Essays    Reportage    Marginalia    Interviews    Poetry    Fiction    Videos    Everything   
Like Agha Shahid Ali, I too saw Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight

a land mistaken for a people is a people / objectified as spoils of the land

The article has been rendered inoperative
you can no longer speak of Kashmir
it has withered away into the muzzle.
Kashmiriyat too is inoperative a people
stolen of identity in stealth the manner
of arbitrary anguish to accede is to shut
down freedom in the open air prison.
Three-hundred-and-seventy inoperatives
modification from state to union territory
operate the land: a coronary, a lake, a bifurcation,
a technicality of definition – for some a success –
an integration – to make operative that which
was accessed in steadfast to point out administration.

The article has been rendered inoperative
you no longer speak of complexities
but brandish the new ruler from tanks
soldiers stand instead of street performers.
Jammu and Kashmir, too, is inoperative: a place
complicated, an annex of new history fenced
denizens without phones to call sovereign
a land mistaken for a people is a people
objectified as spoils of the land. If inoperative
then fascist agrilogistics permit silent bloodshed.
Oppression afoot disguised as the open palm of integration.

The article has been rendered inoperative
and so has the opposition who are reduced
to history lectures in the parliament sessions
who wave their papers at the brick horizon.
When the fibre optic line is inoperative
control and censorship flourish and dance
as nationalists do on graves of the occupied.
Unnamed and deterritorialised the inoperatives
try dissent in special sentiment of autonomy
it feels like a lifetime ago as nullification sieges
unapologetically with the lynch and rifle of persecution.