The Sleeping Self And The Enemy Of The State

Source: PTI File Photo

Be proud of the men at the borders because it is for them, you are able to sleep peacefully at night in your cozy bed, ‘safe and secure’. Let’s celebrate to our heart’s content as two more ‘LeT terrorist has been killed by our army in Kashmir’s Anantnag district.’ The prime time television shows churning out headlines after headlines about how bravely our army men saved our day by killing the enemies of the state, the unfamiliar faces around me coming together in a moment of passionate joviality to celebrate the heroes of the nation state who saved us another night of peaceful sleep, so I should be filled with pride too? Yes I am for who are the maroon berets keeping secure if not ‘me’. I should be happy too even when this happiness is etched over the bloody bullet ridden body of the Kashmiri insurgents. I must be happy, for the enemy of the state is dead.

"Identity is socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially transformed and children learn to play roles, both with respect to significant others and the generalized other"(Booth). Growing up exposed to a state-centric and militarized news media, and a societal ideal of military valor the child “me” learned to translate security into the body of the camouflage wearing gun trotting men, and identify my enemy, in the body of the incorrigible Kashmiri militants. The child “me” was taught to reply with a jovial yes, to the question Cynthia Enloe posed “Does Khaki become you?”, to be grateful to "the government-centered, militarized national security"(Booth) who by killing the terrible other, the terrorists at Kashmir, ensured us a peaceful night of sleep. Yet 'me' an obedient citizen, curiously incurious about the state of affairs in Kashmir apart from identifying the enemy amongst us, couldn’t quell the quiet and the confusion of my heart, when the 'I' in 'me' inadvertently asked as George Orwell articulated “there must be something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years”.

Having been chanced upon the tale of the tragedy that befell upon the residents of the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora on the fateful night of February 23rd 1991, by the hands of state sponsored machinery. My socially curated, incurious ‘self’ came to realize that my entire existence has been shaped by continually re-enacting the mantra of what Ken Booth called to be “believing is seeing”. I came to realize that Kashmir is more threatened than being threatening. For this time around, the plague in this Lolab(land of love and beauty), was not the irrational, incorrigible terrorists but rather ‘the sovereign state itself become an important part of the problem of insecurity, not the solution’ (Booth).

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the sketch of our  project”

(Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex)

What started as a cordon-and-search operation to trace the militants, turned out to be a blatant display of indescribable atrocity, when 150 soldiers of the Indian security forces barged into the homes of the Kunan and Poshpora residents, dragged the men out into the snow and forcefully gang raped more than 23 women. Even minor girls as young as eight years of age were not spared.

Planned sexual assaults on women by the state have been historically deployed as a weapon of war waged upon communities to marginalize them further and sap their will to resist domination. The mass rape and sexual torture at Kunan Poshpora is only one unusually well-documented instance of the continued systematic, deliberate and pervasive targeting of women’s bodies as sites of extreme militaristic violence and reprisals against the Kashmiri insurgency. Furthermore the impunity enjoyed by these phallocentric institutions like the military that reveals itself as “made up of, refreshed by and adaptively reproduced by violence as banal practice” (Shepherd) is evident from the existence of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). AFSPA legitimizes any act of systematic or isolated sexual violence carried out in the name of “national security”. As Derrida articulated, “Language is both power and value laden”. The linguistic discourse of the state and the armed forces in debunking the alleged incident as "a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathizers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad as a part of sustained and cleverly contrived strategy of psychological warfare…a tissue of lies by many persons at many levels" shows how nation-state dynamics continues to carve out an absolute immunity for armed forces without any accountability whatsoever.

The discourse of violence often correlates to the masculine temperament of the nation “where the scripts of nationalism are violently written on human flesh.”(Enloe). For in the sexual violence against women, the message that is being delivered is that of the masculinity of the perpetrator being powerful and dominant, whilst at the same time emasculating the victim, presenting it as weak, and powerless. ‘In this formulation, society provides the script, individuals slip into assigned roles, and the `social play proceeds as planned as long as everybody plays their appropriate parts’ (Shepherd). Therefore, the beaten bloodied bodies of the ‘Kunan Poshpora’ survivors who still have “scars of barrel guns being shoved into the stomach”, or had to get their uterus removed due to excessive bleeding after the mass rape” are symbolic of a “militarized, masculinized state structure, where the politics of the nation are mapped on a woman’s body.”(Enloe)The process of threat perception is not only punctuated by prejudice and biases, but also the intersectional identities influence the intensity of disadvantage that one faces. By the virtue of women’s position as the biological, cultural reproducers and the symbolic bearers of the community’s identity and honor--violating their bodily integrity through biological penetration therefore becomes a crucial “weapon of war” for the state to subjugate the “other”.

'Kashmiri detainee Bilal Ahmed's two year old daughter, often points to the window and calls for her father: 'Baba, Baba, when are you coming back?' Source: Dar Yasin / AP

The Kunan Poshpora mass rape incident is a suitable example to understand how the politics of ruptured masculinities has “created a toxic cycle of competing masculinities and unending human rights violation Kashmir.”(Agarwal) Whenever there is a threat to its masculine existence, the Indian state uses violent counter insurgency measures (in the form of rape, physical and emotional trauma, enforced disappearances) to reinforce and uphold the binaries of the hyper masculine state and the effeminize the Kashmiris. However this in turn, forces the ‘emasculated’ Kashmiri men to attempt to resuscitate their injured dignity that has been degraded by the "penetration, occupation, and cultural domination"(Enloe) of the state sponsored aggressor, i.e. ‘the military.’ As accounted by the grieving male family members of the rape victims, who demand for “severe punishment for the soldiers who engaged in this dastardly act” to the extent of “we would ourselves ensure that the culprits have been punished". The dehumanization and the fracture in masculinity caused by these violent, coercive mechanisms of the state embodied by the military, in turn pushes the Kashmiri men, especially the young boys to seek validation of their ‘manhood’ in extremist groups.

This balance of terror created by the “military masculinity” who weaponize “mass rape” to effeminize the “other” on one hand and the “emasculated Kashmiri” on the other hand, gets its third influx through the intermingling of local patriarchy and gender based violence. Inability to match up to the level of performativity that is demanded by ‘military masculinity’, the soldiers’ seek for confirmation of their ‘manhood’ by violating the bodily integrity of women belonging to the marginalized communities in their own country. This in turn is almost reflective of the tradition of “inward turned violence” in patriarchal society, where men, unable to control their external situations, take to assaulting their wife, in order to feel a semblance of control in the power hierarchy. This dismantling of the ‘high and low” politics when it comes to the double disadvantage faced by the “dwellers of the periphery” can be illustrated through the account of “Mymoona Bano, a victim of domestic violence, who left her in laws house on the fateful night of night of Kunan Poshpora mass rape. However she could not save herself from the assault of the military men. Further her brother was sent off to the detention center, never to be seen again.”

As Lene Hansen articulated, ‘the deliberate exclusion of a ‘body’ from epistemological focus not only prevents the examination of individualizing strategies employed in keeping security problems from appearing at the collective level’. The final level of “penetration” then, as carried out by the state on the effeminized body  of the ‘other’, is through enforced disappearance of the men belonging to the marginal community(here Kashmiris).While women are designated as the biological and symbolic reproducer of the community, the men are considered to be carrying the seed of ethnicity. As a corollary, eliminating the present generation of young men becomes crucial to cease the future propagation of the ethnic identity. Therefore it doesn’t come as surprise that “Faizan’s father, after being taken to the detention camp, on the night of the mass rape, still remains missing”. Furthermore, the “half widows” who protest every day on the street with the only demand to “Bring back the disappeared” still haven’t got their loved ones back. And 30 years after the atrocious mass rape incident in Kunan and Poshpora, when the Kashmiri women are still being told by the Indian state to look for their loved ones amongst the deadened silence of the ‘unidentified mass graves’, it serves as a rejoineder that in the ‘absence of violent conflict, the ‘not-war’ (Shepherd) it’s not peace that exists but an all pervasive silence, enforced by the ones at the upper echelons of power hierarchy who continually defines and redefines ‘what means to be secure’ in everyday discourse. 

Finally as Ken Booth formulated `Security is what we make it. An epiphenomenon that is inter-subjectively created.’ For long we had been social sleep-walkers, maybe it’s finally the time to wake up from this nauseating somnambulism and ask our own-selves, why the Kashmiri detainee’s two-year-old daughter points to the window often and calls for her father “Baba, Baba, when are you coming back?'', while we back at home, in the distant lands, swell our hearts with joy and pride celebrating the promise of another night of ‘safety and security’, of peaceful unthreatening sleep as another enemy of the state is being captured or killed.

References

Agarwal, Amya. “Fixing Ruptured Masculinities: Reflections from Kashmir.” E-International Relations, 1 Mar. 2019, www.e-ir.info/2019/02/26/fixing-ruptured-masculinities-reflections-from-kashmir.

Booth, Ken. “Security and Self: Reflections Of A Fallen Realist", Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, Center for International and Strategic Studies, 1994, pp.1-23

Enloe, Cynthia. “Nationalism and Masculinity: The Nationalist Story Is Not Over—and It Is

Not a Simple Story”. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. University of California press, 2nd ed., Pp.83-110. 2014

Hansen, Lene. “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School.” Millennium, vol. 29, no. 2, June 2000, pp. 289–300

Jan, Billal A. "Ocean of Tears". YouTube, Public Service Broadcasting Trust of India, 2012, https://youtu.be/JwGXYw5vf3w.

Shepherd, Laura J. “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies.” Political Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 2, May 2009, pp. 208–216