Propaganda in an exit

In his resignation post, Shah Faesal invokes a narrative of Kashmiri victimhood that is at odds with the reality on the ground and filled with political posturing

In his concerns for India’s minorities, its Constitution and its institutions, Faesal echoes sentiments that are shared by most Indians, irrespective of their current voting preferences. (Illustration: Suvajit Dey)

So, he finally bit the bullet. After months of speculation, Shah Faesal, the erudite and charismatic topper of the 2010 batch of the Indian Administrative Service, a pioneer, a celebrity and a role model for many in the Kashmir Valley and beyond, has resigned. In a social media post announcing his resignation, equally loaded with idealism and political posturing, he enumerated his reasons for taking this step.

To recap, his resignation has been brought about by the unabated killings in Kashmir, the lack of sincere outreach by the Union government, the second-class treatment of India’s Muslims, the threat to the special status of J&K, the growing intolerance and hate in mainland India, and the subversion of autonomous institutions such as the RBI, CBI and NIA. For any principled and idealistic officer, any one of these reasons should be sufficient to quit in protest. Taken together, they make a seemingly compelling case for en masse resignation for all public-spirited civil servants.

Many have lamented the system that could not keep someone like Faesal interested enough to continue in service. If getting into India’s higher echelons of civil services is tough, navigating an ecosystem with constantly shifting sands of political fashion and public sentiment is even harder. It is tempting to think that the system kills all idealism in the likes of Faesal, and that those of us who carry on within, do so by making different types of Faustian bargains. Anyway, the scope of this article is not to psychoanalyse Faesal or the motives that drive the bureaucracy. It is to examine his views on Kashmir as expressed in his resignation post as well as in an article published in this newspaper some days ago.

In his concerns for India’s minorities, its Constitution and its institutions, Faesal echoes sentiments that are shared by most Indians, irrespective of their current voting preferences. However, in his views on Kashmir, Faesal pays homage to a narrative that is at considerable variance with both facts on the ground, as well as with the sentiments of the majority of liberal, secular Indians outside Kashmir, who see Kashmir as an integral part of the civilisational heritage and constitutional ethos of India. The hidden assumption is that Kashmiri separatism and exceptionalism are somehow completely consistent with our Constitutional values. This is an assumption that needs to be examined and challenged.