[Reader-list] Article from Outlookindia.com

[mir_taqi_mir at hotmail.com]

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Omportant essay


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Going Home

This account of my visit to my homeland last year is an attempt to
express the pain, the bitterness and the anger I feel for being an
Indian, a Kashmiri and a Kashmiri in exile at a time when the memory of
another minority in another border state of India recently undergoing a
more brutal, a more heinous 'pogrom' is still fresh.
Ajay Raina



	
	
	"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into
you." 

Friedrich Nietzsche  

When I talk to my KP [Kashmiri Pandit] friends about reconciliation and
hope in Kashmir or even about atrocities committed upon the innocents in
Gujarat, I am mostly shaken by the response. After so many years their
anger and bitterness and hatred towards Muslims remains: 

	"Gujarat and Kashmir represent two faces of the same coin. When
Pandits were killed and thrown out of Kashmir, no one in India gave a
damn. Now Muslims were butchered in Gujarat, and no one in India gave a
damn. Yet there are differences between the situation with Pandits and
hapless Muslim victims in Gujarat - not in what happened, but in the
manner how the social conscience in India reacted.  

	"Very few humanists in India came to the aid of KPs. No one
linked militant Islam to growing fundamentalism in the National
Conference, and almost no one blamed the State government for its
ineptitude or demanded the CM should be declared a criminal.  

	"Gujarat, on the other hand, has become the hollowed ground for
Indian humanists, who are eager to link berserk Hindus to the party in
power, want the CM's head on a platter and see the "dubious hand" of the
Center in the tragedy.  

	"In the end, however, Indian traditions of fate, indifference,
passivity and burdens of day-to-day living have again triumphed in
keeping the silent majority silent, whereas Hindu and Muslim criminals
and humanists keep busy dispensing justice by tools of their trades."  

A Kashmiri Pandit.  

  

For more than a year now, I have found myself unable to express in words
the desolation, the desperation, the hopelessness and the living death
of Kashmir which I was witness to when I was last there. This account of
my visit to my homeland last year is an attempt to express the pain, the
bitterness and the anger I feel for being an Indian, a Kashmiri and a
Kashmiri in exile at a time when the memory of another minority in
another border state of India recently undergoing a more brutal, a more
heinous ‘pogrom’ is still fresh. 

Back In Srinagar 

At the top end corner of the famous Lal Chowk of Srinagar -- named after
the Moscow’s famous Red Square -- stands Hotel Neelam, strategically
placed in the heart of Srinagar at the tri-junction of its most active
thoroughfare.  

Looking straight ahead through the shattered glass panes of the hotel
you will see the clock tower that never ever showed the correct time
right from the day it came to be installed there after a fanfare
inauguration by the Sher-e-Kashmir himself. Beyond the clock tower is
the Residency road of the British Imperial times.  

This road was later named Shahid Sherwani Road after the martyr who
single-handedly stopped the Pakistani tribal raiders from reaching
Srinagar in 1948 for which he paid by his life – a tortuous and
agonizing death; he was nailed to a cross. The road was later, re-named
its original name. After 1990, every other known and unknown landmark of
Srinagar that even remotely suggested of Kashmir’s association with
Independent India was re-named or not re-re-named at all.  

To the left of Hotel Neelam are the now completely gutted Palladium
Cinema and Hotel Lalla Rukh and beyond to Maisuma, Gow Kadal to Haba
Kadal to Fateh Kadal and the infamous Downtown. To its right is the road
that leads to the Amira Kadal, the first of the seven bridges of the
ancient Srinagar city. The Srinagar city, at all times of the day wears
a look of desolation and permanent mourning. After dark it is
frightening.  

To a poet who died before me 

	A patrol is stationed on the bridge and a car hoots like a
cuckoo.  

Agha Shahid Ali  

Inside Hotel Neelam, one sad evening on a cold December day, an old man
in his mid seventies was warming himself beside a bukhari along with
another young man. We were the only three guests in the restaurant of
the hotel that late evening. The streets had already emptied out. There
was no electricity, which is usual in Srinagar’s winters, because the
waters freeze and there is not enough of it left to run the power
plants.  

The locals, however, believe that most of the electricity generated in
Kashmir is sold off to the neighbouring states in the plains of India,
as part payment of unresolved debts of past. I was in Srinagar for the
first time ever after the events of 1990. I was scared because, it was
the first night of my stay in Srinagar and I was alone.  

The old man asked me for a cigarette which I helpfully proffered. Before
long, the old man started getting interested in me -- he asked me where
I was from, why I was in Srinagar and last of all he asked me my name 

I told him my name was Ajay Kumar and then I added Raina to it as a
afterthought. I was not really sure than, if I could announce my
identity to any unknown person in Srinagar so soon; an identity that did
not matter to me elsewhere, but in Srinagar, could have been a matter of
life and death to me at anytime in the past 12 years. 

