An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  The Meiji rulers of Japan initially denounced Zen Buddhism, which had travelled to Japan from China in the eighth century AD. Buddhism was apparently backward, part of the feudal past that Japan had to outgrow. But then a generation of Buddhist intellectuals sought to deflect such criticism by placing themselves and their Buddhism at the vanguard of growing Japanese power. Many Buddhist monks became ideologues of the new nationalism. They claimed that Zen Buddhism was in complete accordance with bushido, the spirit of the warrior. Zen Buddhism became by the twentieth century the mascot of a progressive, rational and politically unified Japan, a sign of its spiritual and cultural superiority over the rest of Asia.

  The most important feature of Japan’s newly found modernity was an increasingly militarized state, which won stunning victories against first China in 1895 and then Russia in 1905, and then expanded into Manchuria, Taiwan and Korea. Many Buddhist leaders had little trouble endorsing Japanese imperialism. The Zen teacher Shaku Soyen, who had represented Zen Buddhism at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893 and who helped introduce Zen to America, was even more nationalistic than his Asian counterparts in Chicago: Vivekananda and Dharampala. He refused to join Tolstoy in condemning the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. In 1906, speaking before an American audience, he described how Japanese Buddhists distrusted individuality and how they proposed to ‘sacrifice their lives for a cause’ and develop ‘a nobler interpretation of death’.

  He sought to defend Japanese aggression against Manchuria in 1912. He claimed that

  war is not necessarily horrible, provided that it is fought for a just and honourable cause…Many material human bodies may be destroyed, many human hearts be broken, but from a broader point of view these sacrifices are so many phoenixes consumed in the sacred fire of spirituality, which will arise from the smouldering ashes reanimated, ennobled, and glorified.8

  Four years later, when Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, visited Japan on a lecture tour, he sensed the spirit of imitative nationalism that had seized large parts of the Japanese intelligentsia. Tagore was then in his mid-fifties, and a much travelled man. His poem Gitanjali, though florid in English translation, had won him the Nobel Prize in 1913, and brought him the admiration of W. B. Yeats among many other European artists and intellectuals. With his long flowing beard and penetrating dark eyes, he was to many Europeans the embodiment of Indian or eastern spirituality.

  When he set out in 1916 for his lecture tour in Japan and the United States, two decades after Vivekananda had mesmerized his audiences, his admirers probably expected a bit of high-flown abstraction from the beatific sage from the mysterious East. Tagore spoke instead of the problems he thought the world faced, particularly the competing nationalisms of Europe that had exploded into a world war.

  Writing in the 1880s, at a time of increasing competition among European nations for colonies, empires and markets, Nietzsche had warned against the mass politics of nationalism, against the ‘national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning with which European peoples nowadays delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if with quarantines’.9 European nations had conducted their rivalries in Asia and Africa, at the expense of weaker peoples, while preparing for war with each other without really expecting it. The long peace that ended in 1914 had been maintained by European statesmen practising realpolitik, the ‘pallid hypocrisy administered by mandarins’ that Nietzsche had raged against.

  It was clear by 1916 that the quick victories each nation expected would not come. Armies had faced each other across trenches for months; there seemed no way to stop the vast machinery of death the European nations had constructed. War itself had turned into a form of mechanized factory work; it had, as the German writer Ernst Jünger, who fought in the war, saw it, the ‘precise work rhythm of a turbine fuelled by blood’.10

  With the help of the latest advances in science and technology, the war killed, wounded and displaced countless millions, inaugurating a new kind of reckoning with human depravity and horror – statistics became the common measure of the suffering caused by the wars (Spain, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam), massacres (Armenians, Jews, Cambodians) and uprootings (Indians, Germans, Greeks, Russians) that marked the twentieth century.

  In Japan, Tagore praised the West for its liberty of conscience, of thought and action. But he also spoke of the ‘grave questions that western civilization had presented the world but not completely answered’:

  the conflict between the individual and the state, labour and capital, the man and the woman; the conflict between the greed of material gain and the spiritual life of man, the organised selfishness of nations and the higher ideals of humanity; the conflict between all the ugly complexities inseparable from giant organisations of commerce and state and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fullness of leisure.11

  In Japan, Tagore spoke to a largely sceptical audience of the dangers inherent in their national mood. He said that Japan’s ‘social ideals are already showing signs of defeat at the hands of politics’. He mentioned the irony that Europe had not respected Japan until the latter militarized. He spoke of the political civilization that the West had created in which the state is an abstraction and the relations among men are utilitarian. It was ‘based on exclusiveness’, eager to keep aliens at bay or to exterminate them. He said that ‘what is dangerous for Japan is not the imitation of the outer features of the West, but the acceptance of the motive force of western nationalism as her own’.

  Tagore feared that the idea of the nation state had acquired existential roots within the culture of Japan. What was originally a concept had turned under the imperatives of greed and conquest into a sacred and exclusive cosmic order. It created homogeneity within and excluded foreignness from without, dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. It claimed a monopoly on truth and goodness, and attempted to become the sole source of identity, meaning and purpose in human lives – something that men could easily be persuaded to die for.

