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

by Pankaj Mishra

  He saw the distinct cultural identity of Kashmir as something that had to be undermined before the state could join what in India is referred to, without irony, as the “national mainstream.” With this all subsuming idea in mind, he sought to impose a peculiarly Hindu modernity on the state, where the unrestricted sale of alcohol was permitted but Muslims were forbidden to slaughter sheep on a Hindu festival day, a pointless law since no prohibitions on meat exist for Kashmiri Hindus. The number of Muslims being recruited in government service went down. The Hindu nationalists were known to admire the resettlement policies followed by the Israeli government in the occupied territories in the 1970s, and Jagmohan may have been inspired by them in encouraging non-Muslims to work in Kashmir.

  The backlash was not long in coming; what a colonized people fear most is the possibility of being swallowed up by the dominant alien culture in their midst, which is why the British had left the great religions of the subcontinent and their many subcultures more or less untouched. As in Algeria, Iran, and Egypt, anxiety about modernization, cultural influences from elsewhere, and rampant unemployment turned, because of Jagmohan, into an anxiety about religion, the notion that not only Muslims but Islam itself was in danger, the same fear that had led many Indian Muslims in the mid-1940s to suddenly embrace, after years of relative indifference toward it, the idea of Pakistan.

  The popularity of Islamist parties grew throughout the 1980s, helped by the growth of madrassas, the privately owned theology schools which were often run by Muslims from Assam in eastern India, over a thousand miles away, after mass killings of Muslims in the early eighties had forced their migration to Kashmir. These Muslims from outside Kashmir brought their own fundamentalist variety of Islam to the valley: The clerics suddenly wanted to impose new prohibitions restricting women’s rights; they wished to ban Bombay films and beauty parlors.

  The Islamist parties came together to fight the elections of 1987, in which Abdullah teamed up with the Congress. Just three years after being thrown out by the Congress, Farooq Abdullah decided he couldn’t do anything in Kashmir without the support of the ruling party. But his power-sharing arrangement with the Congress was seen as another humiliation for Kashmir. To no one’s surprise, he won the elections, and Kashmiris still talk about the active rigging that went on by Indian election officials. Opposition candidates comfortably in the lead suddenly found themselves defeated; candidates and polling agents were beaten up and tortured. Syed Salahuddin, the current leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, the leading Pakistan-based guerrilla outfit, was imprisoned after almost winning the vote in his constituency.

  “There is no material there for democracy.” The expressed contempt of Nehru’s statement, amplified over time, began to affect a new generation of Kashmiris, the educated sons of peasants and artisans already reduced to futile resentment by corruption and unemployment. It was also around this time that the first groups of young Kashmiri men, most of them highly skilled, some even with engineering degrees, and almost all of them jobless, stole across the open border into Pakistan.

  The young men were received by middle-level army officers in Pakistan and set up with salaries and private housing. They were trained in the use of light weapons for some months; many of them were asked to return to the valley and bring back more young men. Other recruits smuggled arms and ammunition into the valley. Slowly the traffic across the border grew; in less than three years thousands of young Kashmiri men had ventured across the border, where they formed the first guerrilla groups that declared war on India in 1990.

  Pakistan was a natural ally of disaffected Kashmiris. It had tried to liberate Kashmir by force twice by sending in armed infiltrators—first in 1948 and then in 1965—and on both occasions had failed to muster enough support among the local population, which, though not entirely happy with Indian rule, remained wary of Pakistan. But the fast-growing disillusionment with Indian rule through the 1980s made many Kashmiris look toward Pakistan for assistance; it was the only country in the world that consistently affirmed, at least rhetorically, the Kashmiri “right to self-determination.”

  For the Pakistani Army officers who received the Kashmiris, the creation and support of the guerrilla groups required no expertise; they had done similar things, on a much larger scale, for the mujahideen fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Most of the officers worked for the Inter-Services Intelligence. Set up to coordinate the war effort in Afghanistan, the ISI had close links with the CIA and had come to play a considerable extraconstitutional role in Pakistan.

