[Reader-list] Lines of Control - Basharat Peer

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Lines of control

Last Updated: December 11. 2008 8:06PM UAE / December 11. 2008 4:06PM GMT Like Palestine, Kashmir has served as a call to arms for countless acts of Islamist violence. Reporting from Srinigar, Basharat Peer describes life inside a rallying cry.





On November 27, the second day of the attack on Mumbai, five terrorists in their mid-twenties were holding hostages in Nariman House, an orthodox Jewish centre in India’s financial capital. As army commandos were preparing to launch an attack on the building to rescue the five hostages, a military helicopter circled overhead and a crowd of onlookers gathered. At about this time a populist Hindi-language news network, India TV, received a call from a terrorist inside the Jewish centre who introduced himself as Imran Babar, a 25-year-old. He spoke Urdu with a smattering of Hindi words in a Pakistani Punjabi accent; he had called to “explain why he was there.”

Babar, who came from Multan in Pakistan, delivered a mostly familiar list of grievances in a combative but controlled tone. He referred to the state-aided 2002 pogrom in Gujarat, which claimed the lives of some 2000 Muslims, described the wrongful arrests and detentions of various Indian Muslims, and complained of the daily injustices that afflict Muslims in India. The words he used most frequently were Zulm, the Hindi and Urdu word for oppression, and Itihaas, the Hindi word for history.

The Mumbai terrorists claimed to be part of a previously unknown terror group called the Deccan Mujahideen, whose name suggested a “home-grown” Indian outfit. But the scale and sophistication of the audacious assault on Mumbai pointed to the involvement of one of several militant groups armed by Pakistani intelligence and created to fight against India in Kashmir; Indian authorities have since blamed Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group that has carried out bloody attacks in Kashmir and, more recently, inside India.

I watched the video of Imran Babar’s phone call on a website at my parents’ house in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, a day after he called India TV. His voice and accent betrayed his lower-middle-class origins in Pakistani Punjab, far from the Deccan Plateau in southern India – even as he spoke of the oppression of Indian Muslims. But I was struck when he turned to Kashmir, saying: ““What was the Israeli Army chief doing in Kashmir? What is he to the Indian government? An uncle?” His voice was growing agitated and he shouted, “Was he there to teach what the Israelis do in Gaza and what they did to Bait-ul-Muqadas [the al Aqsa Mosque]?”

Here was a Punjabi terrorist who claimed to speak in the name of Kashmiris and Palestinians alike, assuming the mantle of oppressed communities to rationalise the murder of innocents in hotels and train stations. I was rattled, sitting in Srinigar, watching the loud theatre of terror drown out the complexities of life in Kashmir – watching the cause of Kashmiri independence become linked, in the mind of the world, with the deeds of jihadists in Mumbai.


The direct linkage of Kashmir and Palestine – two occupied territories, open wounds that sit side-by-side in the minds of those driven to violent jihad – was jarring. In the West Bank and Gaza, my Palestinian friends tell me, Kashmir is a distant, vague place of discontent. And in Kashmir, there is little talk of Palestine, though one might find the works of Edward Said and a few other Palestinian writers in bookstores.

But the September visit of Avi Mizrahi – the chief of ground forces in the Israeli army – to Kashmir, to which Babar referred in his call from Nariman House, made the front pages of all Kashmiri and Pakistani newspapers. India and Israel have shared defence co-operation since diplomatic relations between New Delhi and Tel Aviv were established in 1992. The ties have become stronger in recent times, and India has become the largest purchaser of Israeli arms, spending some $5 billion (Dh18.4 billion) since 2000. Indian forces use Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance, particularly in Kashmir.

To Pakistan-based Islamist terror groups, such co-operation is further evidence of a conspiracy against Muslims – a view on full display in a fiery speech delivered in August by the founder and leader of Lashkar-i-Taiba, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a middle-aged former university professor who sports brown-tinted glasses and a henna-dyed beard. In his address at al Qudsea mosque in Lahore, Saeed, the most forceful proponent of a jihad for the liberation of Kashmir – and against “all infidel forces” – began with mention of the “Jewish oppression” of Palestinian Muslims and exhorted Muslims to battle against the American and Nato forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.

