Mapping the Claims of History and Memory in Theorizing of the Kashmir Question

Abstract

The Kashmir Question is as much a conflict about competing histories and memories as it is about competing territorial claims. However, it has often been reduced to an understanding that reckons the question as one about the region perceived as a terrain of contestation between India and Pakistan. While this could be true, there are multiple complexities at play and the most serious happens to be one rising from the terrain of history and memory and the tensions which emanate thereof to shape the Kashmiri identity. The present paper therefore aims to study how the claims of history and memory have been employed by the Indian state, post-partition and the place it offers to the claims of collective memory. Secondly, the present paper aims to explore the different ways in which memory has been employed as a weapon of resistance to subvert the statist reading of the Kashmir Question. Further the present paper attempts to understand the layers that constitute the collective memory. Finally, this will in turn enable us to ask- what is the relationship between history and memory in configuring the Kashmiri identity and how does this relationship problematize the Kashmiri identity?

Keywords:

• Kashmir Question
• political conflict
• history
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sister Anastasija was quoted saying, “The Albanians hate us because our presence reminds them that historically and culturally this is Serbian land. This is a war not just against us but against memory” (New York Times 1988).

2 From the poem “Farewell” by Agha Shahid Ali (2000).

3 The British had propped up a number of princely states ruled by local monarchies that acted as their loyal clients before 1947. When the British decided to leave, the future of these states came into question. Both India and Pakistan wanted to absorb these vestigial states into their territories. In 1947, Hari Singh, the last Dogra king of the region, wanted independence. However, as a Hindu king ruling over a majority Muslim population, his power base was slipping. In 1948, the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan. Pakistan controls part of Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan. India holds much of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh. India lost territory to China after a war in 1962. The three countries that lay claim to parts of this region are all nuclear powers. This raises the spectre of a truly catastrophic conflict (Singh 2019).

4 Indian-administered Kashmir has held a special position within the country historically through this article, that was commonly understood as a provision that granted special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir (Noorani 2014) which gave it significant autonomy, including its own constitution and a separate flag.

5 At this point, the most common case studies trace the changing public history of a single event, such as the

Civil War or Holocaust, in response to political currents. Other studies, operating at a grander scale, contemplate changes in the forms and practices of remembering, tying those changes to the rise and decline of the nation-state as a political entity (Glassberg 1996).

6 Maurice Halbwachs, first employed the specific term collective memory in The Social Frameworks of Memory (1992) and in The Collective Memory (1980). His ideas have proven to be a fitting starting point. However, his main focus was on the social dependence of the memory of the individual.

7 Among many others within the separatist faction, the founding head of the Dukhtaran- e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi imagines the resistance movement as a pan- Islamic state where Islam is the only basis of identity and nationalism, rejecting the notion of territorial nationalism. The essence of “Kashmiriyat” or the distinct Kashmiri identity has no place in her pan- Islamist worldview as she clearly says. On the other hand, there is Zamruda Habib, a founding member of the Muslim Khawateen Markaz (MKM). She is the only woman to have served a five-year prison sentence under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) on charges of carrying funds to militant groups, which she has always denied. She considers the Kashmiri militant movement essentially as a “women’s movement” (Parashar 2014) and rejects the religious fundamentalism of leaders like Asiya Andrabi. In a response to Andrabi’s diktats in the 90s that any woman who comes out without burqa, her group would throw paint on those women, MKM was the first organisation that challenged her and said that women wearing burqa will not solve the Kashmir issue. She is one of those within the separatist faction who envisions an inclusive Kashmiri Nationalism. She argues that the Kashmiri Pandits should be included in the nationalist discourse and believes that communalism had distanced the Pandits from the Kashmiri Muslims. Similar testimonies have been recorded through interviews, notably by Swati Parashar in Women and the Militant wars: The politics of injury, among other scholars and journalists.

8 It is pertinent to mention that the case of Jammu also becomes another site through which one may explore history and memory as an alternative to the master narratives. For instance, memories of the Jammu massacre constitute one of the sites of contestation between the “history of triumphal events and the silenced memory of traumatic events”. This “forgetting” is a direct result of the construction of Indian nationalist narratives which tend to narrate the events of 1947 in the language of “action” and “reaction,” with the actions of Muslims in Punjab resulting in an “over-reaction” in the border belts of Jammu province (Rashid 2020). Strikingly, there are only scanty primary archival reports which enumerate the lives lost in terms of numbers. In a letter to Nehru, Dalip Singh stated that Sheikh Abdullah had informed him that 150,000 Muslims had been massacred in Reasi district in Jammu province (Singh 1947). However, as Dalip Singh also cautioned, there was nothing to corroborate this number.

9 For instance, the dismissal of Sheikh Abdullah’s government in 1953 and subsequent imprisonment, ban on the Plebiscite Front during the exile of Sheikh Abdullah, Indira-Sheikh Accords in 1975, in the region may be counted as some of the many watershed events that paved way for ages of trust-deficit between the people and the state government as well as the government at the centre and erosion of the regional autonomy. In the subsequent years, following the rigged elections of 1987, Kashmir witnessed rise of the insurgency movements in the late 1980s, followed by the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in early 1990s and mishandling of the situation by the Indian state, with constant attempts at erasure of the stories of brutality and injustice that has further heightened peoples’ anxiety.

