Distorting A Narrative: A Rejoinder to Basharat Ali’s Piece in the Pakistani Media about the Episode Concerning Kashmiri Students in Meerut

Karmanye Thadani

As an Indian keenly interested in the Kashmir issue and who tries to be updated on narratives on the other side of the border (and I have sought to dispel misconceptions about Pakistan promoted by sections of Hindu rightists in my writings- http://wordpress-200526-602825.cloudwaysapps.com//do-we-tend-to-exaggerate-the-plight-of-the-religious-minorities-and-women-in-pakistan/), it was interesting to read two articles in a well-known liberal Pakistani newspaper Express Tribune about the episode concerning Kashmiri students cheering for Pakistan in Meerut. One (http://tribune.com.pk/story/679764/meerut-is-not-srinagar/) was by noted journalist Shivam Vij, a writer known for being vocal about Indo-Pak friendship and Kashmiris’ right to self-determination, who expressed sympathy with the university authorities suspending the students. The other article (http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/21343/kashmir-will-celebrate-the-indian-cricket-teams-loss-no-matter-who-they-play-against/) was a rebuttal to the same by Basharat Ali, a Kashmiri who wishes to see his homeland as an independent nation-state. My objective here is to provide yet another rebuttal, this time to Basharat Ali. It is not meant personally.

But before I go on to discuss Basharat’s article, let me present to Pakistani readers certain possibilities to visualize. Imagine, for a moment, Pakistani Hindu students openly celebrating India’s victory against Pakistan in a cricket match in a college in Lahore or Islamabad, or alternatively, Baloch Muslim students doing the same. Is it hard to imagine that those students would be physically attacked? Obviously, this is not to suggest that the high probability of something like this happening in Pakistan justifies the same happening in India. What happened in India was wrong, and what would happen in this hypothetical situation in Pakistan would also be wrong, and two wrongs (in this case, one being purely hypothetical) never make a thing right. The analogy was only to present to Pakistani readers an insight to gain an understanding of what actually transpired in Meerut. While some very humanistic or very intellectually minded  people would assert that violence in such cases is indefensible, the fact of the matter is that most Indians and Pakistanis in the respective cases would not really be very sympathetic to the students in question, to say the least, and their reactions would vary from apathy to contempt. There is also the dimension of practically being sensible enough to not ask for unwarranted trouble, which these Kashmiri Muslim students foolishly did.

Kashmiri Muslims studying in Indian universities are often vocal about their refusing to identify themselves as Indians, but to take that sentiment to this extent was a plain act of foolhardiness. Had the university not taken action against these students, there could have been an escalation of violence, and Meerut is a city known for Hindu-Muslim disturbances (and the ordinary Hindu layman of Meerut sees no difference between a Kashmiri Muslim and a non-Kashmiri Indian Muslim) the way Karachi is known for Sindhi-Mohajir disturbances, and it is going by this practical reason that Vij justifies the suspension of these students, as does a rational Pakistani writer in yet another column in that very newspaper (http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/21318/the-67-kashmiri-students-were-wrong-period/). And my mention of a hypothetical situation in Pakistan apart, there has been a real case of senior leaders in Pakistan-administered Kashmir being arrested for cheering for India against Pakistan in 2011 (http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JS00vMjAxMS8wNC8xOCNBcjAwNjAw) and more recently, Baloch students were allegedly attacked in Islamabad only on the ground of their ethnicity (http://tribune.com.pk/story/680872/campus-violence-private-varsity-students-thrashed-for-speaking-balochi/), aside from Pakistani Hindus being subjected to atrocities without any provocation, ever since Pakistan’s intelligence agencies propped up terrorist organizations as “strategic assets”.

Shivam Vij has nowhere stated that slamming sedition charges against the students by the police was right (of course, it was wrong). In fact, nowhere in his entire article has he even so much as used the word ‘sedition’; yet, Basharat Ali accuses him of “justifying charges of sedition slapped on Kashmiri students”!

Vij has pointed out that there had been several instances of stones being pelted at houses of Kashmiri Hindus’ homes after Indo-Pak cricket matches by some miscreants from Kashmir’s Muslim majority, and points out that he was told this not only by Kashmiri Hindus but even by a “pro-freedom activist”. Strangely, Basharat Ali has a problem with Vij using the term ‘activist’ instead of ‘separatist’, but the term ‘activist’ is often used to describe people who are seen as passionately working for a cause or outfit, and certainly has no negative connotation.

