Rashid’s idea of a “free hand” wasn’t very different from that of the government. The words were part of the accepted vocabulary, more potent than the previous talk of “proactive policy,” which really meant pursuing guerrillas across the border into the training camps, easy to fantasize about in Delhi but impossible to achieve without starting, as almost happened in 1990, a war with Pakistan. The borrowed phrase “ethnic cleansing” was even less effective. After each killing of Hindus, it was said that the guerrillas were engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” but ethnically, the Sikhs and Hindus were no different from the Muslims of the valley. In the end, the few attempts at subtle rhetoric always collapsed into crudely aggressive demands for a “free hand.”
The “free hand” means that the cycle of retribution will continue for a much longer time. In Pattan, outside Srinagar, just a few days after I left, the local police station was attacked with grenades and rockets. In response, the frustrated policemen looted and burned down the entire market. I didn’t go back; I didn’t feel I could face the helpless shopkeepers I had met on my previous visit. I went instead to Jammu, the city of the plains, where, far away from the new mansions of the politicians and bureaucrats, thousands of Hindu refugees from Kashmir now live.
It was in early 1990, during Jagmohan’s few months as India’s appointed governor in Kashmir—and with, some say, his active encouragement—that most of the 140,000-strong community of Kashmiri Hindus left the valley. Jagmohan had originally been made governor in 1984, appointed by Mrs. Candhi in order to dismiss Kashmir’s elected government; he had served for five turbulent years, during which his aggressively pro-Hindu policies further alienated Muslims in the state from India. His limited comprehension of the insurgency, as simply a limited law-and-order problem which could be contained fast, is apparent in his memoir about his time as governor of Kashmir. Many Kashmiris believe that he wanted the Hindus safely out of the way while he dealt with the Muslim guerrillas.
The Hindus had formed a kind of elite in the valley and made their presence felt in the bureaucracy, both there and in Delhi, where government policy on Kashmir often came to be dictated by the fears and concerns of this tiny minority. Their connections with India and their relative affluence made them highly visible targets during the first few months of the insurgency in 1990; several government officials were assassinated by pro-Pakistan Muslim guerrillas who also committed random atrocities against Hindu civilians: rapes, murders, kidnappings.
Approximately 130,000 Kashmiri Hindus left the valley within two months of the insurgency beginning; few have been able to return. The ordeal of displacement was less difficult for the professional elite of doctors, engineers, and academic, who, on leaving the valley, renewed their links with the outside world; they now form a distinct diaspora within India and in the U.K. and America, where large numbers have settled.
It has been the less well-off Hindus in the countryside. who have suf fered the most. A few miles out of Jammu, on a stony, treeless plain, you suddenly come across hundreds of one-room tenements where thousands of Kashmiri Hindus have been living for the last ten years, waiting, without much hope, for things to improve. It was early spring in the valley and still cold when I visited the camps, but around Jammu, the temperatures had begun to rise, and the sun felt more severe on the rocky exposed ground. The tar that held together the thermocoal roof of the igloo-shaped tenements had already begun to melt, and more tar was hard to find; you had to bribe the roadworks laborers.
This wasn’t the only thing that worried Gautam, the Hindu I met in one of the camps. In 1990, he had left his apple orchards near Baramulla in the north of the valley with just sixty-five rupees in his pocket. There had been no water for eight days, and the plastic buckets used for storage had begun to run dry.
Gautam sat behind a window with iron bars, half slumped on the single wooden cot in his half-sleeved vest and pajamas. The smell of burned onion came from the tiny room where all five members of his family slept. The walls were bare except for a calendar with pictures of Ram and Sita; there were a few steel utensils on the shelf over a rusty gas cylinder; a small television sat on a rickety stool. Outside, in the cramped little courtyard edged with an open drain, a mangy dog slumbered in the shade of the overburdened clothesline, and the tin doors of the public latrines were cut so low that you could see the blank face of the person squatting over the hole in the floor.