  Speaking in the midst of the war, Tagore knew that the European masses had largely welcomed it at first – perhaps out of relief from the wearying routine of mechanized work that they had been forced into. Ernst Jünger later confessed how, ‘having grown up in a period of security, we all felt a desire for the unusual’. ‘The war,’ he wrote, ‘was supposed to offer us, finally, great, strong, solemn things.’ People everywhere were swept away by patriotic fervour. As Simone Weil wrote, the ‘state, the object of hatred, repugnance, derision, disdain, and fear’ demanded absolute loyalty, total self-abnegation, the supreme sacrifice, and obtained them, from 1914 to 1918, to an extent which surpassed all expectations.12

  In America, to which he travelled from Japan, Tagore claimed with more relief than concern that India ‘has never had a real sense of nationalism’. He asserted that ‘India shouldn’t compete with western civilization in its own field’. He wryly mentioned the Japanese newspaper that had editorialized about Tagore’s speeches against Japan’s imitation of the West: how they were ‘the poetry of a defeated people’.

  Subsequent events proved that Tagore was wise in not minding such defeats. The mood of triumph he had sensed was to turn Japan into an efficient military-imperial state through the 1920s and 1930s. In its attempt to counter the influence of Britain and the United States, it invaded and conquered China and after the fall of France moved into Indo-China. Finally, in 1941, it attacked the United States, which four years later ended the most serious challenge to the western dominance of the world by dropping nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Tagore, rightly nervous of Japanese nationalism, proved to have been too optimistic about India. The example of Ashoka’s humane reign was of mostly rhetorical value in an India striving after independence to be a modern nation state. For much of the time after 1947, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty presided over a system of administration left behind by British colonials. Impersonal bureaucrats had combine
d with autocrats into a heavily centralized state that claimed to promote democracy and economic development and set itself up as a supreme arbiter in the lives of its citizens.

  The government of free India often responded more ruthlessly to dissent than even the old colonial state. Its violence – usually carried out in the name of democracy and national security – had become most visible in Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Himalayan valley at the northernmost extremity of Ashoka’s empire, which had once been the centre of Buddhism in India. It was from here that Indian translators in the centuries after Christ had taken the Buddha’s ideas to Central Asia and China.

  Islam 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 for the mystics, poets and saints whom both Hindus and Muslims revered. It was part of the gentleness of life in Kashmir – the fragile achievement of a small, self-enclosed community, which had lived without great wars and conflicts, and whose later violation – by Islamic fundamentalists from or trained in Pakistan, and by Indian security forces – was to appear especially brutal.

  In the fall of 1987, as a teenager, I had first visited the valley of Kashmir. Growing up in the oppressively warm, dusty, flat and blindingly bright Indian plains, I imagined the bowl-shaped valley of Kashmir as containing all the marvels of the world: soft light, cool air and a gentle landscape of lakes and mountains. And on that first trip to Kashmir, the disappointment I had set myself up for never came.

  There was the Kashmiri countryside, where the poplar-lined avenues seemed to run endlessly, past the apple orchards and the rice fields, past the cool streams flowing over smooth pebbles, to some place of great calm and happiness. There was the capital, Srinagar, a medieval city with its densely packed alleys and wooden mosques, the butcher stalls with hanging flesh and the small dark shops where papier mâché toys sat in orderly rows and nimble hands unrolled bright rugs of fine Persian design.

  Around the Dal lake were the seventeenth-century terrace gardens created by Mughal emperors, where water ran through elaborately carved pavilions, and where on the peanut-littered grass young Kashmiri men and women met on surreptitious dates, not kissing, touching or even talking much, but simply being happy together.

  I didn’t take much notice of the Kashmiris except to wonder at their exotically pale skins and long woollen cloaks, and the slight resentment they seemed to harbour towards Indian visitors. I didn’t think much about them afterwards. It was as if the shawl and rug sellers, the drivers of taxis and shikaras, the countless touts and the red-cheeked children standing outside huts with rose-laden mud roofs existed merely to sustain my nostalgia for Kashmir.

  Years passed before I could wonder at my political innocence. India and Pakistan had fought two wars over Kashmir. Pakistan, which had come into being as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims during the partition of British India in 1947, had always claimed the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir.

  I had visited Kashmir in the last peaceful days it would know for the next fifteen years. By 1987, a better-educated and more articulate generation of Muslims had begun to chafe at the lack of democracy and economic development in the valley. The Indian government did little to help. Indeed, its representatives saw the distinct culture of Kashmir as something that had to be undermined before the state could join what they called the ‘national mainstream’.

  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. As in Algeria, Iran and Egypt, anxiety about modernization, about cultural influences from elsewhere and rampant unemployment turned, in Kashmir, into an anxiety about religion: the notion that not only Muslims but Islam itself was in danger.

  In the spring of 2000, I returned to Kashmir for the first time since 1987 to report on the Pakistan-supported anti-India insurgency. More than thirty thousand people – militants, soldiers and civilians – had died by then. I stayed in a big hotel, formerly a palace of the Maharajah of Kashmir, overlooking the Dal lake. I was the only guest.

