When does lathicharge in Kashmir become news?

Mix students, television, cricket match, Kashmir and India and you usually get violence or intimidation against Kashmiri students in universities across the Hindi-belt. Sometimes the Kashmiri students have even been banished from the university or thrown out of their hostel overnight. None of these makes “national” headlines. However, last week, the same mix of students, television, cricket match, Kashmir and India became ‘national news’ in the Indian Union because, the site was Kashmir, not the Hindi-belt and the primary victims were non-Kashmiris. These double standards can be understood not by tricolour rhetoric, but by multi-coloured reality. Truths are not legislable, though its expression can be. 

In Kashmir, few support BCCI’s ‘Team India’. Many are happy when it loses. Hence, some Kashmiri students at National Institute of Technology (NIT), Srinagar, rejoiced when West Indies won the recent T20 semifinals. Some outsider students didn’t like that. They got a flavour of what Kashmiri students are made to feel daily in Hindi belt. Tension escalated and a few Kashmiri students were assaulted. The Kashmiris around NIT allegedly threw stones at the hostels on outsider students. Outsider students tried to take out a procession with an Indian national flag — a symbol rarely seen in Kashmir except under tight Indian security cover. The Jammu and Kashmir police stopped the outsider’s flag procession from leaving the campus and did so by serious lath-charge. Some students were hurt. Police beating up anyone is horrible and this subcontinent has a particularly brutal police system. I am no supporter of police authoritarianism but I am merely pointing it out that the JK Police treated them less harshly than what it does to fellow Kashmiris. There is ‘us’ and ‘them’ even in superior treatment — that’s how sometimes differences show up, in the most opposite way than expected. Many lathi-charge incidents of far greater and brutal scale on many Kashmiri youth hasn’t been of interest to Indian media.

Beyond chest-beating about the right of flying the tricolour from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, its important to understand reality, irrespective of Indian Union’s legal frame work. A nation is only a nation to those who believe in it. A nation doesn’t exist by itself, without its believers. Its a self-styled collective. If this collective has the resources to put symbols of its nationhood in areas significantly inhabited by people who may collectively think of themselves to be some other nation, conflict occurs. The democratic and peaceful way of resolving this conflict, is to ask the people inhabiting the contested area, what do they want. If this choice is denied, then the outcome of that conflict — victory, defeat or constant repression — is typically ensured by superior resources, especially military resources. Men with more guns and money ‘win’.

One outcome of this incident is that many Indian media outlets have shown Kashmiri people’s state of mind. Exploration of ‘what they want’ is something that Indian media avoids in a near-total way. This incident shows how different Kashmiri students, how different people in that Srinagar neighbourhood are from the outside students. Whether the difference is present in even wider sections of the Kashmiri population is something that this set of events cannot directly tell but it does have a strong hint. Indian nationalists claim Kashmiris are Indians. These Kashmiris are a very strange kind of Indian — much of what is considered national by Kashmiris is considered anti-national by Indian nationalists and vice versa. Does electoral democracy in Kashmir express this aspect of Kashmir? If not, who does the government represent?