Bursting the Jammu Kashmir State Myth and Why Jammu will Continue to Get the Raw Deal

How Much Longer - Kud is a Dance Form That Very Few People can Practice Now (credit: Daily Excelsior)

Narratives are foundational to building myths and legends. More often than nott, state narrative building is an army unto itself as an entity, working with the operators and managers for shaping people's thoughts. If you ask CHATGPT for the definition of state narrative building, as I did, chances are you'll get the following curt response:

State narrative building refers to the deliberate crafting and promotion of a particular story or perspective by a government to shape public opinion, identity, or national image. This narrative may involve promoting certain values, historical interpretations, policies, or ideologies to create a unified vision of a nation's past, present, or future. It can be used to legitimize the government's authority, foster nationalism, and influence both domestic and international perceptions.

State narratives can be disseminated through various channels such as media, education, cultural institutions, and public speeches. They often highlight certain aspects of history or current events while downplaying or omitting others, shaping the collective understanding of issues like national identity, foreign policy, or societal challenges.

These narratives can be instrumental in mobilizing support, creating social cohesion, or justifying political actions, but they may also face criticism for being manipulative or suppressing alternative perspectives.

One angle that most people don't realise about state narrative building is the power of negation that it holds in it. Many countries around the world mute about the crises and episodes that are inconvenient to them. Be it the Armenian genocide in Turkey or the complete expulsion of the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, narratives try to bury such lessons of history six feet under, hoping they will fade and rot away. 

In India, the concept of a secular state has been legitimized against its own definition and its origins. One particular example of it gets exercised in the creation of a narrative that certain discriminations worded in law are legitimate, only because it is truly "secular" in nature. This is supposed to be used as a cohesive element of nation building in India, even at the cost of hiding realities. For instance, the partition of 1947 was not rooted in the reactions of the majority; rather it was rooted in the distinct identities that were ideated by the elites and their followers of certain belief systems for more than four hundred years. To assume that not all believe the same is fine; but to disallow any discussion on the origins is a problem that we continue to face.

The lack of acknowledgment of truth and its negation through state building - for instance, by glorifying as leaders those who called communities as separate nations and called the majority community's most accommodative faces as infidels - has perpetuated the constant myth of superiority, privilege and entitlement to the extent of any action being seen as a threat to their interests, even if it does not affect in any material way. The fear that the partition will repeat itself again is a fault of this state narrative that has rendered people, even sensible ones, illogical, instilling illogical fear that in turn generates facetious if not downright infantile arguments. 

The lack of distinction in thought, be it supposed right or left, on this subject, is baffling, but really it reflects the success of the state narrative. When you have people claiming that there was a culture of syncretism or Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb, one wonders what level of delusion can be tolerated. But when you hear those supposedly toeing your line writing bizarre claims of people hiding their murtis and practicing different faith in secret, one is forced to question if there was some consumption of materials that led to the origins of such proclivities of imagination. Since 1947, a state was allowed to exist in a certain form only to perpetuate a narrative that never really existed, and further demarcation is seen as a taboo subject, because it would now be politically incorrect. Instead, fictional, baseless stories have been built up across the ecosystem to create a sense of guilt among the overall state minority in a fashion that is similar to how a theocratic state would work. 

For instance, how different is the fake 1931 "Martyrs' Day" lie and the 1947 "Jammu massacre" any different from the way the theocratic Pakistan studies textbooks parrot insidious stories about "Hindus performing endless miseries and tortures on Muslims"? When one looks at the way the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kohat got justified in 1924 by the then Islamist apologist British regime, the pattern becomes one oft repeated and digested. And because the setup continues to remain the same, we see the colonial admiration and awe for Islamists continuing in the same template post 1947 as well. 

