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LETTER FROM KASHMIR

BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS
by Isabel Hilton

Posted 2002-03-11
When the French doctor François Bernier entered the Kashmir Valley for the first time, in 1665, he was astounded by what he found. "In truth," he wrote, it "surpasses in beauty all that my warm imagination had anticipated. It is not indeed without reason that the Moghuls call Kachemire the terrestrial paradise of the Indies." The valley, which is some ninety miles long and twenty miles across, is sumptuously fertile. Along its floor, there are walnut and almond trees, orchards of apricots and apples, vineyards, rice paddies, hemp and saffron fields. There are woods on the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains—sycamore, oak, pine, and cedar. The southern side is bounded by the Pir Panjal, not the highest mountain range in Asia but one of the most striking, rising abruptly from the valley floor. The northern boundary is formed by the Great Himalayas. At the heart of the valley lie Dal Lake and the graceful capital, Srinagar.

For Europeans, Kashmir became a locus of romantic dreams, inspiring writers like the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who didn't even need to visit it to understand its charms. "Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere," he wrote in 1817, "with its roses the brightest that earth ever gave." So seductive was this landlocked valley that, like a beautiful woman surrounded by jealous lovers, Kashmir attracted a succession of invaders, each eager to possess her.

The Moghuls established their control in the sixteenth century. Kashmir became the northern limit of their Indian empire as well as their pleasure ground, a place to wait out the summer heat of the plains. They built gardens in Srinagar, along the shores of Dal Lake, with cool and elegantly proportioned terraces—with fountains and roses and jasmine and rows of chinar trees. The Moghul rulers were followed by the Afghans and, later, by the Sikhs from the Punjab, who were driven out in the nineteenth century by the British, who then sold the valley, to the abiding sh
r seven and a half million rupees to the maharaja, Gulab Singh. Singh was the notoriously brutal Hindu ruler of Jammu, the region that lay to the south, beyond the Pir Panjal, on the edge of the plains of the Punjab.

Under Singh, the Kashmir Valley was conjoined in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. According to one calculation of the purchase, the ruler of the newly formed state had bought the people of Kashmir for approximately three rupees each, a sum he was to recover many times over through taxation. For the maharaja and his descendants and their visitors, the valley was a luxurious paradise; they enjoyed fishing and duck shooting, boating excursions on Dal Lake, picnics in the hills and the saffron fields, moonlit parties in the magnificent gardens. In the penetrating cold of the winters, the visitors, and the maharaja, left the valley to itself and returned to Jammu.

Kashmir was also a natural crossroads. The Silk Route, with its great camel trains from China, passed to the north, and the country's mountain passes opened routes to the Punjab, Afghanistan, and Jammu. Through them successive intruders brought different cultures that added layers to Kashmir's own. The Kashmiri language was a mixture of Persian, Sanskrit, and Punjabi; the handicrafts for which the valley was celebrated were Central Asian; and the religious faith was variously Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. Sufi masters left a legacy of music and tolerance in their Muslim teachings. A Sikh who had lived many years in Srinagar described the culture of the valley as an old cloth so covered in patches that you can't see the original.

Today, the valley is predominantly Muslim, but, as part of the maharaja's portmanteau state of Jammu and Kashmir, it still shares its destiny with other faiths and peoples: the Hindus of Jammu, the Buddhists of Ladakh, as well as Gilgits and Baltis, Hunzas and Mirpuris. There had been conflicts between the communities in the past, but by the mid-twentieth century Kashmir was an unusually tolerant culture.
that Partition brought to the neighboring Punjab when the British left the subcontinent, in 1947. Kashmir's violence was to occur later, as the two new states of India and Pakistan became the latest of Kashmir's neighbors to fight over it.