He asked me my father's name and I told him
 I do not know if it was
just the smoke of the Bukhari, but I saw a film of cloud come over his
eyes, a mist of certain sadness, a tinge of remorse perhaps? He said he
used to know my father well; they had been professional colleagues till
the time he had to leave... we got talking and he told me of an incident
more than 40 years old. 

	"It was the Autumn of 1958
I was with a group of friends, having
tea in this same restaurant, about the same hour as now, the hour of the
evening news bulletins from Radio Kashmir -- as All India Radio is known
in Kashmir. The news announced the release of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah
from one of his numerous incarcerations. There was an instantaneous
jubilation all around.  

	"The shopkeepers downed their shutters and came out on the road
and the people walking back home from office, old and young, all made up
an impromptu procession that started from Lal Chowk and wended its
euphoric way down the residency road, past hotel Lalla Rukh, past Biscoe
school, past Partap Park towards Regal Chowk.  

	"It was a huge procession of people carrying lit candles, with
thanksgiving songs on their lips. It was a huge mass of euphoria that
turned into a mass frenzy in no time. At the Regal Chowk, someone from
among the crowd, pointing to a house, started uttering the choicest
Kashmiri abuses
 

	"In no time; a man (one of the cabinet minister or the party
official - I don’t clearly remember which it was - of Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammad’s then government) was dragged down from his apartment and
roundly abused and beaten up by the mob.  

	"With the light of the lit candles in their hands, the mob set
that badly mauled and almost lifeless man to a blaze. Over his burning
body, writhing in death throes, they danced
and they sang songs of
thanksgiving to the God for Sher-e-Kashmir’s release.  

	"I was watching this gory celebration from the side pavement on
Residency road near Regal Chowk. An old frightened man, a Kashmiri
Pandit with his typical headdress and ‘tilak’ on his forehead, nudged me
and asked me if I had a pen and some paper. I fished the same from my
pocket and gave it to him
He wrote something on the paper and returned
it to me with an urging, that I must preserve the paper and remember
this mad moment
On the paper was written,  

	

		"'I may not be there when the same sight will repeat
before your eyes, sometime in the near future. These very people who are
singing the praises of their Sher-e-Kashmir today, will one day burn his
effigy on these very streets of Srinagar. The person they revile now
will in turn be visited at his grave with flowers by the same men.' 

		"In 1990, I saw the prediction of that Pandit come true.
In the euphoria of ‘azadi’ and mass frenzy, the people of Kashmir, who
so revered their Sher-e-Kashmir, actually wanted to dig up the very
bones of their very dear leader from his mausoleum.  

		"The grave of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, to this day
remains guarded 24 hours of day and night by a posse of heavily armed
security man. His son rules Kashmir now. [This conversation, you'd
recall took place last year, before the October 2002 elections -- Ed] He
will in his own time anoint his own son as heir-apparent of Kashmir, in
the same imperial fashion of Indian Maharajas, the way Sheikh Abdullah
did more than 20 years ago when there was wide spread jubilation on the
streets of Srinagar. On the other hand, the memory of Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammad, the Chief Minister replacement of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953
remains unsullied
" 

		"At that time, in 1990, in the spirit of the Old Pandits
prediction, I had made my very own prediction about the future of
Kashmir:  

		" 'These very people who have brought our land and the
Pandits of Kashmir to their present misery will one day turn upon each
other and tear each other apart.’  

	"This, my friend," he concluded, "is the entire story of what
has happened to Kashmir in the last 12 years since Kashmiri Pandits left
because of a forced exodus."  

	I never met him again after that
but subsequently, I have come
to know, and read and hear that during those initial moments of euphoria
in 1990, the same kinds of forebodings and apprehensions had occurred to
many older generation Kashmiris about the future of Kashmir.  

	The waters of the many sacred springs and revered religious
shrines of Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims had turned dark or had begun to
overflow. The forebodings of imminent catastrophe in Kashmir are too
numerous to recall, but magnitude of death and destruction that has
visited upon Kashmir in the past decade, has permanently scarred the
landscape of the valley and the psyche of its people within Kashmir and
of those in exile in the plains of India. 

	In 1990, the Militants of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and
Hizbul Mujahideen dealt my sense of self and my identity as an Indian a
humiliatingly serious blow. 12 years since, it is still hard for any of
the people who belong to my community to consider going back home.  

	When we cried for our people then - some shot in the head with a
single bullet, some tortured to death, some hanged, some sawed off into
a hundred body parts and some gang-raped to death, and when we cried for
our homes, farms, orchards and a heritage of traditions and beliefs left
behind - we were graciously enough provided ‘tents’ and a ‘migrant’
status within our own country, so we could be left on our own to wipe
our tears and pick up the threads of life in exile.  

	Nobody spoke up for us then, and not enough. The wounds of
‘forced exile’ of an entire community of Kashmiri Pandits have begun to
fester and bleed again after the events of Godhra and Gujarat. My heart
cries out for them but the tears have long dried up.  