  The army’s control of Pakistan had not weakened since the last months of 1947, when the war with India over Kashmir transformed the new country, lacking the administrative center or the infrastructure of the former colonial government, into a national security state, with over 70 percent of the national budget being spent on defense. Islam turned out to be a weak nation-building glue in Pakistan. The feudal and professional Muslim elite’s fear of being overwhelmed by Hindu India mutated into an anxiety about the assertion of ethnic identities in Sind, Baluchistan, and East Pakistan. The need to pacify ethnic minorities while affirming the power of the central government—a tricky maneuver that in the stronger and more democratic state of India had ended up promoting political life—only further expanded the role of the army and the bureaucracy in Pakistan.

  In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan was thirty-two years old and still without a coherent political life. Just eight years before, it had suffered the traumatic secession of East Pakistan with its large Bengali Muslim population, which became, with India’s assistance, Bangladesh. What remained was ruled despotically by an army general, Zia-ul-Haq, who had just hanged his former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the primitive economy with a tiny manufacturing base was propped up by export of cheap labor to the Middle East.

  The CIA found Pakistan a ready host for its proxy war against the Soviet Union. Billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition arrived in Pakistan over the next ten years, transforming the social and political landscape of the entire region while creating a strong Islamic fundamentalist movement all around the world.

  The arms went to the mujahideen fighting the Soviet Army, and their sale in the black market was also used to finance an illegal drug trade, a disastrous link that eventually resulted in, apart from cheap heroin on the streets of New York, an estimated five million heroin addicts in Pakistan. The army was brought into the civil administration, and organizations like the ISI acquired their currently limitless and sinister power during this time.

  Most damagingly, Zia-ul-Haq revived the idea of an Islamic society in order to postpone the transition to civilian rule he had promised soon after his coup against Bhutto. The state funds available to Islamic organizations went into raising armed outfits that attacked Muslim minorities such as the Shiites and the Ahmediyas, and violent conflict within rival Islamic groups broke out in many parts of the country.

  Of the three million Afghans who came as refugees to Pakistan, many went to the province of Sind, where local opposition to their presence developed into a particularly savage civil war in Karachi, the largest city. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees were given food, shelter, and elementary Islamic instruction at madrassas run by an Islamic organization close to the Pakistani Army and sponsored by Saudi Arabia. It was the students at these madrassas who, assisted by Pakistan, went on to form the extremist Taliban.

  The Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 was claimed as a victory by the fundamentalists. The fantasy of a new extensive jihad, such as the one in the seventh and eighth centuries that had established Islam as a world religion, attracted thousands of Muslims to Pakistan, from countries including Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, and Sudan. This globalized jihad, which began as a CIA-initiated move to unite all Muslims against godless communism, found new promoters after 1989, such as Osama bin Laden, whose network of Muslim militants now spans the world. Many of the Muslims initially trained in Afghanistan bec
ame leading activists within Islamic fundamentalist movements in Egypt, Algeria, and the Central Asian republics.

  About a hundred thousand unemployed men from Pakistan fought the jihad in Afghanistan; a few thousand among them went on to fight in Kashmir. The Pakistani Army itself was infiltrated by Islamic fundamentalists, and the possibility of these fundamentalists seizing political power in a nuclear-armed Pakistan is ever present. Among other equally ruinous aftereffects of the American-Pakistani adventure in Afghanistan, the generous American and Saudi Arabian support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan created and enriched a powerful lobby composed of army officers, smugglers, and drug barons, whose particular, often conflicting needs have shaped Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies and usually work against Pakistan’s own larger interests.

  Jihad alone brought about a degree of consensus among Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elite, holy war having been the very profitable raison d’être of many of them. When American interest in Afghanistan dwindled in the early 1990s, the ISI turned its attention to the long-standing dispute over Kashmir, which had always aroused much patriotic sentiment within Pakistan. Throughout the 1990s the uprising against Indian rule in Kashmir and the hectic mobilization by the ISI for a fresh jihad against India proved especially handy as distractions from the widespread social and economic breakdowns within Pakistan.

