Kashmiri man died in a terrorist strike on a CRPF battalion in the Sopore town of Kashmir. In what was an emotionally jarring visual, the dead man’s 3 year old sat on his dead body trying to wake him up before an officer rescued the boy and too him to safety. A CRPF Jawan also died in the attack 3 other security personals were injured. But the victim’s family blamed the security forces for the killing.
Kashmir bleeds & Kashmiri lives matter started trending on Twitter. Predictable parallels with palatines began to be drawn. And the impression that got conveyed globally was that the Indian forces had committed the murder. This was of course a big fat lie. So, how do you make sense of what just transpired in Kashmir? Why did the victim’s family blame the CRPF for what was clearly the work of the terrorists? Of course there can be all kinds of reasons for this specific posturing by the victim’s family.
But i don’t want to get into that here. But how do you understand the morality of an entire society? In fact, a global community that compulsively bites the hand that feeds them? And without understanding this, how would you even take remedial measures? This is the classic divide between reality and narrative that somehow refuse to work in India’s favour. The unimaginative way in which the Indian state frames the Kashmir problem is adequately demonstrated in the long standing policy of the Indian government since 1947.
Political maniupulation, ideological compromises and a kind of strategic waywardness have defined India’s Kashmir policy and if there’s a single noun that captures the underlined philosophy of the state, its “cowardice”. But if you want to make it palatable, make that indifference, “pitch black Tamas”. As i have said before, piggy backing on the professionalism of the Indian security apparatus does not absolve the political leadership of its responsibility to reclaim Kashmir not in a territorial but in a civilizational sense. But that that would require a paradigm shift in how the people of this country and outsiders view the Kashmir issue. Educating people in India and outside is really the job of the government.
In today’s information age, education is a synonym for narrative building. Facts are facts; making sense of them is to buy into a narrative. A narrative may correspond with the objective reality or not but it has to be coherent and its power lies in its emotional appeal. I don’t recall where I read this, but it just overall sums it up, “A lie travels to the other part of the world and comes back while the truth is still tying its shoe laces” . In order for the truth to win a information war, it must be given the wings of a narrative. Some prominent conservative intellectuals in the west have popularized the following expression, “Facts don’t care for your feelings”.
But elementary cognitive psychology teaches just the opposite. You might just as well reframe it as feelings don’t care about facts. This is the very foundation on which a narrative, a very effective one is built. So, you have a world view, a coherent mental map of the world consisting of values, beliefs, likes and dislikes. Your sense organs send information to your brain and it starts processing the information. However, there are 2 steps to it. First, you react to the information emotionally, and then your rational mind gets on with what it has evolved to do i.e. justify your feelings and give you reasons to act on them.
Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt has likened this relationship between logical mind and emotional apparatus as that between a lawyer and a client. The lawyer is duty bound to protect the interests of the client even when he knows that the client is wrong. To put it simply, your rational mind is not meant to be a torch with which you go around looking for the truth but an evolutionary instrument which helps you survive on the planet by forming tribal alliances- alliances based on common fundamental assumptions about life.
This means that your rational response to an event in real world is pretty much determined by your emotional reactions unless you consciously suppress this natural tendency. This natural tendency is called bias, a word loosely thrown around in TV panel discussions and social media to accuse the other side of the conversation. Bias is a cognitive error as well as an evolutionary strategy which is why it’s universal and inescapable in a sense. John Haidt demystifies it further. Suppose I tell you that, someone we know, let’s call him Afzal committed a bankrupt. If Afzal is your friend, your rational mind will process the information through a filter in the form of a question, “Must I believe it?” Then you would ask this question, “Can I believe it?”
To which a quick reply will come, “Of course, I can”. Narratives play out in the subtle difference between must I believe it and can I believe it and the question posed by your mind depends on your relation with Afzal which in turn is often a function of your own religious identity or the lack there of in the case of a secular Hindu or the spiritual but not religious clown. According the Game Theory, infinite players successfully build narratives because they continue playing the game by propagating their values, values which provide meaning to their lives, make them feel good about themselves by defining who they are. Values are function of identity and vice versa. What do finite players do?
They want to win arguments at the expense of narratives because there are obsessed with facts and data as if they mean everything in the information war raging on in this age. Finite players play the game as if they have no identity. I have repeatedly called for framing Kashmir as a Civilizational problem. But I suspect that people miss the real input of this verbal expression. Unless it’s approached in this way, India’s never going to win this war of narratives because honestly, no one cares about facts. Contrary to their intentions, the Indian TV channels are constantly hammering the point that the man was killed by the terrorists will be taken to mean that they are covering up for the crime of their own armed forces.
To play the infinite game, India must tell its own story, a coherent powerful humane story of the 7 exoduses of Kashmiri Hindus. The atrocities done against them for being a religious minority in the valley and the urgent need for the reversal of the centuries of genocide perpetrated on them. Before telling the story, the political leadership and the bureaucracy must first listen to it and internalize it. Do your school text books inform you about what happened in Kashmir in 1990? No? Have you ever wondered why? It is inconceivable as to why no Indian government has used the Kashmiri Hindu exodus as a negotiating lever in managing international relations. Actually, it’s not inconceivable; I know why they don’t do it because the migration of half a million of people from Kashmir to the other parts of India and the world is a statement of fact. Why they moved is a story that needs to be told.
Kashmiri Hindus have been crying hoarse for decades telling their story to their neighbours, friends, and colleagues on social media, everywhere. But no one listens to the people. People need the official backing of the state and the support of the institutions of the state to be taken seriously. The Westphalia state of India with no civilization responsibility does not have the spine to tell the story of its invisible people. Think about it… The PM doesn’t have anything to say about the recent gruesome lynching of the Sadhus in Palgarh. That’s why I said, if there’s a single noun that captures the underlined philosophy of the state, its “cowardice”, but if you want to make it palatable, make that indifference, “pitch black Tamas”.
MAYUKH DEBNATH