“Fascists get an upper hand only when we lose hope in resistance”

Few students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University had protested Union Minister Jitendra Singh’s lecture organised by the varsity admin on ‘Abrogation of Article 370: Peace, Stability and Development in Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh’ on Oct 3.

Members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) had resorted to hooliganism and attacked several students, including Kashmiri students and female students. One of them heckled and dragged this reporter who also happens to be ex-student of the varsity. He wrote a longer post on social media narrating what has happened that day. He writes for us as to what made him resilient!

“Thank you everyone for the Solidarity and support you extended towards me. I am overwhelmed. They come to kill us, they do not know we are immortal.

In the war they started, verily, we do not fear death. We have legacy of people who fought with zeal, valour and passion. Omar Mokhtar, (leader of resistance against the Italian colonization of Libya) before being hanged till death would say, “I would live longer than my hangman.”

We have legacy of people who loved and were loved back. We stand with those who are fighting for freedom. Comrade Bhagat Singh (Indian revolutionary who fought for India’s freedom from British colonization) taught us that dying with dignity is better than living with humiliation. We have never turned back even when they shot us dead.

This is war. Fascists are by nature criminals of war. Even our bodies scare them. The Central Intelligence Agenc (CIA) killed Patrice Lumumba (Congolese independence leader and the first Prime Minister of Democratic Republic of Congo), and what it did afterwards, cut his bodies into pieces and burn them. None other than India’s first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru had to say about him, “A ‘dead’ Lumumba is thousand times more powerful than a living Lumumba.”

This is the war between us and them, between revolutionary and fascist. Now, why do we fight this war? Because we tremble in indignation at every injustice they commit. We tend to finish the injustice. By nature, a revolutionary cannot be unjust.

For us, justice is more than merely a word. It is our objective, aim, goal and force that drive our life and action. In order to ensure justice, we do not hide our heads in sand. In fact, we roar and say, as Malcolm X (an African American leader who advocated race pride and black nationalism in the early 1960s) would say, “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

Fascists get an upper hand only when we lose hope in resistance. We have let them take the offensive. Our resistance must resurface. As Malcolm X would say, “Power never takes a step back except in the face of more power,” we have to achieve more of it.

It is ironical that the minister, inside the auditorium, talked peace in Kashmir and outside the hall, the foot-soldiers of the far-right disproved him then and there itself by resorting to violence in the premier university in India. We do not need a rocket science to understand what is normalcy in Kashmir.

For Indian state, the presence of Indian armed forces in Kashmir is normal. For Indian state, killing Kashmiris, subjecting them to enforced disappearance, blinding them, using rape and human shield against them as a weapons of war is normal.

To punish Kashmiris without any crime, without any trial is normal for Indian state. Union Minister of India Mr Prakash Javadekar proved it after he boasted that having no access to communicate with people is the worst kind of punishment. For Indian state, punishing eight million Kashmiris is normal. A friend a had said to me, “If this is normal in Kashmir, implement this normalcy in India as well.”

Tomorrow, a goon or a group of goons may attempt to kill me, like it does with rest of us as well. These cowards, with all their efforts to muzzle us and force us into a dead silence, would never achieve any success. Each time they attack us, we gain some super power to speak more fiercely. That is rule.

There is no normalcy in Kashmir. There is no normalcy under occupation. What ABVP did was not even a fraction of violence that the occupying forces commit in an occupied territory. It was just a reflection of those torture that Kashmiris are subjected to, each day, each hour. It is duty of revolutionaries to call for the end of Indian Occupation of Kashmir. To call and fight for the end of the fascist rule in India.

We may stumble for a moment but surely rise again only to break their back with a blow. Omar Mokhtar said, “Blow that does not break back, strengthen it.” We are here only to remind the fascists that we are strengthening it.”

Amir Malik is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

Cover image courtesy: Reyazul Haque