  India was always the significant enemy. The war with India over Bangladesh in 1971 had ended with utter humiliation for the Pakistani Army, with ninety thousand of its soldiers taken prisoner, and revenge motivated many ISI officers as much as the need to keep invoking jihad. One reason why American arms and money for the mujahideen in Afghanistan were so eagerly accepted by Zia-ul-Haq was that they seemed to give Pakistan a “strategic depth” in any potential conflict with India over Kashmir. In the mid-1990s the government of Pakistan risked international isolation in supporting the Taliban, partly because the latter provided facilities in Afghanistan for the training of Muslims committed to the jihad in Kashmir.

  The war in Afghanistan thus brought Pakistan to an unexpected fulfillment of its original mission; instead of becoming the pure homeland of Muslims, it became the capital of a global movement for jihad, a holy war against infidels, who seemed to be everywhere. It wasn’t what Iqbal, insecure after his time in the West, thrown back to regretting the dead glory of Islam in Europe, could have imagined when he first proposed a democratic society of believers. And it wasn’t what the Kashmiris, accustomed to a more benign version of Islam, could have imagined when they turned spontaneously to Pakistan for assistance in their struggle against India.

  The first murders, kidnappings, and bombings by Pakistan-backed guerrillas began in Kashmir in 1989, while Farooq Abdullah was still heading a civilian government. Later that year the daughter of the home minister in the federal government in Delhi, a native of Kashmir, was taken hostage and then released in exchange for five guerrillas. Large crowds welcomed the released men on the streets of Srinagar. They were fired upon by Indian police; five men died. There were more protests, bigger and bigger demonstrations; hundreds of thousands of men and women filled the streets of Srinagar, shouting, “Azadi, Azadi” (“Freedom, Freedom”). People still speak of the strange energy in the air at the time. Everyone shared the heady expectation that freedom was just around the corner, and news of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and television images of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great demonstrations of Eastern Europe only deepened the delusion.

  It was then, early in 1990, that the Indian government again appointed Jagmohan as governor; he arrived with a sense of mission whose fanaticism approached that of the Islamic guerrillas. Farooq Abdullah resigned, leaving Kashmir without an elected leader. A series of ruthless actions quickly followed. Hundreds of young men suspected of being guerrillas were taken away from their homes, tortured, and sometimes killed. Unprovoked attacks on demonstrators alone cost hundreds of lives—thanks to jumpy soldiers far from home, given a simple idea of the enemy, and licensed to kill. Thousands of Indian soldiers were brought into the valley—their current number is between three and four hundred thousand—while foreign journalists were expelled and local journalists found themselves confined to their houses.

  A range of severe laws were introduced, not that many were needed, since all safeguards for civil liberties had completely collapsed by then. You could be picked up anywhere, interrogated, or killed, and no one would ever come to know what happened. The Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali quotes a doctor who attended to a sixteen-year-old boy released from one of the interrogation centers: “Did anything in his lines of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?”

  By the time Jagmohan was replaced, after six months as governor, the entire Muslim population of the valley had revolted against Indian rule. The local police had mutinied; the legal system staffed by Kashmiris was close to collapse; more than a hundred thousand Hindus had fled while the hospitals were flooded with tortured and maimed young men; and thousands more were missing, presumed dead, or in Pakistan.