Today, Kashmir is partitioned—Pakistan controls slightly less than a third, India some sixty per cent, and China the rest. Most of Kashmir's twelve million people are concentrated in Indian-held territories, and the rest are mainly in Pakistan-held ones; relations among its many communities are now marked by mutual mistrust. And since the late eighties a bewildering number of combatants have fought a savage, irregular war that, in a steady daily toll of killing, has cost, depending on whom you believe, between thirty to eighty thousand lives. On the side of the Indian state, the participants include the local police, the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, and the Army, supported by various intelligence organizations and a motley group of turncoat former militants who have muddied the public understanding of who, over the years, has done what to whom. Opposing them are a proliferation of Islamic militant groups. At one time, there were more than sixty of them. Several are fundamentalist and deadly—like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which are based in Pakistan (and have been listed as terrorists by the United States) and were recently banned by Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. The largest group, the Hizbul Mujahideen, is Muslim but not, its supporters insist, fundamentalist, and most of its activists, who number around a thousand, are Kashmiris.

Surrounding the insurgency is the wider, implacable hostility between India and Pakistan. But at its core is the story of a people who, for five centuries, have been longing to call their homeland their own.



Last October, I was permitted to go into what Pakistan calls Azad ("Free") Kashmir, a territory that Pakistan maintains is truly autonomous but which depends entirely on the country's milit
d existence. India calls the territory Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The entity has existed ever since Pakistan wrested this northwest third of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir from Indian control in a war that followed the 1947 Partition. For Pakistan, that war was the first step toward a liberation of Kashmir's Muslims from India. Once liberated, Pakistan hoped, the Kashmiris would join Muslim Pakistan.

At the time of Partition, Jammu and Kashmir was still ruled by a Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh, a descendant of Gulab Singh. The maharaja was one of five hundred and sixty-two fabulously rich feudal monarchs whom the British had manipulated in order to maintain their grip on much of India. At Partition, these states were given a choice of joining India or Pakistan. Independence was not on offer. Most joined India. The maharaja dithered for months, unable to decide between two equally unattractive options. As a Hindu, he did not like Pakistan. As an Indian, he did not like the British. As a prince, he cared neither for the antifeudal Mahatma Gandhi nor for the local Muslim leader, Sheikh Abdullah, who favored autonomy for Kashmir but without its maharaja. Then, on October 20, 1947, armed tribesmen and regular troops from Pakistan invaded Kashmir. The maharaja appealed to India for support and hastily agreed to sign the now famous Instrument of Accession to India: the state of Kashmir and Jammu was accepted as part of the new federal union of India; in exchange, it was, exceptionally, granted a semiautonomous status. (India would control only matters of defense, foreign affairs, and communications; everything else was to be run by Jammu and Kashmir's own parliament.) Pakistan, furious, refused to accept the legality of the accession, and Pakistan and India fought their first war over Kashmir.

In Pakistan, what is remembered was a promise made by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to hold a plebiscite in which the people of Kashmir could make their preferences clear. That plebiscite was never held. India
 was agreed to under United Nations supervision, Pakistan failed to withdraw from Azad Kashmir, a betrayal that, India says, vitiated the commitment to the plebiscite.



Today, there are few routes that connect Azad Kashmir with Pakistan proper. Some fellow-journalists and I set out from Islamabad at 6:30 A.M. and drove for five hours along vertiginous valleys, through Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, and on into the mountains to Chakothi, a town on what is now known as the Line of Control—the ceasefire line established in 1949, after that first war over Kashmir. There, we walked to a peaceful clearing and sat sipping fruit juice. An immaculately turned-out brigadier, Mohammed Yaqub, the commander of the sector, briefed us on the Pakistani version of the history of the present conflict.

Tensions were unusually high. The United States bombing of Afghanistan had begun, and the military's view was that India might take advantage of the situation—troop movements had been detected. Yaqub's list of the casualties incurred in the last thirteen years of what he saw as Kashmir's freedom struggle against India was startling, even if undoubtedly exaggerated: 74,625 killed, 80,317 wounded, 492 adults burned alive, 875 schoolchildren burned alive, 15,812 raped, 6,572 sexually incapacitated, 37,030 disabled, 96,752 missing.

We took a path that led to a bluff overlooking a tributary of the Jhelum River. There was a slender, deserted bridge. On the other side were the Indian Army fortifications. A line of washing flapped in a light breeze above a series of bunkers. I peered through binoculars at men peering through binoculars at me. They waved. I waved back. A Pakistani officer admitted that, in more relaxed times, he met his Indian counterparts on the bridge and shared tea and sweets. "We don't talk about the war," he said.