Here, the state of Jamu Kashmir definitely deserves an important mention. Of late, we are seeing an entire bunch of intellectuals trying to negate the aspiration of the people of Jammu to dissociate themselves from the Valley of Kashmir in the name of nationalism. This is hilarious and infantile an approach, especially when you have disempowered the larger of the two regions administratively as well as through narrative negation. The latest example of the disempowerment was the fact that despite delimitation, which too was based on a fraudulent 2011 census, the larger region continues to have lesser number of seats in the state legislative assembly. No one has yet been able to explain why despite the addition of 22 lakh additional voters in Jammu and a mere 2 lakh additional voters being added in Kashmir, we have the situation that Kashmir continues to have one seat more than the Jammu region. 

The attempt to use Jammu as a springboard to 'control Kashmir' not only serves as a pathetic excuse in the current manner; it further allows the Islamist element within Kashmir to perpetuate the same game and rhetoric, sitting comfortably out of the Kashmir valley, that they have been playing since 1947, with the three families playing the fiddle to make people victims of an ongoing genocide. Speaking of which, it is important to point out how the perpetuation of the odd entity called Jammu and Kashmir allows the Indian state to negate the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits and other Hindus from the valley. The narrative remains that since these people, residing in Jammu, continue to remain within the state, they can merely be 'migrants' not be victims of genocide. Indeed, that is the choice of words for Kashmiri Hindus - look at any form for any government college, and there is a quota for "Kashmiri migrants". Such a position is not by insensitivity of the Indian state, which is not an unfamiliar commodity; rather, it is be design, since the negation of the creation of an Islamist fiefdom has to be perpetuated to promote the warped Nehruvian secularism principles. 

For that matter, one is forced to ask a simple but befuddling question to these jokers - how many Dogras are living in the Kashmir valley? Contrast this with the number of Kashmiris who come to Jammu in winter in their second homes, to visit cinema halls and shop in malls. We want the best of both sharia and freedom, but dare someone who is an "outsider" to the valley come and settle here - that will never be acceptable to us. However, there are people who are so woefully blind to these realities that they will refuse to see the ground reality even if you made them stand on that very ground. Even as we see the glacial pace of action on the Roshni land grab subject despite repeated court orders, we see how demographic changes are acceptable to certain people. For all the noise on illegal immigrants, little has happened to the Rohingyas who were settled in Jammu, and not Kashmir.

If that was not bad enough, no one has been able to explain why the resource allocation and expenditure continues to be skewed towards the smaller region, while the larger region's demands remain unfulfilled for just the basic infrastructure. The tax base from MSMEs comes almost entirely from the Jammu region. "One crore tourists" myth can be perpetuated only because Jammu's Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board hosts more than seventy five lakh of them. Yet, all the rhetoric is about Kashmir valley, the people of Kashmir, and centrism of a problem that effectively lies in four districts of South Kashmir.  

The logical solution to the Kashmir mess has been visible and obvious for more than three decades now. Jammu and Ladakh as two separate administrative self governing units, and Kashmir as a Union territory, further divided into two, including an enclave for displaced Hindus to be resettled. However, such is the power of the state narrative and its proponents that a pragmatic idea like this could not even find a table. Even in 2019, the opportunity was lost for political ambitions of a petty few, who allowed the state to come back and bungle it up because of grandiose opinions about one's own political capabilities. As a result, the people of Jammu remain stranded once again, left nowhere to go. Economically weakened further by the stoppage of the durbar move and the key economic hub of Jammu getting weak by the connectivity with Katra, there are no ideas on saving the region of the people who, in the first place, were responsible for the creation of the pre-1947 Jammu-Kashmir state. What it also shows is that the Indian state only responds to bullies, and in fact actively seeks to fantasize about bullies of certain kinds so that its own narrative and stereotypes are proven and its biased action can be justified. Thus, if the situation continues like this, Jammu will continue to get the raw end of the deal, and the genocide that started in Kashmir will successfully culminate in Jammu in another four decades, given how the state has no interest in saving Jammu or rectifying the ground situation in Kashmir any time soon.

The only way now is for the people of Jammu to challenge this narrative and show the mirror to the Indian state, and ask for their own political aspirations within the Indian state. There is no other way this can be resolved if the Panun Kashmir formula is not applied.