Caught between India and Pakistan, a lost paradise seeks independence
by Mark Drajem
Friday in Srinagar has the feel of both carnival and penance. Outside the luxurious papier-mâché mosque in this crowded, 700-year-old city on a dusty summer afternoon, the cramped roads of the city are closed for a fair. Along both sides of the streets vendors drop vegetable and mutton samosas into vats of murky oil that bubble over gas ranges and they serve them on a plate made of yesterday's newspaper. Butcher shops boast today's prize on a hook at the front of their shop; tonight's meal will be a mutton feast. Toy stores offer cheap plastic guns and yo-yos, fathers in knee-length cotton pajamas carry in their arms daughters wearing pink, frilly dresses, and small boys weave through the crowd on their bicycles, laughing, and yelling. It's a rare moment.
Srinagar is a small city settled deep in a valley, wrapped around Dal Lake, with mountains rising on all sides. The people of Srinagar and the delicately crafted and painted houseboats that ride this lake once offered international visitors escape from an often-violent world. No more. For 10 years the people of Srinagar-the capital of the contested Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir-have been the victims of bombings by guerillas and reprisals by the Indian army. Death and vengeance became part of life in Srinagar, and there is no end in sight. In late October, guerrillas seeking independence bombed a movie theater, killed a cable television worker, fired grenades at the state government's main office building, and launched machine gun attacks on Indian army patrols. The violence brought a quick response.
To date, as many as 70,000 have died in a state with a population of 8 million. This once-peaceful Sufi Muslim society is a police state controlled by the Indian army. Culture and tradition are in seclusion, and nowhere is there greater evidence than in Srinagar's old quarter, where protest to India's half-century of rule turned violent a decade ago.
In the winding alleys on a Friday, the Muslim sabbath day, shopkeepers used to keep their doors open to capture business among those who passed on their way to the mosque to make namaz, or prayer. Now, by 1 o'clock in the afternoon, merchants pull down their rusty steel doors like shrouds over the sweets, long-distance telephone services, the tailor shops, and the chick shop where the butcher sat on the floor, cutting hens into fillets with a knife held between his toes. They hurry off to Srinagar's main mosque, Jamia Masjid.
Along the way, a shop owner may turn off the main road to pass by the unadorned tomb of a Sufi saint that some claim is the resting place of Jesus Christ. Then he passes the high brick walls and double-locked steel doors of traders' homes that line the back roads of this cramped city center. A stray dog sniffs through the rubble of a house crushed to the ground. The call to prayer surges from the Jamia Masjid, and loudspeakers proclaim the religious text of the day as a truck passes, carrying a load of nervous sheep.
Jamia Masjid does not look very Muslim. Its spires look more like the pagodas of a Hindu temple in Nepal rather than a mosque in Kashmir. The mosque rings an unkempt grassy courtyard and the roof is held up by unfinished lumber of the trunks of more than 100 pine trees, giving it none of the opulence of mosques in Delhi or Agra. What gives away the mosque's Muslim purpose are the arches that meet in a point give away its Muslim heritage, and the true believers who enter.
Below a traffic light at the intersection and just beyond the courtyard of Jamia Masjid is an Indian military checkpoint: a small, circular building with double-thick mud walls bearing the seal of the Indian government. The roof is tin and plastic and the lookout windows are covered with netting, allowing the soldiers to poke their machine guns out and to prevent guerillas from hurling grenades in. Indian soldiers occupy all of Srinagar's major intersections. They stand out with their dark skin and mustaches, combat helmets, and camouflaged bullet-proof vests, shiny new automatic weapons and walkie-talkies. They speak Hindi, not Kashmiri and come, for the most part, from the hills of Himachal Pradesh, a bordering hill state with a strong military history. The soldiers standing in front of Jamia Masjid stop and body search each Kashmiri who wants to enter the mosque. Friday prayers have often been followed by violent confrontations in this neighborhood.
Not everyone attends Friday prayers. The mystical religious traditions of the Sufis of Kashmir do not require much ritual, so not everyone goes to the mosque. But some, such as the Bhats of Bhatpora, do not go out of fear of what will happen along the way.
