SOME GLIMPSES FROM INDIAN OCCUPIED KASHMIR

Here are some extracts from an article written by James Buchan on Kashmir. James Buchan spent ten years as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. He has written five novels, among them "A Parish of Rich Women," which won the Whitbread First Novel Award: "Heart's Journey in Winter," which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; and most recently "High Latitudes."

1. …I am bewildered by novelty: not just the hillsides clear-cut of trees, or the shuttered bazaar in Anantnag and the soldiers and armed police everywhere, or the filthy lake and the crudy hotels along the Boulevard with soldiers' underclothes flapping from their balconies, or the streets full of garbage and army checkpoints ; but something about the way the Kashmiris move. The men hurry along with their heads bowed, evidently on some urgent business, though the bazaar and administration have been closed by a general strike. The women are muffled in their burqas, as if relieved to hide their faces (and hence their identities) behind a general, harmless and degraded femininity. They look as if the Indians have knocked the stuffing out of them.

2. On the stern of the boat, in the twenty-watt light, I drink Indian whisky from a teapot. A full moon shivers in the lake. The silence is broken every now and then, by a single or double gunshot, the muezzin hawking into the Hazratbal mosque public address system, or the lake belching methane from its bed of **** and silt. There are lights on the other side: the villas of war profiteers. The green bloom on the lake surface is indescribably sickly. I fear the Kashmir I knew ten years ago has no counterpart in this utterly messed-up world;

3. It is not that Srinagar has been destroyed by the fighting, as Beirut was in the 1970s and Kabul in the 1980s. There is no damage from heavy weapons. The rising or "militancy" as the Indians call it, was fought with knives, pistols, Chinese and Russian automatic rifles supplied from Pakistan and the weapons bazaars of the Afghan border, grenades and the home-made fused bombs known in the subcontinent as improvised explosive devices. It was put down with clubs, money and standard -issue carbines. The Indian Air Force never deployed an armed helicopter, and the airplanes from Delhi come in low over the valley as if the Stinger missile had never been invented or deployed in Afghanistan. What makes Srinagar unrecognizable is its loss of function.

4. The cricket pitches, houseboats, temples, Mogul gardens, shawl and papier-mâché shops that jolt past the window of the car stand idle or have been converted to military use….The streets and bridges are quite empty but for army patrols and Indian reporters in collapsing Ambassadors, morosely looking for trouble. It is as if the uprising has killed the entire population; or rather has sent the people burrowing into their houses, to sit all day on the floor, smoking and eating too much and trying not to think. Only the houseboat wallahs are out: so sleek and fat on my earlier visits, they have shed their weight and confidence and hang about the ghats, unshaven, poor as rats; or squabble over two European hippies, so closed off in their morphine and daily economies that they have nodded out a civil war.

5. The world I inhabited has vanished: the state government and the political class, the rule of law, almost all the 95,000 Hindu inhabitants of the valley, alcohol, cinemas, cricket matches, picnics by moonlight in the saffron fields, schools, universities, an independent press, tourists - and my chief problem -banks. In this reduction of civilian reality, the sights of Kashmir - the things worth seeing, in guidebook language - are redefined: not the filthy lake and Mogul gardens with their busted fountains, or the storied triumphs of Kashmiri agriculture, handicrafts and cookery, but two entities that confront each other without intermediary: the mosque and the army camp.

6. Waiting in the courtyard, while the worshippers scampered towards the gate, wer4 frisked, slid off their shoes, turned west, spread their rugs and bent to their prayers, I was startled by the good nature of the police around me. Then a word burst from the mosque public address system: azadi. It dissolved in a howl of sound, and as the police ran to the gate , their carbines jingling on their hips , it seemed to me the word had been ripped from the body of the speaker and still traveled through the air, over the lake to beat itself against the mountain wall, over and over again. Moments later a man called Javed Mir, famous in Kashmir, was dragged past me in the courtyard by six plain-clothes coppers, his slippers catching on the stones. Javed's face had the self-absorption of a man who has been in jail a lot and is going back there, but the rest was comedy; and it occurred to me that when you want to destroy a people's will you make them and their beliefs, in this case azadi, comical.

7. The rigging of the 1987 election convinced my son and his friends that there was no alternative to armed struggle, which they felt was the only way for Kashmiris to recover their right of an honorable and peaceful existence in an independent state. They were convinced that election and personal politics were no longer a solution. They knew it was impossible to fight India. They were doubly sure of the might of the Indian Republic and their own meager resources, but they were also sure their sacrifices would revive the dead Kashmiri issue in International forums. I am proud that their sacrifices were not wholly in vain.