  Less than a mile away, a bomb had exploded in a bazaar, killing seventeen civilians. Machine-guns poked out of almost every vehicle on the road. Army men had turned the hotels on the boulevards into bunkers. Srinagar was full of spectacularly ruined houses and new graveyards. Kashmiris appeared sullen and tense and it was only in closed unheated rooms that they poured out their rage and grief.

  I left the hotel on the day I learnt about the building next to it. It had been one of the more dreaded Indian interrogation centres, called Papa 1, where, among other things, burning and dripping tyres were hung over the naked backs of suspected militants. The screams of the prisoners, a journalist told me, often reached the hotel.

  I had been in Kashmir for a week when some unidentified men massacred thirty-five Sikhs in a remote Kashmiri village called Chitisinghpura. The killers, dressed in army fatigues, had come late in the evening. At two separate places in the village, they had asked the men to line up and then opened fire on them.

  The village lay in a little hollow muffled by pine, walnut and chenar trees, divided by a brisk stream of cool clear water. A bathing cabin of rough timber stood beside the meadowed bank, where cows grazed among the leafless willows. The villagers were apple, almond and rice farmers. Some of them turned out to own transport businesses – there was enough money around for the village to have two gurudwaras, domed prayer halls with courtyards, one for each side of the village.

  Chitisinghpura, which seemed at first sight so self-sufficient and serene, reminded me of Mashobra. But now this remote Himalayan village had been dragged into international geopolitics. The Indian government and media described the killers as Pakistani or Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists. Journalists and strategic experts on television were speculating that the fundamentalists had killed the Sikhs in order to send some sort of message to the American president Bill Clinton, who was arriving in India on a state visit that very morning, and who had described Kashmir as the ‘most dangerous place in the world’. They had gone on to speak of India as a victim of Islamic terrorism.

  Later that morning, while journalists and politicians continued to arrive in the village, I met a middle-level officer from the Border Security Force, one of the paramilitary organizations fighting the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir. He was a Hindu, a short, paunchy and courteous man. He had refused to talk to the Kashmiri journalists who accompanied me. He told me that he preferred to talk to a fellow Hindu; the Muslim journalists were unreliable. He had been in Kashmir for a long time; he knew about the treachery of Muslims. He told me that he wasn’t worried about the prospect of large numbers of Sikhs fleeing Kashmir after the massacre in the way the Hindus had done after being targeted by Muslim separatists. In fact, he wanted them to leave.

  ‘Isolate the Muslims in Kashmir,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll have a free hand to deal with them.’ He thought all pro-Pakistan separatists were traitors and Pakistan’s henchmen deserved no mercy. He himself hadn’t let go of any of the separatists he had captured in the six years he had spent in Kashmir: it had been torture and then execution for them. He couldn’t compromise, he said, on what he called India’s ‘national integrity’. The separatists had to be brought into line, preferably by violence, so as to end the rebellion against India.

  A day after President Clinton’s departure from India, the Indian government announced that the Pakistani murderers of the Sikhs had been killed in a military operation in a village called Panchalthan in a remote valley in Kashmir. The next day, the Indian newspapers carried black and white photos issued by the government of the partially charred bodies in Indian army fatigues.

  The Pakistanis were quickly buried; so it seemed was the whole matter. But a few days later some Kashmiri villagers discovered, near the graves of the five alleged terrorists, the personal effects of severa
l of their relatives who had been kidnapped from their homes soon after the killing of the Sikhs. When exhumed, the bodies were found to have been badly mutilated; one of them was headless. But the local villagers had little trouble in identifying them as their relatives.

  When I climbed up the hill one late afternoon in Panchalthan where the bodies were exhumed, the villages of hay-topped houses down the valley seemed peaceful. Across shimmering rice fields, women in colourful head-scarves sang traditional songs as they planted the paddy. Then, as dusk fell, they sat cross-legged upon little Kashmiri rugs and sipped salty tea from samovars.

  It was from villages such as these that Indian security officials had kidnapped four of the five men. They had taken them to a shepherd’s shelter on a steep hill, and shot them there in cold blood. Placing the necks of the corpses on logs, they had beheaded and dismembered them. They had then soaked the bodies with petrol and set them alight before presenting them to the world media as Pakistani terrorists or Islamic fundamentalists.

  I had met the police officer most Kashmiris suspected of kidnapping and murdering the villagers. Sitting in an executive chair behind a large table strewn with maps, he had struck me as an amiable, frank man; and I had spent much of my meeting trying mentally to square this person, with his quick smile and graceful manners, with the stories I had heard of his ruthlessness.

  The police officer was a Kashmiri Muslim. He came from a village not unlike the ones I had visited, and had worked his way up the administrative hierarchy. I expected him for this reason to be sympathetic to fellow Kashmiri Muslims. When I said so to a friend, a local Kashmiri journalist, whom I knew to be a devout Muslim, he replied, ‘He is a careerist. Careerists have no religion.’