Dear Aftab, Did you see this outlook article by Pankaj Mishra *India: A Massacre Justified By Philanthropy? http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081006&fname=Cover+Story&sid=3
since it is "pankaj mishra" , his credentials will ever be questioned?!!! we should be grateful to people like Pankaj Mishra. * For decades now, Kashmir has hosted a bloody stalemate, in which a powerful nation-state repeatedly tries, and fails, to impose its will on a small unyielding population. The Indian state uses political means (elections, special privileges) and financial inducements as well as military force to convince Kashmiris that they should not dream of self-determination. Still, Kashmiri defiance and harsh Indian retaliation exact a terrible human toll: tens of thousands killed, innumerable many disabled, tortured, orphaned and widowed. There is hardly a family in the Valley left untouched by the biggest military occupation in the world. People in mass democracies are usually slow to recognise the nature of the undeclared wars conducted by their representatives. But by the late 1960s there was hardly a public figure in the United States—from J.K. Galbraith to Philip Roth—who did not feel compelled to build up a chorus of denunciation against their country's deeply dishonourable involvement in Indochina. In comparison, the deaths, in less than two decades, of nearly 80,000 people in Kashmir have barely registered in the Indian liberal conscience. "I cannot imagine," Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote last month, "what it is to live like under half a million troops." Until very recently, such honest confessions of a moral impasse were rare not only in an increasingly corporatised media, which is as defiantly ignorant as it is nationalistic, but also among the people most likely to initiate national introspection on Kashmir—the impressively numerous writers and intellectuals who by training and temperament are secular and liberal. A few Indian commentators did deplore, consistently and eloquently, India's record of rigged elections and atrocity in the Valley, even if they spoke mainly in terms of defusing rather than heeding Kashmiri aspirations. But many more tended to become nervous at the mention of disaffection in the Kashmir Valley. "I am not taking up that thorny question here," Amartya Sen writes in a footnote devoted to Kashmir in *The Argumentative Indian*. In the more resonant context of a book titled *Identity and Violence*, Sen yet again relegates the subject to a footnote. It is not easy for me to point to these acts of omission. Most Indian liberals have fought with admirable courage the good and necessary war to prevent Hindutva from damaging India's multicultural ethos, and their commitment to justice for the poor and defenceless in Indian society cannot be faulted. They are right to suspect Pakistan of malicious intent in the Valley, and to fear that the four million Kashmiri Muslims demanding azadi expose 150 million Indian Muslims even further to the BJP-VHP's bigotry. But it makes progressively less sense why many Indian liberals should not make nuanced distinctions between Kashmiri and Indian Muslims; why they should help the fanatics of Hindutva hold Indian Muslims hostage by refusing to publicly uphold Kashmiri rights to a life of dignity. A commonplace secular-nationalist argument is that Kashmiri Muslims, if given the slightest concessions by India, would go radically Islamist or embrace Pakistan, emboldening separatists in the Northeast. But it has never been clear that radical Islam has a sustainable appeal in Kashmir. The Kashmiri feeling for Pakistan, too, is highly capricious, almost entirely fuelled by hatred of the Indian military occupation. For years the overtly Islamic and violent aspect of the insurgency in the Valley kept many secular Indian liberals from visibly sympathising with the plight of Kashmiri Muslims: if only the Kashmiris, I often heard, had organised a Gandhian-style political campaign. PS: I did not copy the image along with the text. its very evocative :-) See how "asoka sthabam" is transformed!!- damodr prasad --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
