Kashmir: A View from India (by Tavleen Singh)

Kashmir: A View from India
by Tavleen Singh

There was a sideshow at the Agra Summit that told its
own story about Kashmir. In the lobby of the Moghul
Sheraton Hotel journalists from both countries
gathered from dawn to dusk awaiting news from the
summiteers who met not just in another hotel but
behind doors so completely closed that even titbits of
news were hard to come by. With so much time on our
hands us waiting hacks devised ways to entertain
ourselves. Some invented gossip, others sought
solace in chilled beer while still others made efforts
to befriend the Pakistani journalists among us.
Talking to Pakistani journalists became the most
popular activity and there was bonhomie, friendship
and (with the help of chilled beer)general agreement
that peace between India and Pakistan was an idea
whose time had come. If the Berlin wall could come
down, if Israelis could talk to Palestinians, why
should there not be peace between our two countries so
linked by ties of culture, language and history. This
was the mood on day one of the summit when things
seemed to be going well between the summiteers.

Then, came day two and General Pervez Musharraf's
unforeseen decision to allow his breakfast with Indian
editors to be televised worldwide and suddenly it was
not just ennui that was dispelled in the Moghul
Hotel's lobby but bonhomie as well. Pakistanis
coalesced into tight huddles and the Indians into
theirs. Mistrust replaced bonhomie. 'Isn't that the
woman who was on Star TV yesterday being really
hawkish about Kashmir?'
'Yes, and that's that columnist from Karachi who was
invited because he sounded so reasonable in his
columns but on television he turned out to be just
another hawkish Paki'.

As if some evil creature had cast a powerful spell an
ugliness suddenly manifested itself. An us versus
them thing that bred suspicion and misgivings. When
Pakistani journalists were – or seemed to be – the
recipients of privileged leaks from inside the Summit
the Indian journalists whispered about how strangely
journalists behaved in countries without a free press.

When the Indian media seemed to have access to
privileged information from our Foreign Ministry
spokesman Pakistani journalists nearly attacked the
poor lady physically and by the end of the day the
atmosphere in the lobby of the Moghul was as fraught
as among the summiteers. We knew by then that
Musharraf's breakfast show had put the Indian Prime
Minister into a furious and unforgiving mood.

Even without this information, though, you could have
told that the summit had failed from the atmosphere in
the Moghul Hotel's self-consciously Moghul lobby. If
you were in a Pakistani huddle you would be blaming
India for the failed summit. How can there be
progress as long as India refuses to discuss Kashmir?
If you were in an Indian huddle you would be blaming
the failure on General Musharraf's obsession with what
he called the core issue and his puzzling decision to
make his thoughts on the subject public mid-summit.
Even those who thought he won the propaganda war by
doing precisely this were unimpressed with his views.
All he had done was restate the Pakistani position in
clear, plain-speaking terms but no Indian journalist I
talked to saw it this way. The journalists in Agra
were some of the finest in the sub-continent but were,
inadvertently, taking exactly the positions their
governments had.

It is, alas, always this way. Whether in Lahore's
elegant drawing rooms or in Karachi's crowded streets
I have found all talk of friendship and common
culture, all bonhomie, disappear the minute the K-word
creeps into a conversation. As an Indian journalist
who has spent many years covering Kashmir what also
never ceases to amaze me is the confused impressions
of history on which many Pakistanis – especially
ordinary people – base their passions. Over and over,
when I have talked to the man in the street I have
been told that Kashmir was part of Pakistan when India
was partitioned and was taken by force.

If I have tried to explain that Indian troops only
went into the Kashmir Valley after the Maharajah
acceded to India I have – at least in the streets of
Lahore and Karachi - come close to causing a riot.
How dared I tell such lies, it must be because I was
Indian that I talked like this and more along the same
lines. The question of conversation, leave alone
debate, never begins.

