STATECRAFT BY HAPPYMON JACOB
Politics and its practitioners have never been famous for virtuous talk and truth-telling. So when politicians indulge in such rare acts, questions are bound to be raised, with observers wondering about the timing of the revelation, intended results, and the politics behind it etc. Hence when Prof. Abdul Gani Bhat claimed on 3rd January that key Kashmir dissident leaders such as Abdul Gani Lone and Mirwaiz Maulvi Muhammad Farooq were not killed by government forces but by “their own people”, people reacted differently, and, surely, that was to be expected. Some people jumped at the opportunity to raise fingers at the dissidents, some leaders such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq kept mum, and the Lone brothers appreciated Prof. Bhat for showing the way by speaking the truth about their father’s killing. Reactions from Hurriyat (G) and Dukhtran-e-Milat not only showed that they were unwilling to engage in truth-telling but more importantly, that they were just not comfortable with truths per se.
Some said that the Hurriyat leader was seeking some much-needed attention since he is increasingly getting marginalised in Kashmir’s dissident politics. While some observers attributed it to the internal dynamics within the separatist ranks, some others attributed it to the increasing differences between the separatist movement and the Pakistani establishment. While the ‘why now’ question will linger on for some more time, the more important questions to ask are ‘why is truth-telling and introspection important for movements such as the one in Kashmir’ and ‘what are the implications of the 'truth according to Prof. Bhat?’
To my mind, ‘the truth according to Prof. Bhat’ has some significant implications. First of all, his words reconfirm the not so black and white nature of Kashmir politics. Political processes, alliances, enmities and discourses in Kashmir’s separatist camp have almost never been black and white or straightforward; politics therein has been extremely complex and complicated with many grey areas. It is the existence of one such grey area that Prof. Bhat’s statement has managed to bring out. Secondly, Prof. Bhat’s statement also makes it clear that Kashmir’s struggle for azadi can not be based on a pack of convenient lies, half-truths and plain doubletalk. Kashmir’s azadi movement will have to seek truths about itself, face them, accept them, and sustain itself on the moral strength of those truths. Can a nation’s moral and political existence be based on the political expediency provided by lies, half-truths and myths propagated and reinforced by generation after generation? The refusal to introspect and correct the course runs the danger of constructing a self-identity laden with lies, myths and deceit.
Thirdly, Prof. Bhat’s revelation is also an opportunity for the Kashmiris to make peace with their own past even as they take their struggle further ahead. As pointed out earlier, there is a need for every nation and movement to look back at its own past, especially when it is a troubled one, and engage in some necessary introspection so that the burden of the troubled past does not hold it back from its onward march to its destiny. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Prof. Bhat’s words are an open invitation to all those who are party to the conflict in and over Kashmir to engage in some truth-telling. The state police chief and the NC politicians were quick to certify that whatever Prof. Bhat said was true. How about some truths from the J&K police and the state’s mainstream politicians? Are there no skeletons in their closets? Indeed, there are a lot of groups and individuals in Kashmir who need to follow Prof. Bhat’s example and have the guts to tell some truths which the rest of us might already know about just as we always knew what Prof. Bhat has now told us.
Will the J&K police and the security forces do some truth-telling about the numerous fake encounters and thousands of disappeared Kashmiris? Does the National Conference have the guts to come out of its denial mode about the many rigged elections with the help of which the party enjoyed power in the state time and again? Even as the former Prime Minister A. B Vajpayee admitted that none of the state assembly elections prior to 2002 were free and fair, the chief beneficiary of all those rigged elections, the National Conference, never came out with any truths about it. Nor did the Congress party do so which had not only overseen those rigged elections, using the twin doctrines of political necessity and national interest, but indeed gifted us with the Kashmir problem. Surprisingly, even the Pakistanis are doing some truth-telling these days about their export of violence into Kashmir as they have realized that their state-sponsored national narrative on Kashmir was becoming a dilemma for the Pakistani nation’s own very existence. When lies are propagated as truths, and truths are not told to the future generations, lies and myths become sacrosanct and national identities get constructed around false notions about oneself and others. Pakistanis, albeit only a section of them, are increasingly realizing that their national identity construction around myths about Kashmir and India, which at some point of time was considered convenient and useful, is proving to be ruinous for the very founding ideals of the Pakistani nation.
Whatever may have been the reason behind Prof. Bhat’s truth-telling, he has clearly shown the way which should be followed by the others in the state irrespective of their ideology, convictions and politics.
(Source: Greater Kashmir, Sunday, 11, 2011. URL: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Jan/16/the-necessity-of-truth-telling-2.asp )