But for South Asian jihadists like Saeed, my homeland remains the paramount cause, the rallying cry for holy war. For more than half an hour in his August address, now visible on YouTube, Saeed spoke of Kashmir, his voice heated with passion. “Kashmiris walk towards mosques and they are fired upon, bodies fall on streets. The Indian soldiers have closed down the grand mosque of Srinagar. Pakistan has forsaken them. Muslims on this side of the line of control [the de facto border separating Indian and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir] have to stand up and fight for your Muslim brothers in Kashmir. We will help them. If we have to sacrifice not 5,000, but 50,000 men, we will. And the brutes in Islamabad don’t realise it. How can you be so insensitive anymore?”

Political discontent in Kashmir dates back to the partition of India and Pakistan. The agreement of accession to India signed by Hari Singh, the Hindu maharaja of the majority-Muslim state, provided for a measure of Kashmiri autonomy that has since been steadily eroded as India extended its control over Kashmir, putting Kashmiri leaders in prison and installing puppet administrators. Two wars, several insurgencies and countless political manoeuvres have failed to settle the issue of “ownership” in Kashmir, and beginning in the mid-1990s pro-Pakistan militant groups have come to the forefront of the rebellion against Indian rule, sidelining secular Kashmiri separatist groups who long ago laid down their arms. Peace talks between India and Pakistan, ongoing since 2004, have made little progress, and the conflict in Kashmir has now claimed some 70,000 lives, many of them civilians – and inspired innumerable acts of violence beyond Kashmiri borders.

India has traditionally seen Kashmir as an “integral part” of its territory, and long refused to even consider independence, though Indian leaders have occasionally spoken of granting more autonomy to the province, with few results. For most Indians, Kashmir remains the “crown of the country”, a place where Bollywood movies were filmed and Indian tourists went on summer holidays, at least until the armed rebellion broke out in 1990.

The official Indian position, somewhat ironically, sees the possession of the Muslim-majority state as an affirmation of Indian secular pluralism – an implicit rebuttal to the two-nation theory that held Hindus and Muslims could not live together and led to the bloody partition of British India and the formation of Pakistan.

Indian rule in Kashmir, however, has displayed few traces of such high-flown idealism. Violence in Kashmir has decreased since 2003 – Kashmir police estimate there are now fewer than 500 active militants in the province – and tourists from India have returned, but the alienation of Kashmiris has not diminished, even though India had come to believe that the province had been “pacified”. This summer a dispute erupted after the state government agreed to transfer 100 acres of land around a pilgrimage site in Kashmir – a cave containing a phallic ice-formation said to be a manifestation of Shiva – to a Hindu trust. The incident triggered months of protests that quickly evolved into a mass mobilisation in favour of independence from India, with hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris taking to the streets between mid-July and mid-September.

What was most startling was that these protests were peaceful. Not a single bullet was fired on the Indian soldiers, which made the Islamist militants who have fought Indian forces for much of the past decade appear suddenly irrelevant. Kashmir, it seemed, had made an overwhelming transition from insurgent violence to Gandhian non-violent protest. But the Indian police responded the only way they knew how, attempting to disperse the protests with escalating violence.

Between August 11 – when a senior separatist leader, Sheikh Aziz, was killed in northern Kashmir while leading a protest – and mid-September, the police opened fire on and killed as many as 50 protesters and injured more than 700 in scores of incidents in Srinagar, the towns of Baramulla and Bandipora and in various villages. Non-violent separatist leaders were placed under house arrest. By the time I flew home to Kashmir from New York in the middle of September, Srinagar was silent and sullen, hunched like a wildcat. Indian paramilitaries and police were spread across one of the world’s most militarised cities, armed with automatic rifles and tear gas guns and edgy in their concrete bunkers and on street corners. One afternoon after I arrived home, I watched a few thousand Kashmiris stand on the streets near the city centre, facing the paramilitaries and police, and chant for an hour: “We Want Freedom! Go India! Go!” Nobody threw a stone or
 tried to break the barriers.