The truth is – as seen from India – that for a couple
of months between August 14, 1947 and the end of
October that year Kashmir was de facto an independent
country. Its Hindu prince disliked the idea of
allowing his beautiful kingdom to be absorbed into the
vast amorphousness of India and liked the idea of
Pakistan even less. The biggest political party in
his kingdom, Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference,
was totally against the Maharajah but shared some of
his ambiguity about where to be. Sheikh Abdullah was
happier with the idea of a secular, democratic India
than an Islamic, Punjabi-dominated Pakistan but was
unsure of whether the autonomy he believed was vital
to Kashmir would be allowed to remain.

So, Kashmir went to neither India nor Pakistan until
the so-called 'tribals' invaded from Pakistan.
Indians believe that the Pathan tribesmen included
Pakistani troops and had the full backing of the
Pakistani government. The average Pakistani sees what
happened as some sort of early version of the
intifada, a spontaneous uprising.

Unluckily, for Pakistan the Kashmiris did not see it
that way. The men who came from Pakistan looted,
raped and pillaged their way to Baramulla causing
hatred and revulsion among the local population. The
Maharajah remained immobile and dithering until he
heard that they were less than two hours from
Srinagar. Indians believe that it was at this point
that he asked the Indian government for military
support.

The Indian government pointed out that any military
support would be seen as an invasion unless the
Maharajah signed a document of accession. This he did
on October 27 (CHECK) before fleeing with his jewels
and minions to the safety of Jammu leaving his people
to face an uncertain future.

This is the first event in Kashmir's post-Partition
history and it is right from here that the problem
begins. It is hard to find Pakistanis, even the most
moderate, who believe that Maharajah Hari Singh signed
a document of accession before Indian troops moved
into the state. Those who concede that some kind of
document was signed believe that it was signed under
Indian pressure and therefore invalid. There is also
a peculiar pride in the UN resolutions that came soon
after as if it were somehow Pakistan who had taken the
matter to the United Nations.

The truth, as most Indians know, is that it was
Jawaharlal Nehru who foolishly decided to take the
matter to the UN thereby unintentionally
internationalising the Kashmir problem. He went with
the idea of having Pakistan punished for what he
believed everyone would see as its attempt to take
Kashmir by force. With the hindsight of history most
Indians believe Nehru made a mistake by going to the
UN and also believe that he would have held the
promised plebiscite if Pakistani troops had withdrawn
from what Pakistanis like to call azaad Kashmir. I
have never met a Pakistani who believes that India was
ever serious about holding a plebiscite, nor one who
believed that Nehru was sincere in his offer to hold
one.

Kashmiris believed him, though, and when it did not
happen and the political problems began they rallied
around the fact that he had offered them a plebiscite
that was never held. Indian officials when asked
about why it was never held point out that it could
only have taken place if Pakistani troops had
withdrawn from the territories they occupied in
Kashmir but, again, to the average Pakistani this is
just another Indian excuse.

The irony is that if Nehru had been courageous enough
to order the plebiscite immediately after Independence
Kashmir would almost certainly have voted for India
and there would have probably been no Kashmir problem.
Again, though, nobody is sure that there would have
been peace between India and Pakistan if there had
been no Kashmir problem and the reason is that the
average Indian totally mistrusts Pakistan and believes
that it is a country whose main objective is to break
India up and if it were not the Kashmir problem it
would have been some other excuse that would have been
used.

Unfortunately, the average Indian also believes that
the Kashmiri cannot be trusted. Indian government
propaganda with the national press being the willing
vehicle of it are the reason. In 1981 when I first
went up to do a political story on Kashmir – Farooq
Abdullah's installation as the Sheikh's heir – I was
shocked to find that there was not a single Muslim
journalist employed by the national press. If
Kashmiris were employed as correspondents of national
newspapers they were invariably Kashmiri Pandits.
But, since Srinagar was a beautiful, relatively
comfortable posting senior journalists from Delhi were
eager to go and usually ended up treating the
political sentiments of the average Kashmiri with
total disdain. So, most Indians to this day remain
only vaguely aware that Kashmir was denied fair
elections between 1953 and 1977, when under Prime
Minister Morarji Desai, a truly fair election was
held. Journalists from Delhi, who liked to joke about
the fact that they were India's 'viceroys', also went
out of their way to increase the average Indian's
dislike and distrust of the Kashmiri Muslim and of all
Kashmiri politicians.

