The Indian authorities arrested Bhat in 1976 and, charging him with the murder of a policeman, sentenced him to death. He was kept in prison as a bargaining counter until 1984, when he was executed in response to the kidnapping and murder of an Indian diplomat by Kashmiri militants in Birmingham. The vacuum he left would soon be filled by the men with beards, infiltrated, armed and funded by Pakistan.
By the late 1990s, after years of intra-Muslim factional violence, Afghanistan had come under the control of the Taliban – themselves funded, armed and sustained by the Pakistan army. Pakistan itself was in the grip of corrupt politicians, and sectarian in-fighting was claiming dozens of lives each month. In India, the Congress Party had lost its hold on national politics, paving the way for the Hindu fundamentalist BJP. In Kashmir, the number of armed Islamist groups multiplied as more and more veterans of the Afghan war came across the border to continue their fight for supremacy there. The main rivals were the indigenous Hizbul Mujahidin and the Pakistani-sponsored and armed Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Harkatul Mujahidin. These groups killed each other’s militants, kidnapped Western tourists, drove Kashmiri Hindus out of regions where they had lived for centuries, punished Kashmiri Muslims who remained stubbornly secular, and occasionally knocked off a few Indian soldiers and officials. Each group was willing, when convenient, to make terms with Delhi rather than combine with other groups to inflict punishment on the Indian government. Governor Jagmohan responded by making it as hard as he could for these Muslim groups to find new recruits. Night-long house-to-house searches became a part of everyday life. Young men were abducted by Indian soldiers, never to be seen again. In his self-serving memoir, Frozen Turbulence, Jagmohan explained: ‘Obviously, I could not walk barefoot in a valley full of scorpions. I could leave nothing to chance.’ The result of his policy was to win support for the gunmen.
Kashmir was ruled, more or less unhappily, by Delhi until 1996, when Farooq Abdullah came back to power – most of the other parties boycotted the elections. Since then, his collaboration with the BJP has destroyed his remaining reputation, and if a free election were permitted, his career as a politician would soon be over.
The Indian and Pakistan armies are among the largest in the world. In September 1998, the Pakistani high command decided to test Indian border defences in the virtually undefended Kargil-Drass region, a Himalayan wasteland fourteen thousand feet above sea level where Kashmir meets Pakistan and China. The region is one of mountain ridges and deep valleys, with temperatures averaging–20ºC. It is also an area colonized by wild yellow roses, which bloom for a month each summer; the petals are eaten by villagers, who believe the rose nourishes the body and heals the soul. Most of the villagers are Shi’ite Muslims or Buddhists who live quiet, harmonious lives, sharing, among other things, an aversion to the Sunni fundamentalist imports from next door. The Pakistan army, whole-heartedly backed by Nawaz Sharif’s government, crossed the Line of Control accompanied, just as it had been in 1947 and 1965, by soldiers disguised as irregulars and Lashkar-i-Tayyaba contingents, and occupied several ridges and villages. The Indian army moved troops to the area from Srinagar, and artillery duels became a daily nightmare for the locals.
Why had Pakistan embarked on an adventure of such obvious strategic futility? There was no possibility of triumphant entrances by victorious generals or politicians. Most Pakistani citizens, other than the Islamists, knew very little about what was happening in the mountains. Nor were they particularly interested in the fate of Kashmir. The real reasons for the war were ideological. Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the head mullah of the Lashkar, told Pamela Constable of the Washington Post: ‘Revenge is our religious duty. We beat the Russian superpower in Afghanistan; we can beat the Indian forces too. We fight with the help of Allah, and once we start jihad, no force can withstand us.’ His argument was echoed by Pakistani officials. The Indians weren’t as powerful as the Russians, and since they no longer possessed a nuclear monopoly in the region, there was no danger that a limited war would escalate. Second, and more important, Pakistan’s actions would internationalize the conflict and bring the United States ‘on side’, as in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
In the war zone itself, India suffered initial reverses, then brought in more troops, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, and began to bomb Pakistani installations across the border. If NATO could overfly borders without any legal sanction, so could they. By May 1999, as the yellow roses were about to bloom, the Indian army had retaken most of the ridges it had lost. A month later, its forces were poised to cross the Line of Control. Pakistan’s political leaders panicked, and falling back on an old habit, they made a desperate appeal to the White House.
A US general was sent to Pakistan to have a quiet word with the military, and Nawaz Sharif was summoned to the White House. Clinton told him to withdraw all his troops, as well as the fundamentalists, from the territory they had occupied. Nothing was promised in return. No pressure on India. No money for Pakistan. Sharif capitulated. His information minister, Mushahid Hussain, had told the press just before the Washington visit that ‘we did not start insurgency in Kashmir which is populous [sic], spontaneous and indigenous and we cannot stop it.’ But they did. The dispute had indeed been internationalized, though not exactly as Pakistan had wanted. With China as the main enemy, Washington had dumped on Pakistan and was leaning heavily in India’s direction.