	How can I even defend what I have become?  

	But yes, Gujarat affects me too. It affects me enough to remind
me of my own secondary status as an ‘exile’ in my own country. When I
saw the images of death and destruction and read about the horror tales
from Gujarat, I only saw annihilation of my race in Kashmir
re-re-revisited upon another hapless community of people who belong to a
religion in whose name the hapless and non-violent minorities of Kashmir
valley were forced into exile.  

	Some wise man has said, "Rebellions are normally started by the
hopeful not the abject poor." I am not sure if, when the people of
Kashmir rose up in revolt against India, they were really hopeful of
winning, or even if they were really sure about the real contours of 
the ‘azadi’ they were seeking.  

	The success of the ‘popular’ revolt that lasted only a few years
– till the slaying of Professor. Mushir-ul-Haq, I was told - was due
partly because of the frightening power of the gun over the local
populace, and mostly because of the collapse of every organ of local
governance and the abject surrender of will by the then inept Chief
Minister of J&K. 

	If only, if only they had refused to release the JKLF militants
in exchange of Rubia Sayeed. If only, if only they had not started the
sudden night time searches on January 19-20, reportedly on nobody’s
orders because that day Farooq Abdullah had already resigned. If only,
if only the massacre at Gow Kadal had not taken place. If only, if only
the procession carrying Moulvi Farooq’s Dead body had not been fired
upon by panicking CRPF soldiers. perhaps the contours of the
‘militant-azadi’ movement that picked up as a consequence of these
errors of judgment may have been different today and may have led us to
the real reforms the people of Kashmir genuinely sought.  

	But these are the big If’s of ‘our’ folly and Faroukh Abdullah’s
‘manipulative’ hold over the reigns of power. 

	The failure of the ‘azadi’ movement is much more stark in the 12
years of continuing violence, destruction and robbing of every charm of
Kashmir. The fact is, the vale of Kashmir is a deafening wail now,
desperately looking for the bottom of the abyss into which it has sunk,
into which all its blood flow pours.  

	In the Kashmir of 1989-90, all the dissenting voices against the
violent movement were silenced by death or by forced silent acquisition,
so it had appeared that the entire population was with the revolt. Only
now, when the local militancy has almost dissipated and been replaced by
a dangerous variety of pan-Islamic militancy, are more and more Kashmiri
people coming out to speak against the militants who started it all. 

	A well-known senior journalist in Srinagar said to me. "Before
1989, were we ever prevented from offering prayers in our mosques?" This
is a sentiment almost echoed by a successful doctor in Srinagar, my
classmate at school, who I met again after 12 years, "Who did ever stop
us from practicing our religion here?" 

	A young journalist friend who I met in Srinagar, sounding bitter
in retrospect about those ‘euphoric days of revolt’ said to me, "The
people who used to lead the ‘azadi’ processions, wearing shrouds in
defiance of death, are still alive today, while the people they led are
long dead now."  

	The Srinagar of today is a contrasting picture of destroyed old
landmarks and burnt out structures and of new constructions in the
downtown and newly sprung up suburbs. Comparing Srinagar and a city like
Ahmedabad in terms of population density ratios, I was surprised to know
that there are more Marutis on Srinagar’s roads than in Ahmedabad. 

	Looking through my nostalgic eyes, I was certainly struck to
note that Srinagar today is positively more affluent than it was in the
days when militancy started. How has this phenomenon come about in a
land devastated by violent instability?  

	"Those who only had a grass mat to cover their mud floors are
today living in palatial houses."  This is a common bitter refrain by
the affluent class of old, when they speak about Kashmir’s neo-rich, who
started off as foot soldiers of the ‘militant’ movement.  

	Of the many people I asked, "Why is militancy still continuing,
when people are so fed up?" I was told again and again, "it is the
people with the vested interests - the militants/politicians/surrendered
militants/and neo-businessmen, 'the 5% of people' - who do not want the
uncertainty to end, so that they can thrive."  

	I recall a modern Kashmiri story, which to my knowledge best
describes the ‘the present mind’ of the Kashmiri collective mass in
these times. The story, An Infernal Creature by Amin Kamil, is about a
village that used to be, but is no more.  

	The village, called Zeegyapathir, had six mohallas and five
graveyards on the borders between each mohalla. One day, the only son of
an old woman, borne by her after several miscarriages, dies. The dead
son is buried after the performance of all the sacred Muslim rituals,
but the old woman, unable to bear the sudden loss of her only son, loses
her mind. In the middle of the night at the graveyard of her son, she
espies some dark mysterious figure up to some mischief
 

	The next day morning, her dead son’s grave is found dug up and
the body is left without its shroud. The body is promptly covered in a
fresh shroud and re-buried. The next night, the same deed is repeated
and some other fresh graves are similarly found despoiled off their
shroud. There is much hue and cry and commotion in the village. Every
suspect is questioned. Every villager is suspected, but the shroud
stealer is never found.  