In 1983 I was sent up by The Telegraph newspaper, of
which M.J. Akbar was Editor, to cover elections to the
state legislature. It was the first election after
Sheikh Abdullah's death and within days of arriving in
Srinagar it became evident to me that his National
Conference party had no chance of losing it because
ordinary Kashmiris felt they owed this one election to
the memory of the old Sheikh.

What also became evident, equally quickly, was that
this was not how the election was going to be reported
in the national press. I drove up from Jammu in the
company of an old Kashmir hand who told me that he had
spent many years in Srinagar as a Viceroy. We had
spent some time in Jammu covering Indira Gandhi's
campaign whose main characteristic had been to play
what we liked in those days to call the Hindu card.
She manipulated the sentiments of Jammu's large Hindu
population by making campaign speeches that hinted
darkly at the dangers of Muslims 'from across the
border' being allowed in by the hoard if Farooq
Abdullah came to power. It was the sort of patently
communal campaign that should have drawn the attention
of the national press and it surprised me that it had
not found its way onto front pages. My travelling
companion explained that this was because 'us Viceroys
like to highlight the communalism of the other side'.

In the next three weeks that I spent in the Kashmir
Valley I understood exactly what he meant. Delhi
newspapers were filled with stories of Farooq
Abdullah's 'communal campaign'. As one of the few
journalists who accompanied him on his travels – most
others preferred to drink chilled beer provided by the
Congress Party in Srinagar's Nedou's Hotel – I asked
colleagues when they had heard him make 'communal'
remarks. They said that he usually made these remarks
only in Kashmiri so I would naturally have missed
them. Farooq Abdullah was painted throughout the
election as an unashamed secessionist. The national
press also went out of its way to create the
completely untrue impression that the Congress Party
was in a neck-and-neck fight with the National
Conference. So successful were they in perpetrating
this lie that it was believed enough by Indira Gandhi
for her to be furious with Farooq's landslide victory,
so furious that the Congress Party immediately after
the election set about trying to topple Farooq's
government. Baseless charges of 'massive rigging'
were made, ironically, by the only party that had ever
till then rigged elections in Kashmir.

These charges were reported as credible by the
national newspapers so there was hardly any criticism
of Indira Gandhi when, barely a year after the
assembly election, she brought down Farooq Abdullah's
government. This, in my view, was the beginning of
the current Kashmir problem. The historic problem
died in the seventies when the Bangladesh war and the
execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto made the average
Kashmiri suddenly see Pakistan through new eyes.
During the 1983 assembly election I visited every
constituency in the Valley – other than Uri – and
everywhere I went I asked if plebiscite was still an
issue and everywhere the answer was, 'No, this
election is one in which we are participating as
Indians'.

If Indira Gandhi's hubris had not got the better of
her we would probably never had the uprising of 1989
that began the violence that has now resulted in a
death toll of more than 50,000. Till 1986, despite
the toppling of Farooq Abdullah's government, the
situation in Kashmir was retrievable. All that Rajiv
Gandhi, Prime Minister by then with the largest
mandate in Indian history, needed to have done was
order fresh elections. Farooq, still hugely popular,
would have won and the Congress Party which managed to
get nearly 25% of the vote in 1983 could have built
itself up to take on the National Conference at the
next election. Rajiv, sadly, made the most crucial
mistake of all: he insisted that the National
Conference fight the 1987 assembly election in
alliance with his Congress Party thereby causing both
Kashmir's centrist parties to commit political
suicide.

Farooq Abdullah's kowtowing to Rajiv after having been
called a terrorist by the Congress Party and after the
public humiliation of his government being dismissed
for no reason was seen by the average Kashmir as yet
another attempt to rub Kashmir's nose in the dirt.
Yet another reminder that India's only Muslim-majority
province would never be trusted. Inevitably, memories
of Kashmir's historical problem with India came back
to the surface and the old, secessionist forces
–dormant since Sheikh Abdullah's return as chief
minister – came back to haunt his son.

