Kashmir is all too often read as a fragment. It represents for most a law and order problem, a security issue. It raises problem of terror, violence, secession and misgovernance. Its problems are often excessively personalised. Some believe that the presence or absence of one man can change the logic of the problem. For many now, it is the presence of Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah. His opponents think he has lost control and his supporters argue he needs one more chance. One cannot make up one’s mind whether he is the hero whose last three movies have failed or an overambitious extra. Oddly, what gets hyphenated is the question of peace to the fate of Mr Abdullah. I do not see why we cannot see him through a housewife’s eye as a presentable young man whose premature entry into politics can reverse directions if he removes his i-Pod and puts on a hearing aid.
Mr Abdullah in his piquant way has a touch of all of us. His behaviour raises two sets of questions for all of us. Firstly, are we listening? But, more importantly, we have to ask what are the categories, the assumptions we share about Kashmir. Is it similar or different than the way we looked at Khalistan or Mizoram?
How do we look at Kashmir now? We read it as an integral part of India yet a problematic part of the nation state. In fact, it feels more Indian as it too has been ruled by three generations of the Abdullah family. A touch of dynasty as a snobbish form of nepotism make us feel at home. Secondly, the continuous violence has created a perpetual state of emergency.
An emergency, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims, is a state of exception. A state of exception is an episodic phase where the guarantee of fundamental rights is suspended. In a paradoxical sense, we suspend democracy to restore democracy. But the joke is often on us as an episodic event becomes a perpetual one and a state of exception becomes a permanent state of affairs and a permanent state of mind.
If we sit back and reflect, we realise that the very way we solve a problem adds to it. The Kashmir problem is in a state of perpetual impasse because we perennially operate with categories which are too procrustean or too predictable. I want to argue that the current ideas of the nation, the nation state, the security system, the idea of sovereignty, our sense of electoral democracy are adequate for problem solving. I am not an expert but I must confess that even a bit of naiveté can go a long way to humanising and transporting the problem.
Ask yourself? Why is it that whenever the problem of Kashmir is mentioned, we come up with the same categories and scenarios, the same characters and arguments appear.
Mention Kashmir and like Pavlov’s dog, the state unravels the Army, the paramilitary, the same tired politicians, and the experts spouting PhD-endorsed clichés.
Kashmir is a scream, and a cry for help. The real politics is in the people. They are saying, “Something is wrong. Listen to what we are saying”. Instead we label them as fundamentalists, secessionists, terrorists, agitators. Let us face it. Every Indian has a touch of secessionist in him. Every time I shift from Delhi to Chennai, I sense the need to secede. I assure you I am being serious.
What all of us are confronting is a thing called Delhi. Delhi is a livable idea that makes the rest of India unlivable. As long as Delhi remains Delhi as a mindset, the rest of India is and will be healthily regionalistic and secessionist and Delhi may not know it.
Delhi is a corset, a prudist view of politics, an outdated bureaucratic mentality that has infected two wonderful universities with a compulsion for committees. Intellectuals who won’t clean garbage in front of their houses all demand to be policymakers. Delhi as an intellectual frame is an outdated paradigm. Sending Delhi to Kashmir to listen adds little to dialogue. It makes Delhi look liberal and pious as parliamentarians walk gingerly as if all the natives had AIDS.
One thing is clear. The piety of the conventional will not work. How can we create a conceptual and emotional thaw in Kashmir?
I was reminded of the wisdom of one of India’s great activists, Ela Bhatt. She once suggested that Swadesism demanded a housewife’s theory of politics and globalisation. She argued in another context that it is the women who suffer and it is the women who can look unsentimentally at life. Sentiments are too superficial for the emotions they feel. A housewife understands what continuous violence can do to the men and her children. She understands the sanity of livelihood and the normalcy of continuous work in sustaining a community.
A housewife, I was once told, is too shrewd to think that a suspension of hostilities is the beginning of peace. Peace for her, whether in Kashmir, Palestine or Darfur, is an everyday drama of hope in everydayness, where life demands the restoration of the normal, the flow of gossip and hospitality, the restoration of livelihoods and dignity. It is a recognition that peace speaks a language beyond the idiocy of security. Security, as Ms Bhatt once claimed, does not understand domesticity, the household economy and its connectivities with the globe and the cosmos.
I am not summoning Ms Bhatt, but using her insights to argue for a housewife’s approach to Kashmir. Forget parliamentary delegations. Allow women to travel across, listen, share and celebrate.
Let civil society flood Kashmir so we hear the diversity of opinions, complaints and grievances. Security and intelligence are abortions of storytelling. Forget bandhs. Let us declare state mourning for the children we have killed. The housewife understands the Army but she will be the first to realise that the Army in brutalising Kashmir is brutalising itself.
A housewife understands pain and grief. She knows how to mourn. She may not recite history but she senses the intimacy of gossip. Let the housewife and the civil society take over. They will demonstrate the ridiculousness of security, terror and the politics that haunts Kashmir. A housewife’s theory of peace may outthink the politicians by erring on the right side of simplicity.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist