[Reader-list] Mutiny in the mountains

[Shivam V]

Mutiny in the mountains

Basharat Peer

Published 06 November 2008
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200811060018

One afternoon in August this year, I left a magazine office near the
East Village in New York after an interview, and made my way to
Washington Square Park. It was there that I received a call I shall
never forget. It was from my brother in Kashmir. "They have fired on
the protesters," he said. "Thirteen or fourteen people, and some say
more, have been killed."

A month later, on the flight home to Kashmir from Delhi, I gave up my
attempts to read a news magazine as the pilot announced that we would
be landing in Srinagar in a few minutes. I stared out of the window
and somehow the joy of seeing Kashmir again reminded me of the
melancholy of many departures, of how on every flight out of Kashmir I
would stare out of the window as the plane took off, while below me
there would be the receding houses growing smaller every moment, the
paddies turning into neat green squares marked by their edges, the
metalled roads connecting villages shrink ing into black lines, and in
a few minutes Kashmir appearing as a pristine, serene bowl framed by
snow-peaked mountains.

The day before, in Delhi, I had visited an exhibition of the work of a
20-year-old Kashmiri artist named Malik Sajad. Inside loops of sharp
concertina wire, Malik had hung framed pictures of heavily militarised
Kashmiri streets, with young unarmed protesters staring at soldiers.
One of the cartoons depicted Gandhi being detained at a checkpost
because he had forgotten his identity card.

An hour later, four bombs went off in central Delhi markets, killing
20 people. Indian Mujahedin, a jihadi group, sent emails to television
channels and newspapers claiming responsibility for the attack as
revenge against the 2002 Guj arat pogrom, in which Hindu extremist
mobs had killed as many as 2,000 Muslims with support from the state
government and police. The next day brought the news of the arrest of
Malik Sajad, the cartoonist whose exhibition I had attended Shortly
after the bombs exploded, Sajad had walked from the cultural centre to
a nearby internet cafe where he was trying to email the daily cartoon
to his editor at one of Kashmir's largest-selling English language
newspapers, Greater Kashmir. The shopkeeper was suspicious of him and
called the nearby office of the anti-terrorism wing of the Delhi
Police. They arrived to drag Sajad by his neck across the road. A few
hundred civilians gathered around to catch a glimpse of a supposed
terrorist. "Why do you Kashmiris have problems with India?" a
policeman shouted at the artist. Then they called the cultural centre,
which confirmed who the young artist was and that he had been invited
to exhibit his work in Delhi.

Arriving a few days later in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, Sajad
spoke of his relief at finally being back at home. Once a beautiful
medieval city known for its multi-storey wooden houses with
latticework windows, exquisite Sufi shrines, ancient Hindu temples,
and ornate houseboats on Dal Lake, Srinagar is now one of the world's
most militarised cities. It has lost its nights to a decade and a half
of curfews and de facto curfews. Srinagar now has empty streets,
locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. As I travel around
Srinagar, I see a bridge, a clearing, or a nondescript building and
know that men fell here, that a boy was tortured there. Yet whenever I
return to my broken city, I always feel, like Malik, a sense of
relief.

On the first Friday after I arrived home, the shops in Srinagar closed
at noon. Lal Chowk, a crowded bazaar in the city centre, full of
students, shoppers and soldiers, emptied eerily in a few minutes. A
few blocks away, in the Maisuma area of Srinagar, Indian
paramilitaries and police armed with automatic rifles and tear gas
guns took positions in concrete bunkers and on street corners. A few
thousand Kashmiris stood in Friday prayer along the half-mile row of
modest brick houses and stores while police blocked the lanes joining
Maisuma to the city centre, using loops of concertina wire.

After the prayers, Yasin Malik, a wiry man in his forties who lives in
a decrepit mud and brick house, led the protest. In the winter of
1989, when a rebellion against Indian rule had broken out in Kashmir,
Malik was then the 21-year-old commander of the armed group Jammu
Kashmir Liberation Front, which sought independence from India. In the
mid-Nineties, after pro-Pakistan, Islamist militant groups attacked
the Kashmiri nationalist JKLF and took over the anti-India insurgency,
Malik renounced violence and became a self-styled Gandhian. Now he was
leading another protest, with young and old chanting: "We Want
Freedom! Go India! Go!" The tense soldiers looked on in silence.

"You are late," a college friend who worked at a bank nearby said to
me. "You should have been here earlier."

