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Kashmir: what you and I can do?
By Yoginder Sikand
Few people can outshine the Kashmiris
in hospitality and kindness, despite the horrendous sufferings that they
have had to undergo in the course of more than a decade now. Fifty
thousand Kashmiris are said to have lost their precious lives and scores
more maimed for good, widowed, raped and orphaned.
Not a day passes without a mention in the newspapers (generally tucked
away in some obscure corner) of at least one Kashmiri having been done to
death in cold blood. Yet, call it typical Indian amnesia or a total lack
of concern, few Indians seem to be really perturbed by the continuing and
seemingly never-ending deaths of civilians in the area.
In the past five years I have paid more than ten visits to Kashmir, and
each time I go there I see the same helplessness, the same fear, and yet
the same determination writ large on the faces of its hapless people. But
there is little that ordinary Kashmiris seem able to do, as sinister,
anonymous forces in Islamabad and New Delhi dictate their fate. A state
government with little or no popular support and an unaccountable,
notoriously corrupt administration have seen to it that development,
welfare and relief work have come to an almost complete stand-still.
Widows, orphans and the injured have little recourse for help, and with
economic activity being so badly affected, craftsmen, house-boat owners
and people dependent on the tourist trade have been reduced to penury.
The last time I was in Kashmir--five months ago--I was working with a
friend in compiling a directory of social work and non-governmental
organizations in the Kashmir valley. The idea of compiling such a
directory had struck us when, after a random search on the Internet, we
discovered, much to our surprise (and horror) that not a single such
organization was listed. This only confirmed what numerous Kashmiri
friends and respondents had told me on my previous visits--that few, if
any, established NGOs were working in the region. We have, it seemed to
me, a veritable NGO industry in India, raking in crores of rupees every
year, and yet almost none of the big-wigs among them had considered
extending their services to Kashmir, where they were needed most. Was it
because most Kashmiris and most victims of the violence there are Muslims,
I asked myself? Was it because of any restrictions imposed by the
government? Was it for fear of the wrath of the State? I have no answers,
but it seems to me that the absence of any major initiatives from Indian
NGOs in Kashmir reflects the way many Indians see the Kashmir question--as
a real estate dispute, coveting the land but conveniently dispensing with
its people.
In preparing our directory, we travelled to various parts of Kashmir, to
small towns and little villages tucked away high in the mountains. We came
across numerous local-level initiatives started by men and women, working
with meagre resources, helping such vulnerable groups as widows and
orphans, providing them education, food and occasionally, financial help.
Most of these groups were starved for funds and barely managed to survive
on the goodwill of friends and neighbours. Lacking resources, equipment
and training, these local groups can reach only a small number of people,
a minuscule proportion of the hundreds of thousands of people who really
need urgent help.
One takes it as a fact that the State and the administration are
incapable, even if they wanted to, to address the pressing problems of
relief and rehabilitation in Kashmir. Despite this, there is much that
could be done at the local level by private individuals and groups to
reach out to the victims of violence. First and foremost, information
about existing local-level relief groups needs to be widely disseminated,
and that is what we intended our directory to help do. People and agencies
who are in a position to help these groups can establish contact with them
and launch various programmes. I recall meeting a director of a leading
NGO in Delhi, who said that she wished to start a project in Kashmir but
had no idea of any local groups she could work with. Information on these
groups, then, is the first step, through which links could be established
with other organizations, both inside and outside Kashmir, and relief and
development programmes started. Such programmes must, however, have no
hidden political agenda, an obvious point but one which needs to be
stressed, I fear, given the widely-held, though mistaken, assumption, that
economic development is an alternative to a political solution to the
Kashmir dispute.
During my travels in Kashmir I have met numerous young men and women
actively engaged in relief work of some sort or the other. Typically, such
work takes the form of blood donation or collecting money for a child
whose parents have been shot dead or providing a sewing machine to a woman
whose husband has gone 'missing' for years and is presumed to have been
killed. Clearly, such charitable works have their own place and
importance, but they cannot substitute for organized, community-level
initiatives on a wider scale. There, however, seem to be almost no such
organizations in Kashmir.