In private, Sharif told the Americans that he supported a rapprochement with India and had resisted the Kargil war, but he had been outmanoeuvred by the army. The lie went down well in Washington and Delhi, but angered the Pakistani high command. When he got home, Sharif hatched a plan to replace the commander-in-chief of the army, General Pervaiz Musharraf, with one of his placemen, General Khwaja Ziaudin, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Sharif’s brother Shahbaz made an unpublicized visit to Washington with Ziaudin in tow in order to get approval for Ziaudin’s appointment. The two men were received at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA and made many rash promises.
On 11 October 1999, while Musharraf was on his way back from a three-day official visit to Sri Lanka, Nawaz Sharif announced his dismissal and Ziaudin’s promotion. The authorities at Karachi airport were instructed to divert the general’s plane to a tiny airstrip in the interior of Sind, where he would be taken into custody. But the army refused to accept Ziaudin’s authority, and the Karachi commander occupied the airport and ordered the plane to land. Musharraf was received with full military protocol. The army commander in the capital arrested the Sharif brothers and General Ziaudin. This was the first coup d’état carried out in the face of explicit American instructions to the contrary: in a statement issued three days before these events, Clinton had warned against a military take-over. In Pakistan, the fall of the Sharif brothers was celebrated on the streets of every city.
Musharraf pledged to wipe out corruption and restore standards in public life; in an unguarded interview he stressed his affinity with Kemal Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey. No restrictions were placed on the press or political parties. Less than two years later, Musharraf’s early anti-corruption zeal had dissipated. The fiercely incorruptible General Amjad was transferred from the Accountability Bureau to a military command in Karachi: he had amassed evidence revealing extensive corruption in every institution in the country. Supreme Court judges were for sale to the highest bidder (defence lawyers asked clients for six-figure sums as the ‘judge’s fee’, payable before a trial began); many senior civil servants were on the payroll of big business and the narco-barons; businessmen pocketed bank loans worth billions of rupees; senior military officers had succumbed to bribery. Amjad insisted, to no avail, that the new regime clean up the armed forces. Unless retired and serving officers were tried, sentenced and punished, he believed, Pakistan would remain a failed state, dependent on foreign handouts and a black-market economy fuelled by narco-profits. His transfer shows that he lost this battle.
Many people in Pakistan had assumed t
hat Musharraf would disarm the Islamists and restore a semblance of law and order in the big cities. Here, too, the regime made little progress, because it under-estimated Islamist penetration of the army. When I was in Lahore in December 1999, I was told about a disturbing incident. The Indians had informed their Pakistani counterparts that one of the peaks in Kargil-Drass was still occupied by Pakistani soldiers, contrary to the cease-fire agreement. A senior officer went to investigate and ordered the captain in charge of the peak to return to the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. The captain accused his senior officer and the military high command of betraying the Islamist cause, and shot the officer dead. The Islamist officer was finally disarmed, tried by a secret court martial and executed.
If, as is widely agreed, between 25 and 30 per cent of Pakistan’s soldiers are Islamists, the army’s reluctance to act against the jihadis is understandable: it is afraid of provoking a civil war. Musharraf has a serious problem – and it’s not just his problem. The fundamentalists’ boast that in ten years’ time they will control the army and hence Pakistan conjures a deadly image: an Islamist finger on the nuclear trigger. This is what has concentrated minds in Washington, Delhi and Beijing, but so far with little to show for it.
Neither Pakistan nor India favours the cause of Kashmiri independence. Nor does Beijing, worried about the ramifications in Tibet. And yet independence is what the Kashmiri people appear to want. In the valley itself, Farooq Abdullah and his BJP chums, backed by Karan Singh, are plotting a Balkanization of the province, dividing it into eight units along religious–ethnic lines. The J&K Liberation Front, meanwhile, has published a map showing its favoured boundaries for an independent Kashmir, made up of territory currently occupied by India, Pakistan and China. Hashim Qureshi, one of the leaders of the organization, told me that they did not want all the paraphernalia of a modern state. They weren’t interested in having an army. They would be happy for their frontiers to be guaranteed by China, India and Pakistan, so that Kashmir, the cause of three wars, could become a secular, multicultural paradise, open to citizens of both India and Pakistan. At the moment this is a noble, but utopian, hope. The political landscape is exceptionally bleak. (A pamphlet issued by a jihadi group in Pakistan in 2002 called for donations to fund the struggle: the total launch fee for a jihad is 140,000 rupees; the price of a Kalashnikov is given as Rs 20,000; a single bullet is Rs 35; a Kenwood wireless is Rs 28,000.)
For the people who live here, 11 September did not change anything. The Jaish-e-Muhammad group carried out a brutal terrorist act in Srinagar days later. More than forty people were killed. It is the same group that, a few weeks later, killed a group of Christians in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur. The reason this group cannot be disarmed is that it is a creation of Pakistani military intelligence. The links between official and unofficial are inextricable. In retaliation, India bombed a few targets inside Pakistani territory. The message was obvious. If the West can inflict punitive bombing on Afghanistan, then India can do the same to Pakistan. The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament by one of these groups in December 2001 almost led to a war between the two countries. Pakistan acted against the leaders of the fundamentalist armies, but the membership has ominously disappeared.