I wasn’t invited in. Gautam, when he relaxed more with me, said bitterly, “We are like a zoo; people come to watch and then go away.” He felt betrayed by Jagmohan and the other politicians, especially the Hindu nationalists, who had held up the community as victims of Muslim guerrillas in order to secure Hindu votes but then done very little to resettle them, find jobs for the adults or schools for the young. Gautam had been back to the valley just once; he had been persuaded to do so by his Muslim neighbor who personally came to the refugee camp to escort him back to his village. The warmth between the Hindu and Muslim communities of the valley—so alike in many ways for the outsider, so hard to tell apart—had remained intact and had acquired a kind of poignancy after such a long separation.
But when Gautam returned, he found his house had been plundered; children were playing cricket in his apple orchard, where the trees had been cut down for firewood. Then he was kept awake by fear on his first night, by the sound of gunfire., a sound his Muslim neighbors had gotten used to. In the morning he had heard the news of the deaths of five Indian soldiers in the gun battle with guerrillas. Enraged soldiers were expected any minute to launch a “crackdown.” Gautam followed the young men of the village and took the first bus out.
He hadn’t gone back again; he didn’t know if he could. His son, fourteen years old now, had very few memories of Kashmir, had grown up in a different world, with a sense of injustice and the rage of the young. Gautam often had to stop him from denouncing Muslims and Islam.
I didn’t see the boy; he was at school. There was a picture of him in a small plastic frame; with large serious eyes in his pale Kashmiri face, he reminded me of the Muslim boy I had met some days before at a graveyard in Srinagar.
It was my first day in Srinagar. A famous guerrilla had been killed by the army the day before, but there had been no public morning. At the Idgah cemetery for “martyrs,” placed at the edge of a vast, bald field scarred with muddy puddles and full of signboards with exhortations—“Lest you forget that they gave their today for our tomorrow”—there was one fresh grave but, again, no mourners. The grave was of a young man who had been taken from his home by the police for interrogation. A very old man sat nearby with a teenage boy in large thick-framed glasses, both hunched over a kangri. The boy, Jamal, took me around, stepping agilely across the graves, his dark eyes somber behind his glasses.
The earliest graves in that Srinagar cemetery had claimed the most reverence and space; they were set in large plots, adorned with bead necklaces and plastic garlands. But as the numbers had begun to rise, and the graves had been set closer together, the headstone engravings acquired a uniformity of message and style; the green-painted word “martyr” occurred in all of them.
The boy pointed out the new grave, the earth still moist under the wrinkled plastic sheet; it had no headstone yet, but a narrow, freshly dug bed of yellow irises ran around the perimeter. Irises were, Jamal said, the flowers used to honor the Muslim dead in Kashmir.
He couldn’t have been more than five years old when the insurgency began, but he knew the names of all the “martyrs.” There were some in his own family: his elder brother, who had been killed two years ago, soon after he returned from Pakistan; his father, who had died of his injuries after being tortured with hot iron rods. Jamal had dropped out of school and now came to sit in the graveyard each evening. I asked him why, and he said, his large eyes earnest, that he wanted to be close to the martyrs; they had died a holy death in the cause of jihad and were now in paradise. Later he said that his mother was worried about his visits to the
cemetery; she had been going to various shrines and making him wear amulets to prevent him from becoming a “militant” like his brother.
He wanted to know what Indians in India thought of their army killing the Kashmiris, and it was the guilt brought on by this question that made me stay longer with Jamal. Windows opened in the rain dampened houses overlooking the graveyard, and curious faces appeared in them, watching me talk to him. The day, already gray, began to die quickly. The taxi driver grew nervous; the area was the stronghold of the pro-Pakistan guerrillas.
When I left, the image I carried with me was of the young boy and the old man sitting against the dirty, overcast sky, the mist-hazy mountains, and the flat, puddle-stained field; it added to the desolation of those first few days in Srinagar, which, although the terrible scenes of the massacre were yet to come, had already begun to contaminate my early memories of Kashmir, of the landscape that had once been a revelation of beauty.
