Manu Joseph: Nobody told us that Kashmiris are also ‘polarized’

But that does not mean it is true. It only means that in such societies, the cultural elite and old money still control the media, that the loudest voice belongs to one type of people and the world has heard only their side of the story.

It simply cannot be that anywhere in the world, the elite and others have the same politics, especially over a long period of time. This includes Kashmir, which is in the process of electing an assembly for the first time in 10 years. 

Yet, you may think ordinary Kashmiris have the same views as activists who write opinions for foreign media—that they would rather fight India than move on with their lives. This is not true. 

Some people who have good lives in or far away from Kashmir, who do not require ‘normalcy,’ may want revolution. But, from what I have seen, most ordinary people of Kashmir just want to move on.

Societies often exist with opposing views. In fact, this is a natural way for any society to be. When we see political change, it means that one side, especially the one which knows words like ‘polarization,’ has lost its power to tell a biased story. For some time now, Kashmir, too, has held contrasting views. We were not told of that.

Over the years, we were told that Kashmiris faced one bad option and a good option. The ‘bad’ option was acceptance of India. The ‘good’ option was ‘freedom,’ by which they either meant freedom from India and alignment with Pakistan, or freedom from India to become an independent sovereign Islamic nation wedged between India, Pakistan and China. 

We were told that what Kashmiris really wanted was, miraculously, the same as what much of their elite wanted—freedom from India. This has not been true for some time.

I gather that Kashmiris are very excited about the elections. The voter turnout has been very good. The Indian government claims that this enthusiasm is proof that they are ready and eager to be assimilated into the Indian Union, contrary to what their cultural elites propagate. 

Even so, many Kashmiris are disappointed with the Indian government for reinforcing control upon the Valley by abrogating a constitutional provision and ending Kashmir’s statehood. 

Both these views mask the real point that Kashmir’s ordinary people have for long tried to make, which is that they are ready to move on. They have been stuck in time for decades as the world moved ahead. While they may not see Indian control as ideal for emotional reasons, it is the most practical outcome.

Twelve years ago, I visited Kashmir during an extraordinary period of peace and optimism there. Eventually, I would write a story for Open magazine entitled, “Sorry, Kashmir is happy.” Most of the people I met were ordinary folk. 

In the beginning, they said the usual things about how angry they are with India for everything it did to keep Kashmir in its hold. But eventually, they said that they were tired of Kashmir being a place where there was no economic activity or fun. 

They were willing to move on, which was a euphemism for accepting what their parents would call a political defeat. They were ready to accept that India has fared much better than Pakistan, and that a sovereign Islamic nation of Kashmir was not practical. But they pleaded with me not to be identified with this sort of sentiment.

It was not that there was shame in having this view. The shame would be manufactured by people who controlled the local media and had the ear of the Western media, the ones who defamed the idea of calm and normalcy because peace meant India was winning. 

After that story, every time violence would break out in Kashmir, some Kashmiri “poets” (of whom there are many) would tell me, with some complex glee, “Look, Kashmir is happy.”

In previous decades, India did try to muzzle the voices of Kashmiri people. But then, so did Kashmir’s own elite. They humiliated anyone who suggested aligning with India made sense. 

Like, for instance, Shah Faesal, who in 2009 became the only Kashmiri to be ranked first in the Indian civil services exam. He faced severe abuse on social media. 

On his Facebook page, Faesal once said that “…the crop of burger-fed, Armani-attired pseudo-revolutionaries,” referring to long-distance Kashmiri patriots, had “actually harmed” Kashmir.

In troubled places, it is the poor who usually do not have the means to flee and make esoteric suggestions about what must be done to ‘win.’ The people I spoke to in Kashmir wanted the violence to stop, and they wanted the simplest of things. 

They wanted a normal life. Cricket tournaments, concerts, and, as one of them said, KFC. When I wrote this, I got sneers from the avocado constituency. One intellectual said I had claimed that what Kashmiris wanted was fried chicken and not freedom. 

While this demonstrated reading comprehension problems, a more serious implication in those sneers was the idea that fried chicken, cricket matches and cinema halls were frivolous wishes.

In any system, when an old elite becomes the second rung of a society, they hit back through a moral cause and recruit the poor to fight that battle. When the poor develop practical ideas, they are lampooned by their handlers as fools. That was what was going on in Kashmir.