This is hardly surprising--Kashmir University, Srinagar, the only
university in the Valley, boasts of a Department of Business Management
which churns out tens of graduates every year trained for jobs in a modern
industrial sector that is barely existent in the region, while it has no
similar Department of Social Work. Given the almost total absence of
professionally-run NGOs in Kashmir, few social workers I have met there
seem to know anything about how an organized NGO is to be run, how
resources can be generated and how relief and rehabilitation work can be
done on a wider and more effective scale. A simple, yet immensely helpful,
way in which established NGOs could assist in this regard is by inviting
young Kashmiris engaged in some form of social work to spend some time
with them in order to gain an understanding of fund-raising, and project
formulation and implementation.
A small example would make the point clearer. A friend of mine from
Srinagar recently came down to Bangalore to be with me for a month. While
in Kashmir, he and some of his friends would collect money from their
relatives and use it to buy medicines and clothes for widows and orphans.
While in Bangalore, he visited numerous local NGOs engaged in a variety of
development programmes. He spent a week at a rural development project in
Andhra Pradesh, three days with a Dalit activist group and a fortnight at
a tribal school in Kerala. He is now back in Srinagar, and is in the
process of starting an NGO to work among orphan children. 'I would never
have known how to go about it had I not spent all that time with groups in
the south', he writes to me in his latest letter.
Setting up new organizations may be necessary in a region where NGOs are
almost non-existent (we managed to make a list of just 34 groups for the
whole Valley), but so also is the need for a revival of traditional
charitable institutions. Kashmir's numerous Sufi shrines can play a major
role in this regard. Almost every locality and village in Kashmir has a
shrine built over the grave of a Sufi preceptor. Traditionally, Sufi
lodges (khanqahs) were centres of religious instruction, in addition to
providing relief and help to the poor, in the form of education and free
food in community kitchens (langars). Today, they are, for the most part,
mere centres of mediation, where people go to ask for the saints'
intercession with God to have their requests granted. Few, if any, run
community kitchens or engage in any other form of community service.
Devout believers donate large sums to the shrines, but as to how these
resources are used is any one's guess. How these resources could be used
to help the poor and alleviate their suffering is an issue that urgently
needs to be addressed. If the Sufis themselves dedicated their lives to
the service of the poor, tragic indeed it is that the custodians of their
shrines seem, by and large, concerned more about filling their own purses
than anything else.
Another major institution that has its command over resources extending
into crores of rupees is the Jammu and Kashmir Awqaf Trust. The Trust, a
creation of Shaikh Abdullah, administers numerous Muslim endowments all
over the state. Its functioning, I have been told, leaves much to be
desired. Stories of political interference, nepotism and corruption in the
Trust are too numerous to recount here. The Trust seems to be doing
precious little to help the victims of violence in the region. Granting
small stipends to widows and orphans, one of the few relief programmes
actually undertaken by the Trust, may indeed be a valuable service but
such charity can hardly take the place of development initiatives, such as
setting up schools, orphan homes, industrial training centres and such
like. 'If the Vaishno Devi Temple Trust in Jammu can start a university,
why can't the Awqaf, with much more funds at its disposal, do so, too?',
is a point that I have repeatedly heard being made.
Resources for funding social work projects can also be generated locally
from zakat funds. Zakat, a tithe payable by all Muslims whose wealth
exceeds a basic minimum, is one of the five 'pillars' of Islam. I have no
idea how many Kashmiris regularly pay their zakat, but many Muslim
organizations elsewhere have experimented with new ways of using zakat
funds, which could be adopted in Kashmir as well. Rather than distributing
the money to individuals in need, it could be paid into
community-controlled local level zakat committees (bait-ul mals) which, in
turn, could use the resources to start education and training schemes and
income-generation projects for the needy.
Self-help cannot absolve the State of its responsibility of providing
essential services to those who need them most, nor can relief or economic
development take the place of a political solution to the Kashmir dispute,
but yet, in the absence of any meaningful and sincere efforts of the
State, there is much, as I have stressed, that ordinary individuals, both
in Kashmir as well as outside, can do to help relieve the suffering of
thousands of hapless Kashmiris. All it takes is a modicum of time and
effort and bucket-loads of enthusiasm and concern.
Copies of the Directory of Social Work Organizations in
Kashmir, prepared by the author may be had by sending Rs.8 in the form of
unused postage stamps or by money order, to: HIMAYAT c/o Yoginder Sikand,
4304 Oakwood Apts.,8th Main, 1st Cross, Koramangala-III, Bangalore-560034.
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