On one of my last days in Srinagar, one of the many days of protest strikes, enforced by the guerrillas, the city surreally deserted in the minddle of the long, sunny afternoon, I went back to the graveyard. There were more graves, and, with spring finally resurgent in the valley after many cold days, the irises were in full bloom. But Jamal was gone. The old man sat all alone in the middle of the graveyard and didn’t know where Jamal was. He hadn’t been to the graveyard in several days, but his mother had come looking for him.
It was some weeks after I left Kashmir that I read a newspaper account of a teenage boy who had driven a car full of explosives into the army cantonment in Srinagar; it was the first suicide bombing in the valley. The boy went to a local school, and neither of his parents had known about his connections with the jihadi outfits. It couldn’t have been Jamal, who had only one parent, but it was while reading about this boy that I thought of Jamal again. I remembered the wide, serious eyes; I remembered his talk of martyrdom and paradise and death.
The cycle of violence and destruction has been swift and severe in Kashmir; the insurgency has poisoned and destroyed many lives. Yet the insurgents’ political cause remains as lonely and hopeless as before. Independence, which a majority of Kashmiris seem to want, and integration with Pakistan, which for many Kashmiris is the second-best option after independence, are not possibilities that any Indian government can ever consider without immediately losing the support of the Hindu middle classes. The European Union and the United States are unlikely to risk antagonizing India, with its lucrative markets and resources and the trappings of a democracy, by taking up the Kashmiri cause.
It seems unfair that all Kashmiris can hope for at present is a change in Indian attitudes, a bit more breathing space, a bit less heavy-handedness ; that the tens of thousands of victims of the decade-long violence will have to wait much longer for even some partial justice.
But then you can’t hope for much justice in the subcontinent, where fulfillment comes to very few among the needy and restless millions, and where aspiration itself can feel like a luxury. In Kashmir, isolated and oppressed and then dragged into the larger world of competing men and nations and murderous ideologies, more people have been confronted with this awareness in the last ten years than in all of its tormented modern history.
There will always be young men like Jamal who attempt to dissolve the pain of that awareness in the nihilism of jihadi martyrdom. At the same time, there are many more Kashmiris who wish to make their peace with that pain, who are wearied by the bloodletting and resigned to their lack of options, and who now want the relative stability of the time before the insurgency to return, even if it involves living with the humiliation of continued Indian rule over the valley, the same private, uneasy accommodations with the world that keep the deprived millions elsewhere in the subcontinent from exploding into rage and destruction.
PAKISTAN
Jihad Globalized
Peshawar is a mess. And during my stay there in January 2001, when the smog above the city trapped the acrid smoke from the burning tires that the Afghan refugees huddled around for warmth, and Pakistani traffic policemen wearing new-looking gas masks flailed helplessly in the slow swirl of donkey carts, trucks, auto rickshaws, and cars, I began to wonder, somewhat resentfully, if the romance of Peshawar had been an invention of jaded adventurers from the West, of the eager faced white men and women you could still see walking in the narrow alleys of the old quarters, visitors in the first flush of their enchantment with the Orient, for whom all those aggressively encroaching shanty colonies and the precariously defended middle-class suburbs, all the Afghan beggar children with startlingly green eyes, and the heroin addicts slumped on broken pavements could fade easily into the general quaintness of the East.
Fifteen years ago Peshawar had glamour. The Soviet Army was in Afghanistan, just forty miles away, propping up a Communist government ; and Peshawar was the frontline city for the jihad against Soviet communism that the United States and its allies were sponsoring. Spies from the CIA, KGB, Mossad, and ISI worked the streets and refugee camps where more than one million Afghans lived. The local papers were full of cryptic paragraphs about assassinations and bomb explosions. Margaret Thatcher, George H. W. Bush, Kirk Douglas, and Princess Anne, among other celebrities, showed up to raise the spirits of the anti-Communist Afghan mujahideen. European and American journalists crowded into Dean’s Hotel, waiting to be smuggled into the battlefield by their favorite “muj.” At Lala’s Grill, local fixers cadged kebabs from backpackers looking for the frisson of holy war and gossiped about the number of heroin laboratories near the Khyber Pass. You might even have come across rich Saudis like Osama bin Laden, busy enlisting Arab mercenaries into the jihad.
