On Talking Radicalisation

Radicalisation of youth in Kashmir: the theme runs like a sustained drip over a slimed rock. But the media reports, even the analytical pieces, are mostly superficial, and misleading. This is about the serious, and to a large degree objective, reportage; it doesn’t cover what fans the fires of hatred. That  falls in absurd, and hysterical. 

There is another kind of people who talk tirelessly about radicalisation in Kashmir. All kinds of politicians in India use this theme as a virulent piece of demagoguery. Close to this is the officialdom. People at the top – civil administration or the security grid – also rake up this theme. These officials, or security heads, often use it loosely, or else part of some timely political atmospherics. 

But when security grid – Military, Paramilitary, Police, Intelligence – stir this theme, it gives a peek into the mind that controls the actual, and violent, use of state-power. Sometimes it indicates the direction of the immediate action. In that case whether it’s superficial, lazy, misleading, patently wrong, or incisively exact, it merits  attention. 

The Director General of Police, J&K, Dilbag Singh, at a function in Baramulla  just past Wednesday, talked about radicalisation in the Kashmiri youth. According to the news report, Dilbagh Singh urged the police force to deal strictly with “elements involved in radicalisation of youth”. 

In today’s Kashmir radicalisation needs no nuanced debate. What it means here, and what the police officer underlines, constitute ideas and actions that motivate the youth to pick up arms. Plain, and simple. 

Momentarily, take the DGP off the scene, and respond truthfully. Is there a wilful circulation of ideas that motivates a teenager to pick up arms. Yes, there is.  If we don’t turn it into a visceral tirade, if we don’t enter a habitual blame game, there is no escape from an unqualified admission on this count. 

The problem of radicalisation in the Muslim society of Kashmir is my problem, and I need to address it for the reasons solely my own. I have consistently written on this theme, earning the ire of my own tribe. But I keep doing it because I care for my people. And this I say in an ordinary way of relating to my own society. It’s a natural, human act.

But  when someone from Delhi, or someone who is part of the state, invokes the theme of radicalisation, it is occasion to unpack the greater conversation on radicalisation. This, without any hatred towards India as a country where peoples live, or an intention to paste the blame back.

The mother of radicalisation in Kashmir is  the status quo imposed by the state of India. If we keep our identities, and positions, outside we can make it a plain human conversation. And in this conversation, a minimal rundown on the Indian state’s presence in Kashmir would through enough light on how the seeds of violence were brought to Kashmir, sown, and irrigated. The Indian National Movement, that carried the Indian state in its womb, put this entire region to peril. What happened to Kashmir in 1947, and afterwards, is a crime committed by some of the tallest leaders of that Movement. As the crime lives to this date, the Indian State is trying to hide it. What we call radicalisation in Kashmir is an echo of that crime. 

This state has committed every single act of extremism. It’s violent to the core, by birth. It imprisoned the political leaders, and activists. It exiled the political elite, and turned Kashmir sterile. It arranged coups. It reneged on constitutional undertakings. It ruled directly and bulldozed the local institutions of governance and politics. It bribed politicians, and bureaucracy. It killed people by way of assassination, execution, disappearance. It tortured the political dissidents. It torched villages and towns. It committed mass-killings when people in hundreds of thousands came out protesting. And it has to to its credits mass-graves also. How is this Indian State -IS- different than the Islamic State – IS. When this state talks of fighting against radicalism, one doesn’t even want to laugh.

The civil society members from India who have a human heart, and are concerned by the upsurge of radicalisation in Kashmir, have a task at hand. Please tell your people what India has done to Kashmir. Those in this system who retain their human self have a bigger task at hand. De-radicalise this system. It’s, by its being, by its design, and by its function, a violent radical. If it hasn’t consumed you, you have a contradiction sitting right at the core of your human heart.

We are all radicals, radicals of worst order. The difference between you and me is just this; my capacity to generate violence from my own radicalism is unimaginably small, compared to your capacity to generate violence from your source of radicalism. My minuscule radicalism acquires life, because yours shines over it like a blazing planet. If our idea is to see a world free of this extremism, of this violent radicalism, we need to turn to our respective sides, before we throw it at each other. 

I have always been a votary of speaking truth to ones own side; even if unpalatable. At least that gives you the courage to nudge the other. 

mrvaid@greaterkashmir.com