Basharat PeerBesprekingen

When I first picked up this title I imagined it would pull back from the detail and micro-angle on nationalist movements cropping up around the world and draw some larger conclusions. It doesn't get that far, but it does raise the questions. Peer gives a detailed timeline of events that led to the embrace of the authoritarian leaders in India (Narenda Modi) and Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdogan).

Author Bashir Peer points out that those two countries are not alone, and names Russia (Vladimir Putin), Egypt (Abdel Fatteh ed-Sisi), Hungary (Viktor Mihály Orbán), Chad (Idriss Déby) Belarus (Alexander Lukashenko), Cambodia (Hun Sen), Singapore (Lee Hsien Loong). Somewhat oddly, I thought, he pairs Aung San Su Kyi (Myanmar) and Rodrigo Duterte (The Philippines) and names them as illiberal, if not outright autocrats along with Paul Kagame’s (Rwanda) regime, all of which have silenced critical voices, and have not stood up against political and religious persecution. When you look at all those names spread out like that one does have to wonder--what's happening?

What Peer does in this book is follow events that led to the rise of Modi in India, showing his aggression in the suppression of Muslim and Dalit rights. Dalits are India’s lowest caste, and many have benefitted from government attention to their plight in society. However, being admitted to university apparently doesn’t mean Dalits actually have professors willing to mentor them or recommend them or promote their work, somewhat reminiscent of oppressed classes in any society attempting to take advantage of their legal rights. Modi began his political career working for a Hindu supremacist organization.

What may seem remarkable about Modi’s rise was his support from the intellectual, overseas-educated, and business elite. Not so strange when you think that “inequality in India is now growing at a faster rate than in other developing countries like China, Brazil, and Russia.” His biggest electoral challenges were traditional opposition of lower and middle castes to his party, which he managed to overcome with a robust twitter and get-out-the-vote campaign. After he won as prime minister in 2014, he talked a good game about putting caste and religious divisions away but was unable to prevent the country’s descent into violence the following year, probably because he was unwilling to act against this party.

“Modi’s victory in 2014 had legitimized hate speech and physical aggression against real and perceived opponents. Words that couldn’t be uttered at the dinner table were blared in the public sphere.”

It might be worth noting some barely-there shadow outlines of a comparison forming between Modi and Trump. It is worth noting what made Modi popular, how he sustained that popularity, and how quickly taboos against hate talk and violence evaporated.

In Turkey, the period of instability Peer describes starts a little earlier, in 2006. Erdogan took over in 2003 and pushed democratic reforms to make Turkey appealing to the European Union, and trying to lessen tensions with its Kurdish minority through negotiations. Healthcare, affordable housing, and infrastructure improved, but it was the loosening of the non-secularist creed, expanding collective bargaining rights, increasing welfare provisions for children, the disabled, and the elderly and allowing Muslims with headscarves into the governing body that had long banned them. Erdogan was loosening the control of the Kemalist military.

The July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey is covered in great detail, and Peer discusses the Muslim preacher Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, the cleric living in Pennsylvania in the U.S. who, once an ally of Erdogan, opposed to his rapprochement with the Kurds. Gülen’s very powerful group with tentacles worldwide--and especially in the Turkish police--was supposedly responsible for the coup attempt, or was blamed for it, in any case. The detail here is rather more than I was expecting, and less at the same time. I could be interested, but somehow connecting threads were missing in this discussion and I got lost in the details.

This is not a long book but I had a hard time getting a grip on this material and wished it had a greater amount of overview or boldface marking what we are meant to take away. Neither of these countries are my area of expertise, but it was difficult to pick out a few big ideas. It may be a better read for someone that already has a basic understanding of the culture and government in these two countries to take advantage of Peer’s providing the timeline of conflict for the past couple of years.

It may be worth pointing out that one country's specific experiences are probably not going to be immediately relevant to a worldwide theory. One would have to pick and choose details and immediately then one's conclusions become suspect of pointing. It is also perhaps worth noting that authoritarian regimes are nothing new. The author needs to remind us why this moment is different.

Review: Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer.

The book was about a place not many people have heard or read about. Kashmirs territory is surrounded by Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan. Because of where Kashmir is located should indicate some knowledge of what it promises for it‘s people. It was written by Basharat Peer, someone who spent his formative years during the conflicts of war and the immense suffering that Kashmiris endured during the 90’s and still continue to suffer the wider demonstration of the power between different militant groups.