In early 2001 these excitements had died away, except among nostalgic middle-aged local journalists, whom the proxy war had temporarily rescued from ill-paid obscurity. Dean’s Hotel had closed down a few months before my visit. Lala’s Grill had acquired the dark-windowed façade of an Indian-Pakistani dive with pretensions, and although a sign asking visitors not to bring in their guns still stood by the main entrance to the Pearl Continental Hotel, the bright cloth banner outside advertised cooking classes for “ladies.”
I felt oppressed by the city; its shapeless squalor as well as its new aspirations to respectability reminded me too much of the small-town India I had grown up in. Relief, along with proportion and order, seemed to lie only in the British-created cantonment, in the low red tiled bungalows, whitewashed trees, and brick-lined flower beds and the lone guard standing stiff before long smoothly graveled driveways. It was where I often found myself in the long evenings—somehow longer in an unknown city—browsing through the boldly pirated American and British paperbacks at Saeed Book Bank and visiting newspaper offices in Saddar Bazaar.
I was never less than nervous while visiting the cantonment. My visa for Pakistan said, “Not Valid for Cantt Areas.” I wasn’t sure what this meant since cantt areas in the cities of the subcontinent are impossible to avoid. I was expected to stay away from “sensitive military installations,” but since I didn’t know what these were, I had to play it safe. I never turned my head sideways when my rickshaw passed the grander looking buildings, never made it apparent that I was curious about anything except the dreary progression of the well-paved road and the proud replicas of new Pakistani missiles mounted on traffic islands, the missiles named provocatively after the Muslim conquerors of India.
This timidity was partly created by the three men in a beat-up Toyota Corolla who followed me every time I left my hotel. Representatives of one or all of the three major intelligence agencies in Pakistan, they seemed to show an exaggerated interest in me, a reflex from the days of the spy-infested jihad. It would have mortified the very amiable Pakistani diplomats in New Delhi who arranged for my visa and gave me, an Indian writer, what I learned later was an unprecedented liberty of travel within Pakistan. But then to be an Indian in Pakistan—or, for that matter, a Pakistani in India—is to be trapped by the prickly nationa
lisms of the two neighboring countries; it is to be automatically suspect.
Not that the spies did anything—or even looked—particularly ominous; the most visible amongst them, a plump, rosy-checked man in a pink shalwar kurta, could easily have been one of the shopkeepers standing idle behind open sackfuls of dry fruits in the narrow dark rooms of the old bazaar.
Still, if you are not used to being followed and watched, it can get stifling. The world seems full of a vague menace, the friendly, rather camp bellboy with slicked-down hair whom you think you have tipped generously turns into an ungrateful informer (so does, at one point, everyone else), and the liveliest street scene begins to look like an elaborate preparation for an arrest.
Paranoia was what the spies embodied and then, by their very presence, instilled in me. But there was a deeper unease I felt throughout the first three weeks I spent in Pakistan, waiting to go to Afghanistan, an unease about Islam and Muslims I had so far seen in others, something I sensed, while living in London, in the reports and outraged editorials about the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and other Islamic extremists in the British and American press and to which I thought I would be immune after my experience of Kashmir.
Tens of thousands of peopie—mihrants, soldiers, civilians—have been killed since the uprising began in 1990. The Indian press prefers to describe the situation in the valley as a spillover from the jihad in Afghanistan, the timid Kashmiris having been overwhelmed by Pakistani and Afghan terrorists looking to wage fresh holy wars. This broad picture, which depicted Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalists as the major villains, blurred and then dissolved altogether during the several weeks I spent in Kashmir last year; most Kashmiris still followed an unorthodox Sufi version of Islam, and the brutalities of the four hundred thousand Indian soldiers in the valley were what had pushed a small number of young Kashmiri Muslims into jihadi extremism.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Page 25