A country that has had to press the pause button when it comes to celebrating its economic successes, is now face to face with hard political and social questions. There is the Kashmir reprise, the killings and subsequent lynchings in Orissa (shades of Godhra?), the shortsightedness of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, the sobering realisation that there is now a domestic Islamist terror network in operation, the spreading Maoist challenge, and floods in Bihar. Each of these would have been crisis enough; all of them together raise questions about the dysfunctionality of the Indian state, the counter-productiveness of its divisive politics, and the collapse of the rules by which a modern democracy should function—if every issue has to be settled on the streets, or by taking the law into your own hands, by reaching for a gun or planting a bomb, it does not say much for the virtues of Indian democracy.
Nor does it help when the response to the Kashmir uprising varies from a ‘let Kashmir go’ to ‘let them go but leave their land behind’ to ‘stop central funding of development in the state’—all views that have been aired in recent weeks. If the country should get ‘azadi from Kashmir’ (as Arundhati Roy argues), then why not get ‘azadi’ also from Nagaland, and from some other candidates for secession? And what would that do to the idea of India as a multi-faith, multi-ethnic, secular democracy—assuming the country survived the communal carnage against Muslims in the heartland that would follow a Kashmiri secession? The issue is not Kashmir, it is India.
If Kashmiri politicians frustrate their interlocutors by presenting different faces and speaking in different voices, depending on the occasion and the audience, the BJP is not much better when it seeks to deny that there was no blockade imposed by Jammu activists. If the home ministry was sleeping while the Amarnath land issue festered, has the Orissa police been any better? And who should be damned more—the peaceful protestors in Srinagar and Pampore, or violent mobs in Orissa which attack orphanages? And how does anyone manage a dialogue with Mamata Banerjee if she thinks that 2,200 families getting back 300 acres of land (and not just getting better compensation, or alternative land) is more important than the industrial future of West Bengal?
The Kashmir situation (which now supersedes all other crises) is different from the past because, this time round, no one can blame Pakistan. The uprising is homegrown, and it has been peaceful. That it has been sparked by a relative non-issue throws up questions about the divergent pulls on the Kashmiri mind. To be sure, opinions in the valley have been influenced over the years by the failures of Pakistan and the successes of India, but it is also true that the Kashmiri has seen few of the virtues of Indian democracy. The Indian state is represented in the valley by the barrel of an AK-47; and the Indian face is that of the trooper who can humiliate, torture, kill and rape. Nothing is achieved by denying that the price for holding on to Kashmir has been large-scale violation of human rights. So, just as the authority of the state has to be re-asserted in the valley, without preventing local outpourings, there has to be at the appropriate time an accounting done of the violations of human rights, and reparations. Without these, normalcy can be ruled out.
This is a country still in the making, even though the 62nd Independence Day has just been celebrated. It is a nation-state bedeviled with many problems, some of them seemingly intractable. The challenge is to look reality in the eye, deal with the issues that can be sorted out, keep a lid on those that can’t so that the progress on other fronts helps solutions to evolve, and to have the stamina to stay the course. Neither communal ranting nor libertarian defeatism offers solutions. Underlying everything has to be the recognition that this country has faced bigger crises in the past, and that it is up to the challenges of today.