The chapter of South Asian history that opened with the Partition of 1947 needs to be closed. Most people want a durable peace. There are now three large states in the region: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with a combined population of well over a billion human beings. On the periphery are Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Linguistically diverse, the region shares a culture and a history in common. Economic and political logic dictates the formation of a South Asian Union, a voluntary confederation of republics. Within such a framework, in which no state fears a challenge to its sovereignty, Kashmir could be guaranteed complete autonomy, as could the Tamil region in Sri Lanka. Shared sovereignty is better than none at all. A massive reduction in military expenditure and trade deals with China and the Far Eastern bloc could even benefit the continent as a whole. The Empire prefers to play the role of supreme arbiter these days, but its solutions put its own interests first. It would make much more sense for the South Asian states and China to forgo its mediation of the Empire and speak with each other directly. If they fail to do so, they might discover, sometime later this century, that beneath the benign gaze of the Empire, the forces of rampant capitalism are breaking up both China and India. Now there’s a thought.
Arundhati Roy
Azadi: The Only Thing Kashmiris Want
In 2008, the Kashmiri struggle for freedom, azadi, entered a new phase with the most widespread and sustained mass uprising in over a decade. Arundhati Roy was there for that first summer of discontent, the events of which have been repeated each year since.
During the summer months of 2008, the people of Kashmir were free. Free in the most profound sense. They shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers in the most densely militarized zone in the world.
After eighteen years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government found its worst nightmare had come true. Having declared that Kashmir’s militant movement had been crushed, it was faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one was nourished by people’s memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands had been killed, thousands had been ‘disappeared’, and hundreds of thousands had been tortured, injured, raped and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds expression, cannot easily be tamed, re-bottled and sent back to where it came from.
For all those years, the Indian state, known amongst the knowing as the Deep State, had done everything it could to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchase, and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It had used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged elections to subdue what democrats would call the will of the people. But the Deep State, as deep states eventually tend to do, tripped on its own hubris and bought into its own publicity. It made the mistake of believing that domination was victory, that the ‘normalcy’ it had enforced through the barrel of a gun was indeed normal, and that the people’s sullen silence was acquiescence.
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on the people’s behalf, informed us that ‘Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace.’ What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films had brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir’s sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not only peace they yearned for, but freedom too.
In a sudden twist of fate, an ill-conceived move over the transfer of a hundred acres of state forest-land to the Amarnath Shrine Board (which manages the annual Hindu pilgrimage to a cave deep in the Kashmir Himalayas) became the equivalent of a lit match tossed into a barrel of petrol. Until 1989, the Amarnath pilgrimage attracted about 20,000 people, who travelled to the Amarnath cave over a period of about two weeks. In 1990, when the overtly Islamic militant uprising in the Kashmir Valley coincided with the spread of virulent Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in the Indian plains, the number of pilgrims began to increase exponentially. By 2008, more than 500,000 pilgrims were visiting the Amarnath cave annually, travelling in large groups, their passage often sponsored by Indian business houses.
To many people in the valley, this dramatic increase in numbers was seen as an aggressive political statement by an increasingly Hindu-fundamentalist Indian state. Rightly or wrongly, the land transfer was viewed as the thin edge of the wedge. It triggered an anxiety: that this was the beginning of an elaborate plan to build Israeli-st
yle settlements and change the demographics of the valley.
Days of massive protest forced the valley to shut down completely. Within hours, the protests spread from the cities to villages. Young stone-throwers took to the streets and faced armed police, who fired straight at them, killing several. For the Kashmiri people as well as the Indian government, this uprising resurrected memories of the uprising in the early 1990s. Throughout the weeks of protest, hartal (general strikes) and police violence, the Hindutva publicity machine charged Kashmiris with committing every kind of communal excess, while the 500,000 Amarnath pilgrims completed their pilgrimage not only unhurt, but also touched by the hospitality they had been shown by local people.
Eventually, having been taken completely by surprise by the ferocity of the response, the government revoked the land transfer. But by then the land transfer had become what senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani called a non-issue.
Massive protests against the revocation erupted in the predominantly Hindu city of Jammu. There, too, the issue snowballed into something much bigger. Hindus began to raise issues of neglect and discrimination by the Indian state. (For some odd reason they blamed Kashmiris for that neglect.) The protests led to the blockading of the Jammu–Srinagar highway, the only functional road link between Kashmir and India. The army was called out to clear the highway and allow safe passage of trucks between Jammu and Srinagar. But incidents of violence against Kashmiri truckers were being reported from as far away as Punjab, where there was no protection at all. As a result, Kashmiri truckers, fearing for their lives, refused to drive on the highway. Truckloads of perishable fresh fruit and valley produce began to rot. It became very obvious that the blockade had caused the situation to spin out of control. The government announced that the blockade had been cleared and that trucks were going through. Sections of the Indian media, quoting the inevitable ‘intelligence’ sources, began to refer to it as a ‘perceived’ blockade, and even to suggest that there had never been one.