New Delhi, Jan 14 (PTI) The writing is not just on thewall -- but also on the downed shutters of Kashmir.
Political scientist Navnita Chadha Behera, with over 25years of work on the troubled region, believes that to decodeKashmir, you have to start your research afresh every time youare there.
Calling the troubled state a “steep learning curve”,Behera said on her last visit there, she gauged the mood by byobserving the downed shutters in the Valley.
“During my last visit, I decided to just walk around andtake pictures of shut-down shutters. And I learnt a lot. Whatmost captured the spirit was the contesting narrative writtenon these shutters," she said.
On one downed shutter, for instance, Behera said shewould find a slogan such as "Free India".
"But overnight, in another ink, it would be turned into‘Free Kashmir from stone pelters’. Next day, 'stone pelter'would be cut out with a different ink and the slogan wouldchange to ‘Free Kashmir from India’ or ‘Go Back India’," shesaid.
And then the slogan "Go back India" would turn into "GoodIndia", said the academic at the recent book launch of‘Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation’ at the IndiaInternational Centre.
Behera noted that there was a dire need for new socialscience tools to understand and create knowledge on strife-torn Kashmir.
“Complexities are second nature to Kashmir. But socialscientists, that includes me too, have failed to understandthem. We need to engage in a very robust manner withanthropologists, sociologists, historians and with the peopleon the ground to come up with new voices and new knowledge onKashmir,” she added.
But then that is not the only tribe to have failedKashmir, said journalist Siddharth Vardarajan, who was also apanelist in the discussion.
The media, especially television channels, had alteredthe national discourse on Kashmir in an “atrocious” way, saidthe founder of The Wire, a news portal.
“The systematic humiliation on the part of these anchorsand channels of any Kashmiri voice that is not in tune withthe thinking of the hyper-nationalist or the pseudo-nationalist, I think, has poisoned the atmosphere," he said.
Published by Cambridge University Press, the book editedby Chitralekha Zutshi is a collection of 14 essays on multipleaspects of Kashmir. PTI MGBDS.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.