Kashmir's solution to the problems of India's Muslims

Two Kashmiri researchers have an article in Caravan magazine condemning 'illiberal' liberals who object to the use of Islamic slogans during anti C.A.A protests. They begin their article by describing a confrontation between 'leftists' and Muslims at Jamia Milia University over Islamist graffiti on a wall.

In the comments section, a young lady who is a student at the University says that she complained to the proctor about graffiti supporting the Islamic Caliphate and condemning Secularism and Democracy and calling on people to vote for Islam.

The two researchers write- 

What is it about Muslim assertion that must be repressed in order to forge unity with the leftist-liberals? This is not a comment on Jamia alone, but goes well beyond. Solidarity from liberals is conditional because of their understanding of Muslims as quintessentially illiberal. The liberals boast about the country’s pluralistic credentials, but see any assertion on part of Muslims who foreground their identity in religious terms as inimical to India’s secular fabric. 

I think the answer to this is that 'leftist-liberals' don't want to be condemned by Muslims for believing in Secularism and Democracy. They don't want to champion the right of Muslims to form an Islamic Caliphate of the sort which recently existed in Mosul. Why? They would be killed under such a regime. Surely it is not 'illiberal' to object to being murdered?

There are varied forms of Islamophobia in India right now. On the one hand, there is a government which does not even bother to hide its anti-Islam stance.

Does the Modi Government tell its friends in the U.A.E and Saudi Arabia that Islam is evil? Does Amit Shah call in Asifa Khan and urge her to abandon her religion?
On the other hand punishing Pakistani terrorists may, in the opinion of the authors, be blatantly anti-Islamic.

In 1939, even before the formation of Pakistan—the very existence of which is used to target Indian Muslims—Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the prominent ideologues of Hindutva, remarked, “If we Hindus in India grow stronger, in time these Muslim friends of the League type will have to play the part of German-Jews instead.” Savarkar’s ideology was an inspiration for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The RSS was set up in imitation of the Congress Seva Dal which in turn was based on Mussolini's Black Shirts. Congress grew stronger and 'Muslim friends of the League' either had to migrate or else where shorn of political influence. In 1938, Govind Vallabh Pant described Mahatma Gandhi as the Il Duce and Fuehrer of India. Zail Singh, as Home Minister, praised Hitler in Parliament. Sonia Gandhi, current President of Congress, knows a thing or two about Fascism. Her father was a militant supporter of Mussolini.

Being Kashmiri, the two researchers, have an understandable aversion to the BJP-

Add to this the settler-colonial ambitions of the Hindutva project that were on display after 5 August 2019, when the Indian state changed Kashmir’s constitutional status. The removal of Article 35A—which gave the permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir exclusive rights exclusive rights to buy and sell immovable property—poses an existential threat to the people of Kashmir, the researcher Aditi Saraf wrote in an October 2019 piece for The Caravan. “Maintaining land as inalienable wealth—or, more particularly, preventing outsiders from establishing a land market in Kashmir—is a principle with historical depth and significance in the region,” Saraf noted.

It appears that the Valley will languish economically. It would be neither profitable nor safe to acquire land and settle there. However, laws preventing sale of land to 'outsiders' may be passed because there seems to be a lot of support for this in BJP dominated Jammu.

The highlights of 2019—Kashmir, Ayodhya and CAA—were not about diverting people’s minds from its economic failures or other important issues. They were about realising the Right’s vision of a Hindu Rashtra, which excludes Muslims. When Modi said that the anti-CAA protestors who are indulging in violence “can be identified by their clothes,” it was an obvious insinuation that Muslims are a threat to the peace of the country.

I think the authors are understating matters. The threat is a direct one to non-Muslims lives and property from radicalized Muslim slums. The Left-Liberals have let a genie out of the bottle which will consolidate the Hindu vote while splitting the Muslim vote. On the other hand, in Opposition led States, the Ruling Party can genuinely spearhead the agitation and reap its rewards. But, once again, this means the Left-Liberals will be sidelined.

Perhaps, Left-Liberals should have chosen a socio-economic issue to rally around. It is silly that they are protesting the granting of citizenship to genuine victims of Religious persecution.

On the other hand, if the Left-Liberals stepped back and let Islamists lead the protests- clarifying that they were only supporting it because, all things considered, it was the right thing to do, then the Left-Liberals could gain salience as Muslims turn against the extremists who dream of a Caliphate.

Is this what the two authors are getting at?

But in this moment, the Islamophobia of selective solidarity must be called out—unity that is sought in the name of the nation, unity that seeks to remove all reference to Islam in the name of secular values. How is it that Muslims asserting their Indian identity are welcome, but those asserting their religious identity beyond the liberal framework are silenced?

I think the answer to this question is that India has long experience of what 'Muslims asserting their religious identity' do to non Muslims- unless they are stopped from doing it by brutal repression, extra judicial violence or outright ethnic cleansing by rabid mobs. 

If the people are out on the streets to protect the secular values of the country as enshrined in the Constitution, do those values necessitate for religion to be sidelined—disallow Muslimness in any form in the public sphere, even when the exclusion is clearly about Muslim identity?

This is the crux of the problem. The Left-Liberals are pretending that Muslims in Islamic Republics are as persecuted as non-Muslims. This may have been true of Soviet Republics. But it isn't true of India's Muslim neighbors. 

The complex terrain of the negotiation between religion, politics and the state varies in accordance with the different contexts in each country.

History is the record of this complex negotiation. Any questions as to strategy and tactics that arise can only be answered by looking at what happened in that place in the past.

In India, when secularism means a neutral position of the state towards all religions,

Sadly, India is not secular in this sense. It is democratic. The majority decides what any given State will do. It may choose to embrace the values of a particular Religion. Thus Punjab embraced the values of the Sikh religion and used the Gurumukhi script in which the Sikh scriptures are written. The former state of J&K chose Urdu written in Islamic script as its official language because it had a Muslim majority. 

why does the onus of proving secular credentials rest on the Muslim minority of the country?

Previously, this Muslim minority demanded a share of power disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Many supported the creation of Pakistan. This turned out to be a costly mistake. Furthermore, the Muslim tendency to turn inwards has disadvantaged them economically. Thus Muslim minorities- not just in India, but also the U.K, Europe, America etc- need to advertise their secular credentials. In London you will see plenty of Muslims dressed in an orthodox style. But the London Mayor- or the Chancellor of the Exchequer- dress and speak just like the majority population. The current Home Secretary is a Hindu lady. Does she wear a sari and 'bindi'? No. She looks and sounds like a successful professional from the British mainstream. 

Why do Indian Muslims have to stifle their religious identity to prove these credentials?

The 'religious identity' of Muslims has been a strong and consistent opponent of Secular and Democratic values. 

When the Supreme Court validated the destroyers of the Babri Masjid by effectively sanctioning the construction of a temple in its place, why did the country expect Muslims to accept the decision in the name of secular values?

Muslims were expected to accept the decision in obedience to the law of the land. Furthermore, it is not the case that they have the physical power to oppose the construction of the Temple. In other words, Muslims are expected to recognize that they must accept what they can not prevent. They have to act sensibly or risk brutal punishment.

As the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad argued, the state carries out the function of defining the acceptable public face of religion.

More particularly, the police and the law courts function in a manner such that those whose actions are 'unacceptable' end up incarcerated. Killing kaffirs may be an acceptable public face of Islam in some places. But it isn't acceptable at all where Muslims are in the minority or where the State is strong enough to repress such practices. 

When it comes to the Muslim religious identity, Muslims have to either assimilate liberal values—the liberals see this as an act inherently contravening Islam—or be left out of the nation state’s political imaginary.

I don't think this is true. It is sufficient that they obey the law. After all, there are many conservatives among the majority community. They approve of pious orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

This is akin to the political categorisation of “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” as the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani has written about in context of the West. Referring to the public discussion in America post 9/11, Mamdani writes:


… President Bush moved to distinguish between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” From this point of view, “bad Muslims” were clearly responsible for terrorism. At the same time, the president seemed to assure Americans that “good Muslims” were anxious to clear their names and consciences of this horrible crime and would undoubtedly support “us” in a war against “them.”

Bush was right to make this distinction. The fact is 'good Muslims' were the majority. Saudi Arabia did crack down on its extremists. Pakistan may have been a hypocritical ally, but the fact is Pakistan raised no strenuous objection to the killing of thousands of militants within its own borders. 

But this could not hide the central message of such discourse: unless proved to be “good,” every Muslim was presumed to be “bad.”

No. Bush granted a presumption of innocence to America's long standing friends in the Islamic world. By contrast, Saddam Hussein was considered 'bad'- because as Bush said 'he tried to kill my Daddy!'- and so Iraq was attacked. 

All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against “bad Muslims.

