Stranger in my own home : Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad’s politics and Kashmirs social decline

I will begin this essay with a painfully personal observation: I do not recognize Kashmir anymore. I mean I do - but I am unable to, one, identify with it. Two, the Kashmir that I grew up in seems like a distant space. This Kashmir, of my living memory and formative years was a place of great empathy, high degree of social capital, compassion and general honesty. It was a space where a woman could, after a midnight wedding event, bedecked in jewelry, walk alone, at least on the city’s streets with no fear-real or perceived - of assault, or molestation or robbery.

This was a Kashmir where no one, I repeat, no one, would be turned away from a house or home, if he or she asked for food. This was a Kashmir where honesty was a given, where social relations were characterized by genuineness, care, openness, what sociologists would call ‘spontaneous sociability’. This was a Kashmir where the weak, the marginal and the marginalized with treated with care and compassion. This was a Kashmir where if and when the skies turned too dark, people fretted and raised their hands heavenward, asking for forgiveness for what they presumed may have been an omission or commission by someone from Allah Almighty. This was a Kashmir where everywhere was home. 

I do not (sadly) find an echo of this Kashmir now. I refuse to believe that MY Kashmir and the moral, normative and ethical grid I impute to it was a figment of my imagination, ‘false consciousness’ of my formative years, or an assumption formed by a naïve, otherworldly, upper-class kid who lived a very sheltered life. Yes, there would have been dark sides to our society, but whatever these may have been were ‘underground’, with moral indignation and embarrassment serving as a ‘blanket’ to cover whatever minor social infractions existed. Now, I see signs of degradation - moral, ethical, social and so on. (I must confess here that I speak as a flawed human being with many imperfections). All this chagrins me.

But there is one redemptive feature to both our collective and individual selves: exclude the very minute layer of the psychopathological and the pathological in some sections of our society, scratch the surface, the fine layers and sediments of our actual and real selves are resplendently visible. These are empathy, compassion, generosity and other redeeming features. Why do we then act and behave – in some domains of life - like what we really and actually are not?

I do not know. But one reason may be context determines our behavior and comportment. To delve a little deeper into our recent history, some attribute the negative aspects to the tumultuous period of the 90’s. A period where all certainties were swept away, and life jostled with death, attributing our current condition to the tumultuous nineties is not a useful starting point. I, for example, recall a vivid incident which would have left me dead were it not for the extremely brave and kind intervention of some stranger.

I was riding on my new Yamaha RX 100 motorbike from my high school when suddenly a gunfight erupted on the street of Nowpora, Srinagar. The bullets almost flew over my ears and head. I was fearful, lost and unable to think. Suddenly, a door cracked open, and I was pulled by someone inside her home. Ashen faced and fearful, and grateful at having escaped with my life, I saw over a dozen civilians inside, some consoling each other, others lying flat with fear, some being given water and so on.

The courageous family that lived by the roadside had saved over dozen lives that day. How can this act of great courage, courage and generosity be squared with what seems to be our ‘lived reality’ these days: a zero-sum social dynamic where material advancement appears to be seen as at the expense of another person, a massive trust deficit that appears to define our social relations and the corrosion of empathy. There must be a causal and a historical variable and constant that explains this.

If an explanation is to be sought, in our modern history, while there are many events that can decimate a society’s trust and confidence in itself, the major variable appears to be the Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad period. The reference is not to the coup by Bakshi and his henchmen against Sheikh Abdullah. Yes, an event of some historical import, this coup was a mere blip in the grand scheme and march of history. It is the post-coup politics that is of significance. In this period, a canny and savvy street-smart political operator, and extremely ambitious politician employed what the great French philosopher and political theorist Michel Foucault called ‘bio- politics’ - ably demonstrated by one Kashmiri American scholar in her thesis.

‘Bio-politics’ is form of politics where the bodies and thereby material and biological needs of people become paramount and the target of politics. In the schemata of biopolitics, there is a normative aspect as well: individuals seen as deviating from the biopolitical grid are marginalized and excluded, at times, with the acquiescence of the broader population. Bakshi using the instrumentality of the state, political patronage, perks and permissiveness in many matters crafted a new psychical anchor for Kashmiris.

This ‘anchor’ pertained to peoples’ natural need for employment, economic stability and a good future for their children, among other things. An ‘amnesic’, ‘curative’ prescription, used as a tool by Bakshi to make people look to and after their own selves, this appears to have laid the long-term basis and predicate for self-centeredness, self-absorption, lack of apparent empathy among us. What we are witnessing now, described by a friend as ‘overcompensation for perceived material and hedonic deprivation, may actually be accruing from Bakhsi’s policies and politics.

But, is there redemption? Can we, after introspection and soul searching, scratching the surface restore ourselves to who we really are? Maybe. How? The answer may lie ultimately in seeking both solace and redemption in the great teachings of our faith. Two, by reaching out to each other in an idiom of trust and care. Three, restore proportion to our social and economic relations. And, last, by a concerted on these three, rid ourselves of ‘pride and prejudice’. Can we find equilibrium then? The case, typically, rests on hope!

(PS: As part of his bio-politics policy, Bakshi and his henchmen marginalized dissenters, excluded and harassed the decent and the politically unyielding.)