Just as night was falling, we stopped at a refugee camp about an hour's drive away. A camp manager called on the refugees to tell stories of the atrocities that had forced them from their homes
mir. The misery, no doubt, was real, but the exercise smelled too much of propaganda to be of any genuine interest. The message, though, was clear: Kashmir was the unspoken subtext of the Afghan war. Under President Musharraf, Pakistan had sided with the United States and backed the bombing of Afghanistan. Nearly twenty years earlier, Pakistan had also sided with the United States in its mission to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, by enlisting Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the I.S.I., to arm and train Islamic warriors to lead the fight. The I.S.I. had seen the opportunity to foment discontent in Kashmir, and Islamic warriors were armed and trained and sent there as well. Both wars were seen as religious and patriotic causes. But now Musharraf had renounced the Taliban and his country's earlier ambition to dominate Afghanistan through support of its hard-line Islamist government. Would he also be forced to abandon a dream that Pakistan has clung to since 1947—of uniting the Muslims of Kashmir with the state of Pakistan?



I met a member of one of the Kashmiri militant groups in Islamabad. He called himself Iqbal, though we both knew that it was not his name. He was a good-looking man in his early forties, with black hair beginning to gray. We had arranged to meet in an outdoor café. He was nervous, and constantly scanned the customers until he insisted that we move to a different location. We drove around the city looking for somewhere to talk. Eventually, he took me to a house in an affluent district of the city, a two-story villa set back from the street by high walls. There, we sat on the floor, and he told me his story.

Iqbal had grown up in a Kashmir that preserved the memory—from before the Moghuls—of an independent country. For him, the Instrument of Accession was important because, in granting special autonomy, it implicitly acknowledged the idea of Kashmiri independence. But the Indian government, anxious about Pakistan's ambitions and uncertain of Kashmiri loyalty, regularly encroach
shmir's popular Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah, was removed and arrested (he was suspected of autonomous leanings)—the first in a series of detentions that continued through the sixties. In 1963, a sacred relic—a hair of the Prophet's beard—disappeared from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar, and demonstrations erupted. The following year, India passed an order that allowed the Indian President to rule directly in Kashmiri affairs. By then, Muslim sentiments in the valley were hardening.

The long-established Kashmiri tradition of tolerance—the pluralism that had accommodated so many different faiths and cultures—was breaking down in the frustration generated by India's interference. One friend described to me what the valley was like in the late seventies and early eighties. There were, he recalled, fevered political discussions, stimulated by activist teachers who distributed everything from the works of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the teachings of Mao Zedong. Kashmiris were impatient for change. Their hopes were focussed on elections that were to take place in 1987.

The chief minister was Farooq Abdullah, who had returned to power after having been dismissed by Indira Gandhi, in 1984. He had regained his position by allying himself with the Indian National Congress Party, and many regarded him as a traitor to the cause of Kashmir. The opposition was led by the Muslim United Front, a coalition of ten or so Muslim parties campaigning on a platform of Islamic unity and greater autonomy for Kashmir.

Iqbal was a student at the university in Srinagar and was involved in the electoral campaign. "The 1987 elections were our last hope," he told me. Eighty per cent of the population of the valley turned out to vote. When the results were declared, Farooq Abdullah's pro-India Conference-Congress alliance had—to the dismay and disbelief of the voters—won a two-thirds majority.

The fraud had been crude and blatant. In one constituency in Srinagar, witnesses told me, the result had been publicly declared, only to b
er. After the election, opposition candidates and party members were arrested. There were widespread street protests, which were brutally suppressed. "When the results were declared," Iqbal said, "people decided that we could not free our land through peaceful means."

Iqbal joined an underground group and was arrested. "I was in jail for two and a half years without trial," he said. When he was released, he was immediately rearrested and held for another two years. He was released and arrested again.

Iqbal returned to the university in Srinagar, but during an Army search an informer identified him as a militant. He was detained again. This time, he said, he was tortured. (According to Amnesty International, in Jammu and Kashmir torture has become so routine in the arrest-and-detention process that it is rarely reported.) But this time, once he was released, Iqbal took up arms. He joined Hizbul Mujahideen and spent three years as an underground militant. He was arrested three more times, before he finally escaped to Pakistan. He had spent, he said, fourteen years in prison, about half his adult life. "If you want to talk about Kashmir," he said, "you must talk about the eighty thousand innocent martyrs. It's a death rate of fifteen innocent civilians to every one Indian soldier."



A few weeks after I met with Iqbal, that balance shifted, marginally but dramatically, in the other direction. At eleven-forty on the morning of December 13th, in New Delhi, five men dressed in olive-green fatigues and armed with assault rifles, grenades, and explosives drove a white official car, complete with flashing lights and security passes, through the gates of the Indian Parliament complex. The session had just ended, and the politicians were beginning to disperse. It was only after security guards noticed the car turn the wrong way that they became suspicious. A guard ran after it, calling to the driver to stop. Alarmed, the Vice-President's security guard, waiting by his official vehicle, challenged the white car. Gunfire c
he Vice-President's vehicle, and the men inside ran toward the Parliament building. In the ensuing firefight, all five terrorists were killed, along with eight security personnel and a gardener. The car was found to be packed with explosives. The target of the assault was the Parliament building itself. Although the identity of the terrorists was not established, the Pakistan-based groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed were named by the Indian government, and the Indian press published calls to finish this long quarrel with Pakistan once and for all with a full-scale war.

In Pakistan, President Musharraf condemned the attack and banned the two groups, closing down their offices and arresting dozens of their members as well as other extremists. But in the following weeks tensions between the subcontinent's hostile neighbors heightened, and India began to lay mines along the border. The future of Kashmir was once again reduced to a poisonous contest between these rival nations. Each claimed to have the loyalty of the Kashmiri people and blamed the other for the conflict. In this deafening exchange, the voice of Kashmir was silent.







Ramesh Mahanoori is a Pandit, a Kashmiri Hindu who, like most of the half million people in his community, lived until 1990 in relative prosperity in the Kashmir Valley. The Pandits formed the backbone of the professional class, and filled most of the teaching and government jobs. They had deep roots and high status in the valley, and lived side by side with Muslims, sharing the Kashmiri traditions of song and poetry, eating in each other's houses, sometimes worshipping at common holy sites. The harmony between the communities, so distinct from the tensions and violence elsewhere in India, was part of a general culture—the so-called Kashmiriyat—of which both Hindus and Muslims were proud. Even when Partition unleashed mass murder between Muslims and Hindus elsewhere, in Kashmir neighbors of different faiths preserved their courtesies and communal tolerance.

But between Janu
at tolerance ended, and a quarter of a million Pandits fled the Kashmir Valley, driven out by murders, riots, and death threats. The Pandits had become early victims of the new Muslim insurgency.

Ramesh Mahanoori was once a teacher in the Kashmir Valley. Now in his fifties, he received me in a tiny one-room house in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Jammu. A large bed took up much of the room. There was a sliver of living space where a child sat on the floor, bent over a book; behind a curtain was a crude kitchen where Mr. Mahanoori's wife could be heard preparing tea. A tap outside served as the bathroom. We sat, cross-legged, on the bed, along with two of Mr. Mahanoori's friends. As we talked, his wife appeared and burrowed beneath the bed.

"That's where we keep the stores," he explained.

For Mr. Mahanoori, the expulsion of the Pandits was a straightforward case of betrayal. It began, he believed, with the Islamist underground, financed by the I.S.I. Its leaders had started organizing in Kashmir in 1986, and after the farce of the 1987 elections their followers increased. In 1989, an orchestrated campaign of executions began. "The first assassination was of a lawyer," Mr. Mahanoori said. "It was followed by other killings—three hundred and ninety highly selective killings of doctors, engineers, educators, judges. All labelled Indian agents. All our intellectuals." The government, he said, gave no protection. "There was a clear message from the majority that they could no longer live with the Pandits. The Muslims were all united under the banner of azad—freedom. Pakistan was their mentor."

Warnings were posted that Pandits who remained in the valley would be killed. Muslim activists set businesses on fire as the police stood by. Fear gave way to panic, and families began to leave. There were rumors of death lists in the local mosques. Pandits throughout the valley hastily packed and fled. Many ended up in the Hindu-dominated security of Jammu, in the south, imagining that they would return in a 
 their property was looted. Twelve years later, most of them are still refugees.

