Review The Hartal Model

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Riyaz Masroor

Hartal is already an English word. Wikipeida describes hartal as a mass protest often involving a total shutdown of workplaces, offices, shops, courts of law as a form of civil disobedience. It’s similar to a labor strike. In addition to being a general strike, it involves the voluntary closing of schools and places of business. Throughout the 20th century hartal has all along been a communist idea.

During the communist wave in Europe and parts of Asia, the labor class was exploited by the industry, which are largely a state affair. The workers wanted to economically hurt their tormentors by shutting down factory units. The shutdown would hit the state where the industry was nationalized and it would affect the factory owner where it was not. It was quite obvious that the halt in production would hurt the state or the owner, bringing the tormentor to the table of negotiations.

The post-soviet world works on a different economic model. The characteristics of the business have changed. So have the methods of exploitation by the state or the state-backed corporate. When the ways through which the state hurts people change, the ways through which the people resist must change in order to avoid self-harm.

Nowadays hartal is sponsored to achieve either of the two ends: Force the adversarial state to acknowledge the legitimate demands or jolt the world conscience and bring global attention onto the people’s miseries. The ends remain indisputable. The means, however, become questionable when they fail either to awaken the world community or hurt the tormentor.

The resistance after all is a response to the actions of the adversary. If the resistance is modeled in response to adversary’s plans about your physical and economic annihilation, your natural response would be to resist the annihilation and survive both physically as well as economically. The survival, despite attempts of annihilation, has been acclaimed as the best form of resistance. In response to Nazi brutalities the Jews would tell their children to survive in order to defeat the idea of holocaust.

In situations like Kashmir the resistance has two prongs and a given. One, it is the resistance against forgetting. Two, it is to resist the attempts of splitting the collective mass. As for the territorial control, that is the given. The territorial controls have never been undone by street campaigns or sustained shutdowns. At best, the uprisings and street campaigns can dethrone a regime, they cannot unhinge a military power. Seeking a territorial objective through uprisings is like imagining a boat ride in a bucketful of water. That makes our case slightly akin to Palestine but a bit more complex than Egypt, Tunisia, Iran or Nepal.

Just for the academic sake, imagine for a moment that Kashmiris remodel their struggle around these two prongs and a given. The survival rather than death will become the key to resistance; Growth of industry and other businesses rather than procrastinated strikes would be the tool of defiance; Articulation through art and craft rather than silence would be the hallmark of struggle. In nutshell, a shopkeeper should feel himself as part of resistance by lifting the shutter of his shop. When your adversary wants you to decline the reasonable way to resist is to rise.

Kashmir’s veteran politician Ram Piara Saraf was one of the leading lights of India’s 20th century leftist movement. I had an opportunity to interview this avowed Marxist, few years before his death in 2009. Among other things, he recalled how in late 1940s the Communist Polit Bureau in Moscow would exhort its cadres in Kashmir to join National Conference, which had just been rechristened from the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference. “Hum ko bataya gaya, alag se kuch karney ki zaroorat nai, NC mai shamil hojao, ye apni hi party hai (No need to be active separately, just join NC, it’s our own party)”, Saraf recounted.

Almost a decade later, when New Delhi humiliatingly deposed the NC patriarch Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and jailed him for “treason” his followers rallied for the right of self-determination. The Plebiscite Front launched a mass movement,  characteristics of which have all along been the signature of every anti-India stir in Kashmir. The PF employed various tactics to press for the referendum but hartal remained the key weapon of its idea of resistance.

Prolonged hartals, excommunicating the opponents, evening blackouts, road shows etc are the tools, which are still being employed as instruments of resistance. It is probably for this reason that some Abdullah loyalists claim National Conference being the mother of separatism in Kashmir. Over the decades such Soviet-era models of resistance morphed into a subculture of our politics as well as resistance.

Token strikes and symbolic shutdowns do make sense when the adversary seeks to divide you between 95 percent “good citizens” and five percent “bad ones”. Occasional hartal is a starker display of unity. It reinforces the relevance of popular political demands and is of course a way to remember. Yet  prolonged hartal cannot be enforced as a now-or-never scenario.

While the goal remains sacred the means to achieve that goal should be allowed to transform as per the demands of time. Something which in past the communists waged only to fail should not be treated like a religious practice that cannot be questioned or altered in present. Source: Greater Kashmir

 (Author is BBC’s J&K Correspondent) 

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