by Ruskin Bond
Some students of modern religion have read Sikh triumphalism into the founding of this gurudwara at Hem Kund since it outtops Tungnath, traditionally the highest of the shrines on the Hindu spiritual circuit of Uttarakhand. The Hem Kund building is a lavish stadium-like gurudwara funded by overseas Sikhs and took years to complete. Although its design is pleasingly modernistic its size seems out of scale for the small lake on whose shore also sits the tiny and wholly appropriate temple of Lokpal (this has also recently been enlarged). The original gurudwara had been a small structure in keeping with the size of the lake. The king-size replacement seemed grandiose and rather pointless. At this altitude pilgrims cannot linger and after a holy dip and worship they descend to Ghangaria the same day. Not even the priest stays overnight because of the lack of oxygen. Such a large building argues an impractical understanding of Himalayan conditions. Hinduism, by contrast, with its centuries of experience in coping with pilgrimage at altitudes, sensibly did not place its main shrines much above the critical 10,000-foot level at which human lungs behave normally. Anything higher and the body faces several serious health risks. The material success of overseas Sikhs not only inspired the inflated design of the Hem Kund gurudwara but contributed to the political agitation for Khalistan, a separate state for Sikhs whose capital would be Amritsar, deemed akin to the Vatican. The more extreme believers funded by foreign dollars turned to terrorism to try and force the government’s hand. To show the government took these triumphalist politics seriously, the district magistrate in Chamoli, on hearing of a Hem Kund devotee’s plans to carry building material to Kak Bhusand Tal (to construct a gurudwara), impounded the wooden beams and tin sheets.
Just as Sardar Mohan Singh had read into the surroundings of Hem Kund the interpretation of Guru Govind Singh’s memories (the seven peaks are not obvious to any but the most zealous of observers), this new attempt to convert the lake of (Hindu) crows into the site where Guru Govind Singh’s hawk nested seemed another instance of spiritual one-upmanship at work. It is noticeable to any who ride a pilgrim bus to the Garhwal shrines that the Sikh pilgrims are far more active in their behavior than Hindu pilgrims. Most of the Hindu pilgrims are peasants from the plains. At road blocks they huddle in their bus and wait apathetically for the debris to be cleared. By contrast Sikh pilgrims will immediately spring from the bus and almost joyfully start rolling boulders down the hill to clear a way. This helps explain why the Hem Kund ascent, in spite of its rigor, is a more vibrant pilgrim experience. All the way Sikhs greet each other with a thunderous “Bole Sone Hal” to which the reply echoing from above is “Sat Sri Akal!” Natural exuberance is probably the real reason for the impressive gurudwara as a climax to the climb.
As a former Sikh maharani conscious of her history, the ascent to Hem Kund was very meaningful for Prithwi. She is a natural devotee with the gift of feeling at home in any situation where true religion is present. Our dogs, being of Tibetan ancestry, felt perfectly at home too in the snow and were allowed into the (unfinished) gurudwara since they had, like the other pilgrims, climbed on their own.
The way to the Valley of Flowers was likewise snowbound at the end of May and when we got there not a flower was in sight. Only a sprinkling of green and pink shoots indicated how the new life would have to sprint to perform its cycle in a brief three months’ period. By the middle of August the tiny shoots underfoot would have shot up to become head-high in perfume-laden flowers and then just as quickly they would dry.
Prithwi found the valley disappointing after Smythe’s hype and I left her sunning with the dogs while I went to photograph the memorial stone on the grave of the lady botanist from Edinburgh who had slipped while plant-collecting and died here. As I was returning by a lower route I came across in a protected dell the first outburst of flowers in the form of crocuses. The dew on their golden petals glowed like diamonds in the cold sun and I beckoned Prithwi to descend and see how the valley had won its reputation for beauty. She grumbled at having to lose height but once in the magic dell was bewitched by the tenderness of nature’s new leaf. In a way this visit was more meaningful than my earlier one during the peak season. The intensity of the beauty in its uncurled potential seemed more wonderful than the even spread of a thousand species in full blossom.
* * *
THEY MAKE A DESOLATION AND CALL IT PEACE*9
Amitav Ghosh
On the morning of August 24 [1998] I boarded an Indian Air Force plane with [George] Fernandes and his entourage. The plane was a twin-engined AN-32, an elderly and unabashedly functional craft of Soviet manufacture.
We had lunch at a large military base in eastern Kashmir. Fernandes met with a warmly enthusiastic reception: it was clear that he was very popular, among soldiers and officers alike.
At lunch I found myself sharing a table with several major-generals and other senior officers. Some of their names were familiar to me: they were from old soldiering families and I had read about their relatives in books of history. Their fathers and grandfathers had fought for the British Empire in Flanders, North Africa, Italy, and Burma. But their sons and daughters, I was interested to learn, had for the most part broken with these family traditions, choosing to become computer engineers, bankers, lawyers, and the like. Evidently, even among those for whom being a general was a family business, soldiering in the Indian Army no longer held its old appeal.