I heard endless variations of the Pandit story. Some people believed, genuinely, that the assassinated men had been agents of the Indian state. Others believed that the violence had been orchestrated from New Delhi (thus the lack of official interference); this way, the Kashmiri insurgents could be condemned for ethnic cleansing and dealt with accordingly. All versions agreed that the expulsion was brutal, sudden, and comprehensive.

Mr. Mahanoori recalled that in the village where he grew up in Kashmir he had been surrounded by members of his extended family. In the flight, they have scattered, and they rarely meet. "We had the same surnames as the Muslims," he said. "We were all related. They just converted to Islam—only three hundred years ago. Our cultures resembled each other. Here, in Jammu, we are aliens. We have nothing in common with these people."

Now there is a generation of children growing up in a world bounded by the camps. For them, Kashmir is a name, the source of their parents' sadness, something that marks them as different from the people of Jammu. They no longer speak the Kashmiri language, Mr. Mahanoori said. He longed for war. India, he said, should go to war with Pakistan, to resolve this issue once and for all.







As I flew to Srinagar, I had few fellow-passengers—some Indian military personnel, a handful of Kashmiris, and one other foreigner. Even the most intrepid trekkers now prefer to explore other, less dangerous mountains, and the tourist trade that used to sustain the economy has dwindled.

The road into the city was an obstacle course made from an eclectic selection of barriers: metal bars set with eight-inch-long spikes, rolls of razor wire, and oil drums filled with concrete, which forced cars to weave a slow slalom path between them. Each barrier was guarded by men with automatic weapons. Beside one, in a bizarre juxtaposition, a poster offered a seductive welcome. "Kashmir—an adventure," it s
 of forests."

The light was fading as I reached the last barrier before my hotel, which had been recommended as a secure place to stay. The driver stopped and switched on the interior light. Beyond my own reflection in the glass, an armed guard was peering suspiciously into the car. In the deserted lobby, Muzak was playing to empty armchairs. Three men looked up from the reception desk in surprise. The lobby was so cold that I could see their breath in the dank atmosphere.

India has now fought three direct wars with Pakistan, two of them over Kashmir. For India, the insurgency that began in the late eighties is another war with Pakistan—a proxy war, in which the enemy is Pakistani-trained infiltrators, with weapons and money supplied by the Pakistani intelligence services. This invasion of its territory, India argues, is a straightforward attack on its sovereignty, and demands defending. For India, Kashmir's status is incontrovertible: it is a part of the Indian state, a senior official told me, and there is no negotiation on either sovereignty or territory. India's response, therefore, has been a military one. But the nature of that response has created a conflict with the wider population of the Kashmir Valley.

Early in the morning on January 13th, four days before I arrived in Srinagar, two men were shot dead by Indian security forces, on a road near Dal Lake. Their names were Ahmed el Bakiouli and Khalid el Hassnoui, and it was reported that they were foreigners who had attacked a Border Security Force patrol. In the ensuing incident, the two men were fired on by soldiers on watch in a fortified bunker nearby. By the time local photographers arrived, Ahmed and Khalid were dead.

The fact that Indian soldiers had shot two men was not in itself newsworthy. Since 1947, India has maintained a heavy security presence in Kashmir, one that is now half a million strong. To the local Kashmiris, these forces look and behave like an occupying army. With the exception of the local police—who are regarded with suspicio
ry forces drawn from elsewhere in India—few of these forces speak Kashmiri. They, in turn, are far from home, surrounded by people whose language they cannot understand, and threatened by an enemy they cannot identify. To the Indian security forces, anyone they encounter could be a terrorist infiltrated from Pakistan. "If a dog barks in the market," one trader told me, "the Indians call him a Pakistani."

The men the soldiers are looking for belong to any number of dangerous militant groups, many with competing objectives—some wanting independence from India, or an Islamic state, or a union with Pakistan. Several groups began to impose a more severe version of Islam on the tolerant culture of the valley: women were made to wear veils, and bars and beauty parlors were closed down. Foreigners were attacked. In 1995, a Pakistan-based Islamic rebel group kidnapped six Western trekkers: four vanished and one escaped; the sixth was decapitated. There were plane hijackings, which sometimes led to the release of captured terrorist leaders; armed encounters in the mountains and villages; and car bombs and grenade attacks in the cities.