The Bhat family is by local standards a large one. I met three generations of the Bhats as they sat one summer afternoon on the front patio of their home, a residence of concrete bricks covered in plaster freshly painted yellow. Geese splashed around in the muck beneath trees that surround the house. An uncle's scooter sat abandoned in a small dirt patch. An occasional breeze lifted the leaves of these trees and carried the heavy aroma of the two large water buffalo cows tethered at the front gate near gardens of marigolds and roses. Surrounding all of this is a tall brick wall laced on top with shards of glass.
The family spends its days within this small compound. Three daughters embroider elaborate floral designs on the light, wool shawls for which Kashmir is famous. It takes as many as two months to finish a shawl. One daughter, Masrat Jan, is married. Her two-year-old daughter spins around on the cool cement porch while her mother and aunts work. "It's good work," says Nasreen Jan, the youngest and prettiest daughter. "It takes a lot of time, but we don't like to leave here." The matriarch, Raja Begum, spins raw wool into thread on a hand-powered wheel.
Twelve years ago, Raja Begum's husband, Gulamb Ahmed Bhat, moved from the from the old city center to this farmhouse 15 miles away from the chaos and increasing violence. From a photograph in the house, Gulamb Ahmed looks tall and gaunt, with sunken cheeks and a shock of white hair like that of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. In 1992, Indian soldiers shot and killed Gulamb Ahmed. He was 58 and the father of seven children.
His widow tells the story with deliberate clarity. "With all the disturbances and all the strikes, it was hard to get vegetables," Raja Begum said. Gulamb had gone to his brother's house to pick up seeds for their small garden. After he was gone, guerrillas tossed a homemade grenade at a passing Indian army convoy, killing two soldiers. The army sealed off the neighborhood and searched door to door for the killers. When Gulamb tried to return to his house to see that his wife and children were unharmed, the soldiers questioned him, then let him go. "As he turned and started to walk away, they shot him," Raja Begum says. "The bullets came through the back." Raja Begum twisted her own arms behind to illustrate, and they began to cry quietly.
Does you hate India for what happened, I asked.
"What else can I do," she said.
Their family friend, Amin Guru, who served as my translator, told me, "Everyone here has a tragedy." Bu do the victims of these tragedies demand freedom? Azadi? Nasreen Jan, Raja Begum's daughter, said, "We don't want azadi. We don't want all this fighting. We want it to stop. We want peace."
When an Indian army truck turns a corner in Srinagar, men talking together will instantly scatter because gatherings of more than six people are illegal in Kashmir. This restriction is waived only for Friday prayers. After prayers is the only time in the week when Muslim men can gather and discuss politics and the freedom movement.
Singly and in pairs, men enter the Jamia Masjid and squat at the central fountain to scrub their feet and take a small sip of the holy water. They walk shoeless across the mosque's stone floor toward a black marble faux arch that shows the way to Mecca and then kneel in measured rows, sitting back on their heels. Their religious leader is 26-year old Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, who attended a local Christian boarding school, and dreams of attending Columbia University. As the 14th mirwaiz, or head priest, he is spiritual head of Sufism's 600-year-old Muslim community in the Vale of Kashmir. At Ramadan, 100,000 people will come to hear Mirwaiz Omar Farooq preach in this mosque.
In 1994, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, who is also a political leader for Kashmiris, formed the moderate All-Parties Hurriyat Conference, a coalition of more than 30 groups seeking freedom from Indian control. When I met Omar Farooq in his suburban Srinagar home, he was dressed in a denim shirt and Birkenstock-style sandals. He does not look like a teacher of the community's weathered and bearded conservatives or of the women who, covered in black burkhas, kneel before him each week. He gave me his e-mail address and talked about his role in Kashmir's political life.
As the first All-Parties chairman, he told India he would declare a ceasefire if the Indian government would engage in unconditional talks. India refused, but Omar Farooq thinks that whenever India wants to seek peace, they will have to discuss Kashmir's independence with him. "If we are given the chance, we really can play a role in solving this crisis," Omar Farooq said. But while he may speak for hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris as the faith's hereditary heir, others in the community say he is out of his depth. "He's just a kid," one Srinagar resident said to me. "He's a puppet of those old, corrupt men in the Hurriyat conference." In his book on the 10 years of violence in Kashmir Indian, the journalist Manoj Joshi writes that Omar Farooq wasn't accorded the prestige of his father, Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, and accused the son of fanning the flames of an armed struggle in his sermons, thus prolonging Kashmir's suffering.
The skeptics and critics do not appear to worry him. "Because of my religious seat I hold a unique position in the Kashmir Valley," he says. He rose to that position at the age of 16 when one day in May, 1990, two men entered the family home, stood face to face with Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq, pulled out guns and started shooting him. The 200,000 mourners who attended his funeral turned into an angry mob. Indian soldiers opened fire and killed more than 20 people and the coffin of the martyred mirwaiz contains bullet holes from the shooting. The murder of the mirwaiz and the violence of the funeral day are seen as the catalyst of Kashmir's violent decade.
In the Rashomon world of Kashmir, there are many explanations for who killed the mirwaiz and why no one has been charged with the murder. Some believe that the Pakistan secret service killed Maulvi Farooq because he wasn't tough enough in his dealings with India. His son, Omar Farooq, suspects India because, he says, they never delivered a promised report on the assassination.
The young mirwaiz portrays himself as a moderating force among the resistance leaders. He was the only one among them to support discussions of the Kashmir dispute in Lahore, Pakistan last February between the then-prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and last summer Omar Farooq opened a peace center in Srinagar. Last year he pled the Kashmir cause to the United Nations and at the U.S. State Department. When he returned home, he was publicly critical of Indian rule, and was, therefore, denied permission to leave Kashmir again. Two months ago he went to the airport to fly to New York for a U.N. General Assembly meeting, but Indian soldiers prevented him from boarding the plane. To date, however, Omar Farooq has not been arrested. All other All-Parties Hurriyat Conference leaders have been arrested on suspicion of playing a role in the October bombing of the Secretariat, the state government's office building in Srinagar. No one died in the attack, the most bold action taken in the last five years by opponents to Indian rule. Farooq denies that he or his colleagues had any part in the bombing.
In a tight circle on the lawn of Jamia Masjid, 40 men discuss the latest news. Their ears pop out wide beneath their cloth prayer caps. They have the sunken cheeks of smokers, and beards they call "the gift of Allah." Mirwaiz Umar Farooq had a cold, and couldn't address the day's meeting so the task fell to the mosque's administrator, G. Nabi. When Nabi noticed me listening from just beyond the circle, he interrupted the discussion and called me forward to ask what I wanted. I asked if the years of violence have made them tired of the freedom struggle. He grew firm.
"We have not acceded to India," he replied, and the men around him nodded in agreement. "We have been killed mercilessly by the Indians. Yes, our boys have taken to the gun, but what can they do given this amount of suppression. India has forced us to take the gun." His face contorted in painful tears as Nabi lifted his pant leg and displayed a 30-year-old bullet wound. "How can I forget this?"
He told me that Kashmiris "have full hope that God and truth will prevail and we will get our azadi." Why will things improve now, I asked?
"Your Mr. Clinton has said he will take a personal interest in Kashmir. We hope he will help decide the future of Kashmir … (But) in our heart of hearts we know that America is not interested in us. That is why we must have faith in God and shariah." Shah Nawaz, a 22-year-old shop owner, said that Harkat-ul-Ansar, the pro-Taliban fundamentalist militants, as one of his heroes. "These people are the true believers," Shah Nawaz said. "They know you can't live in a country ruled by the heathens."
I have found few who share Shah Nawaz's hope for an independent state under Islamic law, and many of them are here at Jami Masjid.
