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| The truth about Kashmir | | | Aditya Sinha
In 1982, two friends and I visited Kashmir, and enjoyed ourselves save the one moment when the young manager of our house-boat on the Dal Lake told me: “Yes, I know you’re from India.” It was jarring. I knew nothing of Kashmir’s history, so the fellow made no sense to me. I later dismissed it as a dreamer’s outburst when he told me I should take a Kashmiri bride back with me from the Valley.
Ten years later, I chatted with a local friend in downtown Srinagar. The initial separatist enthusiasm of 1990 had ebbed a bit, though no one was willing to admit it; local journalists were splintering in the way the tanzeems were.We were still heatedly discussing politics, but by now I did not flinch whenever ‘India’ was referred to as a foreign country.
My friend said: “We ourselves would have given up Article 370 if India had played fair with us.” But I did not take the bait; by now I knew that in Kashmir, there are many truths.
Two years later I went to a party in south Delhi, hosted by the Time photographer in India. In attendance were foreign journalists and those Indians who had been covering Kashmir on a regular basis. Time writer Anthony Spaeth cornered me and lectured me about how unfair India was to Kashmiris.
“I have Kashmiri friends,” he slurred. “They tell me what’s going on.” I listened and smiled. If we were so unfair, I wondered, why was it that I had just as many Kashmiri Muslim friends, if not more, than he. In any case, not too many years passed before Spaeth’s writings shifted in tone and emphasis, to something more India-friendly.
Another two years later Kashmir had its first elections after an eventful gap. On polling day, I left my hotel early, travelling south from Srinagar, going from village to village, and what struck me were the long, noisy queues at polling booths. The throngs were laughing and smiling, as if they were at a cow-belt mela. I did not even interview anyone at first, so fascinating was the sight: after many years of anti-India demonstrations and vitriol, people were behaving like children on a day off from school.
Suddenly, a car-full of foreign journalists pulled up at that very polling booth, and immediately the crowd turned and began shrieking zabardasti, zabardasti. They screamed that they had been forced by the Indian army to queue up at the polling booths; that soldiers had gone around knocking at doors at the crack of dawn, threatening to kill anyone who did not have the telltale indelible ink-mark on their forefinger.
Voters just emerging from the booth held up their forefingers as if that were sufficient evidence for their allegations. The foreigners were impressed.
Later in the day I traveled to north Kashmir, to Sopore, hometown of the poisonous Syed Ali Shah Geelani, head of the Jama’ate- Islami. The polling booths were deserted; local boys turned surly when I approached them. Yet the security forces also hovered — so why no zabardasti there? The foreign press gave the chief secretary a hard time at his press conference that evening, and the next day, they reported that the turnout was due to military coercion by India. Correspondents of the national newspapers, deputed from Delhi, reported a different story: that all Kashmiris happily voted, except in areas where the militants had threatened to chop off the finger that had an ink-mark. My own take had been that the traditionally liberal areas saw greater participation, the traditionally conservative areas showed more alienation from India. My editor was not happy, and took me off the home ministry beat.
These episodes are relevant because of Arundhati Roy’s recent essay in Outlook, and pieces by two well-known columnists, Vir Sanghvi and Swaminathan Aiyer, who, in reaction to the ‘azadi’ protests in Srinagar, said that the government should hold a referendum in the Valley, and if need be, let it go. One of Arundhati’s lines stuck out in particular: a Kashmiri woman told her that India’s pluses meant nothing to a people who were regularly raped by India’s soldiers. It was a statement that quieted Arundhati. I think she has been a bit naïve.
Soldiers in Kashmir do not regularly rape women. Even the most liberal activists doubt the veracity of the infamous Kunanposh pora incident in Kupwara in 1992. Yet rape does happen once in a while, and it used to serve well as a propaganda point to make Indians ashamed. Until, that is, the time Kashmiri militants themselves were regularly committing rape. The fact that Indian soldiers occasionally commit rape even in non-conflict zones is no excuse for even a single rape in a high-pressure situation. But to extrapolate this into something akin to what the Russians did in Germany at the end of World War II is, I think, taking advantage of Indian liberalism.
Familiarity with Kashmir will reveal that in this paradise on Earth, there exist simultaneously many truths. Each is selected to suit the audience at hand. Indians are told what will please them; Pakistanis are told what they want to hear; and Americans, of course, are treated like royalty. This is a basic feature of Kashmir.
Partly, the cold war between Pakistan’s ISI and India’s IB since the 1980s is to blame.
The smoke-and-mirrors bred distrust even within Kashmiri homes.Where there is no trust, there can be no absolute truth. This is one of the lessons that Kashmir offers.
This appears to have eluded these writers.
I like Arundhati’s impassioned pleas (India really needs her to counter-balance the crotchety old right-wingers); and I think Vir and Swaminathan, through their soft conservatism, represent more of urban India than either the hardliners or the liberals.
Yet all three are wide of the mark when they call for letting Kashmir go.
Firstly, India can’t let go — not legally, not politically, not logistically. It can’t happen, and it won’t happen; even if the Americans try to make it happen.
Secondly, it seems presumptuous for anyone to decide the fate of Kashmir without asking the people who live there. The Kashmiri is not an absolutist. He does not have an absolute truth. So he cannot be handed an absolute solution. Truth for him is relative; the Kashmiri is a relativist (I would never use the word opportunist). His solution will also be relative. Yet you can’t reach a relative truth without tâtonnement (in economics, the process of groping till equilibrium is reached). This requires dialogue.
It may sound radical, novel and cool to propose letting Kashmir go. Yet it is no position.
It lacks nuance, and it is undemocratic.
And it doesn’t seem to recognize one basic reality right below our noses.
When that house-boat owner from a quarter of a century ago said I was from India, his telling me to take a bride demonstrated he actually had no malice in his heart. His separateness from India was for him just a neutral fact of life. If we do not engage the Kashmiri in dialogue, and try to bridge over that separateness that he feels, another quarter of a century will pass us by, and by that time, there will be much more than just malice which will have filled his heart. |
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