This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  I have seen the insurgency in Kashmir through the eyes of the remarkable, ever-optimistic Indu Mukund, a widowed mother to a three-year-old daughter, who caught the imagination of the country when she strode up to the dais to receive the Ashok Chakra from President Pranab Mukherjee at the Republic Day parade in January 2015. That day during an interview with her, I read out a love poem she had written in memory of her husband. ‘I know this for sure, one day I will meet him, I know this for sure... And he shall give me that warm hug of his, I know this for sure, and I will not complain that I can’t breathe, I know this for sure, you can hug me, hug me all you want.’ She didn’t want to recite it herself because she feared it might unlock the floodgates of loss and longing. Why was it so important for her not to betray any emotion, I asked. After all, who would not appreciate what she had gone through? ‘It’s important that India should see the man Mukund was, not my sorrow. It’s what he would have wanted,’ she said recounting how her husband had first evacuated civilians from the target house in a village of south Kashmir, and then moved towards eliminating three militants holed up inside, crawling on his stomach through the last lap of the operation, even when bleeding profusely. It was impossible not to be overcome with sadness when you saw the home video on the major’s Facebook page, now run by friends and family. His daughter Arshea on his lap, her hands wrapped around his neck, father and daughter were singing aloud to the words of iconoclastic Tamil poet Subramania Bharati.

  ‘Fear I have not, fear I have not,

  Even if the entire sky breaks

  And falls on my head even if they judge me as the worst,

  Fear I have not, fear I have not.’

  This was one powerful and defining aspect of the twenty-five-year-old conflict in Kashmir. Yet, I have argued, often without success, that it does not in any way diminish our gratitude for the heroism of our men and women in uniform to also be sensitive to the injuries of genuine injustice.

  Take, for example, the experiences of the Valley’s ‘half-widows’, women who live in the twilight zone of not knowing whether their husbands are alive or dead, forever asking the same question—when will he come back home, will he ever return? I would often see these women stream into the ancient Sufi shrine of Makhdoom Sahib in the foothills of Hari Parbat, their hands outstretched in prayer. They came here for solace, the hope of salvation and for a moment of peaceful solitude. One of the images that came to characterize the conflict was of grief-torn women sitting cross-legged on the floor, clutching faded photographs of the men who had disappeared, sometimes the only material memory they had of them, holding them up for the visiting cameras, hoping that media attention could somehow, magically, deliver a homecoming. Their husbands had evaporated into the ether of conflict. The uncertainty was so much more difficult than the certitude of death. Years had passed, yet they waited, both helpless and hopeful, for a knock on the door, borrowing perhaps from the words of the fourteenth-century mystic poet Lal Ded, ‘Ill or well, whatever befalls, let it come. My ears will not hear, my eyes will not see. When the Voice calls from within the inmost mind, the Lamp of Faith burns steady and bright, even in the wind.’

  The women mostly blamed custodial disappearances and in some cases, militant groups, for their men vanishing. Most of these disappearances took place in the first decade of the conflict; by the mid-2000s, an altered security environment and sustained campaigns by human rights groups saw a steep decline in such complaints. But, by now, an estimated 1,500 women had no reason but the irrationality of hope and the absence of bodily evidence, to believe that their partners were still alive. Neither widows, nor wives, their tragedy was compounded by the fact that religious leaders had issued diktats prohibiting remarrying. Often in the prime of their youth they found themselves facing a future of uncertainty and emptiness. In March 2014, the clerics finally relented and said that half-widows could remarry after a waiting period of four years, but for many this decision came too late.

  I met Shamima when she was only twenty-five. Her husband, Shabbir, had already been ‘gone’ for seven years. A midnight knock on the door by a unit of the Rashtriya Rifles proved to be dire. ‘My heart still says he is alive,’ she said softly, her head bent in sorrow, her wide-set eyes blank and tired. We were sitting together on the cold floor of her kitchen. In one corner, she’d put milk to boil on a small kerosene stove placed precariously atop a frayed rug with bright pink roses. Next to it sat her young daughter Bisma, dressed in an over-sized phiran, frowning in confusion at the presence of strangers in her mother’s home. The girl had been only forty days old when her father was taken (her brother Naseem had been three). Shamima had told her children their father was away on work in Jammu; every year she would tell them he would be back the next year. ‘I lied to them,’ she confessed in haltingly spoken Hindi. ‘I said he would be back in five years. When five years were up, my son asked me when he would be back. I said six or seven years. When seven years ended, I told them Papa called from Jammu and said he’d be back after the eighth year.’ When Shamima brings out her husband’s framed photograph to show us, the only form in which his daughter has known him all these years, Bisma burst into tears. A child knows when her mother is using the crutch of untruth to somehow walk around loss.

  In the one-room tenement that was home to a joint family of eight people, Shamima’s father-in-law, Ghulam Ahmed Gazi, a small-time shopkeeper, spread out numerous documents and affidavits across the floor of the tiny house, a testimony to the endless search for his son. A candle flickered on the kitchen ledge; a gas lantern provided some supplementary light as we pored over his papers in the dimly lit room. His face lined by age and grief, Gazi said he had spurned the offer of monetary compensation ordered by the state’s Human Rights Commission. Until he saw a body he would not believe his son was dead. ‘I told them I don’t want your one lakh rupees. I will sell my house and give you that money, just give me my son back,’ he said, as his grandson reached out and placed his tiny hand on Gazi’s gnarled, wrinkled fingers. Gazi told me his wife slipped into insanity soon after her son disappeared until death mercifully released her from pain. Now he spent sleepless nights worrying about what would become of Shamima when he passed on.

  Collapsing into inconsolable sobs mid-sentence, his hand reached out and clasped mine. ‘Mujhe yeh gham kha raha hai ki in bachchon ka kya hoga. Inko sirf upar wale ka aur mera sahara hai. Raat din mujhe yeh hee gham khaye ja raha hai (These children have no one but God and me as their support. What will happen to them when I die? This worry is eating me up inside. Who can say if their father will ever come back? Who knows if he is alive or dead)?’ As Gazi broke down, his grandchildren leaned forward to comfort him, one using the sleeve of her phiran to wipe his tears, the other wrapping his arm around him. Shamima worked wordlessly in the kitchen, barely looking up.

  This haunting image of personal tragedy should have evoked a humane response from observers, especially in the rest of the country, but sadly there were so many other elements muddying the picture—the violence, the terrorism, the lies, the untruths—that these victims did not even receive basic human compassion. This attitude mocked our mouthing of the statement that Jammu and Kashmir was ‘an integral part of India’.

  Equally, I watched with dismay as the worst militant attacks failed to evoke widespread condemnation or outrage within the state. No one took to the streets in protest when guns and bombs snuffed out the lives of countless soldiers, political workers, politicians, or even civilians. The violation of human rights rightfully triggered angry marchers and international op-eds calling for justice and due process but even mass killings by militants saw no overt chest-beating in the Valley. Not even when a hundred people—most of them civilians and pilgrims—were killed in a single day, in August 2000, in six coordinated attacks attributed to the LeT. Today, lulled into denial by the promise of ‘normalcy’, it’s easy to forget those sinister days. But if you were there, and saw as I did, body after body propped up on ice slabs at Sr
inagar’s Bakshi Stadium, with incense sticks being furiously lit to fend off the stench of death, you wouldn’t forget that easily. It was among the bloodiest twenty-four hours that the state had witnessed, beginning with blind firing at an Amarnath Yatra camp about ninety kilometres from Srinagar. At another location, seven migrant labourers were woken up from their sleep and shot one by one. Across the tunnel, in Jammu, members of a village defence committee were gunned down. The line of violence zigzagged across the state, finally ending with seven members of a surrendered militant’s family being killed in north Kashmir. No part of the state was spared the bloodshed. Yet, for years, global media continued to describe these killings as attacks by ‘gunmen’ in ‘disputed Kashmir’; the shift in Western perceptions of Kashmir’s tragedy, when the attacks began to be described as terrorist acts, only came about after the twin towers were brought down by Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts in 2001 and then too, not always. And Western observers were not the only ones at fault. In a society desensitized and hardened by constant violence, where death had become almost routine and thus unremarkable, the most frightening outcome was the failure to empathize. If local sentiment steered by separatists often fell woefully short of basic compassion or unequivocal condemnation, public opinion in the rest of India often dismissed grave human rights violations as the inevitable collateral damage of conflict.