To ask what Kashmir wants is to beg two questions: What is Kashmir? And, what can they want? The historical definition of Kashmir and how it came to be ruled by a Hindu government in New Delhi is a convoluted and disputed story. The princely state of Kashmir was created by a Dogra maharajah, prince who invaded and captured each of four kingdoms in the early 1800s. The British ran Kashmir's external affairs, and left the Hindu maharajah to exploit and enslave much of the Muslim population. In 1947, the British relinquished their colonial powers, leaving Pakistan and India to partition the subcontinent into a predominately Muslim Pakistan and a predominately Hindu India. Each of 500 states in question chose to be part of Pakistan, or India. The Hindu ruler of the Muslim-dominated Kashmir delayed his decision until Pathans from Pakistan invaded Kashmir from the west. The maharajah chose India, which rushed troops in to occupy the eastern two-thirds of Kashmir. That division remains, a half-century later, not as an international border but as a U.N.-approved "line of control."
India pledged to hold a referendum in Jammu and Kashmir so that Kashmiris could hold a plebiscite, but that referendum has never been held. In the early 1950s, the United Nations called for a referendum but the status quo held until 1989, when kidnappings, bombings, and machine-gun exchanges became part of daily life in Kashmir. The Indian government says it has an estimated 200,000 troops in Kashmir, fighting about 4,000 insurgents. India claims that most of the guerrillas are really Pakistan-backed invaders; Pakistan denies this, although everyone in Kashmir says Pakistan does provide significant support. The Indian government says more than 25,000 people have died in the 10 years of violence; locals say it's probably more like 70,000.
There are four distinct pieces to Kashmir, in two nations. One piece is the northern areas of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, where people share more with Afghanistan than they do with the Sufi brand of Islam that predominates in the Kashmir valley across the line of control. The other three pieces are in India: Jammu to the south is mostly Hindu, but with many Muslim districts; Ladakh is a mountainous desert that is ethnically more like Tibet and its people are mostly Buddhist; and, finally, there is the Vale of Kashmir, with Srinagar at its heart, which is overwhelmingly Muslim. It is here, where 4.5 million people live, that the guerrilla violence has been greatest and where those fighting against Indian rule have found hideouts in the mountains, forests, and caves that surround the Vale. The vast majority of the people supported the militants in the first few months of the azadi struggle. "We thought independence was coming in a week," says travel agent Nazir Rah. But the people discovered after many years of life in the midst of violence that change is not so simple now.
Kashmiris say they are not like Indians, but they share a complex and ever-changing history of beliefs and rulers. Like the people of India, Kashmiris have gone through periods of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Moghul domination. It's only under the rule of the Maharaja Gulab Singh, the founder of Dogra dynasty in Kashmir, that the state took its present shape and form. Hindu influences are still found among the Muslims of Kashmir. Many organizations fighting for Kashmir self-rule want to maintain a separate Muslim identity under the name of "Kashmiriyat." Others say they want to create an Islamic state.
But for the most part, Kashmiris are simply tired of the violence.
When I asked in Srinagar where I could find a translator to take on a visit to nearby villages, they were skeptical that anyone would go. Not for fear of convoys of Indian soldiers but for fear of bands of guerrillas. Gone are the days of Indian military reprisal killings. In fact, Kashmiris do not fear reprisal for loudly criticizing the Indian government, and proudly attach their names to the claims. But when they tell me what they do not like about the independence movement, they start talking about going off the record.
Those who want independence say all of this territory should be united into one state. Yasin Malik, the leader of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, for example, extols the Kashmiriyat philosophy, which, he says, transcends religion and cherishes peace, charity, nature, and mutual respect. All of these traits have been in short supply in Kashmir. Ladakh, for example, has waged its own legal fight against the Kashmir valley over the past eight years, earning some autonomy from the state government in Srinagar.
The people who shout for azadi in Kashmir are, for the most part, the Sunni Muslims in the Srinagar valley. Outside of that area, freedom is given little thought. That, of course, means any campaign for independence comes with myriad internal problems.