	The deed becomes a regular practice in the village. The
villagers, at first curious and angry and perturbed, slowly reconcile
with the mystery of the shroud stealer. ‘In this way, when all the dead
bodies of the Zeegyapathir, men and women alike without exception, got
robbed of the shrouds, it by and by became a custom with them. Nobody
got agitated on this, nor did anybody show any kind of fear. They got
used to speaking and hearing of this for two decades. 

	"We were at the graveyard. Has he robbed it? It looks like that.
Let the hell take him. 

	"These four sentences were at the tip of the tongue of everyone
at Zeegyapathir. You would be greeted by these words correct to a
syllable for it had assumed the form of a ritual like giving the last
bath to the dead, and burying the body." 

	Twenty years had passed so. One day a villager by the name of
Ghani Mokul dies. In his last statement before death he confesses to
being that mysterious shroud stealer. He is roundly cursed, but the
piety of the villagers ultimately rescues him from any idea of an after
death revenge.  

	"The truth, however was that the soft-hearted people of
Zeegyapathir did not like to go so far."  

	He is therefore properly buried. The villagers as a matter of
habit continued to curse him but also felt relieved at having been rid
at long last of a big calamity.  

	However, the next day morning they find his grave not only
despoiled of its shroud, but also "left exposed to the elements at the
edge of the grave." Which the first man – Ghani Mokul had never infact
dared to do ever to any dead body. Ghani Mokul is however, re-buried as
had been the practice in the village. 

	And the morning after the next, they find him, and a few other
fresh dead bodies too, again exposed at the edge of the grave in stark
nudity.  

	"It now dawned on the people that it was not simply a case of
wreaking vengeance on Ghani Mokul – the original shroud stealer, but a
new monster was on the rampage
Everybody at Zeegyapathir got scared and
said to one another, "We can not find another man like Ghani Mokul. He
no doubt divested the dead bodies of their shroud, but naked by no means
did he leave them, this hellish creature is far worse than a brute."  

	Then onwards, the people showered blessings on the original
shroud stealer and cursed the new monster with all the abominations of
the hell." 

	The collective mind of the mass of Kashmir is today resigned to
the death and destruction they see happening around them in a similar
way as the people of the fictional Zeegyapathir were resigned to the
ritualistic robbing of their graveyards. The people of Kashmir are not
only hopelessly resigned but also totally powerless before the
Frankenstein’s, they themselves helped create and breed among them. 

	In TV discussions over our satellite news and entertainment
channels, the experts opine that, "what’s going on in Kashmir is a war
of attrition, which nobody seems like winning or losing." They say, "our
sibling neighbour is ‘bleeding India by a thousand cuts’, but on the
ground, there are people of flesh and blood - fathers, mothers, sons,
daughters, brothers, sisters and friends, the people of Kashmir and the
soldiers of India - actually being killed and robbed of their human
dignity.  

	As you will be reading this - the rioting and the killings will
be continuing in Gujarat
at the same time, in some remote hill village
of Kashmir, a family of Hindus or Muslims will be yet again be massacred
by a band of people fighting ‘jihad’ for the liberation of Muslim
majority kashmir
On an average about 10 -15 deaths are reported
everyday. In the past 12 years of ‘militancy’ in Kashmir about 62,000
people have already died. In the past 12 years of ‘militancy’ in Kashmir
about 62,000 people have already died. When is this killing ever going
to stop? 

	When is this killing ever going to stop?" I asked of some in
Kashmir
	A friend said, "In Kashmir, the right to natural death does not
exist."
	My driver said, "The only solution to Kashmir is an Atom Bomb."
	A young writer, who wants to work in Bombay films said, "Our
‘problem’ can only be settled by a war between India and Pakistan now.
Whosoever wins, gets Kashmir."
	A human rights activist (he used to be a Launching Commander of
Hizbul Mujahideen in the young days of the revolt) said, "The killings
will never stop, there will be a civil war here, as in Afghanistan."
	The waiter in my hotel said, "The gun is a source of money and
power to those who wield it, how will they give it up easily." 

	Over there in Kashmir, they call it ‘Gun Culture’. Over here in
India, we prefer to cover our head in the sand, and we say, "It is
cross-border terrorism." – but, when are the killings ever going to
stop? 

	In Srinagar, the job of a journalist these days is writing
‘obituaries’: 

	The independent press of India (the one that lay prostrate
before the forces of Emergency when it was only required to bend)
championed the cause of the homegrown militants of Kashmir, because it
felt the ‘revolt’ was an answer to the decay within Kashmir’s polity.  

	True! Can’t be denied. But the 12 years of militancy have not at
all affected any change in the decay that was; the decay in fact has
decayed further. The political order remains the same. The ruling party
is more hated now than it was before 1990, corruption has in fact become
a way of life and unemployment has increased many folds. The rich have
become richer by addition to their ranks of another class of the
neo-rich.  