I was interested to learn of these senior officers’ view of the nuclear tests, but I soon discovered that their curiosity on this score far exceeded mine. Did I know who was behind the decision to proceed with the tests? they asked. Who had issued the orders? Who exactly had known in advance?
I could no more enlighten them than they could me; only in India, I thought to myself, could a writer and a tableful of generals ask each other questions like these. It was confirmation, at any rate, that the armed forces’ role in the tests had been minimal at best.
I soon learnt also that the views of military personnel were by no means uniform. Many believe very strongly that India needs a nuclear deterrent; some feel that the tests of May 11 have resulted in certain security benefits for both India and Pakistan by bringing their secret nuclear program into the open—that the two countries would now exercise greater caution in their frequent border confrontations.
But some others expressed private apprehensions. “An escalation of hostilities along the border can happen very easily,” a major-general said to me. “It takes just one officer in the field to start off a series of escalations. There’s no telling where it will stop.”
None of the generals, I was relieved to note, appeared to believe that nuclear weapons were harmless icons of empowerment; in the light of some of my earlier conversations around the country, there was something almost reassuring in this.
After lunch we went by helicopter to Surankote, an army base located on the neck of territory that connects Kashmir to India. Fernandes was to inspect the base and address a gathering.
The base was set in a valley, between steep, verdant hills. The sunlight glowed golden and mellow on the surrounding slopes as we landed. The base was fenced off, and the perimeters of the garrison were manned by guards with machine guns ready at their waists.
We were whisked off the landing pad and taken quickly into the interior of the base. I found myself riding in a vehicle with a young major.
“What’s it like here?” I said.
“Bad.” He laughed. “Bordering on terrible.” He had the coiled alertness of someone whose nerves have been wound to the extreme edge of tautness.
The Pakistani front lines were just a few miles away, he explained. It took just a day to walk over the hills. This camp lay astride the main route used by those who wanted to cross from one side to the other. Nowhere in the state was the tension so great as it was here.
Fernandes had mounted a podium with several other politicians and local dignitaries. A crowd of a few hundred people ha
d gathered to hear them. Behind them were green hills, capped by clouds.
The major pointed at the hills. “While we’re standing here talking there are half a dozen operations going on in those hills, right there.”
He led me aside. “Let the politicians talk,” he said. “I’ll show you what’s happening here if you want to know.” We went into a tent and the major seated himself at a radio set. “This is where we listen to them,” he said. He scanned the wavelengths, tuning in to several exchanges.
“Listen,” he said, turning up the volume. “They’re speaking Punjabi, not Kashmiri. They’re mercenaries who’ve signed up on two-year contracts. They’re right there, in those hills.” The voices on the radio had a slow, dreamlike quality; they were speaking to each other unhurriedly, calling out cheerful greetings in slow-cadenced rural Punjabi. I had no idea who the voices belonged to.
As we were leaving the tent, the major darted suddenly into a group of people and took some rolls of film from a photographer. “I can’t trust them,” he said. “I don’t know what they’ve taken pictures of. I can’t trust anyone here.”
We walked back to the crowd to listen to the speeches. “The politicians talk so well,” the major said, his eyes flickering over the crowd. “But what we have here is a war. Does anyone know what’s happening here? Does anyone care?”
The crowd was quiet and orderly; the people in it looked as though they had dressed up for the afternoon. After Fernandes had spoken, he was besieged by petitioners, asking for jobs, roads, schools.
Fernandes is very well acquainted with the situation in Kashmir: he knows it better than almost any other Indian politician. During one of his terms as a minister he functioned as a special reporter on Kashmir. He talks often of those days and of how he drove into the Kashmir countryside, all but alone, meeting insurgents informally, militants and local leaders, listening to people’s grievances, to their stories of brutalization at the hands of the police and the army. Not the least of the many ironies of Fernandes’s present position is that he was once the country’s most prominent campaigner against human rights violations by the army. He is on record as having once described an Indian Army operation as “a naked dance of a bunch of sadists and criminals in uniform.”
As I watched the petitioners clamoring around Fernandes, I began to wonder what it would be like to try to live an everyday life, the life of schools and jobs, in a village that was sandwiched between that base, with its bristling perimeter fence, and the mountains beyond with their hidden guns and disembodied voices. A line quoted by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali kept coming to mind: “They make a desolation and call it peace.” But here peace was not even a pretense.
* * *
The next day we flew to Leh, the principal town in India’s northern-most district, Ladakh. As the crow flies, Ladakh is only a few hundred miles from the valley of Kashmir, but it is a world apart, a niche civilization, as it were—a far outpost of Tibetan Buddhist culture that has flourished in a setting even more extreme, in climate, altitude, and topography, than that of Tibet.
Leh’s altitude is twelve thousand feet. On landing, we were handed pills to prevent altitude sickness and warned of short-term memory loss. In the afternoon, driving toward the Siachen glacier, we went spiraling over the 18,300-foot Khardung Pass. A painted sign announced this to be the world’s highest motorable road. Ahead lay the Karakoram mountains; among the peaks in this range is the 28,000-foot K2, Mount Godwin-Austen, the second-highest mountain in the world.