Indian security forces responded with repressive tactics. Shopkeepers and university professors, impoverished farmers and well-heeled businessmen continue to complain of routine cruelty exercised by the security forces during cordon searches: entire districts are sealed off, and the inhabitants are turned out of their houses and made to squat in the cold for hours as the troops ransack their homes. Men and boys are beaten; there are shootings; valuables go missing.

For the Indian security forces, such operations are a necessary part of a war against an unseen enemy—one who might be disguised as a market trader or as a schoolboy or even, as in the case of Ahmed and Khalid, as a pair of out-of- season travellers. But this time it was not just the people of Srinagar who were skeptical of the official account. Ahmed and Khalid, it emerged, were neither Kashmiri nor Pakistani. They were Dutch 
had ostensibly come to Srinagar as downmarket tourists. They had valid travel documents, had signed in at the Foreign Registration Office in Srinagar, and had been spotted at the Tourist Reception Center by a rickshaw driver named Amin Bakto, who was there looking for business. Bakto had invited them to stay at his houseboat, and they had been there for a week, when, according to an inspector general of the Border Security Force, they had gravely injured two of his men in an unprovoked terrorist attack.



Amin Bakto's houseboat, the Happy New Year, sits in a dirty side canal, greasy green water lapping against the boat's peeling paint. Bakto is a small, spare man, and he talked in nervous bursts, as though he were unable to shake the apprehension that he might somehow be implicated in the events that had led to the deaths of his paying guests. He lives with his family on an adjacent houseboat, and was willing to show me where the two Dutch nationals had slept for the week that they had been his guests.

It was a small room that contained little more than a double bed, which they had shared. Gaping holes in the floor were the consequence of the police search that had followed the killing. The room smelled of stagnant canal. Ahmed and Khalid had paid him two hundred rupees a night (about four dollars), Mr. Bakto told me, a sum that included the use of a heater and breakfast, which he had served himself at nine o'clock each morning. The men were pleasant and quiet, he said, and occasionally played with his children. He never saw them pray or visit the local mosque.

On the day they died, he had gone to offer them breakfast as usual, but found that they had left. The Happy New Year was empty, the doors and windows open. The men had set out along the towpath to a nearby road. By 7:20 A.M., they were both dead, sprawled some twenty yards apart on a road now spattered with their blood. Later, the police had found on the houseboat the packaging to a pair of large kitchen knives, apparently bought in a local bazaar. The 
the evidence that connected the two Dutchmen to a network of international terror.

No local witnesses came forward to corroborate the security forces' story, and almost nobody I met believed the account. The version favored by the local newspapers was that the patrol had been abusing a local woman, and the two Dutchmen had attempted to intervene. Others believed that they had been challenged by the patrol on their way back from morning prayers. They might not have understood an Indian soldier's command to halt. In either case, they risked being shot.

I went to visit Inspector General Gill, who commands the Border Security Force in Srinagar, and whose men had killed the Dutchmen. I had met him on my first evening in town at a rather stiff party attended by the local commanders of the security and intelligence forces in the district. He had seemed cultured and courteous, and it was difficult to connect him with the acts of torture and repression blamed on the men he commanded.

He had suggested that we meet at his bungalow in a hilltop compound that houses government servants. At the first barrier, my car was searched, and the driver and I were body-searched. At the second barrier, we were assigned guards to take us through the third barrier, where an armored car was parked, guarding the approach road. The final barrier was beside the compound gate. From there, I walked to the house. We talked in a small, bare sitting room, warmed by a large metal stove that crackled in the corner.

Gill is a slim man of fifty-one, a Sikh from the Punjab. For him, there was no doubt that the two Dutchmen were terrorists. Their attack, he said, had been unprovoked. They had inflicted eight stab wounds on his men before they were shot; one of his men lost an eye. For Gill, the Dutchmen reinforced his conviction that the war in Kashmir was sustained from outside—a Pakistani proxy war. He admitted that there was no evidence of a Pakistani connection in the Dutchmen's case. "Do I have to prove that everyone has a past career?" he aske
eneral point: If Pakistan, with its connections to international terror, would stop sending militants into Kashmir, the trouble would subside overnight. It was a conviction that was shared by the Indian government and widely reflected in India's national press. Besides, he insisted, his men did not shoot people without cause, and the many allegations of torture and disappearance made against his forces were scrupulously investigated. And almost none, he said, stood up.