Kashmir has seen much death and violence in the last two decades, and the restraint I saw that afternoon was striking. I thought back to the protests in 1990 that followed India’s assumption of direct control over Kashmir and its removal of the state government: then, too, people took to the streets peacefully, and their protests were put down by violence. Between 50 and 100 Kashmiri civilians were killed at Srinigar’s Gawakadal bridge in January 1990 when police opened fire on a march, and some 300 protesters died in that month alone. Many young men I had interviewed over the years pointed directly to these killings to explain their decision to join the militant groups that escalated the conflict in the years to come.

This summer there dawned a realisation that non-violent politics could help Kashmir achieve far more than insurgency had accomplished: India had the resources and the might to put down any number of insurgents, but could not be blind to the political costs that came with images of unarmed protesters sent to hospital by Indian police.

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It was to SMHS hospital in Srinigar that the wounded were taken by the score. The hospital complex, a series of caramel concrete blocks, is surrounded by old buildings with rusted tin roofs and scores of pharmacies; inside, a constant roar of cars and buses droning past and auto rickshaws honking flows from the adjacent road. The casualty ward has a strong phenyl smell, and the cries of the sick and the wails of relatives echo against its concrete walls. 

In casualty I met Dr Arshad Bhat, a thin, lanky man in his late twenties, who is completing his masters in Surgery. The night before Sheikh Aziz was shot in August, Bhat slept on a tiny hospital bed in a doctors’ room in Ward 16. The next morning his team was supposed to man the surgical emergency room – whose walls have seen most of the injured over the last 20 violent years. Bhat slept uneasily, and walked into the emergency room with five other surgeons at 9.30am. He and his colleagues were expecting an influx of wounded protesters, and within two hours, streams of them, hit by police fire, were pouring into the hospital. He summoned every team of surgeons in the hospital; some 30 doctors arrived and by the end of the day they had treated a few hundred people with grave bullet wounds.

“We might have saved more people,” he told me, his voice full of regret, “if they had not tear-gassed the operation theatre”: that afternoon, as relatives and friends of the injured massed outside the emergency room, angrily shouting slogans of their own, Indian paramilitaries in a nearby bunker fired tear-gas shells through the windows of the emergency room, shattering the glass and filling the operating room with gas. “I could see nothing,” Bhat continued, “and lay in a corner. Injured patients were lying on the beds and smoke made us cry for an hour. We lost track of who was attending to whom and couldn’t attend to any patient for the next two hours.”

He would never forget, he told me, one 18-year-old boy with brown hair and a fair face, who arrived in critical condition: “Bullets had torn his abdomen. He had a 10 centimetre cut in a vein and couldn’t talk.” A team of doctors operated on the boy for three and a half hours, replacing 10 pints of blood. “But he wasn’t coming out of anaesthesia,” Bhat continued, slowly. And then the anaesthesiologist announced that the boy’s heart had stopped beating. “The forceps fell from my hands,” Bhat told me.

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For Kashmiris of my generation, coming of age has meant endless conversations about the future of the state, punctuated by outbursts of violence. The protests this summer had brought hope, for the first time in many years, that something might change: within Kashmir, and among Kashmiris scattered around the globe, inboxes were flooded with updates and phones buzzing with news of the latest developments. The violent struggle for Kashmir – the open wound that gave rise to jihadist fury far from Kashmir’s borders – had been pushed to the margins, and it seemed a solution to the problem of Kashmir might finally emerge.

Over the years I have spent innumerable afternoons sitting in coffee shops with friends in Srinigar, talking about Kashmir and India. These conversations, more often than not, are tinged with despair: “It will go on like this,” we say to one another; “Maybe India will give a little bit of autonomy.” But most of us were sure that India will never leave. Sometimes there would be talk of independence, of Kashmir’s freedom. That day, a friend who is a newspaper sub-editor said, “there will be a single word on the front page: Aazadi” – freedom. “I will walk on the waters of Dal Lake,” another friend said, while a third said he imagined millions of Kashmiris gathering outside of Srinigar, in the vast saffron fields of Pampore, where an Indian military camp in the fields calls itself “Mighty Fifty”. “There will be an enormous stage and the Indian army commander will hand over keys to us. Then we will see him drive away and watch the
 last army vehicle leave.”

The pictures of hundreds of thousands of unarmed Kashmiris marching peacefully seemed to augur a shift in Indian opinion, and for the first time, a number of Indian intellectuals, newspaper editors and opinion editors were forced by the protests to raise the possibility of an India without Kashmir. Some spoke with condescension, willing to discard the annoyance of Kashmir, to set aside this obstacle in India’s march toward “conquering the world,” as one writer put it. Others saw uncomfortable symmetries between Indian rule in Kashmir and the practices of the British Raj. Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of India’s major English daily, the Hindustan Times, suggested in a column on August 16 that perhaps the time had come for a referendum in Kashmir: “Let the Kashmiris determine their own destiny. If they want to stay in India, they are welcome. But if they don’t, then we have no moral right to force them to remain . . . It’s time to think the
 unthinkable.”

But if this was an opening toward independence, it would prove to be short-lived. The Indian government moved to curtail further outbreaks of dissent by arresting hundreds of protesters and imposing intense curfews across Kashmir to keep the streets empty. With parliamentary elections in India around the corner, no political party wanted to appear willing to concede ground in Kashmir – even before the bloody assault on Mumbai.

One early October day when the separatists were planning a march to the centre of Srinigar, I woke up to the sound of birds chirping in the backyard of my house in the southern part of the city. The streets were totally silent, and there were groups of paramilitaries standing with guns and bamboo sticks near the bunker that sits in my neighbourhood. 

In the afternoon I managed to get a curfew pass, a document issued by a senior administrative official of the Kashmir government, that allows members of certain professions – after a background check – the ability to travel under curfew if their work requires it. I rode with a journalist friend to Lal Chowk, the city centre, a long avenue of wood and brick buildings that houses hundreds of shops, scores of offices and a few schools and colleges, flanked in parts by tall, majestic Chinar or Iranian maple trees. Several lanes and bylanes connect Lal Chowk to various parts of the city, bringing throngs of visitors each day – it is a site of commerce, politics, and socialising. And almost every access point had been blocked by thick spirals of barbed wire and iron sheets: the city had become an enormous prison whose silent streets testified to the harsh efficiency of military control.

I spent many hours staring at the empty Lal Chowk, watching an occasional ambulance and several police and military vehicles pass by. No windows opened in the nearby houses; I saw only a few faces peeking out from behind curtains every now and then. The only person enjoying himself was an old newspaper vendor, wearing his curfew pass around his neck and waving two- or three-day-old Hindi-language Delhi newspapers at the soldiers gathered around him. “I was frustrated sitting at home,” he said, “and then I remembered I had a bunch of old Hindi newspapers. The soldiers love them,” he told me in Kashmiri, and then pedalled away on his bike.

When I returned home that evening, I was forced to produce my curfew pass and identity card at 10 different checkpoints along the two-mile route, an exercise in humiliation whose sting does not fade with repetition. India’s growing clout as an economic power and its proud status as the world’s largest democracy seemed to make it oblivious to the authoritarian methods deployed in Kashmir – which had, in any case, proved largely successful at curbing the protests.

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Traditionally Kashmiri separatist leaders have opposed participation in Indian elections, and again they called for boycotts when parliamentary elections came around – a worn-out strategy that has brought little benefit to Kashmir. Indian authorities arrested several separatist leaders who had called for boycotts in advance of the vote, just in case; the mobilisation against state elections threatened to undermine India’s insistence that Kashmir enjoys democratic rights.

The elections were held in seven phases to control outbreaks of protest and violence: each day voters went to the polls in a particular area while the rest of Kashmir was put under a strict curfew. Turnout was expected to be poor, but people came to vote in vast numbers, waiting in long lines at polling places. There was little violence and a marked absence of threats from militant groups against voters or candidates. It was a rebuff to the unimaginative politics of separatist leaders, who had failed to devise any long-term strategies or plans to carry the energy of the protests forward into resolving the impasse with India. “We have to make a clear demarcation between the elections for alleviating day-to-day problems and the larger struggle for resolution of Kashmir’s political future,” Sajad Lone, a prominent moderate separatist leader, told me.

But the hope that existed months before – of resolving the 60-year-old quandary of Kashmiri sovereignty – seemed to have evaporated. On December 7, as parts of north Kashmir went to the polls, I travelled north from Srinigar, which remained under curfew. In the village of Hanjiverra, an hour from Srinigar, I saw several groups of voters gathered outside polling places late into the afternoon. Riyaz Ahmed, a 32-year-old teacher, explained why he chose to vote. “This is not a referendum or a vote for the resolution of the Kashmir dispute,” he said. “This is about issues of daily life. We need the roads to be fixed, we need electricity, we also need to have someone in a position of power to turn to if tomorrow the police or the military harass us.”

On this point, however, there was little unanimity: north Kashmir’s two major cities, Sopore and Baramulla, had decided against voting. “We don’t want mere development,” one young man told me outside a polling booth in Baramulla town, where no votes had been registered. “We want independence plus development.”

That morning in Sopore I realised that even though the protests had wound down, the anger remained – and the police were only too eager to quell any signs of dissent. The sudden outbreak of violence remained an imminent threat.

Sopore is a vast bazaar of hundreds of similar shops selling groceries, clothes, stationary, carpets, cement and almost anything else, but they were all closed. Tense soldiers with bamboo sticks and rifles stood every hundred metres; a few polling places I visited were empty. I was driving in search of a another polling place with a few other reporters and photographers when we came upon around 50 teenagers gathered in an alley outside the local police headquarters, shouting and calling for an election boycott. A minute or two after we arrived, an armored car and a jeep, filled with soldiers and policemen, charged at the young crowd. A few tear gas shells were fired and the protesters were scattered, a few hit with sticks. At this point a group of photographers jumped out and began to take pictures – and a fellow journalist heard a police officer shout, “Beat the press and people will run away.” The paramilitaries and police advanced on the
 photographers, and we all ran back towards our cars. Mukhtar Khan, a young Associated Press photojournalist, came limping after us after a beating: we rushed him to a local hospital, but after an hour he was transferred to the major hospital in Srinigar, having sustained severe internal injuries.

As the dusk began to fall, I drove back to Srinagar along the leafless poplars and apple trees, standing forlorn in the road. Hundreds of soldiers were huddled in small groups around fires they had made of twigs and leaves. Thousands of Kashmiris had voted that day; thousands had stayed away. In a few months a new local government would be formed, but I knew that little would change. The attacks on Mumbai had refocused attention on Kashmir – but they were a stark reminder that the wound, unhealed, will continue to inspire the attacks of militant Islamist groups claiming to fight for the freedom of Kashmir, spreading the violence far from Srinigar.

The process of negotiations between India and Pakistan is all but dead in the wake of Mumbai, but perhaps there is some hope to be drawn from the coming inauguration of Barack Obama, who has indicated he will focus on resolving the Kashmir conflict. Obama and his advisers believe peace in Kashmir will allow Pakistan to focus on policing its troubled north-west and co-operate more closely with the US in Afghanistan. India has repeated its stand against “outside interference” in Kashmir, but among Kashmiris Obama’s remarks have been cause for some excitement. “After a very long time we are seeing a statesman who understands the overlap between the crises stretching from Kashmir to Afghanistan and is taking a holistic view. Our fingers are crossed,” said Sajad Lone, whose father, another moderate politician, was killed by pro-Pakistan militants in 2002 for advocating dialogue with India. “Obama is the harbinger of hope for Kashmir.”

Perhaps Lone’s words sound naive – but having grown up with war in Kashmir and written about it for a decade, I can say with confidence that this is the first moment in the past 20 years that an American president has spoken with any seriousness about finding a solution for Kashmir. I know well the desperation of Kashmiris to have their voices heard, for I too have searched hard for listeners, from Delhi to London to New York; the constant suffering of Kashmir has rarely moved the rest of the world. Obama, it is true, is not swayed by the human costs or tales of pain and endurance, but by geopolitical calculations. Yet an intervention on those terms is no less worthwhile, for the dividends of a just peace in Kashmir will be many: greater political and economic stability in South Asia, an end to suffering for millions of Kashmiris, billions in defence expenditures saved by India and Pakistan – and the revival of relations across a border that has
 recently trafficked only in blood.

Basharat Peer’s memoir of the Kashmir conflict, Curfewed Night, was published by Random House India in November, and will be released by Scribner in the US next year. He was recently an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs.