Kashmiri educator Sabbah Haji has been recently released on bail after she was arrested for referring to Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat as ‘war criminal’ in an Instagram post. Sabbah, however, has had not so favourable views on India since long. In a 2010 article in Hindustan Times, she had said how she hesitates before referring to herself as Indian and does not think of herself as one.
“I am now 28. Even today, each time I have to fill a form asking for my ‘nationality’, I hesitate before eventually writing ‘Indian’. That’s about 20 years of hesitating over the same point, because yes, even at 8, I knew something was rotten in the State of Jammu and Kashmir,” she had said in the 2010 article stating that young children pick up resentment against India from their family members. “No one in Kashmir drills their children with ‘Azaadi’ mantras and anti-establishment behaviour. Somewhere between infancy and childhood, I had picked up unwittingly on what most of my family and people felt. Just like that it was part of me,” she had said.
She said that she hailed from Doda district in Jammu & Kashmir but was born and brought up in Dubai amidst Kashmiris. She would spend her holidays in Kashmir and during the little time she spent there she felt “the strong anti-India sentiment running throughout the region. India was personified in its heartless governance and its troops — far too many in civilian areas and in our daily lives for us to understand.”
She had claimed she witnessed men being ‘picked up’ by the soldiers and ‘women getting unwelcome attention’ and there was a ‘dark dark period of disappearances, crackdowns, curfews, torture, deaths and misery’. She then talked about the ‘violent militants’ and claimed that they were mostly non-Kashmiris. She did not mention how they were backed by Pakistan that has been funding and supporting terrorism in the valley since long.
While speaking about the Kashmiri Hindu exodus in the late 1990s, she claimed that India and Pakistan played a huge role “as did those Kashmiris (Muslims and Pandits) who supported communalising the movement, either actively or under threat or coercion.”
While writing about how she feels about India, Sabbah had said how she loves Indian history, culture, colours, food, languages, festivals but this face is what people in India know but not what those in Kashmir see. She refers to Kashmir as if it is a separate entity. Comparing India’s freedom fighters to separatists, she had said, “What irks us is that while your Bhagat Singh is a ‘shaheed’ (martyr), while Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is a fierce nationalist, Kashmiris are to be typecast as violent troublemakers and written off for the same ideals and aspiration.”
She then mentions how she neither feels she is either Indian or Pakistani. “It’s what we call the bottom line — most Kashmiris really believe we are not part of either India or Pakistan. That is what the ‘freedom movement’ in Kashmir is all about,” she mentioned. She then mentioned how earlier generation took up arms, the younger generation, where she belongs, is educated and have ‘learnt from blunders of the past’.
“As to the Pakistan angle, my knowledge of Pakistan is merely bookish, with the exception of what I know of it from Pakistani friends growing up, or watching PTV and their excellent telly dramas. I have never been to Pakistan though I’d love to visit. I love their cricket team, which, looking at their form today is laughable. But really, that’s about it. That’s the extent of our attachment to Pakistan,” she had said about Pakistan, a country that has been largest contributor to terrorism to the valley.
While writing about how she is not an Indian by choice but because she does not have a choice, she wrote, “The only place most Kashmiris can naturally come out to for studying or working is mainland India. So please don’t make us justify that if we are so against India why do we come here. It’s the same as asking me why I have an Indian passport. If there was an alternative I would probably take it. There isn’t.”
She then claimed that Kashmiri’s anti-India stand is not necessarily pro-Pakistan stand. “Please don’t broadside the Kashmiri movement by throwing the accusation, “Pakistani!” in our faces. We do not accept it. A few might, but a few don’t matter. And majority wins,” she said while calling for a referendum. “Give us our plebiscite, the one we were promised under the ruling of the United Nations. It’s got something to do with the idea of ‘democracy’, an idea Indians are very proud of. Self-determination is what we want. Then let the chips fall where they may,” she had said.
On her personal blog, she wrote another post in 2015 where she was quite against integration (likely reference to abrogation of Article 370) with India. While answering a question on why would Kashmiris just not integrate, she said, “‘Integration’. You must understand that this idea of forced integration of Kashmiris is in fact one of the biggest problems there is. And it is pushed and repeated at every opportunity, and it does nothing to make Kashmiris want to belong. This has been voiced often enough in popular protests and written about and discussed in online spaces and TV media by Kashmiris before. The resistance to integration just gets stronger every time it is insisted on by the Indian State.”
She said how even though she did not grow up in Kashmir in the 90s, she resents whatever she saw in the two months of vacation she had in the valley while growing up. “Every time someone says Kashmir and its violence, what violence are we talking about here, we need to understand that as well. I doubt you will find too many cases of kids remembering ‘terrorists’ [we call them militants, and I’d say every Kashmiri family has had a militant from amongst it] ruining their growing years or interfering in their daily lives and entering their homes in a manner that affected them,” she said.
However, after admitting that most families in Kashmir had at least one person growing up as a ‘militant’, she said, Kashmiri children felt more resentment towards Army, BSF and CRPF’s interrogation. “But you will find innumerable stories of resentment and anger among children growing up in the ’90s in Kashmir where they have either been personally at the receiving end of the Army/BSF/CRPF’s interrogations, crackdowns etc or have seen the Armed forces entering their homes, beating up their family members [men, women, old, young] in front of them, breaking furniture, turning the house upside down, tearing their – the children’s- certificates, books and so on and so forth. Being frisked every few metres in your own neighbourhood. Being called out for crackdowns, adhering to curfews, being on the receiving end of insults and mockery on a daily basis,” she said in her blog.
She claimed that major sore point amongst Kashmiris is the presence of Armed Forces in the valley which is infused with terrorists backed by Pakistan. “The resistance in Kashmiri is very strong even today, and giving it a Pakistani bent or Islamo-terrorist bent is just irritating to the regular Kashmiri. Both cards are played often enough, many kids are swayed by anything anti-India; if that turns them to Pakistan or radical Islam, well, yes, there will be cases like that as well,” she said.
Sabbah claims how the India for the children in Kashmir is only about the men in uniform and ‘atrocities’. “Continual nationalistic barrage from MSM and politicians and chest-thumping patriots in India, complete disregard for Kashmiri voices through its local media and press and writers and intellectuals,” she said.
On Independence Day this year, when a caller asked her if national flag was hoisted at her school, Sabbah got angry and referred to the same as ‘rubbish’. Apparently, she received a call from someone asking whether the National Flag was hoisted at her school on the occasion.
Miffed by the question, Sabbah Haji replied that her school did not and it was Sunday. “What is this new rubbish,” she said about the call. Then, without any evidence, she insinuated that the Government of India was behind the call.
That the Director of a School in Kashmir did not wish to hoist the Indian Flag on Independence Day and appeared to harbour separatist inclinations is indeed a cause for concern as she is in a position where she is able to influence the impressionable minds of children. The children are the future and as long as they are influenced into embracing a misguided worldview, Kashmir will continue to suffer as a consequence. Terrorism has been a cause for extreme concern in the Valley, including the menace funded from across the border.