The local press was unconvinced, even though it had been thoroughly briefed on the incident by Gill himself. The widely held feeling in the valley is that the insurgency is no longer masterminded from Pakistan or anywhere else: the native-born movement is now well established, after years of Indian abuses. And that feeling was reinforced by the killing of the Dutch tourists, regardless of what actually happened. Perhaps the men, armed only with kitchen knives, attacked a military patrol. But the belief is that this army of occupation can shoot anyone it wants to, anytime, with impunity.



I tried to explore the region around Srinagar. The roads to the border, where Indian and Pakistani troops continued to exchange mortar fire, were blocked with snow. To travel outside the city was dangerous. The splendid Moghul fort perched on a hill above Srinagar was occupied by the Army. I found myself circling the city, trying not to feel caged. The streets were wet and muddy, with piles of dirty snow. The light was flat and weak, filtered through a morning fog that rarely dispersed during the day. As I drove around, the sense of military occupation was oppressive. On every street, people were being stopped and searched by Indian soldiers, taxi-drivers opening the trunks of their cars for inspection, lines of bus passengers waiting to be frisked. My car was frequently stopped, my documents inspected, and my driver closely questioned. I was harangued by Indian soldiers who considered the stamp on my press pass insufficiently clear.

In the evenings, Srinagar w
stakable. As night fell, the people I met and talked to often began to fidget, caught between the obligations of hospitality and their anxiety that I leave before the streets became unsafe. Nobody, they told me, goes out after dark. A tremulous sociology professor described to me the social effects of the long war—migration, unemployment, broken families, a startlingly high rate of suicide.

"It's the constant fear," he said. "Torture, tension. Even at home, the security forces can arrive at any minute. We used to be a leisured people. Now all our entertainment has gone. It's out of the question to go out."

Education had deteriorated in the wake of the Pandits' departure, he told me; young women cannot find husbands, married women are widowed and destitute. He urged me to walk around the old city, a district I had been warned against, to discover how people really felt. It was a hotbed of militancy, I was told, and subject to constant cordon searches.

"Talk to people," the professor said. "No one will harm you." After a pause, he seemed to think better of his assurances. "Don't tell anyone in advance. Don't make an appointment, in case, in their innocence, they tell someone you are coming. And don't stay more than half an hour in the same place."

It was now dark, and he was agitated. I drove through the rapidly emptying streets, ready for another evening of chilly confinement in my hotel. But that evening I had a visitor.

I had called Commander Chauhan, of the Border Security Force, several times, and now he appeared, exuding friendly confidence, eager to show me the sights—at 9 P.M., long past the hour when civilians had abandoned the city. The Commander was a portly, bespectacled man dressed in a camouflage jacket and a black beret, and carrying a polished swagger stick and a walkie-talkie. He bustled jauntily into the hotel's freezing dining room and greeted the waiters by name. The waiters smiled anxiously.

The Commander was eager to stress that he had excellent relations with the local people. His job, 
them from the militants. His unit had adopted a girl who had been attacked with acid by Islamic fundamentalists for failing to wear a veil. There were orphans whom his men took care of. And, he assured me, they were steadily weaning the Kashmiris off Islamic extremism. Normality, he announced, was visibly returning.

"You see girls driving cars, boys and girls on motor scooters, going out to the lake, going to hotels, cinemas, and beauty parlors," he said. I had seen none of those things.

The security forces, as he described them, were dedicated to social welfare: "If someone's wife goes into labor in the evening, they just ring up. I send a car to take her to hospital. I have had so many calls to say thank you."

I didn't doubt it. Anyone moving around the city at night without military protection, pregnant or not, risked being detained as a terrorist. As though reading my thoughts, Commander Chauhan suddenly said, "What have you seen? I wish we had met earlier. I could have taken you on the lake. We have motor launches, you know. I'll take you out now, to see the city."