8. The Garden of the Kashmiri Martyrs , as it is known, is a raised cemetery, planted with dwarf cypresses, gladioli, irises, and roses. There are about 400 graves, with headstones to record the name, place of residence, educational achievements and place of death of the martyr or myrtyress….In these graves, you can read the story of the Kashmiri uprising in a quarter of an hour….there are many women and children, evidence of the ham-fistedness of the Indian response. All around you, the Muslim middle class is being thinned out, individual by individual: surgeons, lawyers, journalists. What begins as a call to arms passes through a fantasy of victory and ends in inconsolable defeat.

9. Colonel Ravi said: "I would say there are some 2200 militants still active, of which about a thousand are foreigners of some sort or other, Afghans, Sudanese and so on. Bear in mind these fellows aren't the LTTE [Tamil tigers in northern Sri Lanka] who read army manual, and because soldiers are trained to take cover behind a tree or culvert when fired upon, put the improvised explosive devices in there. I have served in the Nagaland, Mizoram and Punjab; and our experience is that these militancies last about ten years before they exhaust themselves, so this problem still has a year or two to run before the Kashmiris are tired out. The particular problem is the border with Pakistan. It is difficult terrain and thus has to be manned, it can't be fenced or controlled electronically. We can't totally seal it off against infiltration."

10. (Colonel Ravi)…Then he began to speak of his life and work, of the wife he never saw and the children who'd grown up without him, and how in the Mizo Hills, the people walked singing to their fields at dawn and returned singing at dusk. He seemed to me to have given his life to his country, or to an idea of it…..I sensed that he did not want to be remembered only for that freezing morning in early January 1993, when his men burn't the bazaar in Sopore and killed fifty-four shopkeepers and their families…

11. Noor ul-Hassan, a former forester now active for human rights, ranged over all recorded history to show that the valley had never been ruled by Hindus from Delhi. On better days, those roots go down only as far back as 1846, when the British sold the present State of Jammu and Kashmir, plus some other pieces now occupied by the Pakistanis or the Chinese, to a Hindu soldier called Gulab Singh for 750,000 pounds down, a horse, twelve goats and six pairs of shawls in tribute each year. That a Muslim people had been sold to a Hindu ruler was not at the time considered reprehensible, though the British came, for reasons of strategy and even conscience, to regret it. The British mostly left the valley to be maladministered by its maharajas, content with sport and houseboat honeymoons…non-Kashmiris weren't permitted to own land or houses in the valley….and with destroying the shawl trade through cheap Glasgow imitations.

12. One can spend so long in 1947 that, stepping outside, you see the place transformed in the autumnal air, and to think to hear the Dakotas rumbling overhead…with just twenty men in each…and see the maharaja's motorcade, he in the first car, driving, with his Russian jeweller, Victor Rosenthal, beside him, the ladies in several cars behind, winding its bumpy way up over the Banihal Pass…the tunnel wasn't yet built…towards safety and oblivion. According to Karan Singh, the maharaja was silent all the forty- eight-hour journey till, arriving at the palace at Jammu, and turning to Rosenthal, he said:"We have lost Kashmir."

13. Thus, for the Kashmiri Muslims, Jammu and Kashmir, the only state in the Indian Union where the Muslims are majority, has been cheated by successive Indian administerations of the self determination promised by the founders of the Constitution…Kashmiri elections have never done Indian democracy proud, and those held in 1996 were unlikely to be exceptions….The village women, shrieking with excitement and rage, said the army had arrived at 6:00 a.m., called the men out of their houses by loudspeaker, and sent them down to the polling station. They had threatened, the women said, to cut off any hand that didn't display the indelible mark painted by Indian polling officers on the index finger. (I heard the charge often in the course of the day, but never saw such amputation.). Latter, in the Khwaja Bazaar district of Srinagar, a BSF sergeant, carrying a side arm, bawled at group of men: "Come to the Motherland polling booth. There is nothing to fear. The Motherland will protect you. Now come on, move along, Move!" Among scores of Kashmiris I met that day, only two elderly men said they voted willingly. That evening, at the J&K Tourism Center, the chief secretary held a press conference. He announced that the turnout in that Srinagar constituency had been twenty-five percent, including postal votes…a blatant fantasy.

14. Indian officials like to talk of the valley as "alienated" from Indian rule, a euphemism that does not begin to describe the mental condition of the Kashmiris. They are in shock. They simply cannot believe that between 14,000 and 20,000 people have died just to return the valley to the situation that existed before 1990: to Farooq Abdullah and the professional politicians of the National Conference. They cannot understand why the world has ignored them.

[Courtesy of Jamshed Khan]