In a fair election these forces, which united to form
the Muslim United Front (MUF), would probably have won
no more than fifteen seats in the Kashmir Assembly.
But, Farooq panicked and although he continues to deny
that the 1987 assembly election was rigged the charges
have managed to stick and are ironically still made by
political leaders including Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Farooq, in his second term as chief minister was too
discredited to be able to hold Kashmir together and
within months of his taking over – although the
tourists still continued to come and Hindi movies
continued to be made – there were rumours of young men
having gone across the border to train as terrorists.

The Pakistan government was barely involved at this
stage, the violent uprising that began after the
Indian Home Minister's daughter was kidnapped in
December 1989 took Pakistan by surprise. But, the
average Indian does not see it this way. The Indian
press and most Indian politicians have encouraged the
belief that the Kashmir problem is entirely a creation
of Pakistan. After the violence began Farooq Abdullah
tried to prevent Jagmohan – hated for his role in
conniving to bring Farooq's earlier government down –
being sent up once more as Governor. When Delhi, now
ruled by a weak, amateurish government under
Vishwanath Pratap Singh, refused to listen Farooq
resigned. Kashmiri anger exploded into the streets in
the form of massive protests and these may have died
their own death –when Kashmiris realized that azaadi
was not going to come so easily – but Jagmohan, a
municipal official from Delhi with no political
sensitivity – decided to use the jackboot. Peaceful,
unarmed protesters were fired upon and so began a
process of alienation from India that had never
existed in the past.

Till the nineties if the Kashmiris had complaints
about India they were mainly to do with the denial of
basic political rights and the denial of the special
status Kashmir was promised in 1947.

There were, till the nineties, no 'martyrs graveyards'
filled with the graves of innocent men, women and
children killed in 'crossfire'. Ironically, in one of
them is buried Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, traditionally
one of Kashmir's most important religious leaders, who
was killed by a militant group but whose death is
blamed on the Indian government by most Kashmiris. So
discredited did the Indian government become in the
six months that Jagmohan was Governor in 1990 that it
was unable to convince ordinary Kashmiris of the truth
even when it was the truth.

It was in early 1990 that Pakistan began to involve
itself in fomenting violence in the Valley. As almost
its first move it set up a militant group called the
Hizb ul Mujahideen (HUM) to take on the JKLF (Jammu
Kashmir Liberation Front) which had started the
violence by kidnapping Home Minister Mufti Mohammed
Syed's daughter in December 1989. The JKLF was
inconvenient for Pakistan because of its determined
stand that the only solution to the Kashmir problem
was to give the state independence. The HUM was more
cooperative because, like the Jamaat-e-Islami whose
militant wing it is believed to be, it takes the view
that Kashmir should be merged with Pakistan.

Nearly all the militant groups that have come up since
have been creations of Pakistan with the clear
objective of establishing Pakistan's right over
Kashmir. And, since Pakistan is one of the only two
countries in the world – Israel being the other –
which was created in the name of religion it was
important to make Kashmiris aware that they were
Muslims and so should recognize their natural affinity
with Pakistan's Islamic republic.

In order to do this the nature of the militancy had to
be changed and by the mid-nineties the beginnings of
the change were became obvious. The militant groups,
increasingly filled with foreign recruits from
Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Muslim countries,
began to enforce their version of Islam. Bars,
cinemas, video libraries and beauty salons were
forcibly closed as being un-Islamic.

Liquor bottles were smashed in the streets, women
ordered to wear the burqa or risk having acid thrown
in their faces and in the mosques –where Kashmiri
women had always been allowed to worship – there were
now more rigid Islamic rules applied so that women
could no longer go. Shrines and dargahs at which both
Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris worshipped like Hazratbal
and Charar-e-Sharif also came under attack.
Charar-e-Sharif was burned down in a battle with the
Indian army and Hazratbal witnessed a siege for
several days when militants opened fire on Indian
troops from inside. Do the Kashmiris like this new
version of Islam? Groups like the JKLF and Kashmiri
leaders like Shabir Shah have tried to maintain the
secular character of their struggle for freedom but
have failed. They have spoken often about the tragedy
of Kashmiri Hindus being forced out of the state but
their appeals lack popular support. Ordinary Kashmiris
are so bitter about Indian repression that Islamist
militants –called guest mujahideen – are given support
that they would not normally have had. Since the
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on
September 11 there appears to be less support for the
idea of drawing Kashmir's freedom movement into some
kind of jehad for Islam but with the government of
Atal Behari Vajpayee seen as a Hindu government the
choice comes across as being between Hinduism and
Islam.

So, will Kashmir be allowed one day to make the choice
between India and Pakistan? Unlikely. No Indian
government could survive a single day if it even
considered the possibilities of a plebiscite under the
UN resolutions. Kashmir has never been an election
issue in India and south of Delhi there is little
interest in Kashmir – unless there is a war – but most
Indians are convinced that giving Kashmir up would be
a threat to India's security. Between keeping Kashmir
under control and fighting to keep the Siachen Glacier
the Indian government is believed to be spending more
than Rs 7 crores a day but nobody seems to mind
because this is seen as vital investment in the
country's security.

The average Indian does not trust Pakistan. After the
Kargil episode this mistrust has assumed huge
proportions. Indians believe that Atal Behari
Vajpayee made a genuine attempt at friendship by going
to Lahore on a bus in February 1999 and Pakistan's
response in Kargil, two months later, is widely seen
as evidence that Pakistan wants not peace with India
but its total destruction. Pakistanis I have met in
positions of high office – both Generals and
politicians – admit that they believe that if India
loses Kashmir it will be the beginning of some kind of
domino effect and that other states will also demand
secession. This is very far from being true because
the one thing that India has succeeded in achieving in
the past fifty years is a sense of national identity.
Pakistanis also seem to believe that it is the 'myth'
of Indian secularism that India seeks to protect by
hanging on to Kashmir but, again, this is not true
because secularism is no longer considered as
important to the average Indian as economic growth and
improved standards of living.

But, even Indian liberals admit that if India's
borders are redrawn once more in the name of Islam or
the 'unfinished agenda of Partition' it will become
extremely difficult for Indian Muslims outside the
Kashmir Valley. Unfortunately, since September 11, the
belief that all Muslims are basically fanatics has
increased among ordinary Hindus so there is little or
no sympathy for the Kashmiris. This makes it harder
for a government in Delhi to solve the domestic
aspects of the problem although it needs to be said
that the Vajpayee government has failed singularly to
even come up with a policy for Kashmir.

Changed international realities have made it easier
for them to evade the domestic side of the problem and
to blame the whole thing on cross-border terrorism.
Sadly, the government has the support of Indian public
opinion where this is concerned so there is
insufficient pressure on it to evolve a policy that
would seek to make internal peace in Kashmir.

Which brings us to the question of whether the
international aspects of the Kashmir problem would
once more fade into the background – as happened
between 1971 (Simla Agreement) and 1989 – if the
Kashmir Valley became once more a peaceful place where
tourists could flock and Hindi movies could once more
be made.

This is possible but what then would happen to
Pakistan's 'core issue' case? How can Pakistan now
withdraw from its position that the only solution to
the Kashmir problem is an international one that
involves redrawing boundaries? How can it sustain its
argument that the only thing preventing peace on the
sub-continent is the absence of a solution in Kashmir?
Through the nineties Pakistani leaders have used
Kashmir to whip up political support for themselves.
I saw how well they had succeeded during a trip to
Pakistan in the summer of 2001. Among the people I
interviewed in the streets of Lahore and Karachi were
unemployed workers who complained bitterly about
General Pervez Musharraf's economic policies. Workers
were being laid off, they said, and factories closed
to meet conditions set by the International Monetary
Fund. The general economic malaise in the country
bothered them, they said, because things seemed to be
getting worse by the day. They wanted friendship with
India because they felt that if there was peace
between the two countries they could cross the border
and find work in India if they could not find it in
Pakistan.

But, they added, they were prepared to die in the
fight for Kashmir. First, Kashmir has to be given to
Pakistan, they said, only then could there be peace.
When I pointed out that this might never happen they
were adamant that it would happen because they were
all prepared to join the jehad. Shopkeepers, small
businessmen and even villagers all said the same
thing. So, we have a situation in which public
opinion in India is almost unanimous that there can be
no more redrawing of our borders and public opinion in
Pakistan is almost unanimous that Kashmir has to come
to Pakistan.

