Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  The truth about the killing of the Sikhs has yet to be discovered. There has been no official inquiry, despite requests from human rights organizations and political parties, and there are new facts, apart from the clumsy and brutal attempt to blame it on “foreign mercenaries,” which cast a considerable shadow on the Indian version of events.

  Five years later not a single person or group has been plausibly held responsible for the killings, and the Pakistan-based guerrilla outfits have continued to deny their involvement. Within a few days after the massacre, most of the Sikhs I had seen so vehemently blaming, without much evidence, the Muslim guerrillas, and who had then gone on to do the same on national and international TV, had left Kashmir with their families. Those Sikhs who stayed on in Chitisinghpura are even more reluctant to talk to journalists. Some complain privately about the special favors bestowed by the government upon a few chosen men: large sums of money given as “compensation,” jobs for the unemployed, special recruitment into the police.

  But the appeasement hasn’t prevented many Sikhs outside the village from expressing their doubts; the killings in Chitisinghpura, many of them believe, were organized by Indian intelligence agencies to influence Clinton, and the Western journalists covering his visit, into taking a tougher line toward Pakistan.

  Yaqub Wagay, arrested soon after the Sikh killings, was brutally interrogated by the SOG and made to sign false confessions. A senior government official admitted to me that he was innocent, and in fact he was released on bail in the Chitisinghpura case, before being rearrested, farcically, in connection with the Panchalthan case, on the basis of the evidence allegedly supplied by him about the five “foreign mercenaries.” He is now out of prison.

  For those who live in Kashmir, the expectations of justice, rarely fulfilled in the Indian subcontinent, are more than optimistic; they belong to fantasy. It makes it all the more difficult for the victims to bear their human losses. At Dalal’s house, the once carefully tended plants and hedges were already running wild just a few weeks after his murder, the fish in the pond were mostly dead, and a few men sat slumped on the floor in a bare hall under the Islamic calendar of mourning. His mother, persuaded by her male relatives to emerge from the dark room where she had taken to since her son’s death, broke down as soon as she noticed the photos of Dalal I had been studying. The pictures showed a young man in dark glasses and trendy clothes, a happy, contented man, someone who had managed to find, amid the relentless violence of the insurgency, a new style and identity for himself, and when Dalal’s mother, still crying, while her mother, Dalal’s grandmother, sat beside her, quietly wiping her tears with the frayed end of her head scarf, asked what was the point of talking to the press, of speaking about her son to me—he was gone and wouldn’t come back; the people who had killed him were too powerful—it was hard not to feel pierced by the truth of what she was saying, hard not to be moved by her grief and the pain, amid the great human waste of Kashmir, of her helplessness.

  More than fifty thousand people—and these are conservative figures—have been killed, maimed, or disappeared in the last ten years. The Indian Army and police have lost a few thousand men but have killed many more Muslim guerrillas and civilians. There is hardly a family among the four million–strong Muslim population of the valley which hasn’t been affected. Abbas said, while we discussed possible stories I could cover, “You must do widows and orphans.” I had foolishly asked, “Where can I find them?” Abbas had let the remark go; he simply said, “Anywhere.” And it was true; widows and orphans were as ubiquitous as graveyards and ruins in the valley.

  After each of my travels around the city and the valley I came back to the hotel room, relieved that the day’s work was over and that I could retreat for some hours at least from the world around me, from the stories—of torture (one hospital alone witnessed 250 cases of death by acute renal failure, caused by putting human bodies under heavy rollers in the army’s interrogation centers called Papa 1 and Papa 2), of summary executions, rapes, kidnappings, and arson—stories that emerged unprompted in the most casual of conversations with Kashmiris and that formed the grisly background to life in the valley.

  The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that there is nothing new about their condition, that they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century, when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governor to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life, which under indigenous rulers had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent, dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century: a Sikh who killed a Muslim native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendhal’s who came to the valley in 1831, thought that “nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir.”

  But this background of constant suffering could remain invisible to the casual visitor; the physical beauty of the place, enhanced by the valley’s isolation from the rest of the world, and more tempting for foreign adventurers, is still, even after these last ten years of violence, overwhelming. All through my stay, memories of previous trips kept bubbling up, visits made in less troubled times, just before the insurgency began in 1990, that first visit which for me—as for anyone who had never been away from the hot, dusty Indian plains—was the first exhilarating revelation of beauty.

  I hadn’t then really noticed the Kashmiris. They did appear very different with their pale, long-nosed faces, their pherans, their strange language, so unlike any Indian language. They also seemed oddly self-possessed. But in the enchanting new world that had opened before me—the big deep blue skies and the tiny boats becalmed in vast lakes, the cool trout streams and the stately forests of chenar and poplar, the red-cheeked children at roadside hamlets and in apple orchards, the cows and sheep grazing on wide meadows, and, always in the valley, the surrounding mountains—in so private an experience of beauty it was hard to acknowledge the inhabitants of the valley, hard to acknowledge the more prosaic facts of their existence: the dependence upon India, the lack of local industry, the growing number of unemployed educated youth.