	There are more beggar women on the streets of Srinagar when
there were none earlier. There is still no electricity. The villages are
still without roads and safe drinking water. The only thing that has
shown any remarkably real progress in Kashmir is ‘the proliferation ‘ of
local newspapers advocating human rights. I counted about 10 English and
about 20 Urdu newspapers but still none in Kashmiri language.  

	The Indian press has by now lost all interest in the happenings
of Kashmir unless there is something really horrendous to report, but
what is the Independent Press in Kashmir championing now? Developmental
issues? Azadi? 

	Almost 11 years to the day, when the Revolt erupted in Srinagar,
there was a suicide bomber attack near the main entrance to Badami Bagh
Army cantonment of Srinagar. I was visiting an acquaintance, from my
college days, in his newspaper office. He was busy trying to get the
details of the attack.  

	First he called up his sources in the Army and the Police for
their official ‘Death Figure’. They said one Army person and five
‘locals’ including the suicide bomber had died. He than called his local
journalist friends one after the other, and about 10 of them - who must
have similarly arrived at a consensual figure amongst ten others at
their own end – collectively arrived at a figure, decidedly and
purposely much higher than the official death toll.  

	Their ostensible objective: to project – that the suicide
mission was a ‘success’.  

	A few days later, at the airport, I met a Junior Commissioned
Officer (JCO) of the Madras regiment from the Indian Army. He was
accompanying the coffin of a dead comrade to Chennai. It was the coffin
of ‘The’ Jawan who had stopped the suicide bomber at the Badami Bagh
cantonment gate.  

	The Subedar told me "only one soldier died, the newspapers
always exaggerate. The terrorists always attack us when we are having
our lunch, change of guard or when we are about to wake up in the
morning."  

	He did not know, I may one day write about it, because I never
thought I would. He also told me, "We burnt down the shopping complex
opposite the gate. We thought there were terrorists there, but there
were not any actually." 

	The next day, based on the pictures of the bombed site taken by
a stringer, and after making a few phone calls, my journalist friend
wrote an ‘eye-witness’ report, which was published in some of the
National English language papers at Delhi. 

	In Kashmir, along with the dead, they also bury the truth
everyday.  

	They bury the truth in tomes of newsprint, poetry and
propaganda. They announce its death at Human Rights Meets in Geneva and
New York, where rival Human Rights activists, representing rival points
of view, speak of deaths as ‘points’-- for and against -- on a score
sheet of victory and defeat.  

	Javed Ahmed Mir, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front, the freedom fighter of Kashmir who pioneered the ‘selective
killings’ of ‘pro-Indians’ (mostly Kashmiri Pandits and National
Conference workers – the leaders were spared) said,  

		"We started the killings only to draw the attention of
the Western Press to our cause. CNN has come to visit us. BBC has come
to visit us. Rabin Raphael also came and visited us here. Now we have
announced unilateral ceasefire. We want to have a political dialogue. We
want peace, but the martyrdom of our Freedom fighters cannot be
forgotten. They call us terrorists, but they reward Nelson Mandela and
Yasser Arafat with Nobel Peace Prize."  

	The JKLF now limits itself to street fights and bandhs and to
exhibiting the photographs of their dead. I remember Javed Mir pointing
out to me a particular photograph – of a few months old dead child – and
making me feel guilty as if it was my own daughter I had allowed to be
killed.  

	As I write this, I hear on TV of a yet another suicide attack on
an Army camp at Jammu. 12 children have been killed, among them a 3
month old child. Javed Ahmed Mir is silent in Srinagar yet.  

	They have mastered to speak eloquently about ‘their’ pain and
‘their sacrifices’ to seek rewards in return. About the pain of others
they speak with forked tongues, they say ‘it was a mistake’. They
condemn India of its ‘Human Rights Violations’ and they overlook the
rapes and vengeance killings by the freedom fighters within their own
ranks. They speak of their own dead and forget to mourn the deaths they
themselves caused. Innocents all:  

	Shakeela w/o Ali Mohammad Dar - abducted, gang raped and
tortured to death. 
	Mir Mustafa - A political leader, kidnapped, tortured and
strangulated to death. 
	Dolly Mohi-ud-Din - kidnapped, tortured, gang raped and shot
dead. 
	Sarla Bhatt, Staff Nurse at SKIMS - kidnapped, raped and shot
dead. 
	Prof.Mushir-ul-Haq - Kidnapped and shot dead. 
	H.L. Khera - Kidnapped and shot dead. 
	Sohan Lal Braro - Shot dead. 
	Archana Braro - gang raped, tortured and shot dead. 
	Bimla Braro - gang raped and shot dead. 
	Mohammad Amin Cheentagar - beheaded. 
	Tika Lal Taploo, Political leader - shot dead. 
	M. K. Ganjoo, retired Judge - shot dead. 
	Lassa Kaul, Station Director Doordarshan Srinagar - shot dead. 
	Satish Bhan, social worker - shot dead. 
	Ghulam Nabi Kullar, Communist - shot dead. 
	Abdul Sattar Ranjoor, poet - shot dead. 
	Maulana Masoodi, an intellectual &Freedom fighter - shot dead. 
	Syed Ghulam Nabi, Government Official - shot dead. 
	Moulvi Farooq, a religious leader - shot dead. 
	

