Of course there are many ways for the Indian state to continue to hold on to Kashmir. It could do what it does best. Wait. And hope that the people’s energy will dissipate in the absence of a concrete plan. It could try to fracture the fragile coalition that is emerging. It could extinguish the non-violent uprisings and reinvite armed militancy. It could increase the number of troops from half a million to a million. A few strategic massacres, a couple of targeted assassinations, some disappearances and a massive round of arrests should do the trick for a few more years.
The unimaginable amount of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnourished population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend that money on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?
The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. It’s all being stirred into a poisonous brew and administered intravenously, straight into our bloodstream.
At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force?
India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much – if not more – than Kashmir needs azadi from India.
Habba Khatun
Poems by a Queen of Kashmir
Translated by Nilla Cram Crook
Habba Khatun
I left my home for play
Nor yet again
Returned, although the day
Sank in the West.
The name I made is hailed
On lips of men,
Habba Khatun! Though veiled,
I found no rest.
Through crowds I found my way,
From forests, then,
The sages came, when day
Sank in the West.
Lol of the Lonely Pine
The one who dazzles – have you seen that one?
Upon him look!
A sleepless stream, in search of him I run,
A restless brook.
In far-off woods, a lonely pine I stood
Till he appeared,
My woodcutter, and came to cut the wood.
His fire I feared,
Yet though he burn my logs, behold, I shine,
My ashes wine!
Never Return These Hours
Meadows I cover with flowers for you,
Come, my lover of flowers!
Come, let me gather fresh jasmine for you,
Never return these hours!
Lilacs have bloomed by the river for you,
Deeply the world is asleep,
Still, though, no answer has reached me from you,
Garlands of green I keep.
What if they speak only evil of me?
Who has been able to change destiny?
Come, my lover of flowers!
Song of the Restless Stream
The world its Ramadan will end,
The lover’s Eid,
The feast of love, O call him, friend!
For love is Eid.
But love has melted me like snow,
A waterfall,
As restless as the summer streams
I sleepless go!
O, call him gently, friend, O call!
With wreaths and dreams
I carry wine to Dara’s peaks
The world below.
And yet he roams in distant vales.
New wine he seeks!
If he comes not, the jasmine pales,
And I, and all!
Gather Violets, O Narcissus!
Rain has come, and fields and fruit trees sing,
Spring has come, and Love, the Lord of Spring,
Dandelions have lifted up their faces,
Cold has gone and every wintry thing!
Forget-me-not the forest graces,
Iris and the lily spring will bring.
Gather violets, O Narcissus,
Winter’s ashes from our door I fling!
The water-bird the lake embraces,
How can frost upon your petals cling?
The Golden Wine Cups of the Night
In henna I have dyed my hands,
When will he come?
I die, while he roams distant lands,
My heart is numb!
O, where is now the day’s delight?
I’ve waited long.
The golden wine cups of the night
To him belong!
The ritual of love is sweet,
Could I adorn
My love with jewels, perfume his feet,
Be no more torn,
Anoint him with my fragrant kiss,
Love, for your sake,
The lotus of my heart in bliss
Would block the lake!
Lol of the Wild Yellow Rose
Wild, the vagrant yellow rose
Again has bloomed,
Beauty has in all that grows
Rare forms assumed!
Where, O love, your hiding place?
I wander far,
Seeking you among the streams
The dew-drops pour.
Jasmine in the forest gleams,
But where your face?
Violets bloom for me to trace To where you are.
Why Are You Cross with Me?
Which rival of mine has lured you away from me?
Why are you cross with me?
Forget the anger and the sulkiness,
You are my only love,
Why are you cross with me?
My garden has blossomed into colourful flowers,
Why are you away from me?
My love, my only love, I think only of you,
Why are you cross with me?
I kept my doors open half the night,
Come and enter my door, my jewel,
Why have you forsaken the path to my house?
Why are you cross with me?
I swear, my love, I am waiting for you,
Dressed in colourful robes,
My youth is in full bloom now,
Why are you cross with me?
Oh, marksman, my bosom is open
To the darts you throw at me.
These darts are piercing me,
Why are you cross with me?
I have been wasting away like snow is summer heat.
My youth is in its bloom.
This is your garden, come and enjoy it.
Why are you cross with me?
I have sought you over hills and dales,
I have sought you from dawn till dusk,
I have cooked dainty dishes for you,
I am pining for you,
What is my fault, O my love?
Why don’t you seek me out?
Why are cross with me?
The shock of your desertion has come as a blow to me,
O cruel one, I continue to nurse the pain.
Why are you cross with me?
I have not complained even to the spring breeze
That is my agony.