This leaves the sub-continent's leaders very little
room for manoeuvre. No Indian leader can even
consider giving Kashmir away and no Pakistani leader
can give up the 'core issue'. Meanwhile, the people
of Kashmir continue to be caught between the guns of
India's security forces on one side and the guns of
the militants on the other. Their faith in azaadi has
waned as the years of violence have gone relentlessly
by as has their faith in the militant groups who began
the struggle for it. A whole generation of young
Kashmiris has grown up without remembering a time when
their lives were normal. Kashmir's political leaders,
whether Farooq Abdullah or those that constitute the
All Party Hurriyat Conference, seem unable to do much
in the face of the governments of India and Pakistan
taking it upon themselves to solve – or prevent
solution – of the problem.

So, where do we go from here? There appear to be two
roads to peace. The one favoured by India is peace
without redrawing borders. This is based on the
belief that if Pakistan stops cross-border terrorism
the movement for azaadi will die a natural death
because the average Kashmiri is weary of violence.
When the next election is held – and these days they
tend to be proper elections – then former militant
leaders like Yasin Malik of the JKLF and Shabir Shah
could contest and possibly defeat Farooq's National
Conference. We could then go back to politics as
usual as happened in Punjab and in Northeastern states
like Assam and Nagaland. This can only happen,
though, if Pakistan in view of its decision since
September 11 to joint the coalition against terrorism
decides to let Kashmir alone.

If it does not and the violence in the Valley
continues to remain beyond the control of the Indian
government then an international solution will have
to, at some point, be sought. There is a growing view
in India, though not in the government, that perhaps
international mediation could be the way forward since
Pakistan and India seem incapable of even speaking the
same language any more. Even if this happens there is
little likelihood of India agreeing to redraw its
borders.

The very most it could agree to would be a softer
border that would allow movement between the two
halves of Kashmir and, perhaps, greater autonomy to
the state in keeping with the original promise to give
it a special status. Even to give this much, though,
would require a strong government in Delhi and this
seems unlikely in the near future. If the coalition
led by the Bharatiya Janata Party is defeated in the
general election due in 2003 it will, in all
likelihood, be replaced by a coalition led by the
Congress Party. Since the Congress is currently led
by a leader of Italian birth this government would
have even less wiggle room than the present one
because it would have to prove its nationalistic
credentials at every step with Hindu nationalists
breathing down its neck.

Besides, since Agra, the general view in India is that
there can never be peace with Pakistan because
Pakistani leaders – whether in uniform or civvies –
cannot deliver it. Since the hunt for Osama bin Laden
began and the United States chose to forget its
earlier aversion to military dictators and take
General Musharraf on board as a valued ally there is a
certain loss of trust in the Americans as well. How
can you fight terrorism if you take the support of
countries that support terrorism is a question that is
widely asked with many Indians, even in positions of
power, concluding that the Americans are only
interested in fighting their own war against terrorism
not in the one India believes it is fighting in
Kashmir.

The militancy in Kashmir has of late taken a very ugly
turn with Hindu villagers and even priests being
targeted in Jammu. The attempt to blow up the
legislative assembly in Srinagar with a car bomb,
shortly after September 11, has added to the
impression that what India faces in the Kashmir Valley
is not a cry for azaadi based on genuine grievances
but an Islamic fundamentalist jehad. So, Osama bin
Laden's war on the West has added an unexpected new
dimension to the Kashmir problem.

There may, one day, be a solution in Kashmir that
satisfies India, Pakistan and ordinary Kashmiris but
right now not even the faintest glimmer of it is
visible on the horizon. We should not conclude from
this that we should just let things fester until there
is a glimmer of hope. It is vital that India and
Pakistan continue talking to each other, vital that we
start some kind of peace process if only because two
nuclear powers cannot afford to remain in a state of
permanent hostility, vital that the process that began
in Agra go forward even if we do not really even speak
the same language any more.

This article, published by permission of Ushba
International Publishers was selected from the
forthcoming volume The Agra Summit and Beyond.

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