South Asia Citizens Web

The growth of nationalism or an autonomous Kashmiri identity certainly doesn’t involve supporting obscurantism or deliberately preventing the growth of knowledge and information. The identity of a state or a nation cannot be built on unquenchable hate and certainly not on cashing in on the pain and grief of other people, some of whom will not have the luxury of closure.

J & K is a palimpsest that has been inscribed upon two or three times, yet the previous texts have been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remain partially visible. A history of unfulfilled pledges, broken promises, political deception, military oppression, illegal political detentions, a scathing human rights record, sterile political alliances, mass exodus, and New Delhi’s malignant interference have created a gangrenous body politic, which hasn’t even started to heal. The various political, religious, and cultural discourses written on the palimpsest of the state may have created alternative epistemologies but without an epicenter.

Communalism has wreaked havoc in Lanka. It is embedded in our prejudices and our backwardness. The Sri Lankan political establishment’s complicity in violence against a minority is a scandal that would impede us for years to come, particularly in view of the lack of will to do away with impunity and hold the armed forces to account. Equally culpable are the Tamil leaders who have inflamed passions where a little sympathy and restraint could have cooled them and hindered communalism putting down institutional roots.

More than 50 years after the arbitrary killing, torture and imprisonment of more than a million communists and their sympathisers in Indonesia, the government has for the first time hosted a two-day national symposium on the 1965-66 violence.

The aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir point the way toward a workable democratic pluralism in the state – where the reigning principle is discussion leading to free elections, not autocratic decision-making either by elected legislators or separatists.