Why have you forgotten me?
Who will take care of me?
Why are you cross with me?
I swear by you I do not go out at all,
I don’t even show up at the spring.
My body is burning,
Why don’t you soothe it?
Why are you cross with me?
My hurt is marrow deep; I did not complain.
I just wasted away for you.
I have suppressed endless longing,
Why are you cross with me?
I, Habba Khatun, am grieving now.
Why didn’t I ever greet you, my love?
The day is fading and I keep recalling,
Why are you cross with me?
Hilal Bhatt
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Fayazabad 31223
Nineteen eighty-seven, the year I finished fifth grade, was a watershed year in the history of my homeland, Kashmir. It was the first and last year that my countrymen in Indian-administered Kashmir participated en masse in an assembly election with dreams of having their own government.
I would finish school at four o’clock, hurry home and then leave with other children from my village in South Kashmir to attend a Muslim United Front rally. MUF was a coalition of independent, local political parties that had decided to contest elections in opposition to the candidates of the parties beholden to New Delhi: the National Conference and the Congress.
Many who would go on to become separatists and even militants, like Syed Salhauddin (now chief of the United Jihad Council, an alliance of Islamic armed resistance groups), had come together to establish a people’s government in the state.
Even prior to the ill-fated elections of 1987, there had been a widespread belief among the people of Kashmir that they had never been given a fair chance to choose their own representatives: since the first such elections, in 1951, the ruling parties had always been those backed by New Delhi. A section of the Kashmiri leadership had always boycotted the elections, demanding the implementation of the 1948 UN resolution for a plebiscite in Kashmir on self-determination. Now, the MUF saw the 1987 elections as a route to the plebiscite.
The emergence of the Muslim United Front rekindled confidence in the democratic process. People overwhelmingly supported the MUF candidates. Kashmir looked even greener with its streets, bazaars, rooftops and roads painted the colour of the MUF flag. It was the highest turnout ever for a Kashmir assembly election. But the results disappointed everyone. Of the forty-four seats the MUF contested, it won four, while the National Conference–Congress alliance took sixty-six. Accounts of how officials had rigged the count and replaced the ballot boxes became household stories. Children from the age of fourteen up began recruiting themselves as cadres of the Liberation Front, Hizbul Mujahidin, Al-Ummar, and other indigenous guerrilla organizations.
Groups of about a dozen boys would cross the border into Pakistan, receive training in guerrilla warfare, and return to Kashmir to fight Indian rule. Every day we heard news of more children joining these groups and heading toward the frontier districts of Kupwara and Baramulla, where they crossed the Line of Control (LOC), the de facto border between Indian-and Pakistani-held territories in Kashmir. Children at my school longed for their turn to become militants, heroes.
The principal of our school, a tall, wiry man in his early forties with a strand of long beard on his chin, was a Jammat-e-Islami sympathizer. I still remember the day when, in class, he declared that he had lost all hope in India and asked the students to prepare for an armed rebellion: ‘You saw what happened in the assembly election. India will never let us enjoy even a basic right like choosing our own representatives. Kashmir is occupied. Peace and dignity can only prevail through the barrel of the gun.’ That was the last lesson he taught in the classroom.
Barely a week later, the news that the principal had crossed the LOC was confirmed when his name figured among a group of Muzaffarabad-based Kashmiris who had requested a Kashmiri song on the Radio Kashmir station there and dedicated it to his friends on our side of the Line of Control. Families parted by the LOC would frequently send messages to their friends and relatives through Azad Kashmir radio. For that reason it was a popular station in both parts of Kashmir. It became even more popular after the 1987 elections.
We learned that our principal had also taken with him his fourteen-year-old son and three other boys from the ninth grade to be trained in guerrilla warfare. The news put a bee in our school bonnet. My classmates all produced two versions of the essay ‘My Aim in Life’. The first version was for our Pandit teacher, Somnath; the second was our principal’s last lesson turned into a personal declaration.
During recess we would often sit in the apple orchard adjacent to our school and share our secret versions of this essay. Without exception, everybody in our class, including the girls, wanted to become mujahidin – fighters.
A year later, the boys who had crossed the LOC returned. They made their presence felt, firing indiscriminately on the Indian army convoys that would routinely pass along the nearby National Highway 1-A, which connected Srinagar with Jammu. The boys occasionally planted improvised explosive devices and land-mines under the highway culverts. Every time an action – our local term for an attack on an army convoy – occurred, masses of people would flee the villages before the army could come and look for the boys who’d undertaken it. The soldiers would barge into the houses and beat the children. The next day, more boys would vow to cross the border and become fighters.