  Then, as the years passed, the news from Kashmir took its place with the other news—equally bad, of murders and destruction—from Pun-jab and the northeast, the distant struggles that were, ultimately, marginal to one’s own life in a very large and deprived country where almost everyone is struggling. In any event, I found I couldn’t always get the necessary information about Kashmir. There were some good books published by small imprints, but you had to search hard for them. To read what was reported in the press was to be told that Pakistan had fomented trouble in Kashmir, and the Indian Army was taking care of it. It was to understand that there really wasn’t a problem except one of law and order, which the relevant military and paramilitary organizations would soon deal with. The missing physical details had to be imagined; and they turned out to be much grimmer than what I once could have thought of.

  Srinagar’s big hotel with its vast lawns and bare trees overlooking the lake was empty, but the staff still felt obliged to work themselves up each morning, like the Indian papers, into cheerful falsehoods: “Everything is fine today, sir, there is no problem at all, there is as much violence here as in any Indian city.”

  In their softly lit, carpet-muffled offices, trays of tea and biscuits regularly brought in by uniformed servants, Indian officials presented statistics about the number of guerrillas killed, guns, rocket launchers, and grenades seized. In a gloomy room, the furnishings dark with grime, piles of unread newspapers in one corner, a member of the Kashmir Bar Association presented me with some counterstatistics about the number of Muslims killed (eighty thousand in his estimation), tortured, raped, or gone missing.

  The day before
I arrived, a senior guerrilla from one of the pro-Pakistan outfits had been shot dead. But weariness—there had been too many killings of that sort—and the fear of being fired upon by the Indian police or Army kept public mourners in their homes; the streets remained clear of the thousands of grieving men that had once taken the corpses of “martyrs” to the graveyards scattered everywhere in the city, often adjacent to destroyed houses, a sudden swarm of green headstones and irises in the dusty broken streets.

  The festival of Eid came and went, but the shops still closed early, the tense busyness abruptly giving way to silence and darkness, and each evening, in little stockades beside the roads, sheep with purple paint on their backs restlessly awaited slaughter. The long boulevard along the lake, filled in my memory with vacationers, remained deserted and dusty, the hotels on the boulevard serving as barracks for paramilitary soldiers. The houseboats cowered under the snowcapped mountains to the north, the jaunty names on their gables—Miss England, Manhattan Adventure—as gaudily ironical as the “Bright Career Institute” sighted in an alley full of spectacularly ruined houses, heaps of bricks that had already been plundered for wood. Filth lay in small mounds everywhere in the alleys and bazaars of the gray old city—the stronghold of the pro-Pakistan guerrillas—where Indian soldiers stood alert in their improvised bunkers at every bend and corner, the bunkers seeming like some kind of trap, sandbag walls roofed with corrugated iron and blue weather-beaten tarpaulin, light machine gun muzzles pointing out from small squarish holes between the sandbags, behind which you occasionally saw the frightened eyes in dark faces, the helplessness of soldiers in this hostile setting, hundreds of miles away from home, somehow made more poignant by the “Happy Eid” messages painted in Urdu on little cardboards stuck to the sandbags. And everywhere on the narrow broken roads you saw, and hastily stepped aside to make way for, big machine gun-topped trucks in fast-moving convoys of three or four, often flying the defiant banners—INDIA IS GREAT—of a besieged army.

  The military controlled the roads, but the pro-Pakistan guerrillas were still at large in the countryside, the forests and hollows, the hills and flatlands of the valley. The myths once attached to them had been embellished; they now came out of nowhere—detonated a land mine, ambushed a convoy, fired and threw hand grenades at street patrols—and then vanished once more. The soldiers and the policemen emerged from the shock and blood to rage against whomever they could. The victims were often civilians, who just happened to be around when the guerrillas struck. Whole towns and villages had been laid waste in this way: shops and bazaars burned, houses razed, people shot at random.

  This was how Jalaluddin’s photocopy shop at Pattan, a small town a few miles north of Srinagar, came to be destroyed. The guerrillas had come early in the morning, shot one policeman on the main street, and then disappeared. The police came looking for the guerrillas and accused the Muslim shopkeepers of helping them escape. Then, before the shopkeepers could put down their shutters and escape, more policemen arrived, this time with cans of petrol. Jalaluddin’s shop was the first to be set alight possibly because it was very new; he had only recently brought the Xerox machine and Honda generator from Delhi, in a long and difficult journey, during which he’d had to bribe his way out of more than one roadblock.

  The fire quickly spread to the adjacent shops, one in the ramshackle row of single rooms lining the highway, footwear and grocery stores, computer and typing institutes, shaky in structure, quick to combust with their wooden frames. The smell of burned wood was still in the air when I visited Pattan two days later.

  “If you live in Kashmir, you have to be prepared for anything,” Abbas had said, and Jalaluddin, and other young men, had already moved beyond rage, hoping now to receive compensation from the government for the destruction of their property, large enough to enable them to rebuild their shops. The men—well educated and articulate, and handsome, with sharp features and artlessly staring eyes in the Kashmiri manner—were matter-of-fact about the lack of options. There were no jobs to be had if you couldn’t afford large bribes to government officials: fifty thousand rupees to secure fourth-class employment as a chaprasi (servant) in a despised administration that then exposed you and your family to the fury of the guerrillas.