The landscape was of a lunar desolation, with electric-blue skies and a blinding sun. Great sheets of glaciated rock rose sheer out of narrow valleys; their colors were the unearthly pinks and mauves of planetary rings and stellar moons. The mountains rose to sharp, pyramidal points, their ridges honed to fine, knife-like edges. Their slopes were covered with pulverized rock, as though they had been rained upon by torrents of gravel. Along the valley floors, beside ribbon-like streams, there were trees with whispering leaves and silver bark. On an occasional sandbank, dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape, there were tidy little monasteries and villages, surrounded by fan-tailed green terraces.
Outside the polar snows there is perhaps no terrain on earth that is less hospitable, less tolerant of human claims, than the region around the Karakorams. There are no demarcated borders here. In Kashmir there is a Line of Control that serves as a de facto border. This agreed-upon line stops short of this region, ending at an observation post named NJ 9842.
The Line of Control was a product of the first war between India and Pakistan. In 1948 both countries signed an agreement on this line. At the time neither India nor Pakistan thought of extending this line into the high Karakorams. “No one had ever imagined,” a Pakistani academic said to me in Lahore, “that human beings would ever wish to claim these frozen places.”
But it was the very challenge of the terrain that led to the making of these claims. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, several international mountaineering expeditions ventured into this region. They came through Pakistan and used Pakistani-controlled areas as their roadheads. This raised suspicions in India. It was discovered that maps were being published in the United States with lines drawn through the region, suggesting delineated borders where none existed. There was talk of “cartographic aggression.”
It was these notional lines, on maps used mainly by mountaineers, that were eventually to transform the Siachen glacier into a battleground. It is generally agreed that the glacier has absolutely no strategic, military, or economic value whatsoever. It is merely an immense, slowly moving mass of compacted snow and ice, seventy miles long and over a mile deep.
In 1983, in order to stake India’s territorial claims, the Indian Army launched a massive airlifting operation and set up a number of military posts along the glacier. Pakistan responded by putting up a parallel line of posts. There was no agreement on which posts should be where; shoving was the only way to decide.
Since that time, every day, for fifteen years, the Indian and Pakistani armies have been exchanging barrages of artillery fire at heights that range from ten to twenty thousand feet.
We stopped to visit a dimly lit hospital ward. There were some dozen men inside. None of them had been injured by “enemy action”; it was the terrain that was their principal adversary. They were plainsmen mainly: in the normal course of things snow would play no part at all in their lives. They were not volunteers: only officers volunteer for service on the glacier. Some of the men were in their twenties, but most were older, some possibly in their late thirties and perhaps even early forties—family men, whose bodies had no doubt begun to slow down a little even before they were sent here. They stared at us mutely and we stared back, trying to think of something cheerful to say. One of them had tears in his eyes.
At some posts on the glacier, temperatures dip sometimes to –40 and –50°C. At these altitudes wind velocities are very high. The soldiers live in tents that are pitched either on the surface of the glacier or on ledges of rock. Shooting at the other side takes up very little of their time. They spend much of their time crammed inside their tents. Such heat as they have comes from small kerosene stoves. These are kept going all night and all day. Kerosene produces a foul-smelling grimy kind of soot. This soot works itself slowly into the soldiers’ clothes, their hair, their eyes, their nostrils. When they walk back to their base camps, after their three-month tours of duty, they are enveloped in black grime.
The posts on the glacier are supplied mainly by helicopter. The craft used for this purpose is the Cheetah, a lightweight helicopter, descended from a French prototype, the Alouette. The Cheetah has been in production in India for some thirty years. On the glacier it is frequently required to perform beyond its capabilities. The Cheetah requires a two-man pilot team which means that on some sorties the craft can carry a load of only twenty-five kilograms—about one jerrican of kerosene. High winds and bad wea
ther strictly limit the number of days on which sorties can be flown. In fine weather, the helicopters frequently have to fly under fire.
On the higher reaches of the glacier, the soldiers’ dependence on the helicopters is absolute. It sometimes happens, a major-general told me, that the men become besotted with these crafts and begin to pray to them. This is just one of many species of dementia that come to afflict those who live on the glacier.
Supply problems are particularly acute on the Indian side of the glacier, where the military outposts are separated from their roadheads by long stretches of punishing terrain. Helicopter time is too precious to be spent on ferrying men between their bases and their posts. Soldiers make their way across the glacier on foot, hefting loads that are often in excess of those carried by Sherpas on Himalayan expeditions. Because of the glacier’s constantly moving surface, each unit must chart its own route. Crevasses appear and disappear in a matter of hours. Some of the posts require a walk of twenty-three days.
“We allow ten extra men per battalion for wastage,” an officer told me. Relatively few of the casualties on the glacier are chalked up to hostile fire: the environment imposes a heavier toll on both sides than do the guns of either army. Every year some 1,000 Indian soldiers are believed to sustain injuries on the glacier—about the equivalent of an infantry battalion.