India is such a country of diversity! Tongues can’t stop wagging, and in multiple lingos, a perennial Babel that came about not because God confounded its speech, but because that’s the sound of its true self. Really. No wonder the only time our brusque Home Minister had to write home a note implying a hasty, if qualified retreat was when he tried leashing that tongue to some kind of uniform, prison-bar grid. Though his is a figure that inspires fear and awe in equal measure, the outcry was simultaneous and loud.
The South offered a gruff refusal, stretching itself to loom over the Vindhyas to issue such a tongue-lashing that memories of a similar misadventure of a few decades ago came rushing back.
Amidst that verbal fusillade, thoughts of a near-silence miles away in the north were pretty much broken. A place where neither the mother tongue nor the proposed ‘national language’ is being used. Communication itself is in suspension! Tongues tranquilised, confounded into stillness. (So that radio waves from across the border don’t infect them!) The Home Minister has ensured his place in history for that feat, this minor retreat elsewhere will only be a footnote.
“Entire J&K is a jail,” is how M Y Tarigami put it. So why was no one talking or protesting in Kashmir, and did that not denote acquiescence? He replied in that same monotone: “Because that’s how people behave in a prison. They don’t talk.” Tarigami, CPI(M) secretary and many-time MLA from South Kashmir, a Communist holding his ground in the eye of the separatist storm, created his own little history by becoming the first Kashmiri politician to fly out of the Valley, thanks to a habeas corpus filed by Sitaram Yechury. Trust the Left to find a judicial (judicious) way out of the barbed-wired roads of Srinagar. And trust the intrepid Vaiko to follow suit, again using the word ‘prison’. (Who thought such unlikely images of cross-national solidarity would emanate from our cacophonous democracy!) Tarigami has also achieved the rate feat of being the only ‘mainstream’ Valley politician to have addressed a press conference since August 6. The clampdown! The fact that a
South Kashmir constituency was actually voting a CPI(M) candidate term after term is also a little corollary of the diversity this land throws up.The rest are all locked up in any case. The most voluble among them, Farooq Abdullah, included—under the draconian PSA. That’s what left it to Vaiko, that warrior-for-all-seasons, to remember his ‘old friendship’ with Abdullah, and march in with his own habeas corpus. These days, one does not buy a ticket to Srinagar to meet a friend or family—one files a habeas corpus. If this is some kind of a grand plan to ensure mainstream politicians still have a face to wage politics ‘for’ the Indian republic, as conspiracy theorists would have us believe in a post-370 world, it’s a bit of a stretch. The line that the onus for all the mess devolves upon the Abdullahs and the Muftis, and of course the Congress, notwithstanding.
Of course, none of the above can be ticked out of the roster of those responsible for Kashmir’s dark history. Yes, the Rawalpindi HQ always had an agenda drawn in blood. But recall New Delhi’s counter-moves on that Machiavellian chessboard. Can one forget that rigged assembly election of 1987 where a certain Yusuf Shah, better known now by his nom de guerre Syed Salahuddin, fought under the banner of the Muslim United Front? Or when separatist icon Syed Ali Shah Geelani fought elections to become an MLA? What New Delhi did those years, and why, was never quite clear.
We are no wiser now. How do you explain the use of PSA against Abdullah? Till a decade ago, the man entertained hopes of becoming the President of India, or at least the VP. He was once sent to Geneva with A B Vajpayee to defend India against one of Pakistan’s UN machinations. His son, also an ex-CM now under detention, was groomed in politics by Sharad Pawar. It’s all left to the unputdownable Vaiko now, it seems. The man, no stranger to sedition cases and prison terms under POTA, comes as a strange apparition of unity within this cauldron of contradictions.
Prison terms seem to be a walk in the park now, as casually dispensed as Metro tickets. Political antagonisms have always been high in India, but Pakistan-style jail terms were rare. Elsewhere it may not be as sweeping as it is in Kashmir, but witness the language of incarceration creeping up on us. The other day, former Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu was locked up by the incumbent, Jaganmohan Reddy. P Chidambaram, without a pillow and a chair, is in Tihar, tweeting on the economy from beyond the pale. He will have his party colleague D K Shivakumar for company soon. A touch of the bizarre here, no wonder it’s descending into gallows humour on WhatsApp. ‘Why was the picture taken to jail, because it was framed!’ No, not many buy that line about framing. Selectively arraigned suffices perhaps. Amidst this new rush of traffic outside jails —once normally peopled by G N Saibaba or Sudha Bharadwaj or the new Dalit firebrand, Chandrashekhar Azad ‘Ravan’ (all forcibly settled in that habitat)— poor Lalu Prasad Yadav is all but forgotten.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor, Karnataka
Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com