During our annual school exams, boys stood guard at the exam hall with pistols hidden in their pockets. They made sure nobody was copying or cheating and kept an eye on a few exam invigilators who were notorious for taking money from students for helping them to pass the grade.
Students who repeatedly failed the annual exam found it easier to gain standing in the village if they embraced the gun and became militant. One of them, Shabir, went to Muzaffarabad before the tenth grade annual exam and returned three years later with the largest gun I had ever seen.
The boys would often pass through the villages with their guns hidden in their phirens, the long woollen gowns Kashmiris wear in the winter. My classmates loved narrating the previous night’s story of spotting militants with Kalashnikovs.
At nightfall, the militants would stop and enter a village house, spend the night there and start their journey before dawn the next day. Occasionally they walked in large groups, with guns of different shapes and sizes slung over their shoulders.
Late one evening in 1989, when I was in the seventh grade, two boys jumped the brick wall around our house and came in through the kitchen door. We stood scared as they took their AK-47 rifles out of their phirens and placed them under the bulky walnut bed which dominated the drawing room.
My mother prepared dinner for them. They ate, offered prayers and slept. None of us were able to sleep. In the middle of the night, I was surprised to see my father smoking by the window that overlooked the village road. I was worried about the possibility of soldiers cordoning off the house and exchanging fire with our guests. But I was more excited about the AK-47s that were lying beneath the walnut bed in the drawing room. I wanted to touch one. Feel it in my hands. Pull the trigger and experience the force. I wanted to tell my classmates just how forceful a real AK-47 was.
I woke up early in the morning and sneaked into the drawing room. The boys were in a deep sleep. I went to the bed, got hold of a rifle and hid it beneath my phiren. Before I opened the door, I looked back to check that they had not seen me and then I left the house, heading toward the open fields outside the village, Kalashnikov in hand. A strange energy took over my body. With the gun in my phiren, my tread became heavier, firmer, like an adult’s. I walked fearlessly past the men waiting for early morning bread at the village bakery.
I crossed the cemented embankment of the spring on the village periphery, where women and young girls would assemble early in the morning to wash their dishes and gossip about village boys. Half a mile on, I got to an open mustard field near the village tableland, looked back, and convinced myself there was nobody around. I took the rifle out of my phiren, looked at it and took a deep breath. Before I could pull the trigger and experience the force, my father came from behind, slapped me and took the gun.
Fearing that their children would go across the border to become militants, many parents had begun sending them to schools outside the valley. Two years after the AK-47 incident, my parents followed suit.
After finishing eighth grade, in 1991, I was sent to Minto Circle School, along with seven fellow Kashmiris. The pioneering educationist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had founded Minto Circle in 1875. It was a boarding school attached to his Aligarh Muslim University, which sat 130 kilometres from Delh
i along the Delhi–Calcutta Grand Trunk Road.
It was the scorching heat of the North Indian plains that first made me think, ‘I am not home.’ It is a cruel thing to ask a valley dweller to live in a tropical, dry climate zone and withstand a minimum summer temperature of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It was, initially, the most difficult thing the eight of us had to face at boarding school.
Often, at night, we would leave our rooms, gather on the lawn and talk about home: our home of forests, where rivulets and streams criss-cross spring valleys, where the mighty Himalayas wear blankets of snow till late summer and the cooling scent of pine cones fills the air. The great Mughal emperor Jehangir had rightly called it ‘paradise on earth’. All this contrasted sharply with our new surroundings in Aligarh, and we always looked for an excuse to travel home.
The morning newspapers of 6 December 1992 brought the news that 150,000 Kar Sevaks (Hindu nationalist volunteers) were heading to Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to claim the disputed land. Large contingents of police and paramilitaries had been deployed to stop the Kar Sevaks from entering Ayodhya.
Babri Masjid was a mosque built in 1527 by Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire that ruled India for more than two centuries. For many years, India had witnessed alarming politicking on the issue. The Hindu right, including the mainstream Bharatiya Janata Party, argued that the mosque was previously called Masjid-i-Janmasthan (Mosque of the Birthplace), acknowledging the site as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Rama. This, they concluded, meant that they should be allowed to demolish the mosque and build a Hindu temple on the site.
On the afternoon of 6 December, we were having lunch when we heard that the Kar Sevaks had broken through the security cordon and entered the mosque complex. An uneasy silence descended on our dorm. A few hours later, the news came that the Kar Sevaks had climbed over the three mighty domes of the mosque and razed it to the ground.
As soon as the news broke, more than 25,000 students from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) piled out onto Anoopshahra Road in protest, burning a dozen vehicles. It was late into the night before the authorities were able to gain control over the rioting students.