The first half of the book was fragile when it came to keeping my interest but Basharat Peer made up for it in the second half. The stories he wrote were about arrest, disappearances, custodial killings, kidnapping, assassinations, loss, massacres and how torture dominated Kashmir.

I have mixed feelings about the book because of the way it started off. At least I found out where Kashmir is and the story behind the curfews….

A well written tome about the tragic state of affairs in the Author's home state of Kashmir. One thing that stands out is the plethora of opportunities available for personal advancement through education that a few like the Author himself scruplously avail of and redeem themselves from the clutches of violence and militancy.

Like a warm chocolate chip cookie, embedded in it's pages are choice tidbits of history.

A well written tome about the tragic state of affairs in the Author's home state of Kashmir. One thing that stands out is the plethora of opportunities available for personal advancement through education that a few like the Author himself scruplously avail of and redeem themselves from the clutches of violence and militancy.

Like a warm chocolate chip cookie, embedded in it's pages are choice tidbits of history.

Was a good read about things happening in Kashmir from a Kashmiri's point of view.

Started off quite slow for me. Then gathered speed and was quite interesting for some time. Then was a bit dragging towards the end.

An easy read. Even though I took a lot of time to read it.

A favourite for my father and brother but I give it 3 as it didn't keep me interested enough.

Adjectives are words that express attributes of something. Example: Brilliant. Example: Painful.
We usually do not come across situations where we can use both these adjectives together to qualify the same noun or pronoun. Curfewed Night is an exception.

Read the complete review on my blog
http://thebookoutline.blogspot.in/2012/09/curfewed-night.html½

The author grew up in Kashmir and was a schoolboy when the insurgency demanding independence broke out in the late 80s. As he grows up things go from bad to worse and eventually he is lucky enough to go to Dehli and take up journalism. But his bond with his homeland remains and eventually he returns to report from there and grapple with his own experiences by writing a book. A powerful and poignant book and one of the best reads of the year for me so far made all the more topical by the recent discovery by human rights activists of mass graves holding the corpses of thousands of the 'disappeared' in this forgotten conflict.½

If you hear about the Kashmir Conflict these days you think of the Indian Army, Indian Paramilitary Forces and their encounters with armed intruders from Pakistan and how the Indian Forces harass the local people. This completely ignores that everyday ordinary life in Kashmir has to go on. But how can life be ordinary in these circumstances? With their attempt to escape the omnipresent violence people who have no choice but to stay where they are, are caught 'between a rock and a hard place'. The Kashmir Conflict has turned the region into a war zone where nobody can say he gains any advantage over the so called "enemy". Luckily one has to acknowledge that things have changed, that the author is looking back at the past but is a very recent past and the scars have hardly healed. It is an excellent account of the Kashmir Conflict from an too often neglected angle.

This book served as an excellent counterpart to The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed's novel about the crisis in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the narrator of that novel and the author of this book are of similar ages and backgrounds. Peer, a studious young man whose father is a respected government official in Srinagar, the summertime capital of Kashmir, shares his personal experiences as his village, like others throughout the region, experience great hardship and tragedy during the Indian Army crackdown against separatist militants and those who support them. In contrast to the narrator of Waheed's novel, who seeks to travel to Pakistan to join his childhood friends and become a freedom fighter, Peer, with the help of his family, moves to Delhi to finish secondary school and attend law school. While working as a newspaper journalist there, he is assigned to write stories about the growing crisis in Kashmir. He travels back to his home village, and encounters former friends and neighbors, Hindu and Muslim, there and in Srinagar and Jammu. Deeply disturbed by what he sees there, and facing discrimination as a Muslim Kashmiri in Delhi, he decides to abandon his career as a journalist and write a book about the people he knew, those Kashmiris of different backgrounds he encounters, and the troubled past and recent history of the region.

Curfewed Night succeeds as a personal and an 'on the scene' account of life in Kashmir during the crisis, and in its hopeful aftermath following the peace resolution between India and Pakistan in 2004. However, a more detailed history of the region and the origins of the recent crisis would have made this a much better book, in my opinion, although I would strongly recommend this book for anyone who is unfamiliar with Kashmir or its people.