To call the foreign funded insurgency in Kashmir and the terror attacks across the country as justified blowback for the failures of the Indian state and civil society is both false and callous. It implies a failure of the imagination and the intellect and the complete abdication of moral responsibility by you.
Dear Ms Roy,
For
many years now you have enriched the public life of our nation. First, as a
Booker winning novelist with a meteoric debut on the literary firmament, and
then as an essayist, persistently pricking the conscience of a sometimes
indifferent and ignorant nation, highlighting wide ranging issues of urgent
concern. Over the years your provocative essays in the pages of Outlook
magazine amount to a substantial intellectual achievement in their own
right. One has not always agreed with you, but from big dams to the nuclear
bomb, from the vagaries of capitalism to the dangers of American
Imperialism, your writings on these important issues have left no one in any
doubt about where you stand. Disagree with them as one might, your views
occupied an intellectually coherent and morally compelling space in our
public life. Until recently, when one read your two pieces on Kashmir and
Mumbai with a growing sense of shock, anger, pity and dismay.
As
a literary device, self loathing has its uses; the God of Small Things was a
splendid lesson in the use of this sentiment. However I am not sure that
nations and civilizations can organize their policies around this self
indulgent mood. Your two pieces, 'Azadi' and
'9 is Not
11' see you
as usual in top form as far as style and rhetoric are concerned, but as far
as substance goes, I think you have fallen into the trap of being in love
with the sound and significance of your own voice. It is still a powerful
voice, a seductive voice too, but because it chooses to amplify only those
other voices that are prepared to sing in chorus, it is a voice bereft of
any sense of moral responsibility. I am sure once again your latest writings
will bring you further international recognition as a writer of conscience
and conviction, striving tirelessly to expose the monstrosities of the
Indian state and civilization. Dare I suggest that the Magsaysay and the
Nobel Peace Prize, the Holy Grails of the seemingly rootless international
intellectual might not be too far behind? But Madam, despite your great
charm and greater intellect, this is a Faustian bargain. For in doing so you
are doing irreparable harm to the very idea of the intellectual as a
defender of virtue and morality in public life who too, like the problems
you write about, much as he or she would want to, cannot be removed from the
context (your favourite word) that created her, nurtured her and accorded
the civic and intellectual space for her to articulate and propagate her
views.
As
someone who for the past 12 years has worn the Khaki uniform, as a servant
of your favourite object of hate, the Indian state, I confess to a
persistent sense of ambivalence and despair about the manner in which I am
expected to serve. At the same time I cannot deny an equally abiding sense
of pride in the importance of what we are supposed to do and of the
importance of institutions in general in giving meaning and protection to
what would otherwise be a society ruthless and brutal, beyond even your
considerable powers of comprehension and description. Therefore, I am
offended and disgusted by your incomplete, incoherent and therefore immoral
portrayal of the recent upheavals of Indian history. I used to think that
you articulate the pain of the silent, marginalized, oppressed masses of our
country. I had no idea that you held a brief for all those who never felt
anything at all not just for India in particular, but who also actively
profess violent rage at the shared values of the entire human race.
According
to you, everything that the police and security forces do or say whether in
Kashmir, or in the war on terror, or against Naxalism, is a falsehood, where
as everything that is said by 'Kashmiri Freedom Fighters', or by the
harmless theologians of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and their ideological cousins of
the Al Qaeda, or by the peace loving disciples of Marx and Mao living a
bucolic existence in the jungles of central India, constitutes sufficient
grounds to indict the Indian state and civil society in perpetuity. The
people of India have always had a tradition to look up to men and woman of
the arts and culture to serve as their moral compass. One really wonders
what lines of logic and ethics shape your sense of moral direction.
You
seem to passionately believe in and defend the 'right' of the Kashmiris
to ethnic, cultural, religious and geographical exclusivism. If this is
correct than why should we vilify Raj Thackeray or any other chauvinist who
seeks to preserve the purity (however defined) of his people (however
defined) from outsiders (also however defined)? If the Kashmiris are
justified in picking up the gun to safeguard their exclusive identity, then
every part of India is justified in doing so. I do hope you have taken the
trouble to examine the fundamental assumptions underlying all such movements
based on an assertion of a cultural identity. The creation of a hated
outsider, in the case of Kashmir, the Indian; in the case of Raj Thackeray,
the bhaiya of UP and Bihar; and in the case of the jihadists, anyone
and everyone who does not subscribe to their virulent strain of Islam,
including Muslims, is common to all these ideologies but you seem to pick
and choose the bigotries you will demonize and the bigotries you will
defend. Is it possible to freeze identity to a moment in time and on the
basis of this demand recognition, retribution and rights for all time to
come?