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  It was in 1994, that the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons was first formed. Its leading light, Parveena Ahangar, a woman of indomitable spirit, often said that nothing but death would stop her search for her son Javed who was picked up by security forces at the age of seventeen during a raid and never returned home. In 2011, a police team of the state’s Human Rights Commission re-opened the debate on disappearances of people like Javed with its investigation of unmarked graves in north Kashmir. A survey of graves in four districts and at thirty-eight different locations led the commission to conclude that ‘there is every possibility that unidentified bodies in various unmarked graves may contain bodies of enforced disappearances.’ The report went on to say that as per the local police, the bodies were of unnamed militants handed over to villagers for burial. However, without exhumation and DNA sampling, the panel concluded, it would be impossible to identify and categorize with certainty the 2,000 plus bodies buried in various graveyards. Yet, the conclusions of the commission barely made the national headlines.

  To map the geography of the commission’s enquiry you had to head out north from Srinagar past the town of Baramulla towards the border villages of Uri near the LoC. Soft dappled light shimmered on the rice fields. The gentle gurgle of the Jhelum river guided us along the mountain curves. Three hours later, off the main highway, a winding smaller path led us to the village of Boniyar, overlooking the community graveyard. Only a handful of graves—six, to be precise—had tombstones and epitaphs, more than two hundred were nothing but slabs of blank stone waiting for history’s witnesses to inscribe their tale. In some cases, there was just a mound of mud thrown over the body that lay six feet under. The ageing grave-keeper, Atta Mohammed, had buried all those brought to him over many years, without asking too many questions. But what he had seen kept him awake at night even decades later. He spoke of families who came to the graves looking for sons, fathers, brothers, husbands; he had no answers to give them. ‘Burying bodies has begun to damage my health,’ he told me. ‘Hum kamzor ho gaye hain, aankhon ki roshni chali gayee. Raat ko neend nahin aati. Jab hum sote hain to hum in logon ke saath hote hain. Lekin inka chehra dekha nahin jata. Yeh sab khoon hai (I have become old and weak; the light has gone out of my eyes. At night I just cannot sleep. When I try, I see myself with all these men I have buried. But I can’t even look at their faces. All I see is blood, blood everywhere).’ As Atta Mohammed recalled bodies that had been brought to his graveyard—some dismembered, missing an arm or a leg, one with the entire stomach absent—he would lapse into sudden silence as he recounted the horror of what he had had to witness; it was too painful, even today, to put words to it.

  Less than an hour away from Atta’s graveyard, in another interior hamlet, I met a brother and a sister whose hopes had been rekindled by the Human Rights Commission report. Roshana and Ishtiyar sat close together with their mother wordlessly listening in, and told me about their father, an ordinary shopkeeper who went to work one morning in 1991 and had been ‘missing’ ever since. The siblings were infants then. As they grew older, finding their father became their life’s mission. ‘Every time I read something in the newspaper or see someone protesting, I feel a new hope rising within me,’ said Ishtiyar, his eyes downcast in silent admission that the hope was irrational. ‘When we haven’t seen a body, why should we believe he is dead?’ argued Roshana. ‘We can dream, can’t we?’ In the initial years after his disappearance, the children say, their mother was too over-burdened and grief-stricken to pursue a legal case. When the children were older and the family approached the police they suggested it was time to declare him dead as he had already been gone for seven years. Staring down at her clenched hands, Roshana said, ‘But I keep thinking he will walk in through that door any day…’ What was ordinary for others was hurtful for them. ‘Kissi ko bhi main “papa” pukarte huye sunta hoon to mujhe bhi lagta hai dil mein ki main papa bolun. Kyon ki maine zindagi mein kisi ko papa nahin bulaya (When I hear anyone calling out “papa”, I too feel the urge to say it. In my life, I have never been able to use that word),’ said a forlorn Ishtiyar.