  3. The Unending War

  The unprovoked firings on unarmed demonstrators by the Indian police and army—a recurring, if little-reported, event in Kashmir over the next few years—alienated even pro-India Kashmiris. Coming after the corruption and arbitrariness of Indian rule in the previous four decades, they created a vast number of humiliated men in Kashmir, people likely to be attracted to the upsurge of nihilistic energy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So intent were the Kashmiris upon fighting for independence that their cultural and political differences with the Pakistanis became relatively unimportant. The first men who went over to Pakistan were still thinking of an independent and secular Kashmir. But as the movement grew and the ISI found increasing numbers of Kashmiris willing to fight for integration into Pakistan, the country stopped bankrolling those secular Kashmiri guerrillas who were seeking independence. They were betrayed to Indian intelligence agencies, and many of them also killed, by the more militant pro-Pakistan guerrillas. These new insurgents were seen as hard-line Islamic terrorists, especially after they kidnapped and killed Hindus and, later, European and American tourists in Kashmir. Among Kashmiri Muslims, who belong to the peaceable Sufi tradition of Islam, they came to be feared for their fanaticism, which often erupted into violence against women and other unprotected civilians.

  Kashmiris, who had expected as much international support as had been given to the East Germans and the Czechs when they filled the streets in late 1989, were surprised by the cautious pro-India policies followed by the European Union and America. But diplomats and policy makers in the West had their reasons to be worried. In 1994, as the Taliban achieved major victories in Afghanistan, the network of radical Islamists began to spread. Islamic fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan became stronger; so did the ISI, which played a large role in shaping Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies. As the Taliban began consolidating its position in Afghanistan, the ISI and the fundamentalists began to export jihad to Kashmir, where guerrilla groups were brought together by the ISI in an umbrella organization called the United Jihad Council. The guerrillas, once raw young Kashmiris, were trained in the use of light weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan and then sent back to wage war on India. The traffic across the border grew very busy. Even now almost every Kashmiri Muslim you meet has friends or acquaintances who went to Pakistan. However, the Pakistani involvement in Kashmir reached a new pitch when, in the summer of 1999, Kashmiri guerrillas along with Pakistani soldiers were discovered to have occupied strategic Himalayan heights in India-held Kargil.

  There were other, larger reasons behind the insurgency in Kashmir, which lay in changes in India. In addition to the shift in Indian politics throughout the 1970s, there was a later cultural shift in the early 1990s, when India’s nominally socialist, protectionist economy was opened up to foreign investment, giving rise to a new middle class of people in business and the professions. As with most new middle clas
ses its members were eager to hold on to what they had recently acquired, and their politics were on the whole conservative. Many of them felt India’s stability should be ensured by brute force, if necessary, in places like Kashmir and the northeastern states, since stability was essential for business, both locally and internationally. This was an attitude most strongly articulated by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, which the middle class helped elect to power in 1998.

  Under the Hindu nationalists, India’s economy was further globalized, creating a small elite of business tycoons and reanimating the cultural and emotional links many affluent Indian-Americans had with their home country. The BJP attempted to give India, and this global Hindu middle class, a greater international presence by conducting nuclear tests and lobbying for a permanent seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. The government’s obsession with India’s unity and its deep suspicion of internal and external enemies moved beyond the nationalism of the Congress Party. As the party in power, the BJP had more opportunity to enforce its nineteenth-century idea of nationhood: one people, one culture, one language.

  The BJP had kept up a steady rhetoric on Kashmir throughout most of the nineties, before they came to power, even as a harsh crackdown in the state went on. India, they said, had become a “soft” state, easily bullied by its neighbors and secessionists; they spoke of a “proactive” policy and “hot pursuit” of terrorists across the border into Pakistan. In 1999 the battles with Pakistan-backed infiltrators in Kashmir broke out, the first in India to be fought before TV cameras, and suddenly many in the middle class adopted the BJP’s extreme rhetoric about the “Kashmir problem.”

  During the long years of rule from Delhi, most middle-class Indians had been generally indifferent to local politics in Kashmir; for the more affluent, the valley itself was a holiday destination, cherished for sentimental reasons. However, with Pakistan seen increasingly as an ever more implacable enemy, renewed patriotic sentiment and the televised demands for an end to Pakistani support for the guerrillas affected the Indian Army. A friend back from the front told me of a Pakistani soldier in Kargil whose arms had been cut off and who, as he bled to death, kept pleading futilely with indifferent Indian soldiers to take his money out of his pocket and send it to his children and aging mother in Pakistan.