	The list is a long one, this is just of some who come to mind
readily ... and there are many more who still continue to die 
not any
of these died by police firing.  

		  

		
and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners left
behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From
windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us, like
ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,
the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. Kashmir is burning.  

		Agha Shahid Ali 

	 

	Who killed Mir Mustafa?
	Who killed Dr. Gooru? 
	Who killed Moulvi Farouk? 
	Who killed Qazi Nisar? 
	Who killed Abdul Ghani Lone?
	Kashmir is burning still, who lit the fire? 
	Who burnt the Chrar-e-Sharif? 
	Whose midnight soldiers?  

	In the Month of February in 1990, Kashmiris used to go in trucks
and buses in processions to Chrar-e-Sharif shrine, to pray for ‘azadi’.
They used to tie threads as promise in return for fulfillment of their
dreams. In 1995, they stood silent as ‘Foreign Militants’ - representing
a brand of Islam alien to the very ethos of Kashmir - lay siege to our
prime shrine and let it be burnt down by a Must Gul, who escaped to a
hero’s welcome in Pakistan.  

		  

		
"All threads must be untied
		before springtime. Ask all – Muslim and Brahmin - if
their wish came true? 
		He appears beside me, cloaked in black: "Alas! Death has
bent my back.
		It is too late for threads at Chrar-e-Sharif." 
 

	Agha Shahid Ali 

	  

	The threads are there no more now. Along with the Shrine, the
hopes for that ‘azadi’ also lie in ruins. Today they go to the burnt
down shrine at Chrar and to their Sufi ‘Pirs’ not to pray for ‘azadi’
but for the return of sanity to Kashmir.  

		"Rehman Sahib is one faith healer in whom thousands of
locals, especially women, believe. He lives in a mud house at Aalistang
in the outskirts of Srinagar, where his sitting room is always full of
mureeds (devotees). One after another, they come close and whisper their
problems in his ear. "Please pray and stop my son. He wants to be a
militant," a mother from nearby Waheedpora village in Ganderbal
requested the peer sahib (saint) one recent morning. Another woman
sought help for an end to nocturnal raids by the security forces on her
house. "I have two grown-up unmarried daughters. It is dangerous. Please
help," she begged, and started crying."  

	Muzamil Jaleel  

	  

	But why does the fire that lit Chrar-e-Sharif consume us still? 


	Because they betrayed Nund Rishi by their silence and they
allowed their temples to be desecrated and they lied about their
betrayal of our Gods to the entire world.  

		"Kashmir is burning: 
		By that dazzling light 
		we see men removing statues from temples. 
		We beg them, "Who will protect us if you leave?" 
		They don’t answer; they just disappear 
		on the road to the plains, clutching the gods."  

	Agha Shahid Ali  

	An obvious reference to the Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from
Kashmir, the above lines of a poem, by its implication and compounded
and by its extraordinary formal brilliance suggests that the Kashmiri
Pandits left despite being stopped by their neighbours and that they
came away carrying their temple gods along with them.  

	In reality, nothing could be farther from the actual truth. In
his poetic lament about the pain of Kashmir - often searing imagery
his
voice unerringly eloquent in response to Kashmir’s agony", as Edward
Said writes in his praise on the back cover - Agha Shahid Ali can barely
remember the agony faced by his Pandit friends in those euphoric days of
near freedom, when it appeared as if the whole Muslim population of
Srinagar had come out on the streets shouting "allah-o-akbar’, ‘hum kya
chahite - azadi’ and ‘death to Indian dogs’.  

	He can barely remember, ‘the call to all Muslims of Kashmir to
revolt’ which was announced - from pre-recorded audiocassettes - through
the loudspeakers of mosques all over Srinagar city. He can barely bring
himself to imagine the panic of a miniscule community, faced with the
impotence of an administration in Kashmir that had suddenly vanished
He
can barely remember, that this miniscule community was looking in the
face of a yet another forced migration, the fourth in the span of a few
hundred years
 

	Your memory gets in the way of my memory
Shahid  

		Twelve years later, when I came to Kashmir, I chanced
upon a temple at Rainawari. 
		I opened the door, but Shahid, there was no god inside,
it’s true. 
		It was all filth and ashes there, walls smeared with
human refuse of many years: 
		How could you not have seen them, stopped them - the
kalashnikov people - 
		from stealing my gods and burning your temples?  

