I do not
know if many people know that there used to be a
department in the Government of India coordinating
the Ministry of Home Affairs, External Affairs,
Informational and Broadcasting and, of course, All
India Radio and Doordarshan geared to the twin but
not identical purpose of what the world would see
of the Kashmir Valley, and what the people of the
Valley would see of themselves, even if only
through the eyes of the powers that be in New
Delhi. Many an itinerant film-maker made his, or
her, fortune producing programmes for this cabal,
some of them graduating to ownership of satellite
channels.
As Mani Shankar Ayer,
famously used to say when he was the official
spokesmen of the Ministry of External Affairs
decades ago, Spokesman and Government Media are
not sources of information, they are instruments
of foreign policy – and arguably instruments
of domestic policy too. This surely continues to
be the case even after the privatisation of
information and broadcasting and the blossoming of
500 Television channels up-linked from the
homeland.
I say this
as I read the newspapers, and surf the TV
channels, Indian, Pakistani and third-party such
and CNN and BBC, so to say, as the valley of
Kashmir, or at least the part that remains in
India, passes through what I fear is the most
tragic and critical phase of its existence
since the Accession sixty-two years ago. I have a
soft corner for the Kashmir valley. I spent the
first few years of my life in the Valley at the
turn of the 1940s and early 1950s, and boy and
man, have followed the developments closely from
the incarceration of Sheikh Abdullah and the three
wars with Pakistan – after the Qabaili
invasion, which I was too young to be bothered
about – all through the many government,
Congress, National Conference and various
configurations through Dr Faroukh Abdullah and
ending with his son. Each phase had its nadir,
till the crisis dipped further towards cataclysm.
But there was always a lingering hope
that it would turn out safe and peaceful, for
there were very few alien elements stoking the
fire, directly, indirectly or even
unintentionally. Even the tragic exodus of the
Kashmiri Pundits, engineering according to many by
the government in New Delhi and its agent in
Srinagar, low point as it was, did not seem
irretrievable. It goes to the sanity of the
nation at large that even the Exodus, and I use
the capital letter in full consciousness, did not
precipitate the sort of communal explosion which
would have been easy in a nation that had seen the
1992 Babri masjid aftermath and the ranting of the
Sangh Parivar.
It is not the Sangh
Parivar’s ranting or its known ability to
pervert the holy Yatra into a communal flashpoint
that is the danger. The danger comes from the
feedback syndrome of the new media, specially the
TV channels. In fact, the buck for aggravating the
situation does indeed stop with them, though not
in the manner their anchors seem to presume in
their inflated egos and pay-packets. With
censorship always a reality in interpersonal
communications through telephones, mobiles and
Internet, and a wide chasm of interpretation of
factors and fiction between local newspapers of
the valley and those published from Jammu,
Chandigarh or New Delhi, the lack of credibility
seems offset only by the visuals.
And the visuals of
demonstrations, coffin of martyred soldiers, women
in the throes of mourning for their dead, makes a
volatile mixture. The Editor of the Milli Gazette,
New Delhi Zafarul Islam Khan, fears the valley may
be on the verge of an Intifada, which if New Delhi
does not act, may invite foreign military
intervention.
The Sangh Parivar, sees
an opportunity, and has pout the government on an
ultimatum that whatever happens in the valley must
not jeopardise the Pilgrimage to the Ice Lingam in
the holy cave of Amarnath, now under progress,
almost threatening national repercussions. The
comatose responses from New Delhi, the fishing
expeditions by the BJP and the unconcern by every
other political force - even the Left
parties seem not to be too bothered, while the
Tamil parties, the Telugu parties, the Yadavs and
Mayawatized ones possibly find Kashmir much too
far away to prick their political sensitivity
– is only adding to the crisis.
Sanity must return soon. It will not do for
security forces to be firing at, and killing, not
terrorists and Pakistani combatant infiltrators,
but civilian protestors. Many in India and in the
non resident Indian population in the UK and the
US may not want to acknowledge it, but there has
been all too much civilian no-combatant blood shed
in the Valley over the decades. Not just the
Pandits, the poor Muslims, among them women and
children, have not just been displaced in their
tens of thousands, but brutally killed in fake
encounters by the local police, in firing by army
soldiers and security forces of the Central
Reserve Police, by indigenous anti-New Delhi
militants, and by invading terrorists.
For them really, there
seems to be no friend. It is not spurring that
they can be roused to protest every death, every
rape, and every injury, shouting slogans before TV
cameras and pelting stones at the command of local
political vested interests. Cameramen are not
unknown to occasionally ask crowds to kindly shout
a few hostile slogans, or throw a stone or two.
But for them, too, it is safety first. We all
vividly remember seeing embedded BBC and CNN
journalists filming from the same gun porthole
that their friendly soldier was shooting from, all
for the sake of live TV. So it is either the crowd
playing to the camera with slogans, or the camera
filming stone-lobbers from the safety of the CRPF
van’s cover. And we are not even talking of
the headlines in journals such as Panchjanya and
Organiser, and their Web equivalents.
Parliament must find time between its impasses
on food prices and Narendra Modi’s
shenanigans to act, and act fast for a
change. It is no one’s case that this
is going to be easy. It is a difficult task; more
complex than any political hot potato we have seen
in years. But surely it is not beyond redemption.
Issues of humanity and human rights must be
recognised in all that fire and brimstone. The
United progressive Alliance II government in New
Delhi, which is a partner in the Srinagar regime
too, must be seen to encourage a return to peace,
instead of hoping that the fire will die out of
its own and perhaps leave in its ashes something
that ruling parties can retrieve to continue in
power. Even the Indian media can shed its
pomposity and its Fox TV patriotism and, for once,
come on the side of peace.
