[Reader-list] Please, set Kashmir free

[Shivam Vij शिवम् विज्]

Please, set Kashmir free

by Malavika Sangghvi
Saturday, August 23, 2008  21:56 IST
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1185295&pageid=0

As the daughter of a Kashmiri Hindu, whose family left its ancestral
home in Srinagar during the turmoil  that followed Partition, I would
like  to express a sentiment that I still haven't heard in the
rhetoric about Kashmir.

I speak for those for whom Kashmir is not a symbol of one-upman ship
with Pakistan, not a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is intrinsic to the
sovereignty of India  and not a football to be kicked around by
cynical politicians, but as the daughter of a family in whose very
lifeblood Kashmir courses every moment.

Cut our hearts open and you will see Kashmir, put your ear to our
sighs, and you will hear our yearning for the land where our family
spent its last days intact and happy before Partition scattered us to
the winds, rendering us refugees.

Growing up dislocated in Mumbai, as a child, it never failed to
surprise me when people who often  hadn't so far stepped out of their
suburb, would say:"Kashmir is ours! We will never give it up! Let them
try and take Kashmir from us!"

Even at that early age, when I could have mistaken their jingoism for
kindred sentiment, I realised that their virulence had nothing to do
with my family's  love for Kashmir, but was misguided machismo.

And I would find myself seething with rage at the audacity of their
presumption. "But Kashmir was never yours," I'd say in my mind. And
sometimes, when more provoked: "You don't deserve Kashmir!" And then
I'd go home to my mother, whose ever present, unshed tears for her
homeland, were a leitmotif of our life in Mumbai.

Throughout my childhood, my family would go back to Srinagar (the
ancestral home in Vazir Baugh had to be sold when my widower
grandfather became too old to live alone) to stay with Muslim friends,
with whom we shared a poignant empathy: we had lost Kashmir because we
had moved away; they were losing it everyday, living there, witnessing
its destruction. Over kawha, we would watch as the elders of our
family weep for what had been.

Like a woman too beautiful for her own good, Kashmir was a tragedy
even then. It produced an ache in our hearts when we heard its name
and thought of its ill fate: and then, because you cannot sit weeping
over lost Valleys all your life,  when we returned home we put Kashmir
on the backburner.

And on that backburner, Kashmir fermented Sheikh Abdullah, a man whose
commitment to India was unquestionable, was humiliated, jailed,
alienated. The most unimaginable genocide was committed on the
people. Entire generations of its sons were mowed down by an army
whose presence was as large as it was unpopular. And in its knee-jerk,
misguided, ill-conceived approach to Kashmir the Indian polity
revealed its shallowness.

But through this all, intrinsically, those of us who have Kashmir in
our bloods, know that the Kashmiri Pandits who have been driven out of
their homeland are not enemies of the Kashmiri Muslims, in fact they
are both victims of the historic blundering of the Indian government's
Kashmir policy.

Take away Delhi's political brinkmanship, take away the Hindutva
sentiment that has played so neatly into the hands of Pakistan and its
fishing-in-troubled-waters game and you may be surprised at how
harmoniously Kashmir's Hindus and Muslims can live.

So, on behalf of my mother, my family, and all those who have loved
and lost Kashmir, I beg:   Please. We have done enough damage to and
in Kashmir. Enough to last many lifetimes. The chinars are tinged with
too much  blood. We have failed Kashmir and we don't deserve her
anymore. Leave Kashmir alone. Set her free.

Email: s_malavika at dnaindia.net