He was referring to the protests, which ran from mid-July to
mid-September and in which hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris had come
out on the streets to agitate for freedom from Indian rule. What was
most startling was that the protests were peaceful. Not a single
bullet was fired on the Indian soldiers, and because of this the
Islamist militants who had been fighting Indian forces for much of the
past decade had suddenly become irrelevant. Kashmir, it seemed, had
made an overwhelming transition from insurgent violence to Gandhian,
non-violent protest. The message was clear, even on the posters of a
coalition of separatist groups: Us Qaum Ko Shamsher Ki Haajat Nahin
Padti; Ho Jis Ke Jawanoon Ki Khudi Ho Surat-e-Faulaad (The Nation
Whose Youth Are Awake Needs No Swords).

The Indian soldiers and police responded to these peaceful protests in
the only way they knew - with violence. Between 11 August, when a
senior separatist leader, Sheikh Aziz, was killed in northern Kashmir
while leading a protest along the Jhelum Valley Road, 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, in the towns of Baramulla and Bandipora and in various
villages.

Political discontent has simmered in the Indian-controlled sector of
Kashmir since partition in 1947, when Hari Singh, the Hindu maharajah
of the Muslim-majority state, joined India after a raid by tribals
from Pakistan. The agreement of accession that Singh signed with India
in October 1947 gave Kashmir much autonomy; India controlled only
defence, foreign affairs and telecommunications. But, in later years,
India began to erode Kashmir's autonomy by imprisoning popularly
elected leaders and appointing quiescent puppet administrators who
helped extend the jurisdiction of the Indian supreme court over
Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over control of the old
princely state of Kashmir. In 1987, the government in
Indian-controlled Kashmir rigged a local election, after which
Kashmiris lost the little faith they had in India and began a
secessionist armed uprising with support from Pakistan. The Indian
military presence in Kashmir rose to half a million and by the
mid-Nineties jihadi outfits from Pakistan began to dominate the
rebellion. Although violence has fallen in the past few years and the
number of active militants has reduced to fewer than 500, according to
the Kashmir police, peace talks between India and Pakistan have made
little progress. The exception, in April 2005, was the symbolic
opening of a bus service across the Line of Control, the de facto
border which has divided the two parts of Kashmir between India and
Pakistan since the first war over the state in 1947.

Since 1990, the conflict has claimed as many as 70,000 lives - mostly
of Kashmiri civilians and militants, as well as Indian soldiers and
policemen - but the lessening violence after 2003 and increasing
tourist flows from India have created an impression that Kashmir has
been "pacified". The protests of this summer destroyed any illusion of
peace.

They were provoked by the transfer, in May, of 100 acres of land by
the Kashmir government, led by India's ruling Congress Party, to a
trust that manages a Hindu pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave in the
mountains of southern Kashmir. The cave, discovered by a Muslim
shepherd in the mid-19th century, is associated with Shiva, the Hindu
god of destruction, and Hindus believe a phallic ice formation inside
the cave is a manifestation of Shiva. The pilgrimage used to be a
small affair of a few thousand pilgrims over a few weeks. Local
Muslims provided the necessary support, setting up shops along the
route, providing food supplies and helping to carry the old and weak
on horsebacks into the high mountains. But from the mid-Nineties,
India's emerging Hindu nationalists made strong efforts to turn the
pilgrimage into a mega-event, an exercise in Hindu supremacy, using
the presence of thousands of pilgrims as a sign of greater Indian
control over Kashmir.

Many Kashmiri Muslims viewed the land transfer as a move towards Hindu
hegemony, and in June thousands protested against it. The Kashmir
government revoked the land transfer after five protesters had been
shot. The Hindus in Jammu, the southern province of the state, then
began counter protests; they attacked and burnt some houses owned by
Muslims and blocked the only road connecting the Kashmir Valley with
the Indian plains. Kashmiri apple growers, whose produce was rotting
as the blockade stopped it from being transported to markets in Delhi,
marched in protest to Pakistan. On 11 August, thousands of ordinary
people joined the march on the Jhelum Valley Road, which connected
Kashmir with the cities of Rawalpindi and Lahore before the partition
of British India. That was when the Indian soldiers fired on the
protesters, and my brother called me in New York.

The protests quickly transformed from being about a land dispute to
being about freedom from Indian rule, and hundreds of marches
followed, including a huge march on 22 August to the United Nations
Observer Group office in Srinagar.

