Aditya Sinha
Two Saturdays ago, the bodies of 22-year-old Nilofar and her 17-year-old sister-in-law Asiya were found separately in a stream in Shopian, south Kashmir. They had likely been raped, possibly by security force personnel. An early medical report said nothing about rape, but massive protests around the Valley (in which one died and scores injured) forced the state government into forensic examinations which confirmed the worst. A Commission of Inquiry is currently looking into the matter, but the quantum of rumour and hearsay dwarfs the facts. Kashmiris on facebook declare “Shame Ho”. Home minister P Chidambaram in Srinagar announced that the CRPF would play “a secondary role” in J&K, as if this was just the balm that Kashmiris had long been awaiting. (In any case, the CRPF does not maintain law and order). It’s exactly the kind of semantic finesse that pushes Kashmiris further from India.
Young Omar Abdullah looks beleaguered. Mehbooba Mufti, unencumbered by the responsibility of power, has been at her shrillest. No point in Omar fulminating on facebook about her incendiary rhetoric; it has always been borderline separatist. Maybe he should have nipped it in the bud, but a rape-murder was always going to escalate into a major protest, whether it was done by the army, the CRPF, or rival villagers. Kashmiris look for incidents that are metaphors for the agony they’ve suffered the past two decades. The furore will eventually subside, and the chief minister would have hopefully learned something.
More important is the incident’s focus on human rights. In a scene from the 1998 Hindi film Satya, Mumbai’s police commissioner lectures his wife about the human rights of victims, in response to her question on the extra-judicial killing of gangsters. Then, as he leaves for work, he is shot (perhaps as divine punishment for his tirade). But he echoes many urban Indians who equate human rights with being soft on terrorism. If the police were to give Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving 26/11 terrorist, the third degree, middle-class Mumbai would savage anyone daring to question its legality. Many patriots seem to think that human rights are an obstacle to natural justice.
That is nonsense. We need only look at America’s recent record to see how the contravention of human rights not only serves no objective, but also hampers justice. On June 4 President Barack Obama made a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. It seems to have gone down well. Referring to the trauma of 9/11 he said “it made us act contrary to our traditions and our ideals… I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed”.
Of course the world was dismayed by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and many people actually hope the Israel-Palestine dispute is someday settled. Yet what really bothered the Muslim world, and repulsed the rest of us, were the 2004 disclosures about torture at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. The torture photos, many of which Obama refused to release because they were too provocative (possibly including photos of soldiers raping Iraqi women), also led to the disclosure of the secret torture programme at Guantanamo Bay, a prison set up at the US military base in Cuba to house terrorism suspects post-9/11. According to The Dark Side (432 pages, Anchor, 2009), based on a series of chilling investigations by The New Yorker correspondent Jane Mayer, Abu Ghraib’s torture techniques were first used at Guantanamo Bay.
To enable the use of torture, conservatives led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington went against the opinions of conservative lawyers in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel, and the armed forces’ advocate-generals, to write legal memos that were flimsy in law, circumventive of the US Constitution and the Geneva Convention, and downright unethical and inhumane. Only the increasingly powerful CIA was enthused by Cheney’s undermining of US law (his justification: a necessary expansion of executive powers, uncurbed by legislative or judicial checks and balances).
This included wordplay where “enhanced”, “robust” and “special” interrogations replaced torture; where torture “required the intent to inflict suffering equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”; and where mental suffering had to “result in significant psychological harm”. All inmates later said the worst abuse was not the water-boarding but the humiliation.
Yet as a variety of accounts including The Dark Side show, the US never gleaned any justifiable intelligence from all the renditions and torture it inflicted.
Disdain for human rights did the most damage to the USA’s standing in the world, especially the Muslim world. No wonder Obama addressed it head on, making the closure of Guantanamo Bay one of his first acts as president.
It is the same in Kashmir. What rankles the Valley’s Muslims is not so much the stubborn refusal by New Delhi to address their political grievances — it sometimes seems the average Kashmiri is reconciled to living in India and is just looking for a face-saving way to live in peace — but the recurring human rights abuses. True, the kind of abuses that marked the 1990s is rare now, but so long as India keeps a heavy military presence in Kashmir, stray incidents of rape or extra-judicial killing will continue. Such is in the nature of armed forces; their aggression cannot be curbed. It might damage them as fighting machines. Yet sporadic abuses will hamper us diplomatically, and not just vis-à-vis Pakistan.
As long as terrorism exists, however, no government will lessen military presence. And terrorism is here to stay. That need not mean Kashmir’s suffering is also here to stay. Sorting out Kashmir’s political grievances and reaching an agreement with Pakistan will deny terrorists of their main raison d’être, and will allow New Delhi to reduce troops in Kashmir. Pakistan’s permanent identity crisis means that there will still be anti-India terrorists, but we will not have to waste goodwill or manpower patrolling every nook and cranny of the Valley.
Sorting out Kashmir’s political problems requires political will, not some administrative fussing over the CRPF’s role. Now that the UPA has electorally vanquished those who would take a harder line on Kashmir, it can afford to try some new initiatives to decisively sort out Kashmir. If Obama can attempt a new beginning with the Muslim world, why can’t we do the same in Kashmir?
Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai
