[Reader-list] William Dalrymple: review of Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

[Patrice Riemens]

original at: http://bit.ly/9os0bu

Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

A new star of Indian non-fiction is born with this searing memoir about
the bloody struggle for justice in Kashmir

William Dalrymple
The Guardian/ The Observer Book reviews, Sunday 20 June 2010


Twenty years ago, as a young foreign correspondent newly arrived in Delhi,
I was sent up to Srinagar to cover the outbreak of the rebellion against
India. It was the most beautiful place: looking out over the Dal lake,
shikara canoes skimming across. Behind were the willows and the poplars,
and the orchards of apricots and almonds. Beyond stretched the old Mughal
water-gardens, and above them, the jagged snow-peaks of the great
Himalaya. Yet almost from my first morning in this earthly paradise, I
found myself reporting some of the most chilling atrocities I have ever
witnessed.

On the morning of 21 January 1990, several thousand Kashmiris, including
much of the civil service, broke the curfew and marched peacefully out of
the old city to complain about incidents of police violence during search
operations the previous night. When the crowd was halfway across the
Gowkadal bridge, at the centre of town, the much-feared CRPF paramilitary
police opened fire on the unarmed civilians, with automatic weapons, from
three directions.

I went to the city hospital later that evening. Every bed was full, and
the overflow lined the corridors. Farooq Ahmed, the urbane city engineer,
described how after the firing, the CRPF walked slowly across the bridge,
finishing off those who were lying on the ground. Ahmed had fallen flat
and managed to escape unhurt. "Just as I was about to get up," he told me,
"I saw soldiers coming forward, shooting anyone who was injured. Someone
pointed and shouted, 'That man is alive,' and the soldiers began firing at
me. I was hit four times in the back and twice in the arms." Seeing how he
was still alive, another soldiers raised his gun, but the officer told him
not to waste ammunition: "He will die anyway."

In his moving memoir, Basharat Peer provides the fullest account that I
have read of the Gowkadal bridge massacre, among many other tragic tales.
Peer grew up in Kashmir during the height of the insurgency, which has now
left some 70,000 Kashmiris dead, and many more scarred and wounded.
Already highly acclaimed in India, Curfewed Night is an extraordinary
book, a minor masterpiece of autobiography and reportage that will surely
become the classic account of the conflict.

Peer was barely 13 when the massacre took place, but with beautifully
melancholic prose he evokes memories of that period and shows how the
innocent rural Kashmir of his childhood turned into the brutalised
battlefield of today, where Pakistan-backed guerrillas continue to fight
Indian security forces in a bloody stalemate that has wrecked the region.
Along with the catastrophe currently unfolding in Afghanistan, it remains
one of the two proxy wars currently being fought by India and Pakistan for
control of Himalayan central Asia.

Peer was born in a small village near Anantnag, later to become one of the
most militant areas in the valley. His father was a civil servant, who by
dint of hard work had pulled himself out of poverty and risen to marry the
daughter of the village schoolteacher. The family had some land, and
during the planting season and the harvest the whole family would toil in
the paddy and mustard fields. No one in the village had a telephone and
few had ever left the valley. Electricity was intermittent, and the wider
world seemed far away, as indeed did India: Kashmir's autonomy was
guaranteed by its act of accession to the Indian union, and alone among
Indian states it had complete control over its internal affairs. India
only had the right to police its borders.

Successive Indian governments, however, steadily increased their control
and in 1953 the Kashmiri prime minister, Sheikh Abdullah, was imprisoned.
The referendum, promised by Nehru at the UN, on whether the state would
remain part of India, was never held, either in Indian Kashmir or the
western part of the state that ended up under Pakistani control. Instead,
a succession of elected Kashmiri governments were dismissed by New Delhi,
and direct rule imposed. Development grants were misappropriated: four
golf courses were built, but few schools and no hydroelectric dams or
public sector industrial plants. Following the shameless rigging of the
1987 local elections, furious Kashmiri leaders went underground. Soon
afterwards, the bombings, strikes, assassinations and stone-throwings
began.

Peer tells how a series of horrific rapes and atrocities by Indian troops
radicalised a population who were vaguely pro-Pakistani, but whose
activism had previously never gone beyond cheering for Pakistani fast
bowlers. The massacres of the early 1990s changed Kashmir for ever:
militant groups sprung up in every village, initially armed with only
home-made weapons, and the Kashmiri Hindu population fled the valley where
their ancestors had lived for thousands of years, cohabiting peacefully
with the Sufi Muslim Kashmiris for centuries. Peer returned to school in
the spring to see his village schoolroom half empty: the desks of the
Hindus were now vacant.

By the mid-1990s, under Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan ramped up the conflict by
sending over the border thousands of ideologically hardened jihadis. Some
of these were the sort of exiled Arab radicals who were at that moment
forming al-Qaida in Peshawar. These foreign jihadis tried to impose a
hardline Salafi-Wahhabi form of Islam on the people of the valley. Women
who refused to wear the full black chador might have acid thrown in their
faces.

In Peer's village, militants attacked the security forces with
Kalashnikovs, and on several occasions Peer and his family had narrow
escapes as army convoys were attacked around them and their house was
sprayed with bullets. He describes the "crackdowns", when Indian security
forces would surround a village and parade its inhabitants in front of a
masked informer. Anyone fingered would be tortured.

It is Peer's descriptions of the systematic torture by India of its
Kashmiri citizens that reflect most badly on the world's largest
democracy. As with Israel, a democratic electoral system in India has not
been enough to keep its discontented citizens – whether Muslims in Kashmir
or tribal Naxals resisting Indian mining companies – from suffering
systematic human rights abuse at the hands of its armed forces. In
Kashmir, India responded to the insurgency by setting up two medieval
torture chambers, Papa 1 and Papa 2, into which large numbers of local
people, as well as the occasional captured foreign jihadi, would
"disappear". Their bodies would later be found, if at all, floating down
rivers, bruised, covered in cigarette burns, missing fingers or even
limbs. Peer describes how many of his generation of Kashmiris were
rendered impotent by one favoured torture method: inserting a copper wire
up the suspect's penis and connecting it to the electricity mains.

Considering the geopolitical importance of Kashmir and its crucial role in
causing three major wars between India and Pakistan, remarkably little has
been written on the conflict, especially by Kashmiris themselves. In a
memorable passage, Peer describes walking into a New Delhi bookshop and
being overcome "with a sense of shame" that almost nothing was available
in English on the struggle he had grown up with. Peer has magnificently
filled this gap in a memoir that instantly marks him out as a new star of
Indian non-fiction.

[Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir
by Basharat Peer; 240pp, HarperPress, £13.99]



William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
(Bloomsbury) has just been awarded the first Asia House prize for
literature.