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W hat do we celebrate this Independence Day?

A few years ago I was discussing the insurgency in Punjab with a Sikh friend. Let us call him Singh, as I have not sought permission to relay the particulars of the conversation, and it is part of his name. As we discussed the complicated role of NGOs in insurgencies, he laughed and said, “You know, Omair, everything else aside I just could not sympathise with the Khalistanis. It was impossible for me to imagine limiting my intellectual horizons to the distance between Amritsar and Chandigarh.”

I grinned and thought how, in this one simple sentence, he had captured the essence of India. The possibilities of the country, its many languages, richness of cuisine, sheer geographic and human diversity, is always hard to truly appreciate.

I will be in Kerala on Independence Day, a State I haven’t been to so far. I have heard about its backwaters; there is the Periyar Tiger Reserve; the spice gardens. It all seems so rich. And yet, in the 42 years that I have been around, I have not had a chance to visit it. Even in the few days that I will be there, I will see very little of it. I do not know the language, the history that I have heard of is what I picked up from a book here or there, in English.

But it is the possibility, of becoming more, knowing more, of finding out more of who I am, what my inheritance is as a citizen of this country, that excites me. Sure, there is knowledge for knowledge’s sake, when we travel to foreign countries, make friends, find out, but there is also this richness, this wealth, that we have within.

And yet, that isn’t the whole story, is it? Singh and I were talking a few months ago, in the context of Hindi imposition, of the cow vigilante attacks, of a majoritarian mindset that wishes to limit the diversity that is allowed in this country. He sighed and said, “We don’t speak of the Partition violence in Punjab honestly. It was a form of ethnic cleansing, so that the Sikhs could have a place where they were in undisputed majority. I don’t know what I feel about it, especially right now, as at least it gives me a place to retreat, to be myself.”

It brought home to me sharply a conversation I had with a Kashmiri doctor several years ago. A slim, gentle soul, he did not wish to talk of the violence that has marked and marred his State for the last three decades but of an incident in Delhi from the 1980s. “I was at Teen Murti Bhavan,” he recounted, “and I was just looking at the paintings, and I saw that somebody had poked the eyes out of the portrait of Maulana Azad. I informed the caretaker, but”, and here he turned to me to ask, “how do you live with that?”

I did not have an answer for him, and I do not have an answer for Singh, but two years ago, on the eve of Republic Day, I went to the J&K State emporium in Connaught Place with my wife. It was a cold day, and I wore a pheran. It is a very practical overcoat for the winter, and keeps your knees warm, but I knew there was also something else that I was expressing.

There was a Kashmir exhibition at Baba Kharak Singh Marg, and a number of Kashmiris there — none of them in pherans — and all of whom turned to see us walk by. In Delhi, a city in which Kashmiris have been arrested on terrorism charges only to be released years later because the charges were patently false, I was wearing a Kashmiri dress just hours before a high-security holiday.

At the emporium, too, the reaction was the same, although it went a step further — one of the staff members started speaking to me in Koshur and addressed me as “Mara…”, the traditional honorific used for Kashmiri Pandits, a shortening of “maharaj”. When my wife said I neither spoke Kashmiri, nor hailed from there, Pandit or not, they did not know how to react.

It was a matter of privilege, as well as my bloody-mindedness that allowed me to do this little thing. And yet, I have often thought about it, the words of Singh, of that Kashmiri doctor and his question, and on Independence Day it is worth asking again. Is our freedom only for a few, only to be expressed in increasingly narrow ways, bounded on all sides by fear, and getting smaller, less-attractive, day by day? If so, what do we celebrate this Independence Day?

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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