Freedom, as Beloved

Peep deep into the heart of Kashmiris and see the image of the beloved being worshipped. No guesses.

  Lovers choose to die and don’t listen to pleas for abandoning “infatuation” or juvenile romantic fantasies. Death dance they indulge is a perceived by them – and by many great tragedians – as a ritual of healing. Souls are healed and what happens to the bodies and other this-worldly businesses is not important in their view. And there are at least bouts of such “infatuation”  if not fully involved love affair in almost every Kashmiri. And occasionally this passion asserts and burns everything on its way. And that is precisely what is happening post-Burhan. Peep deep into the heart of Kashmiris and see the image of the beloved being worshipped. No guesses. All these unmistakably point to a diagnosis of affliction of love. And it doesn’t matter what the object of love is or how rational it is or what possibility of consummation of such a relationship is. For them Tolstoy expressed it so well: “Put reason into life and life is gone.” So Kashmir is a case of love in which spirit is involved not just psyche. So psychologists/psychoanalysts can’t help in treating it but only in diagnosing. Not least the politicians. Never military. And love is its own reward; its own salvation. It is idle to ask when will Kashmir get its coveted object. Living with this passion is itself an Azadi – a freedom that is life of spirit – that arm chair Kashmir experts and cool political commentators on talk shows can’t even imagine. So Kashmiris don’t really want anything – we love only inexistent things as Ibn Arabi has argued so convincingly and every great writer and lover testifies and we know none of the traditionally treasured seven love stories are consummated on earth – and cherishing this love is, though painful as long as separation from the beloved. If you have to pray for Kashmir don’t pray for Azadi as ordinarily understood as it might turn into a drab and thus disillusioning matter. Great love ever approximates but never  that Kashmiri story tellers narrate unites with the Beloved. Love ever burns and this is such a sweet burning that all religion and mysticism and art are valued precisely for feeding this flame. So like heaven of the mystic that is not in some future time but in the timeless now he accesses here and now, Kashmiris have won. Whose fault is it that there is bluish – or greenish – blood running in both arteries and veins of Kashmiris? They are perfectly cut for tragedy where only red blood runs properly.
      Kashmiris may have many reasons now to consider or reconsider this or that political choice, to hate Pakistan or see through the “illusion” of Azadi but the fact remains that they feel irresistible pull for something that we can call for want of a better term, to be themselves, authentically themselves and to care for this they need to reject  what Heidegger calls “they-self” (inauthentic conformist death fearing cowardly self). According to Heidegger, man  is a "being toward death."  And to understand this without any blinkers is a requirement for authentic existence. To court martyrdom is the greatest adventure from Heideggerian point of view and what we are seeing in the form of willing protestors inviting bullets is probably tasting this adventure and the freedom this very act brings. Man is supremely himself when he can dare death and there is no argument on earth against such a man. It brackets off all politics, all calculations of instrumental technological rationality that has so far been employed to handle Kashmir. A Kashmiri youth - rightly guided or misguided  it doesn’t matter– in love with death is the last and conclusive argument against all status quoist ideologies.
      Although the frenzy of love of death might pass but once tasted it becomes malignant for the whole society and no therapy can cure it permanently. Thanatos (death instinct) also rules  with iron hand as Freud showed and sometimes it outsmarts eros. Against instincts no force is ultimately victorious. Repression fails to subdue it. It asserts with a vehemence.  From Indian point of view, according to many analysts that insiders in Kashmir find closer to their own felt reality, Kashmir is now like an advanced stage cancer patient whose death very costly (in moral terms) pellet and bullet therapies can only delay to some extent.
      It is not that one fights for certain reasons – good or bad – for one’s position as Hume long back argued and he has been echoed by many modern psychoanalysts and philosophers. One first loves something and then rationalizes or invents reasons in the defense of that passion. Kashmiris loved – at least dreamt of – Pakistan long before UN resolutions or Nehru’s statements in favour of plebiscite came into the picture (pictures of Jinah and Iqbal were craze here those days). These post hoc reasons aren’t to be dismissed thereby however but what is to be emphasized is that love has the first word and the last word as far as man is a man and not an animal in bondage or angel in perpetual prayer.
      Poets and scientists especially psychoanalysts should now be consulted to illuminate Kashmir problem that politicians failed to solve for 69 years (and created in the first place). Vajpayee’s “Insaniyat kae daryae mein” is the poet’s word that unfortunately is only sold rather than meant by politicians when short of ideas for responding to crisis situation.
      India didn’t lose Kashmir in 1953 or on any other date. No lion or tiger could hunt or prey  on  freedom of people that defines their subjectivity and grounds the reign of conscience and give it to some earthly Master. India had never possessed it. In fact you can’t possess humans who are defined by freedom to  make their own choices and who accept only slavery of Love  and that is, in any case, freedom. Kashmir has never been India’s object of love (and vice versa was never the case either). So it was bound to be lost from the very first day it had a lustful eye on it. Man lives for love or worships the object of love.
http://greaterkashmir.news/news/op-ed/freedom-as-beloved/225973.html