Most of the injured were brought to SMHS Hospital in Srinagar. There
is a single poster on the walls of the casualty ward of a dignified
old man with a beard and a Jinnah cap: Sheikh Abdul Aziz, the
separatist leader, one of the first to be shot and killed by the
Indian troops .

In a sanitised room at the hospital, I met Saleem Iqbal, a 41-year-old
surgeon who heads the team of 30 doctors working on the casualty ward.
Dr Iqbal, a soft-faced man with a black moustache, had been preparing
his team for the worst since the latest wave of protests began. "I
have worked here for 14 years and we expected the injured to be
brought to the hospitals the moment the protests began. That is how it
was in the early Nineties," he told me. At that time, when Kashmiris
rebelled against Indian rule and millions came out on to the streets
demanding freedom, Indian troops had opened fire, killing hundreds.

One of the doctors at the hospital told me that after the recent
shootings he had "operated on 15 people but saved only five. I had to
amputate the legs of young boys." A few days after our meeting, I saw
Dr Iqbal again at a fundraising event, where the Kashmiri middle class
had gathered to raise money for ambulances and medicines for the
injured who couldn't afford them, including some of the boys whose
legs had been amputated.

Not everyone was despondent. The recent protests have, for the first
time since 1990, shifted Indian opinion on Kashmir. Many Indian
writers, editors and journalists are beginning to discuss properly for
the first time the possibility of an India without Kashmir. Vir
Sanghvi, the celebrated former editor of India's major English daily,
the Hindustan Times, wrote in the paper on 16 August: "I reckon we
should hold a referendum in the Valley. 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."

India traditionally described Muslim-majority Kashmir as an integral
part of the nation, necessary to prove its claim to be a secular
country in which Hindus and Muslims were equal citizens. But the
claims of Indian plurality and secularism have been weakened by the
rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and especially by
the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat.

However, these recent debates among the Indian intellectual elite
reminded me of the many afternoons I have spent with friends in
Srinagar coffee shops talking about Kashmir and India. Most of us were
sure that India would never leave Kashmir. But something is changing,
on both sides.

Many more lives could have been lost through September if the Kashmiri
separatist leaders had not called on people to suspend the protests
during Ramadan; the Indian government responded by lifting the curfew.
But the protests were set to resume in October and a coordination
committee with representatives from various separatist groups called
on people to march en masse to Lal Chowk on 6 October. No one knew how
the Indian troops would respond to another march.

On that morning, I woke up to the sound of birds chirping on the
mulberry and chinar trees in the backyard of my house in southern
Srinagar. Outside, the streets were silent; there were groups of
paramilitaries standing with guns and bamboo sticks near the
neighbourhood bunker. I sat on the lawn reading the Palestinian writer
Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,
which is an account of the difficulties and impossibilities of walking
around your own landscape in the face of conflict and occupation.
Later, in the afternoon, I managed to get a curfew pass and rode with
a journalist friend to Lal Chowk. Indian paramilitaries and soldiers
used thick loops of barbed wire and walls of iron sheets to block
almost every lane leading there. Three boys played cricket in a narrow
lane off the main square.

I watched as paramilitaries stopped a red SUV coming towards us. I saw
the drained faces of two men inside; the legs of a dead woman wrapped
in floral sheet jutted out of a window. They were taking her home from
a Srinagar hospital. The SUV was allowed to pass after a few minutes,
but it somehow reinforced the omnipresence of death. In my two-mile
journey back home that evening, I was forced to produce my curfew pass
and identity card at ten different checkpoints. Driving through the
silent streets was a reminder of how efficient India's military
control of Kashmir had become: a city of more than a million people
had been turned into an open prison because its people had planned to
go on a peaceful march for freedom. Police vans had been driving
through various Srinagar neighbourhoods warning people that those who
defied the curfew would be shot.

As many as 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the
past 20 years of armed conflict in Kashmir. That October day, the
people of Srinagar stayed home to save many more from being shot and
killed. But they stared in defiance from open windows, as their armed
Indian jailers passed by in military vehicles.

India has rejected even moderate demands to remove some of the
half-million Indian forces from civilian areas or to restore some of
Kashmir's lost autonomy. There are parliamentary elections in India
next year, and the exaggerated fear, for now, is that any party that
concedes ground on Kashmir will lose votes. This means that, for the
coming months, Kashmiris will remain on edge, angry and protesting,
dying in their ones and twos.