What made this easy was that the 'bad' Muslims had declared war on the 'good' Muslim regimes. 

This is what we see when the liberal-left activists seek to direct today’s decisive movement for the Muslims of India. When pictures of the Jamia students Ladeeda Sakhaloon and Aysha Renna vociferously protesting and defending students emerged online, social media hailed them as heroes of the anti-CAA movement. But then, their social-media posts started to circulate online—such as one where Sakhaloon posted, “We have abandoned your secular slogans long before.” Suddenly, Twitter users started to insinuate that they are traitors to secular values.

A person who says they have 'abandoned' something, may- with perfect justice- be said to 'betrayed' that thing. Ladeeda is a member of Kerala based S.I.O which has an Islamist, not Secular, ideology. 

On 29 December, the Congress member of parliament Shashi Tharoor, who is popularly considered a liberal, retweeted a video of the slogan “La ilaha illallah” being raised at a protest. “Our fight against Hindutva extremism should give no comfort to Islamist extremism either,” Tharoor wrote in the text of his retweet. He added that “we” will not allow pluralism and diversity to be “supplanted by any kind of religious fundamentalism.”

Like the two ladies mentioned in the previous paragraph, Tharoor comes from Kerala. He understands the risk of a second 'Moplah' type uprising. Middle class Keralites are very worried about radicalization and recruitment to ISIS at Universities. Thus Tharoor is acting rationally in condemning a type of militancy which is a threat to the people he represents. 

After online backlash for statement, Tharoor provided an explanation via a thread of tweets stating he understands “primordial place” of the slogan in Islam and its usage as an assertion of faith. And yet, he revealed a basic flaw in his understanding by adding, “You can’t fight Hindutva communalism by promoting Muslim communalism.” His stance, that it is the Muslims who must understand that the very idea of India’s pluralism that is threatened, comes from a position of utter privilege and patronises a community facing an existential threat.

This is the crux of the problem. Muslims were living peacefully in East Punjab and Jammu. Then they were ethnically cleansed. Why? Because Pakistan was created. Suddenly all over North India, Muslims lost 'separate electorates' which gave them disproportionate political representation. Many faced a genuine 'existential threat' and had to migrate to Pakistan. But this threat only appears when Muslims overplay their hand and demand things which they don't have the power to take for themselves.

Tharoor claimed that the BJP is circulating such videos to give a communal colour to the movement. He failed to note that the threat to pluralism also comes from those who claim to uphold democratic values by singling out Muslim assertion and giving it a negative connotation. The only difference between the Congress and the BJP seems to be their articulation while shouting down Muslims—the former, in the name of the Hindu Rashtra; the latter, for its skewed definition of a plural, liberal and secular India.

Our two researchers come from a Muslim majority area. They know that their community has the power to enforce whatever it likes in the Valley. If they want to ethnically cleanse Hindu Pandits- that is exactly what happens. The only problem is that if they attack the Army, then they get shot. So the only limit on their power is military. By contrast, in non Muslim majority areas, if the police are not numerous enough to repress an Islamic agitation, then mobs of non-Muslims will do spontaneous ethnic cleansing. This is not the fault of Liberalism or any other ideology. It is the fault of history and demography. 

Rather than asking the Muslim “other” to get along with liberal values, it is necessary to direct the questions at the privileged self.

Sadly, the 'liberal self' is not privileged in India. It is ignored. If it tries to act up, it gets beaten by the police. Mummy and Daddy may initially be sympathetic. But if they can't get you into a foreign University, they lose patience with you. They cut off your allowance and make you get a job. 

What does the liberal sense of solidarity entail for a group facing violence owing to its religious identity?

Initially, it entails being a 'useful idiot' front-man for a bunch of lunatics. Then it entails getting the shit kicked out of you in a police thana. After that it entails either emigration or Mummy and Daddy forcing you to get a job. 

How tolerant is the liberal idea of the “secular” and the “plural?”

Tolerance is not the issue. Compassion fatigue is. Sooner or later, the Liberals move on. They stop returning calls from the insulted and injured. With a few years, the Liberals have got jobs and families and spend a lot of time cursing the Government for taxing their income so as to educate and feed the great unwashed. 

At the brink of a possible annihilation, “Muslims have nothing to prove to India,” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi, wrote in an article in The Wire.

Why? Because, if they rise up, 'possible annihilation' will turn into the certainty of brutal repression and mob violence till the weaker community withdraws from they fray. 

He highlighted how many “well-wishers” of Muslims are worried that the BJP will frame the opposition to the CAA as sectarian and essentially Muslim. “Should Jamia and AMU have kept silent, or the protestors of Seelampur or Purnia kept themselves confined to their daily chores since their ‘visibility’ would weaken the argument against the CAA?” Apoorvanand asked.

The problem here is that 'the argument against CAA' is very weak indeed. It consists in saying non-Muslims who have fled Islamic persecution should not be granted citizenship despite India having had the opposite tradition since Independence. Muslims may well say 'we don't want the non-Muslim population of India to increase'. They may equally say 'we don't want Hindu temples to be constructed'. However, the reason they say this is because they don't like non-Muslims. Thus non-Muslims feel no sympathy for them. 

In Jamia, too, we encountered students who felt that framing the CAA issue in terms of the exclusion of Muslims and through slogans reflective of Muslimness could mean reinforcing of Jamia’s image as a backward, terrorist and a minority ghetto. This image was cemented in September 2008 with the Batla House killings—when the Delhi police shot two students in an alleged encounter in Jamia Nagar, an area that surrounds the varsity.

These students have a point. They are afraid that their qualifications from this University may lead to their disqualification from remunerative employment. Further, they may come under the radar of the Security Services. Even their chances of emigration to the Gulf may be affected. Other Muslim countries don't want to hire potential ISIS type militants.

Many human-rights groups including the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association questioned the authenticity of the encounter, terming it a part of the “shameful history of extrajudicial violence.” The killing brought more suspicion against the Muslim neighbourhood, and the university in particular. The right-wing then furthered this suspicion. Shortly after the incident, Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, said: “There is a university in Delhi called Jamia Millia Islamia. It has publicly announced that it will foot the legal fee of terrorists involved in the act. Doob maro, doob maro”—Go drown yourself. In 2017, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the RSS, called Jamia a “refuge for anti-nationals.”

Thus, the fears of the Jamia students are well founded. Hindus listen to Modi. They will view the graduates of this institution with suspicion. That's a bad thing for its alumni.

It was in the context of the Batla House case that over a decade later, a woman student on campus told us, “This is about Jamia’s image.” Many students asked us to distance ourselves from the residents of Jamia Nagar who had come out on roads in solidarity with Jamia students. In tones that reeked of condescension, several students gave us the directive: “They are an unruly mob; we are educated and distinct from them. Don’t join them.”

These two researchers are doing a service to Jamia alumni by pointing out that many of them came to University to better themselves, not to sink back to the level of the uneducated ruffians from the slums. 

Rizwan Qaiser, a professor of Modern Indian History at Jamia, told the Indian Express that students are seeking constitutional, not religious, rights through their anti-CAA protests. Further, that it is crucial for people to know that Jamia is like any other “modern, liberal institution.”

Hopefully, Indians are rational enough to see that people like this Professor predominate on the Jamia campus. If this were not the case, bright English medium students would not come to Jamia from all over the country. Constitutional rights are things smart people worry about. Any illiterate ruffian can get worked up about Religion. The reason ordinary people tolerate Liberals is because they use long words- like 'constitutional'- which we can't understand. Still, we dimly intuit that these long words may save our bacon in court. 

But these narratives also go beyond Jamia. For example, the historian Ramchandra Guha wrote in a March 2018 article in the Indian Express that the Muslim community needs to come out of a “medievalist ghetto into a full engagement with the modern world.”

Guha may be a cretin, but in this case he is right. Who says that any community should remain in a 'medievalist ghetto'? Only Nazis who want to keep Jews in ghett so as to make it easier to exterminate them. Alternatively, American racists may want Black people to be confined to inner city ghettos. But such things are bad for the country as a whole.

He had also argued that any objection to the Muslim women publicly wearing burqas was rooted in emancipation and liberal values.

His argument was partly, but not wholly, correct. Ataturk banned the burqa because he wanted Turkey to come forward on the basis of Rationality and Scientific progress. Communists did not subscribe to 'liberal values'. But they too would ban the burqa and 're-educate' its wearers so as to increase the productivity and military capacity of the population.

These comments are an implicit acknowledgement of the orientalist stereotypes of Muslims as barbarians, who need to be taught ways of an enlightened existence.

In other words, orientalist stereotypes have a grain of truth in them. But it is no more than a grain. Turkey granted women the vote before France did. 

They discredit Muslim identities to only legitimise the sarkaari musalmaan, the state’s version of an ideal Muslim—the one who does not have any symbols of Islam visible in the public sphere, who will be more favourable to the Indian identity of his hyphenated Indian-Muslim self, the one who would be the picture perfect on billboards, with a beard and skull cap even, to speak of India’s pluralistic image.

The beard and skull cap are visible symbols of Islamic identity. It is interesting that the male researcher does not have a skull cap or an Islamic beard. He could easily be a Bollywood actor. The lady researcher, however, wears an orthodox hijab but not the full burqa. It seems there is a double standard when it comes to gender even among such enlightened people!

The suggestion is that “living life as a Muslim is itself the problem,” according to Santhosh S, a cultural theorist.

I think it is true that Liberalism has a problem with people living religious lives. But this problem arises within sects. It is a problem of ipseity, not alterity. No doubt, the opposite also happens. An orthodox member of your faith might put pressure on you to be outwardly observant. In turn, you may say 'why this medieval get-up? The year is 2020. Our community is part of the modern world. Why pretend we are stuck in a time warp?'

The liberal articulation of the issue or expression of solidarity demands that Muslims keep their religious identity aside, probably even give up on it in the name of the nation, and show off how secular they are.

Liberal Muslims do make this demand of their brethren. So do Liberal Hindus and Liberal Jews and so forth. 

It demands the idealised Muslim, an educated patriot, keep away from other Muslims.

Liberal Islam may demand that they keep away from Orthodox Muslims. But, equally, the orthodox members of a community may pressurize co-religionists to boycott 'liberals'. 

In truth, liberal solidarity demands a total separation, an exclusion of an exclusion.

Sadly, 'solidarity' does work in that way. That's a good reason to avoid the thing like the plague. You originally sign up to a protest about what is happening to your pay, working conditions or pension rights. Next thing you know, you are supposed to be shouting anti-Zionist slogans 'in solidarity'. This turns into anti-Semitism pure and simple. This is what happened to Corbyn's Labor party. Jews were forced out. Thankfully, Corbyn was massively defeated at the polls and this stupid type of 'solidarity' will no longer vitiate the atmosphere at Labor Party meetings. 

The liberal solidarity is offered as a favour, as a teaching for the “other” on how to protest. Liberals direct how the oppressed engage with the movement; they claim to stand with the oppressed but muzzle their voice in the process.

I think this is a reasonable claim. After all, the Liberals are acting gratuitously. They are doing a favor, not protecting their own interests. Thus, they will abandon this movement sooner or later. 

Often times since these protests began, we have asked ourselves: as Kashmiri Muslims where do we place ourselves in this movement? We have had a strong sense of disengagement with all forms of politics in India.

Yes. The Muslims of the Kashmir Valley don't want to be part of a non-Muslim majority country. But they lack the physical force to reverse this outcome. 

Back home, we have often been a part of discussions about the indifference of Muslims outside Kashmir to the situation in our homeland.

There is a reciprocal indifference here. The Valley Muslims don't want to help those from outside. They attack Bihari Muslim laborers. They won't let Indian Muslims settle in Kashmir even if they have a maternal connection to the place. Thus, Indian Muslims are determined that the selfishness of Kashmiri Muslims should not endanger their own position.

Those conversations never led to an imagination of the kind of battle that is currently unfolding in India.

Why not? This current 'battle' is wholly imaginary. It is based on stupid lies- viz. the notion that the BJP needs a National Register in order to identify Muslims for ethnic cleansing. The fact of the matter is voting lists already do the job. In any case, religious identity is easily detected from one's name. India saw a great deal of ethnic cleansing by wholly illiterate people. 

The slogans of “azadi” in Kashmir and India are different in terms of the framing and the goals.

In Kashmir, azadi entails the military defeat of the Indian army. In the rest of India it is just a meaningless word like 'Inquilab'. 

This is not the potential “Kashmirisation of India” as certain analysts, such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta, want us to believe—the term could only be used if the Indian state laid siege to the country.

Mehta was conjuring up the bogeyman of the Center turning every State into a bunch of Union territories. This is quite foolish. The Union Home Minister does not want to be responsible for policing every single District in India.

But this is a significant time in the sense of the assertiveness of Indian Muslims and the pouring of people on the streets.

How many people are 'pouring'? An insignificant percentage. Why? Because this is not a bread and butter issue. It is merely 'fake news'. 

This is certainly not a time for us to give patronising sermons.
We find ourselves drawn to this movement in relation to the Muslim identity, in addition to a general solidarity with the oppressed and the persecuted—like we have been for decades at the hands of the Indian state. To discard the Muslimness of our solidarity would be to take the same stance of the left-liberal activists in shedding a reality that is central to this moment in time.

Will these two researchers go back to Kashmir and demand that Indian Muslims be allowed to settle there? If not, what 'Muslimness' of solidarity are they showing? Imran Khan may show an equal solidarity. But he has explicitly said that Pakistan won't accept a single Indian Muslim no matter how badly persecuted by a 'Fascist' regime. Thus there is no actual 'Solidarity' here. All we have is opportunistic 'enemy of my enemy' tactical support. But such support backfires. Why? Both Pakistan and Kashmir valley have ethnically cleansed Muslims. But Indian Muslims have no similar capacity. Thus, their 'allies'- who won't accept a single one of them for settlement- are actually tarring them with the brush of genocidal mania against non-Muslims. Thus, the Muslims of India can get demonized and become themselves subject to ethnic cleansing. Obviously, things won't go that far. This agitation will collapse. Still, the Hindu vote has been further consolidated. Muslim votes will get split between extremists and mainstream politicians. Who gains from this tamasha? Modi, Shah and some Regional satraps. Who loses? Muslims and Left Liberals.

It is perhaps this Muslimness that has made Kashmiris stand with Palestinian struggle for decades.

But Palestinians have gained nothing from this 'solidarity'. On the other hand, the Pakistani air force did greatly assist the PLO by bombing Palestinian Refugee camps during 'Black September'. With friends like this, who needs enemies? Consider the case of the Kashmiri Islamist, Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai who funneled Pakistani ISI funds to American politicians and was sent to jail for that offence. What great service did Fai do the Palestinians? It seems he got Prof. Ismail Faruqi- a Palestinian philosopher- killed along with his wife by a lunatic. Supposedly this was because Al Faruqi was having homosexual relations with his Malaysian students!

The streets of Kashmir have been adorned with graffiti saying “Save Gaza” and, referring to Islam, “Falasteen se rishta kya-La illaha-illalah”—Our relation to Palestine; There is no god but Allah.It is this multi-layered solidarity that pushed Kashmiris to the streets in 1969 during the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Previously, they had rushed into the streets because they claimed 'hazratbal'- the hair of the Prophet Muhammad- had gone missing. Speaking generally, this type of 'tabbaruk' is condemned by the Alim because proof is lacking that such relics are genuine.

This is how Kashmiris have shown bonds of solidarity with the persecuted Muslims of Bosnia and Iraq, Rohingya Muslims of Arakan and Uighur Muslims.

Interestingly, Kashmiri Muslims say they are willing to take Rohingyas but not Indian Muslims. 

Solidarity is a responsibility, as much for one’s own conscience as it is towards the oppressed.

It can also be very well paid as the case of 'Dr.' Fai (his Phd was fake) proved. 

It has to be unconditional and accepting of the different contextual realities.

The contextual reality is that Kashmiri Muslims are entirely powerless whether under Indian or Pakistani rule. 

When expressed as convenient condescension and blindness to people’s specific identities and lived realities, it ceases to be solidarity—it is an attempt at the same othering and exclusion that the state is being questioned for.

These two researchers are blind to the 'lived reality' of Indian Muslims which is that they are a minority. They can't ethnically cleanse non-Muslims in the manner that the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley did in the Nineties. Thus these two researchers are showing a breathtaking 'condescension and blindness' to Indian Muslims whom they already treat as an alterity- even if they have Kashmiri ancestry- because they won't permit them to settle in the Valley as equals.

Solidarity has to be a constant learning and unlearning, a continuing conversation—not one that comes with conditional clauses and terms of dictation.

But these two researchers have just dictated 'conditional clauses' for 'Solidarity'!

On 20 December, we met a research scholar from Jamia, a Muslim woman, who told us how happy she is to see people finally out on the roads, resisting the power that is all set to annihilate them. “Some students and locals tell me they don’t even know how to go about this, or what a ‘proper’ way of protest is,” she said. “But they are coming out here with their families. Isn’t that some start, at least?”

It may well be the start of something fatal to those families. Still, these two Kashmiri researchers may be glad to see it happening to Indian Muslims. Misery loves company. The Kashmir Valley is turning into a remittance based 'spite-slum'- a Gaza without the rockets- and so Kashmiri Muslims must be permitted the shadenfreude of imagining Indian Muslims being burnt out of house and home. Truly, this is a prospect to warm the cockles of Kashmiri hearts during their long winters.