	I asked a Kashmiri Pandit friend, who is now settled in a far
way land, to explain to me why Kashmiri Pandits chose to come away
rather than stay back and fight. He wrote back to me, a long letter:  

	"You have seen the sober faces of the population there (12 years
after) but what I have experienced cannot be put into words. It was a
feeling of uncertainty and isolation with doubts about the sincerity of
your closest associates. It was almost being enslaved with the
tyrannical smile of the victor haunting you.  

	"It was the time to decide whether you would be able to accept
the NIZAM-E-MUSTAFA (rule of the faithful), either willingly or after
seeing your family dishonoured and massacred. Do remember that it was a
well thought of plan to drive all kafirs away.  

	"The area commander of any area never was native of the same
area and thus would not relate to you. His only aim was subjugation in
the name of Allah. Killing in his name was justified as was revealed by
Javed Mir in your documentary. Previously (Before 1990), our differences
could be settled by a word for word or at the most a fistfight. Now it
was the kalishnikov.  

	"Fathers would not dare to discuss the futility or viability of
the actions. Brothers would not trust Brothers lest they would be
killed. THE FEAR WAS TOTAL. The sane had no say and the insane were
driven into frenzy by their masters. Chaos was total and administration
had collapsed completely.  

	"It is too simplistic when I put it into words but just close
your eyes and imagine the plight. There can be no proper description of
the events in words. Finally it was our worldly wisdom, which made all
of us to flee the place. When I migrated, I had to fend for family and
myself. The options were either to organize a resistance OR to start
afresh. I chose the latter." 
 

		  

		If only somehow you could have been mine, 
		what wouldn’t have happened in this world? 
		I’m everything you lost. You won’t forgive me. 
		My memory keeps getting in the way of your history. 
		There is nothing to forgive. You won’t forgive me
.  

	Agha Shahid Ali  

	  

	But there is a lot to forgive and ask forgiveness for. The first
thing that has to be answered about Kashmir is about Kashmiri Pandits
forced abandonment of their motherland. 

	Who orchestrated their deaths, their feeling of persecution, and
their fear? 
	Who sent them the anonymous letters asking them to leave
forthwith? 
	Who sponsored those ads, those notices in leading local Dailies
of Kashmir, threatening the Pandits of dire consequences, if they did
not leave?  

	It surely was not because Jagmohan, the then administrative head
of J&K, facilitated the exodus, as Indian Human Rights people would like
us to believe. To Kashmiri pandits, Jagmohan in his person represents
the abject failure of the ‘state’ in not protecting, nor ensuring the
safety of its ‘non-violent’ citizens, who remained true in their loyalty
to India.  

	It's true, and I am ashamed to admit, as most Pandits now are,
that when they came as refugees to Jammu and Delhi, they went straight
into the arms of "the Hindu Parties". But tell me, what are a
‘traumatised’ people supposed to do, but hope for refuge in the camp of
a party ‘supposedly their own’, when threatened by ‘Islamic forces’ and
when betrayed by the secular forces of India? Which secular institution
of India has spoken up for the trauma of Kashmiri Pandits yet? The irony
here is that even the human rights activists who have so tirelessly
tabulated all the atrocities inflicted upon a hapless minority in
Gujarat still continue to silently acquiesce in the forced exodus of
Kashmiri Pandits quoting Governor Jagmohan as an alibi.  

	And after forgiveness, There is a dispute to settle. 

	The fact of the matter is, between Us and Them, Between India
and Kashmir, between India and Pakistan there are many disputes to
settle. Central to the resolution of all these disputes, is the dispute
between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The genesis of these disputes
has forever been prone to myriad interpretations and conflicting points
of view - of the experts as well as the layperson - which no amount of
logic, good sense and wars seem to unravel or resolve. 

	In the words of a Pakistani writer: 

		"When India's Home Minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel sent
feelers about a possible give-and-take on Hyderabad and Kashmir, Ghulam
Mohammed is said to have spurned this opportunity and carried on his
lucrative dealings with Hyderabad Nizam. Pakistan also welcomed the
accession of Junagadh and Manavadar, whereas an overwhelming majority in
both states (as well as Hyderabad) was Hindu.  

		"In effect, Pakistan held three divergent positions on
the question of accession—in favour of the Hyderabad Nizam's right to
independence, Junagadh's right to accede to Pakistan against the wish of
the populace, and, in Kashmir, for the right to self determination.
Double standard is a common enough practice in politics, but it
invariably harms the actor who lacks the power to avert consequences.  

		"The Nawab of Junagadh tried to deliver his
Hindu-majority state to Pakistan, which set the precedence for the
Maharaja of Muslim-dominated Kashmir choosing India. Pakistan did not
have the power to defend either the Nawab or the Nizam, nor the will to
punish the Maharaja. So India, practising double standards in its turn,
took it all.  