  An old man, short and squat, with dull, bloodshot eyes in a round, puffy face, came and stood behind Jalaluddin as he spoke. The owner of a house that the fire had consumed, he had been lucky to get out with his wife, five daughters, and two grandsons, and it was his story that the young men began to tell me: the cousin who been killed in an “encounter,” the son, a banana seller in the bazaar, whom the police had kidnapped and then returned on a ransom payment of five thousand rupees.

  The young men insisted on showing me the extent of the destruction. The photocopy shop had been completely gutted, the wooden beams charred and swollen into a kind of delicate filigree. The cream colored Xerox machine lay on the floor, the shiniest and most expensive thing in the shop, and it was with lingering solicitude that Jalaluddin turned it over and around to reveal the shattered glass and blackened underside.

  One of the walls had collapsed, exposing the derelict shell, greater when seen from above, of the adjacent burned house, where a garish poster of a Swiss chalet remained on one of the bare walls, the broad brushed sentiment on it still legible: “A smile works magic like the sun and makes things bright for everyone.”

  The Muslim middle class in the valley still largely consists of people connected to the government as elected or nonelected officials, and during the insurgency it hadn’t stopped carving out private profits from public works; if anything, the violence and instability, the constant destruction and rebuilding had offered more opportunities of raiding the state exchequer. Jammu, the Hindu-majority city outside the valley, was full of newly built mansions of senior ministers and bureaucrats; in remote villages in the valley, corruption finding its own level everywhere, the massive new houses of local petty officials stood apart from the enclosing shabbiness.

  Twenty miles south of Srinagar, past steep slopes and startlingly panoramic views of the pear and apple orchards and rice fields and the tall mountains on the horizon, lies the hillside town of Charar-e-Sharif. It was here that the shrine of Kashmir’s fifteenth-century patron saint, Sheikh Nuruddin, stood, until 1995, when it was torched and destroyed during fighting between the Indian Army and guerrillas. Kashmiris, both Hindu and Muslim, grieved at its loss. In Kashmir, Islam had escaped the taint it acquired elsewhere in the subcontinent from forced conversions and temple destroying during the several centuries of invasions and conquests by Muslims from Arabia and Central Asia. It had come to the valley in the fourteenth century by way of Central Asian and Persian missionaries and, blending well with earlier Hindu and Buddhist cultures, had taken on a uniquely Kashmiri character; it was to become known not for invaders but for the great Sufi saints whom both Hindus and Muslims revered. Sheikh Nuruddin was one of the earliest and greatest of these saints.

  It wasn’t clear who started the fire, the guerrillas, some of whom were from Pakistan, who, contemptuous of the pacificism of Sufi Islam, had turned the shrine into a bunker, or the Indian Army, which had laid a siege around the shrine. But the destruction was international news, and for some months various Kashmiri political and religious outfits as well as the government repeatedly promised to rebuild the shrine.

  Five years later Charar-e-Sharif and its inhabitants appeared overtaken by events in the valley. The rebuilding amounted to an ungainly corrugated iron roof over unpainted walls in the middle of a slushy field. A lot of money had been collected from shocked devotees, the government had pitched in, but little work was done, the funds disappearing, as with all delayed reconstruction projects, into many pockets.

  The part of the town that had been destroyed and partly rebuilt was still a mess of rubble and open gutters and uncollected rubbish. A few new houses and shops had come up: small, bare, windowless rooms, often with plastic sheets as doors, where ancient
men sat embroidering wicker baskets for kangris (little earthenware pots with charcoal embers that Kashmiris keep under their pherans), their thin legs drawn up against the wall, a hookah quietly smoldering beside them.

  Word of my presence in the town had quickly spread. The car, the notebook, and the camera had their own associations here, and as I prepared to leave, about forty men appeared before the tiny stationery store where I been talking to some schoolchildren (there are about twenty schools in the thinly populated region). The men had walked four miles from their village, across the hilly countryside, after hearing that an official-seeming person was in town. The pipes in their area had burst, and there had been no water for eight days. They had trudged to the assistant engineer’s office but found it locked; they had gone to the local police station but hadn’t been allowed a hearing; they were now melting the snow in the gullies for water, but there wasn’t much snow left. Raggedly dressed, large holes gaping from their pherans, their thickly bearded faces white with dust, they seemed to have emerged out of a scene of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century wretchedness, the kind that made Victor Jacquemont conclude that nowhere in India were the masses as poor and denuded as in Kashmir.

  The continuing backwardness of Kashmir, its failure, or inability, to join the modern world and find new identities for itself: This was what the commissioner of Srinagar, an official of the central Indian government, had spoken to me about at his house; so too, although less directly, Abbas, who had told me on the very first day I met him that his ancestors had come to Kashmir from Samarkand in Central Asia.