. Not surprisingly, the tourist-is-safe cliché has been riddled with bullets for raising the Indo-Pak temperature.
After the abrogation of Article 370, the picture of normalcy in Kashmir was crafted by suppressing street protests, repeatedly disallowing Mirwaiz Umar Farooq from holding Friday prayers, and turning the media into the State’s handmaiden. State functionaries began believing as real the illusion of normalcy the media felt pressured into depicting, perhaps leading to a lax security matrix. Was this why there were no soldiers on the Baisaran meadow? Was this also why former diplomat Vivek Katju’s warning, in a March 21 analysis of the Balochistan crisis, that Pakistan might sponsor a “terrorist event” in India went unheeded?
When clichés are swept away, there arise opportunities for forging a new reality. And that opportunity, last week, was the Kashmiri public’s disapproval of the Baisaran massacre, which should have been built upon. Instead, the houses where militants once lived were blown up and Kashmiri students elsewhere in India were threatened into fleeing to Kashmir. These responses, hackneyed by now, will also get buried in the graveyard of clichés one day, through actions too chilling to contemplate.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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