Neither Modi's visit nor Geelani's million man march will help Kashmir

On November 7, Mr Narendra Modi will visit the Kashmir Valley. The hardline Kashmiri ideologue, and former MLA, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, has called a "Million Man March" to protest Mr Modi's presence - although none of us know what the prime minister has to say. In response, dozens of people have been put under "preventive detention" aka arrested, and the police and security forces are deployed at their peak.

What will happen tomorrow is that Mr Modi will give a speech, announce another package or two and lambast his opponents. His supporters will call it "very generous", "statesman-like", "in the footsteps of - or even better than - Vajpayee".

Geelani's supporters will say, this is how India treats Kashmiris, "locks us up, and then tries to appease the easily-bribed by some money." Both sides will be happy to be unhappy, their points proved, and go back to sulking at each other.

What can and cannot be given

The unfortunate thing is that the word freedom or azadi obscures what is being negotiated. Kashmiris demand freedom, and India responds by saying, "We cannot change the borders, but here, take some money or some concession or two, if that will make you feel better". A senior dissident Kashmiri leader - now a member of the J&K Cabinet once explained to me that there was no "chair" for Kashmiris in New Delhi to negotiate from, only a sofa where they could sit comfortably for a while before the next chap could be called in. It is on this basis that Geelani bases his whole appeal.

From the 1970s to now, he has been saying essentially the same thing, "India will give you nothing".

And, for that whole time, we have essentially been proving him right, because the Indian state genuinely believes that it can give Kashmiris nothing.

This is wrong, and it is a terrible lie at the basis of the Indian mishandling and abuse of Kashmiris since the beginning of our relationship after the Instrument of Accession was signed in October 1947. India had much to offer Kashmir; at its root, it had the possibility of offering the various freedoms that are the basis of the Indian Constitution to the residents of Jammu & Kashmir. It chose to do the opposite.

If democracy is the freedom to peacefully remove a government by democratic ballot, the Indian government denied the people of J&K this basic right from the start. We talk about the wretched 1987 state elections in which massive rigging took place. Opposition candidates such as Yusuf Shah (who would go on to take the nom de guerre of Syed Salahuddin as the leader of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen) and their elections agents such as Yasin Malik (who would go on to lead the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front) were illegally arrested and mistreated. We know all that, but we are not told of the traducing of democracy both before and after.

"We will give you bribes, just don't ask for democracy or justice"

Every single prime minister and chief minister of the state of Jammu & Kashmir until 2002 was removed by New Delhi. The only exception was GM Sadiq, who died in office. We have spent more than half a century teaching the Kashmiris that their ballots mean nothing, that democracy is a dead word in the language of the Indian state when applied to J&K. Justice is a dead word too.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in J&K since 1989, including hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits. Nobody even knows how many people have been killed, and it seems that the state does not even care to count. In 2011, more than 2,700 unmarked graves were discovered by an investigation by police officers assigned to the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in J&K. To this day, no detailed enquiry has taken place on whose bodies lie there, instead, the SHRC has been happily stripped of its powers and personnel.

The Indian state is wonderfully secular in denying justice, so no cases have really been brought to closure for the hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits that were murdered either. Instead, between 2002 and 2008, the PDP-Congress alliance that was in power built hundreds of modern apartments for Kashmiri Pandits, and offered government jobs. Today, it is difficult to get a flat in these buildings. To Muslims and Hindus alike, the Indian government's response is similar, "We are willing to give you bribes, but don't expect justice, not ever."

The real challenge

So while Modi and Geelani engage in their sterile rhetoric, people will remain locked up under curfew or threat of violence across Kashmir, sure of only one thing, that nothing will change for the better. This is why it is better to look beyond Srinagar to know what is happening in the rest of the Valley. If you read the newspapers closely you might have noticed that a commander of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Abdul Rehman usually referred to by his nom de guerre of Abu Qasim, was killed in the end of October in Kulgam, in south Kashmir. If you were seriously curious, you might have come across the picture of his funeral, which was carried by only one Indian national newspaper that I know of, The Indian Express, and even that did not try to explain why a Pakistani militant seemed to have hundreds, if not thousands, of Kashmiris mourning for him.

Had you read a bit deeper, asked around, you might have learned that three villages had fought for the "honour" of hosting his burial. And then you might have wanted to ask why the death of a commander of the LeT generates such a response? Are Kashmiris naturally pro-Pakistan and anti-India? In 1965, this was manifestly not so. With Sheikh Abdullah under illegal detention (no charges were proved against him) the Pakistani had infiltrated people into Kashmir to stoke tensions.

Pakistani radio informed everyone that the Banihal tunnel had fallen into the hands of an "independence movement" when, in fact, Kashmiris largely informed the Indian Army, which interdicted these groups long before they came near their targets. Operation Ghaznavi, as it was called, completely failed because Kashmiris were not interested in letting their resentments be hijacked by Pakistanis.

After decades of our work of denying them democracy, justice and the minimum basics of rule of law that are promised under the Indian Constitution, is it any surprise that resentment has festered into something else?

If we are to make any progress at all, we must realise that bribes and empty calls for azadi serve no purpose. The core of the Indian constitutional promise to its citizens, of truth, justice, rule of law and liberty must be offered. If we are not prepared to give the freedoms that we offer to Indians as their basic right, Kashmiris will keep demanding freedom from us, their jailers.