10 See Lamb (1990, 1994) and Signing up to India in Whitehead (2007).

11 The family appeals drew the attention of Kashmir’s human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what came to be known as the “Machil Encounter” was about to create a watershed in Kashmir. Subsequently in 2008, while surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir’s 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers led him to a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2700. Inside them were 2943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified (Scott-Clark 2012).

12 The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993.

13 2700 unknown, unmarked and mass graves containing bodies standing over the figure of 2900 were documented between 2006 and 2009, across villages in Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara districts of Kashmir alone (Chatterji et al. 2009)

14 Post abrogation of Article 370, the Indian Government dissolved a set of institutions working in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, like the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), State Information Commission (SIC) and the State Accountability Commission (SAC), among others (The Wire Government Shuts Down J&K Human Rights Commission, Information Commission 2019).

15 For many, Kashmir’s loss of sovereignty is often juxtaposed with time when its last native ruler, Yusuf Shah Chak was dethroned, and is tied intrinsically to his poet-singer wife, the once-peasant girl Habba Khatoon. In 1585, Akbar, the Mughal emperor in Delhi, invaded Kashmir. To broker peace, Shah Chak personally visited Akbar’s court, where he was imprisoned and sent subsequently to be confined in Bihar’s Nalanda district, where he died in 1592.

16 See for instance Chol Hama Roshay – Dal Sessions by Ali Saffudin – YouTube.

17 Ae Rahe Haq Ke Shaheedon | Madar-e-Watan | Naseem Begum Songs – YouTube is the original song, the rendition of which was created by the artists in Kashmir and is available online on YouTube.

18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zduUkB8TFz0

19 Admirers of the artist made videos of the number using raw protest footage; one such video, made and uploaded on the internet, reportedly crossed 100,000 views before it was pulled down from YouTube, and the studio where the song was recorded was raided by the police. Similar videos still exist on YouTube and a line from the song inspired the title of the Sanjay Kak-edited 2011 book, Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada In Kashmir (When Stones turn to Songs in Kashmir 2017).

20 See for instance Like A Sufi: MC Kash & Alif | Music Video | India’s First Sufi Rap | Unique Stories from India – YouTube

21 At this juncture, it is important to reiterate the silencing of indigenous theatre in Kashmir during the rise of insurgency movements. Cinema theatres and traditional mode of entertainment were targeted alike, including the traditional Band Pather performances, which is basically the indigenous folk theatre combining satire, music, dance and buffoonery (Kabir 2009).

22 Shikara is a 2020 Indian Hindi-language romantic drama film directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The film is based on the love story of a Kashmiri Pandit couple at the peak of insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir during the 1990s and the subsequent exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley. 

23 It is nothing less than ironical that the foundational ceremony for the construction of the Ram Temple was conducted amidst a raging pandemic on the same date a year later, on which the abrogation of the article 370 was given effect in the parliament (Ram Mandir And Article 370: August 5 Signifies The Complete Transformation Of National Politics [Outlook 2020]).

24 Prem Nath Bazaz wrote books in favour of an independent Kashmir long before the armed struggled gave voice to this demand. See for instance The history of struggle for freedom in Kashmir: Cultural and political, from the earliest times to the present day (1954).

25 In the intervening night of 23rd and 24th February 1991 troops of Indian Army’s Rajputana Riffles launched a search operation in the village of Kunan Poshpora, just two miles from the main township of Kupwara, and raped the women and girls of these twin villages, numbering over fifty as per various estimates, including teenage girls and an over eighty years old frail grandmother.

26 See for instance works by Nyla Ali Khan and Khalid Bashir Ahmed.

27 Memoryscape connotes a form of remembering represented through the surge in memorial sites which are often in the form of memorials, monuments or museums that shape the collective memory. These sites transform public spaces into sites for remembering the past.

28 To date, Chittisinghpora has been the subject of only one government inquiry that was never made public and was later found by a Justice Pandian commission probe to have had many irregularities.

29 On the morning of 30 May 2009, the bodies of two sisters-in-law, Neelofar Jan and Asiya Jan, aged 22 and 17 respectively, were found in Shopian. The case had rocked Kashmir Valley throughout the summer, as people had come on to the streets in mass protests the state’s mishandling of the case –that was largely perceived to be an indication of the complicity of state agents in the perpetration of the crime itself (Duschinski and Hoffman 2011).

30 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP Kashmir n.d) – Official Website

31 The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), a hard-line separatist militant outfit was one of the first groups to set up a women’s wing called Muslim Khwateen Markaz (MKM) to enlist the support of women for their cause in both Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir. he MKM is still active as a political group in Jammu and Kashmir and now represents the women’s wing of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC). Ironically the MKM has no voice within the Hurriyat, a political constituent of separatist organisations today, even though it has been accorded token membership.

Additional information

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Sana Shah

Sana Shah is a research scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her area of focus deals with Religious Diversity and the limits of the Liberal Paradigm.