Basharat seems to be taking a dig at how an Indian journalist should not use the term ‘separatist’ which is a more acceptable term to Indians, since they do not see Kashmiris as being colonized, but rather than appreciating Vij’s stance of acknowledging the struggle in Kashmir as being a legitimate one for self-determination (though that is not a stand I personally share with either of the two, and I do consider the part of Kashmir governed by India to be a part of India, the logic for which I have explained in this article – http://wordpress-200526-602825.cloudwaysapps.com//christopher-sneddons-research-damaging-indias-cause-vis-vis-kashmir/), Basharat seems to be pooh-poohing it. Either he hasn’t read the article carefully enough or he is deliberately distorting the import of what Vij said to appeal to the sentiment of like-minded Kashmiri Muslims and Pakistanis. (Indeed, in the spirit of impartiality, I have no hesitation in pointing out that there are Indian nationalist counterparts of Basharat Ali too like Nitin Pai and Seema Sirohi, who did pretty much the same thing in their analysis of William Dalrymple’s Brookings essay on the Indo-Pak rivalry playing out in Afghanistan, where they distorted what he said to make his piece appear to be biased against India when it was not, and I have written on this too-http://wordpress-200526-602825.cloudwaysapps.com//in-defence-of-william-dalrymples-brookings-essay-on-indo-pak-afghan-relations-how-immature-can-some-indians-even-in-journalistic-and-scholastic-circles-get/.)

Further, when Shivam Vij rightly mentions that a spirit of extreme Indian nationalism led to the attacks on Kashmiri students and points out that for these misplaced nationalists, any Indian citizen (as per Indian law) cheering for Pakistan against India is seen as an enemy, and to these folks, Kashmiri aspirations for self-determination are totally irrelevant, Basharat Ali accuses Shivam Vij of deliberately trying to render Kashmiri aspirations as irrelevant and only highlight the plight of Kashmir’s pro-India Hindu minority as being relevant, even though Vij has explicitly stated that he does not wish to misuse the plight of the Kashmiri Hindus as a “bogey to deny that Kashmiris are being denied the right to self-determination” or even to deny that “India is holding on to the Kashmir Valley through the military jackboot”! Clearly, Basharat has presented a flawed picture of what Vij had been trying to say, though I repeat that I personally do not believe that Kashmiri Muslims on this side of the Line of Control have a right to secede from India.

Basharat Ali has also cited the views of Sanjay Kak, a Kashmiri Hindu intellectual known for being supportive of Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations for ‘independence’, on the issue of the exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus, which I disagree with, and an excellent rebuttal to all such theories has been presented by Sualeh Keen, a pro-India Kashmiri Muslim intellectual- http://www.sanitysucks.blogspot.in/2013/02/puncturing-separatist-discourse.html; it would be confirmation bias to accept those from the other community who support your cause with open arms and to denounce those from your own community who do not share the mainstream opinion.  In fact, pro-India Kashmiri Muslims apart, even a Kashmiri Muslim supporting the ‘Kashmiri freedom struggle’, Basharat Peer (interestingly, Basharat Ali’s namesake) has, in his highly acclaimed book Curfewed Night, acknowledged honestly the role of the militants in the exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus, aside from the atrocities the militants even committed against Kashmiri Muslims for varying reasons.

Besides, Basharat Ali has, with great admiration, quoted Arunadhati Roy on India needing azadi from Kashmir as much as, if not more than, vice versa, but overlooks that in the very same article in which Roy made this statement (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/22/kashmir.india), she mentions the character of the mainstream ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir as communal and theocratic, resembling, in her eyes, the Hindu rightist movement in India, and she clearly mentions that the freedom struggle in Kashmir “cannot by any means call itself pristine, and will always be stigmatised by, and will some day, have to account for” several wrongs including, she hopes, “the brutal killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the early years of the uprising, culminating in the exodus of almost the entire Hindu community from the Kashmir valley”. Need I say more? It is indeed necessary to debunk baseless conspiracy theories that come in the way of shaming and blaming the perpetrators of any human tragedy, and I have exactly the same attitude in the context of the gross human rights violations by the rogue elements in the Indian military and paramilitary forces in Kashmir (http://wordpress-200526-602825.cloudwaysapps.com//we-want-cameron-to-apologize-will-the-indian-state-apologize-for-its-own-crimes/) as also their Pakistani counterparts with a similar record in Balochistan and the erstwhile East Pakistan.

 A lawyer by qualification, the author is a freelance writer based in New Delhi, India. He has authored/co-authored several short books, including ‘Anti-Muslim Prejudices in the Indian Context: Addressing and Dispelling Them’ and is also involved in making an Urdu television serial on the life of the Indian nationalist leader Maulana Azad.