  But this being the Kashmir Valley, the torment of the family did not end here. Roshana and Ishtiyar’s sister, Yasmin, was also killed in mysterious circumstances. When their father vanished Roshana was just over a year old, her brother not even three. As Yasmin grew into young adulthood, she led the family’s search for their father, making countless trips to the local police stations. One evening, in a terrifying echo of what had happened to him, she went out to meet someone and never came back. A month later, in the dead of night, there was a knock on the door. A voice ordered them to keep their lights off and listen carefully: Yasmin was dead, her body had been buried two kilometres from their house. The family believe Yasmin may have been targeted because her frequent visits to the police could have led militants to (wrongly) assume that she was an informer for the security forces. ‘We are trapped between both sides,’ Ishtiyar lamented.

  In several pockets of north Kashmir, similar tragedies were to be encountered. In one village of Kichama district in Baramulla, residents only had to glance out of their windows to see unmarked graves scattered in the wilderness behind their homes. The Human Rights Commission report estimated that there were a hundred unidentified bodies in this small patch alone. Though it had been investigated and compiled by a team of their own colleagues, the Jammu and Kashmir police were infuriated by the report. S. M. Sahai, a high-profile officer, argued that the revelations were ‘nothing very new’. Insisting these were the corpses of men who tried to travel into Pakistan for training in militant camps he told me, ‘Fact is that people while crossing the border were killed. A large number of them were from Pakistan, so a large number of them will remain unidentified.’

  The government was angry at the description of these burial grounds as ‘mass graves’ in sections of the international media. Kashmir is not Cambodia, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah argued. Human rights activists did not deny that within these unmarked graves could be victims of militant violence, or indeed even militants themselves. Hidden away beyond the apple orchards in a remote mountain hamlet with rundown hutments I met one such family. When the only earning member of their home ‘disappeared’, they suspected a militant group had abducted him, but it was impossible to protest or speak out. ‘If the army or police pick up a young man, there is some law you can invoke, an institution you can rally against. Whom do you protest against in a situation like this?’ asked one young man I met. ‘Agar hum awaaz uthayenge koi banda humare ghar aakar humko bhi mar dalega (They would have killed us too, so we kept
quiet).’ So, like much else in Jammu and Kashmir, the truth about the unmarked graves was certainly not absolute. What made it truly unfortunate was that few were concerned about it in the rest of the country. This was especially true of the government at the centre. Within the state the authorities continued to argue over exactly how many people had gone missing, when and under what circumstances. But the debate was meaningless to families where time had failed to bring the glimmer of hope or the certainty of heartbreak. When I met them, the women in these homes would wrap their arms around me and cry without inhibition even before they knew my name. It’s almost as if for them every visitor from outside was a bearer of some news, any news that would seal the open-ended sorrow of their lives.

  There were countless stories, like those of Shabnam’s brother Manzoor who was just nineteen in 1997 when he was bundled into a car by security personnel and never seen again. He had been walking home after picking up some milk and vegetables for his three sisters. When I met her in 2011, Shabnam had searched the prisons of Jammu, Delhi, even Rajasthan, for any sign of her brother. With the only earning member gone, there were days that the girls literally starved because there was no money at home. Now Shabnam had learnt tailoring and stitched clothes to support her family. She hadn’t given up on her brother.