Outside, his jeep backed slowly to the door, as six soldiers armed with automatic weapons walked alongside. I climbed into the front, the Commander took the wheel, and the soldiers jumped into the back. Another vehicle moved up behind us. We then pulled out into the deserted street and embarked on a tour of the city.

"This is the polo ground," he said. He waved a hand vaguely at the darkness. "But they don't play much polo these days. And here—this is the golf course. Excellent golf." We drove on in the empty street. "This is the canal." We turned toward the lake. "Have you seen the Nishat Gardens?" he inquired.

Before I could reply, I was blinded by the beam of a searchlight which had appeared from inside a bunker. The Commander braked sharply. A man jumped out from the back of our vehicle and explained our presence to a group of nervous soldiers whose guns were trained on him and on us. Satisfied, they allowed us to pass, and the Commander
ption of the delights of boating on Dal Lake. I found myself recalling an incident described to me by a lecturer in the English department of the Srinagar university. A group of graduate students doing research on the lake one day were shot dead in their boat.

A few hundred yards further on, we found ourselves inching around oil drums and rows of spikes in the road, and came to a stop before a final improvised barrier of rocks—and another checkpoint. At the next bunker, however, we failed to stop in time, and there was a fusillade of hostile shouts. Commander Chauhan braked violently. A soldier in the back climbed out, his hands raised, and stood for several minutes in front, in the glare of the headlights, trying to talk down the guard whose gun was trained on him. I held my breath. Five more guns were pointing at the jeep. Even Commander Chauhan had fallen silent. At last, the soldier gradually lowered his arms.

Commander Chauhan had lost a little of his bounce. For the first time, he seemed to feel that he should acknowledge the surreal character of a city tour in which even a senior officer risked being shot by his men. "Actually," he said, "we give them orders that every vehicle must be stopped. You never know which vehicle a terrorist might be driving." As he picked up speed, his faith in his mission returned. "We are keeping them safe," he said. We turned back through the deserted streets of the old city. There was hardly a light showing, but for Commander Chauhan this didn't mean that people were afraid to go out. "Look," he said triumphantly, "they are all in bed with their wives and their blankets, and my men are out here, keeping them safe!" Suddenly, he turned to me. "What did people tell you, by the way?"

"They said they wanted independence," I replied bluntly. "That they were afraid of your men and their searches." I stopped short of telling him how many rejoiced when Indian soldiers were killed.

"Did you ask them why we search them?" he said.

I had not, of course, though I could imagine Chauha
risked people, in an exercise in hearts-and-minds didacticism, cheerfully explaining his motives as their humiliation deepened.

I asked him how many terrorists he thought there were.

"Very few, these days," he replied.

Why, then, did the government need to keep half a million men here?

"Because," he replied quietly, "you don't know who they are."







The conflict over Kashmir has entrenched the worst suspicions that India and Pakistan nurse about each other. For India, the separate Muslim state of Pakistan represents a rejection of the secularism that India believes to be essential to keeping its own rival religious communities at peace. If Kashmir's Muslims were to join Pakistan, what signal would that send to the more than a hundred million Muslims elsewhere in India? For Pakistan, India's refusal to allow Kashmiri Muslims to join the Pakistani state merely confirms its conviction that India never abandoned a long-term ambition to establish Hindu domination on the subcontinent, or that it even accepted Pakistan's existence. But for the people of the Kashmir Valley, with their distant dreams of independence, neither neighbor offers a solution. Pakistan's muscular Islam is at odds with Kashmir's Sufi-inspired traditions. The Muslims and Pandits of the valley speak a different language from the language of India or Pakistan. Neither country is home, and each, in turn, has been a threat: after all, it was the incursion of tribal raiders from Pakistan in 1947 that brought Indian troops in retaliation.

Thirteen years into the insurgency, the local politicians in Kashmir, like the competing militant groups, have conflicting objectives. Even members of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which was formed in 1993 by more than thirty political parties to act as a voice of a people who felt themselves disenfranchised, are quarrelsome and deeply divided. I met many members, and asked them what they wanted for the country. I got many different answers. One wanted union with Pakistan. One wanted independence. Others
 with real autonomy within the Indian state. Some had links to the militants; others did not. Each claimed to represent a general majority.