		Eqbal Ahmad
		

	That may well be the truth about J&K’s accession to India, to
many Kashmiris, Pakistanis and even to some Indians, but there are also
other truths. The truth about Sheikh Abdullah’s genuine liking for
Indian secularism. The truth about his preferring to stay with India
rather than with Pakistan. The truth about his not insisting on ‘azadi’
before or after 1953. The truth about Sheikh Abdullah being a genuine
and great leader of Kashmiris. The truth about Faroukh Abdullah being an
inept inheritor of Sheikh Abdullah’s legacy.  

	The problem with truths is that it has not brought us, at any
point of time, any closer to a resolution than it ever can, even 50 or
100 years from now. 

	There is one another story by Amin Kamil, which expresses the
nature of this dispute much plainly than any amount of explanation or
writings have so far.  

	The story What Matters Is The Head describes a dispute between
two thanedaars of adjacent police stations over a murdered corpse found
lying at the boundary of their respective area jurisdiction. Before the
culprit can be found or the murdered person identified, it is necessary
to determine in which thanedaar's jurisdiction the murdered person was
found.  

	The case is confounded by the fact that it is difficult to
determine in which side of the boundary the head of the deceased lay,
because the thanedaars have conflicting proofs. The respective
thanedaars, in order to prove their claim about the jurisdictional right
over the corpse, wrangle in colourful language over the finer details,
the technicalities and the forensic procedure, thus in fact relegating
the dead corpse and its case to oblivion.  

	Finally, the bewildered bystander watching the entire drama is
exasperated by this jurisdictional drama to ask for a final resolution.
He is told, "What matters really is for us to find towards which side
the head of the corpse lay. So long as this is not resolved, the matter
will linger on as it is." 

	"But what about the corpse, meanwhile?"
	"Let it rot." (Sadne do ji)
	

		"India's policies have been no less riddled with
blunders than Pakistan's. Its moral isolation on Kashmir is nearly
total, and unlikely to be overcome by military means or political
manipulation. New Delhi commands not a shred of legitimacy among
Kashmiri Muslims. Ironically, even as India's standing in Kashmir
appears increasingly untenable, Kashmiris today appear farther from the
goal of liberation than they were in the years 1989 to 1992." 

	Eqbal Ahmad
	

	It is true; Kashmir’s problems are as a result of our country’s
folly and blunders. Our follies and blunders in Kashmir are compounded
by the fact of Partition and by the existence of a dispute, as our
permanent neighbour enemy continues to insist. Kashmir has been used to
bleed purportedly for a cause in which not many Kashmiris believe.  

	The resolution of the historical dispute between India and
Pakistan – through logic, diplomacy, wars, and terrorism or by time -
has defied a sane answer for the last 55 years. Nor does it seem any
likely that India and Pakistan can co-exist in peace by any stratagem
invented or discovered so far.  

	Meanwhile, the deaths and the killings of the innocents in
Kashmir continues. We are as close to a war as at any time before. 
Kashmir is caught in the crossfire of History. Kashmir was happy and
prosperous once, when it had chosen not to be in the crossfire. 

	It’s more than a year since my last visit to Kashmir. The
tumultuous events of the past year – September 11, December 13
Parliament Attack, The Fall of the Taliban in Afgahnistan, President of
Pakistan’s famous January 12 speech denouncing Terrorism and Islamic
Fundamentalism, and the most recent catastrophe of ‘state sponsored
pogrom’ in Gujarat and the terrorist attack on children and women at a
Army camp in Jammu, have completely altered my fundamental understanding
of the nature of man and along with it, the perception about man’s sense
of his morals
which allow him to justify one violent cause at one place
as ‘just’ and to condemn another equally violent cause as ‘unacceptable’
to civilization.  

	I have never felt so powerless before the ‘insane’ insistence by
men - of presumably immeasurable human values and inestimable
intellectual capabilities - of their personal dogmas and points of view
and the catastrophic consequences thereof. I therefore repudiate every
ideology that leads to violence. 

	And I want to ask my people in Kashmir: Isn’t it time that
Kashmiri people resolved, once for and all, to give up the option of
violence as a means to finding the solution to a historically vexed
problem? 

	... 

	The above is an account of my first journey to Kashmir in 12
years since I was there last. I still have a home there and I am looking
forward to my permanent return as soon as I can determine for myself
that my life and freedom will not be at any more risk there as it is
here.  
  _____  


	Ajay Raina is a film maker. His film about homecoming - "Tell
them, the tree they had planted has now grown" - won the Golden Conch
award at Mumbai Festival 2002 and the RAPA award. 
	
	
  _____  

	# You may be missing other accompanying blurbs, related stories,
graphics etc.
	Link to this story as it appears on the site :- Going Home
<http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20021115&fname=ajayraina&s
id=1> 
	www.outlookindia.com <http://www.outlookindia.com> 
  _____  


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<http://203.200.89.68/NEWsuboutlook.asp> 
	
	

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