In response to Scroll's 'Hear it from a former stone pelter' article
On March 26, Scroll published a piece titled "Hear it from a former stone-pelter: What Kashmir needs is dialogue and non-violent discourse" based on a speech delivered by a young engineering student at a seminar held in Srinagar in February.
First, let's talk about the seminar.
The seminar was titled "Has gun proven to be the enemy of Kashmir? Will violence achieve anything"? The title of the seminar at best sounds hilarious and at worst paradoxical. Let's assume any of the speakers on the panel answered the first question in affirmative and later elucidated the "achievements" of "gun" and "violence". What does that mean? It means an open invitation for sedition. But wait. Kashmir has no cases of sedition. (Also, can you charge someone under a law which he does not recognise?) Therefore, he will be going behind bars for at least two years under Public Safety Act (PSA) for openly endorsing "gun" in Kashmir.
Now which "gun" are we talking about? There are two guns roaring in Kashmir. One for India and one against India. Again, let's assume there was someone in the list of speakers who chose to speak about the Indian gun. Consider, he has the same position and arguments to make which Irfan Gull made about the gun against India. He says, for example, that the Indian gun has not brought any stability, is under control of someone in Delhi, and has not brought any solution to the Kashmir problem therefore this gun must go. What will the response to such a position be, from media (in this case the website) and the Indian State? Again, slapped with PSA.
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| Irfan Gull at the seminar. |
The only position one can take at any such seminar, bearing the consequences in mind, is what Irfan Gull has taken. Damn the gun that is against India, save yourself and also earn some promotion in media for free.
This conference was organised in Srinagar by Juniad Qureshi, son of Hashim Qureshi - who, if you believe Quora, was a double agent, first worked with RAW and then won over by ISI to take part in the 1971 hijacking of an Indian airliner from Srinagar which was taken to Lahore and if local reports are to believed he worked for RAW again after his release - on a day when two young Kashmiris, Danish and Shaista, were killed by Indian forces in Pulwama. Enough said on the seminar.
Now let's talk about this "former stone pelter" description for a while.
The Indian state, its media and a large section of its population believe that stone pelting is an institutionalised practise in Kashmir. They think stone pelters are recruited, paid and then they also attain an age of retirement; which is wrong but not bad, because that is exactly how the resistance movement against an occupation should be run. It must be institutionalised. But should one get paid to demand freedom? Nah!
This "former stone pelter" in his speech has confessed that he "organised" stone pelting in his village (and yet the website believes his is a story of "how Kashmir's youth are manipulated") but rues the fact that his friends once stopped him from pelting stones on "our own party" contesting elections. Is this a suggestion that "mainstream" parties pay for stone pelting in Kashmir? Irfan Gull and his friends surely know something here!
Gull didn't retire from stone pelting because of his age but because he felt "hurt". He couldn't see anything "change". He is "shocked". He is aghast by the fact that pro-freedom parties restricted the protests to Shopian after months of protests against the rape and murder of Asiya and Neelofar in 2009 but he does not have a word to utter against the manner in which the Indian State and its security agencies hushed up the case and how their investigation declared that death of these two women was caused by drowning in a stream.
But then Gull is a young boy, too young to have formulated his ideas fully which are clearly vague given his assessment that "struggle" will culminate in "emancipation of miseries". He believes that at one point of his life he wasn't a rational individual and could not think for himself. "I noticed that I was being glorified and, perhaps instigated", he says, thus surrendering his agency. Our ideas are a reflection of our experiences and given his age it will be premature to suggest that the position he holds at present is final. You never know, may be a year later he speaks on a similar topic and suggests the opposite! But will media be interested in his story then? May be not.
For a section of media to call his speech of some "historic importance" and one that "acquires greater significance", it did not take much time to work the idea out in a way alternative media is supposed to. And also, because such a story perfectly fits in the prewritten script of Indian media on Kashmir and in the larger imagination of an Indian about a Kashmiri, the story was put out.
The website staff needs a visit to kaandar waans (baker shops) in a village, any village, in Kashmir and find for themselves how such things of "historic importance" are build and destroyed by argumentation and not how they suggest - "fraught with grave risks to life". So that next time they write something about Kashmir, or anything related to Kashmir, or try to make someone a voice of "manipulated" youth, they at least have their basics in place. And what does this non-violence discourse mean when the State, every State, is a monopoly of violence itself?