In
your world view, the wrongs of Indian security forces of the last twenty
years, and the failures of Indian state craft before it, are sufficient
justifications for Kashmiri grievances, just as the wrongs of Babri Masjid,
the Mumbai riots of 1993, the Gujarat riots of 2002, will justify Islamist
terror against India, and the wrongs of corrupt governance and poor
administration will justify Naxalite violence, in all perpetuity. Why should
only these events be accepted as justification for settling scores by
shedding the blood of innocents? By this logic, the Crucifixion of Christ
amply justifies the Holocaust. We non white societies must all be allowed
eternal rights to slaughter the Europeans for the sins of colonialism and
slavery. Islam itself had a long history of violent conquest and forcible
conversions, perhaps that should justify an eternal crusade or dharmyudhh
against Islam? The Greeks and Romans have their own scores to settle with
the Christian Church. The Latin Americans have their own grievances with
Spain and Portugal. Seen this way, human history is merely a parody of the
eternal theme of perpetrators and victims, and all present violence, no
matter how barbaric or senseless, can be justified with reference to some
past grievance, and we must allow these grievances full expression no matter
what. Only then would we return to a state of original purity where all
historical sins of the past and present have been fully avenged and the
moral ledger as you see it stands perfectly balanced. The only thing is that
after
this bloody book-keeping, there may not be anyone left to enjoy the fruits of
such a 'just' society.
The
Indian state, whose sworn servant I am, is by no means a perfect entity. It
is certainly corrupt, it is sometimes brutal and it is often indifferent to
the sufferings of the weak and the powerless. But it does have a vision and
aim based on certain civilizational values that are uniquely Indian.
Demography and history dictates that these values have a prominently Hindu
flavour. It is undeniable that these values have come under attack at times
from the Hindu right as well. But even the most rabid of the Hindutva forces
do not see the world united under the saffron flag by force of arms, as is
the Islamist project of one world under the Green Crescent, or the Naxal
project of one world under the Red Star. It would take a pretty breathless
and brainless leap of logic to equate violent, local outbursts of Hindu
chauvinism, abetted by the sins of commission and omission of the state
apparatus, in themselves however repugnant and indefensible, with the
atrocities on a global scale that were inflicted by Communism in the 20th
century or the outrages that are now threatened across all parts of the
world by jihadi Islam. To call the foreign funded insurgency in Kashmir and
the terror attacks across the country as justified blowback for the failures
of the Indian state and civil society is both false and callous. It implies
a failure of the imagination and the intellect and the complete abdication
of moral responsibility by you.
One
could indeed forgive you, Ma'am, if you were purely an artist. Art has at
the best of times a complicated relationship with truth and life. But in
your avatar as a public intellectual, you cannot abandon your commitment to
the demands of truth, accuracy and the ability to discriminate between the
varieties of human experience and action. The liberties you have exercised
in the past and continue to do today, however gratuitously and offensively,
do not exist in a vacuum. I am not sure if any of these liberties would have
a place in a Naxalite Utopia or a Jihadi Caliphate or even in a
self-determined Kashmiri paradise that you eloquently espoused. As visions
of human perfectability they are far more flawed than the vision of India
that you love to denigrate. In any case, the liberties that you have
recently taken with the sensibilities of proud Indians too exist in a
cultural, political and constitutional context, a context that is ultimately
safeguarded by men such as Hemant Karkare and Major Unnikrishnan with
disregard for their own life. Remember that the next time you use your
poisoned pen to vent your twisted logic on a polity that deserves better from
its intellectuals.
Warm
regards
Abhinav Kumar
Abhinav Kumar is a
serving IPS officer. Though these are his personal views, he hopes that they also
reflect the anguish of an entire fraternity of proud Indians in uniform