Nayeem Rather | Essay
Living in unfreedom in Kashmir

Before I talk of freedom, let's begin with “unfreedom”. I remember a conversation I had with a Kashmiri old man a few years ago, who, when I asked him what it meant to live in Kashmir, said, nonchalantly, “We are living a curfewed existence.”

I was born in Kashmir, in a small village in the early ’90s. I have lived my childhood and adult life there, experiencing life under an armed conflict, more importantly under the gaze of extensive militarization — so much so that for a long time, the militarization and its control over daily life and its alteration of the landscape appeared to me as part of the nature, which, like trees has been there since ages.

How does life look life in such a setting? What does the curfewed existence mean? What does freedom mean in such a place?

Let me begin by telling you what a day looks like for me in Kashmir: you wake up in the morning, and the first thing you do, before washing your face is to scroll through the phone, and wish not to read news about a killing. But it is rare that you won’t read the news of a killing, or torture, or detention. You start your day with the news of death. It has become a part of the Kashmiri life — its psyche and its socio-political life. Death is a metaphor for the stopping of life, and consequently freedom.   

If you are a student, you prepare to go to school, you take up a bus; if you play on a road and an army convoy passes by, you are asked to stop, for half an hour, or for two. You sit there in your seat, watching the military trucks speed past you. You look around and see people in cars and on bikes and scooters staring at the convoy with tired faces, in fear and anticipation, cautious of the presence of the soldiers with guns managing the traffic. It is a display of military writ over the people and their freedom of movement. If you are lucky and don’t find army convoy on the road, the second thing awaiting you is the police barricade. You will be stopped, randomly at a road by a group of armed police men, frisked, may be abused, and then let go. Or you might be stopped at a barricade, and the police officer will ask you for your identity card, or worse, for your phone. Surveillance? Well, if they take your phone, they will ask you for the password to look into the content you have in the phone. You hope they don’t find anything: even the photos of your girlfriend or boyfriend can lead you to trouble. If you have any messaging encrypting app on your phone, you just hope that they don’t take you with them and put you in the interrogation room. The policemen check your Instagram messages, your Twitter messages, and your Facebook. And if it fancies anyone among them to not return your phone to you, they can do that. They have done it many times, and keep doing it. They function on the principle of total impunity. They can do anything they want and you cannot do anything about it. They snatch your sense of agency, your sense of control over your own life.

If you survive this, then you are on the edge, looking sideways at the standing soldiers with their guns, watching you do everything. It is not paranoia. It is the reality of life, in Kashmir. It is a glimpse of what the old man referred to as curfewed existence.

A life where before going to sleep you make sure no one is knocking on the door. In your sleep, you are somehow strangely aware of the sounds of trucks and police jeeps. You see the police raid your neighbour’s house in the dead of the night, bang on the doors, and drag your neighbour’s son out. You watch the policemen manhandling women, abusing them, calling them names, and worse, raping them. Have you heard of Kunan and Poshpora? Google will tell you how the women of these two villages in the Kupwoer district of Jammu and Kashmir were gang raped. The memory of the rape is etched in the Kashmiri psyche. It is something that all Kashmiris are aware of, especially the women. In the recent memory: Asiya and Neloofar, two women of Shoipain, had gone to their vegetable garden and were allegedly raped by the soldiers. Gender violence and freedom?

While they take your neighbour’s son, you watch, like other villagers, from your room; your heart skips and beats at the rustle of leaves. Who knows whose house they will raid next?

And if you are a journalist, like me, you sure want to report these incidents and their systemic nature. You try to pitch the idea and you think many times about what to write and what not to. Your writing is informed by how much pressure you think you can take from the state once it is published. You self-censor and make the report look as less ‘critical’ as possible. Then, if you pitch the idea to the newspaper editor, he will tell you it was too ‘radical’ and needs to be toned down. But, how can facts be radical? The editor will trim it or publish it at the bottom of the page where it won’t be noticed. But it sometimes does. The state authorities notice. They will summon you to the police station, or worse, they will raid your home and take you with them. They will lodge you in jail, and then, in a Kafkaesque way, won’t tell you why you have been arrested! They will use laws designed to check ‘dissent’. You will go to jail — and while I write this, at least four journalists whom I know or have worked with are in jails. Right to freedom of expression?

And recently, many Kashmiri journalists are being barred from travelling overseas. The right to livelihood and movement?

Never in my life have I experienced the unfreedoms more acutely than in 2019 when the entire region of Jammu and Kashmir was put under curfew and subsequent communication clampdown; the movement was curbed with people forced to stay indoors; the mobile internet and telephone services were suspended. I experienced and saw and read reports about soldiers and police personnel stopping ambulances, barring people from the right to health. 

A few things I mentioned above are aspects of unfreedom — the root cause is, to paraphrase Franz Fanon, the system that is premised on the principle - at least in practice and legality - of denial of agency of people and their choice of freedom to a dignified life. The crippling unfreedoms are bottlenecking the very agency of an individual, and thereby the collective’s political and economic aspirations.

In such a place, what would freedom mean to me?

I have pondered about it for years if not all my whole life. Freedom to begin with, would mean regaining my personal agency — the right to choose my own destiny, the right to have a say in how I want to shape my individual and political life. May be for the lack of better word, we call it right to self-determination.

Freedom to me means being able to sleep in my home without the fear of being raided at night by police. Freedom means to be no more a homo sacer. It means control over my body. It means to have the assurance that my body will not be violated with torture and violence. It means to be able to explore the places I have been denied entry into. It is the basic human freedom, a kind of freedom that is inherent in nature. Freedom means to be able to live and express myself without being penalised for my political beliefs. To be able to live a life of dignity.

Freedom means to have a right to memory; to be able to memorialise without threat, to be able to tell my story; to have power over my own story. Maybe, I like to think, freedom is the storytelling exactly the way the story is. Here I am not talking about these abstract things devoid of their political meaning. Storytelling is history, memory is history, and history defines every aspect of our present; persecution is historic, repression is historic; freedom would mean having the power to be able to correct historical injustices, and restore people’s will to decide their own political destiny.

It would mean the end of violence of the landscape; cleansing the Kashmiri landscape of the ever-expanding network of concertina wires that lay buried in every street and tree of the region. It means, in political terms, demilitarisation. It means end of encroachment of the military apparatus into my life, my private life. It means being able to walk in the city wherever I want to without the ominous feeling of being watched.

Freedom means restoring justice. It means the end of sexual violence — it means living a life and not reading news about rape. It means ending use of rape as a political tool. 

It means going to a mountain and be assured that I wouldn't disappear. It means living with that assurance that I will return home unharmed, or at least my dead body will reach home and be buried. It means to have a right to burial where one wants to. It means walking through a meadow without the fear of lurking land mines. It means not witnessing little children without limbs. It means enabling a childhood that is free of violence. A childhood where children don’t have to witness what children are not supposed to; beheaded corpses, blood, and cries of wailing women. Freedom to me means witnessing social justice in the society; it means to have right to education and equal opportunity. It means living under a political system that respects people's will and aspirations; a system that is economically sustainable and all-inclusive in the real sense.

Freedom is living in a political system that is premised on the values of democracy, and where your religion, race or ethnicity is not othered. It means restoration of right to self-determination.

And most of all, freedom means not being forced to live a ‘curfewed existence’.