why India is blamed for Kashmir Voilence?

JAI DUGGAR

 Hello! Toh kasie hain app sab? Chaliye shuru kartey hain....

A Kashmiri man died in a terrorist strike on a CRPF battalion in Sopore town. In what was an emotionally jarring visual,the dead man’s three-year-old grandson sat on his dead body trying to wake him up before an officer rescued the boy and took him to safety. A CRPF jawan also died in the attack and three other security personnel were injured. But the victim’s family blamed the security forces for the killing. 

#Kashmirbleeds and #Kashmirilivesmatter started trending on Twitter, predictable parallels with Palestine began to be drawn and the impression that got conveyed globally was that the Indian forces had committed the murder. This was of course a big fat lie. So how do you make sense of what just transpired in Kashmir? Why did the victim’s family blame CRPF for what was clearly the work of the terrorists? Of course, there may be all kinds of reasons for this specific posturing by the family, which I don’t want to get into here. But how do you understand the morality of an entire society, in fact, a global community, that compulsively bites the hand that feeds them? And without understanding it, how would you take remedial measures? This is the classic divide between reality and narrative that somehow refuses to work in India’s favour. The unimaginative way in which the Indian state frames the Kashmir problem is adequately demonstrated in the longstanding policy of the Indian government since 1947. Political manipulation, ideological compromises and strategic waywardness have defined India’s Kashmir policy. And if there is a single noun that captures the underlying philosophy of the State – it is cowardice but if you want to make it more palatable, make that indifference – pitch-black tamas. 

As I’ve said before, piggybacking on the professionalism of the Indian security apparatus does not absolve the political leadership of its responsibility to reclaim Kashmir, not in a territorial, but a civilizational sense. But that would require a paradigm shift in how the people of this country and outsiders view the Kashmir issue. Educating people, in India and outside, is really the job of the government. In today’s information age, education is a synonym for narrative building. Facts are facts, making sense of them is to buy into a narrative. A narrative may correspond with the objective reality or not but it has to be coherent and its power lies in its emotional appeal. I don’t recall where I read this but it just about sums it up: a lie travels to the other side of the world and back while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. In order for the truth to win the information war, it must be given the wings of a narrative. Some prominent conservative intellectuals in the West have popularised the following expression: “Facts don’t care for your feelings”. But elementary cognitive psychology teaches us just the opposite. We might as well restate the principle as“Feelings don’t care about facts”. This is the very foundation on which a narrative,any effective narrative, is built. So, you have a worldview, a coherent mental map of the world, consisting of values, beliefs, likes and dislikes. 

Your sense organs send information to your brain and it starts processing the information. However, there are two steps to it. First, you react to the information emotionally and then your rational mind gets on with what it has evolved to do – justify your feelings and give you reasons to act on them. Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has likened the relationship between the rational mind and the emotional apparatus as that between a lawyer and a client. The lawyer is duty bound to protect the interests of the client even if he knows that the client is wrong. To put it simply, your rational mind is not meant to be a torch with which you go around looking for the truth but an evolutionary instrument that helps you survive on the planet by forming tribal alliances based on common fundamental assumptions about life. This means that your rational response to an event in the real world is pretty much determined by your emotional reaction unless you consciously suppress this natural tendency. That natural tendency is called bias, a word loosely thrown around on TV panels and Social Media to accuse the other side of dishonesty. Bias is a cognitive error as well as an evolutionary strategy, which is why it is universal and inescapable. Jon Haidt demystifies it further. 

Suppose I tell you that someone we both know,let us call him Shahrukh, committed a bank robbery. If Shahrukh is your friend, your rational mind will process the information through a filter in the form of a question: Must I believe this information? – Kya mujhe is baat par vishwas karna chahiye? Answer: Hmmm let me see, not necessarily. On the other hand, if Shahrukh is someone you hate, your rational mind will ask the question: Can I believe this information? – Kya main is baat par vishwas kar sakta hun? ‘Of course, I can’ will come the quick reply. Narratives play out in the subtle difference between ‘Must I believe it?’ and ‘Can I believe it?’ and the question posed by your own mind depends on your relationship with Shahrukh, which in turn, is often a function of your own religious identity. Or the lack thereof, in the case of a secular Hindu or the ‘spiritual but not religious’ clown. Remember, I spoke of the game theory in an earlier video? Infinite players successfully build narratives because they want to continue the game by propagating their values – values that provide meaning to their lives, make them feel good about themselves by defining who they are. Values are a function of identity and vice-versa. Now, what do finite players do? They want to win arguments at the expense of building narratives because they are obsessed with facts and data as if these things mean anything in the information war raging in this day and age. Finite players play the game as if they have no identity. I have repeatedly called for framing Kashmir as a civilizational problem but I suspect that people miss the real import of this verbal expression. Unless it is approached this way, India will never win the war of narratives because honestly, no one cares for facts. Contrary to their intention, the Indian TV channels constantly hammering the point that the man was killed by terrorists will be taken to mean that they are covering up for the crime of the armed forces. 

 To play the infinite game, India must tell its own story. A coherent, powerful human story of the seven exoduses of Kashmiri Hindus, the atrocities meted out to them for being a religious minority and the urgent need for the reversal of the centuries of genocide perpetrated on them. Before telling the story, the political leadership and the bureaucracy must first listen to it and internalize it. Do their school textbooks inform your kids about what happened in Kashmir in 1990? No? Have you ever wondered why? It is inconceivable as to why no Indian government has used the Kashmiri Hindu exodus as a negotiating lever in international relations. Actually, it is not inconceivable. I know why they don’t do it. Because the ‘migration’ of half a million people from Kashmir to other parts of India and the world is a statement of fact. Why they moved is a story that begs to be told. Kashmiri Hindus have been crying hoarse for decades telling their stories to their neighbours, friends, and colleagues. No one listens to the people, they need the official backing of the State and the support of institutions to be taken seriously. The West phalian nation-state of India with no civilizational responsibility does not have the spine to tell the stories of its invisible people. Think about it. The Prime Minister did not have anything to say even about the recent gruesome lynching of the Sadhus in Palghar. This is why I said, if there is a single noun that captures the underlying philosophy of the Indian State – it is cowardice but if you want to make it more palatable, make that indifference – pitch black tamas. So, that's all for today.....

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