The single question concerning the rule of Kashmir that has been forthrightly answered since 1947 is that both Pakistan and India want Kashmir for themselves. Pakistan says that this Muslim-majority state should have joined Pakistan in 1947; India says Kashmir's ruler chose India, and that's final.
"India is a power. Pakistan is a power. But we are a nothing stuck in between," said Nazeer Khan, a 27-year-old shopkeeper. Even the United Nations ruling would only allow Kashmiris to choose India or Pakistan. No one offers them a third choice.
And what do Kashmiris want? That is a question too few in Kashmir have been asked. Kashmiris in and around Srinagar say they want freedom from both. "Kashmir must be a free, multiethnic, multireligious state," Malik said. Most share his view. In a 1995 poll by the Indian newsmagazine, Outlook, 72 percent of Kashmiris wanted independence, and 80 percent opposed elections within the Indian framework. Two-thirds of the people said they disapproved of the growing fundamentalism in the valley. And if anyone thinks the current state structure reflects popular sentiments, consider that in parliamentary elections in September, only 16 percent of the people in Srinagar even voted.
In the patterns of daily life, however, Srinagar endures. While azadi guerrillas and Indian soldiers kill each other and any Kashmiris who happen to get in the way, the people of Srinagar knit scarves and they shop for new Sony television sets or extravagant polyester dresses. They paddle out on Dal Lake and cut lotus flowers for their cattle, and they urge tourists to "have a look, looking is free" in their carpet shop. They also know how to duck quickly and scamper fast when the gunfire begins. "After awhile people have gotten immune to it," says Parvez Imroz, a human rights lawyer in the capital. "They've acclimatized." Parvez Imroz, a thin, chain-smoking lawyer, has the kind of long, sloping nose that is uncharitably identified as a "Kashmiri nose." Imroz's office is stacked high with tattered folders wrapped in string; he works on a manual typewriter, a cigarette tucked tightly between his lips. The only brightness in his creaky, crumbling office is the 1996 world conference poster behind him seeking recovery of the "disappeared."
Imroz fights to discover what happened to 2,000 "disappeared" Kashmiris. He has no problem assigning blame: "For the past 10 years the people of Kashmir have been victims of state-sponsored terrorism." On behalf of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, which he founded, Imroz has filed hundreds of cases. He has found very few, but the search has become a popular public issue in the Kashmir valley.
In the current climate, advocacy dances an odd tango. Rallies are against the law. Even dissident Imroz is circumspect in describing recent events. "People are very afraid to agitate," he says. "We don't have the feeling that we are safe; we're vulnerable. We aren't comfortable enough to stage strikes and demonstrations, so we're doing this in a way that is tolerable to the government."
There is more to the dance between Imroz and the Indian government than meets the eye. The Indian government pays about $2,300 to survivors of those killed in violence; because most of the dead are males, widows have receive preferential treatment in hiring for government jobs.
Rashid, a taxi driver, told me that his 14-year-old nephew was picked up by the army on his way home from school because he passed near a car from which someone had tossed a grenade at some Indian officers. The boy was never seen again. His mother lost her will to live and, eventually, her mind. But by the pace of his tale and the tone of his voice, it sounded as if Rashid's greater concern was not for his sister's well-being, but that the government had never compensated the family.
"It's human nature, people learn to cope," Imroz said. "People have gotten so desensitized to violence." That has caused Imroz, the lawyer, to seek larger solutions to Kashmir's troubles: the rebuilding of the civil society of Kashmir. None of his efforts have led Imroz to a sense of optimism. "Basically, I see no solution," he said.
On Friday, afternoon prayers merge into an evening wedding reception. The bride reclines Cleopatra-style on a makeshift divan of cushions in a wide tent. Around her cluster her sister, some friends, and a dozen other young women. Across the room, mothers beat a drum and sing the same the songs over and over for four hours.
The bride is having her mendhi done, the intricate painting of henna patterns on her hands and feet, by a man who is undisturbed by the high-pitched songs. Long into the bride's hand-painting, the women's enthusiasm begins to ebb. They don't know enough songs, and the repetition is tiring them. The groom stands outside smoking a Camel cigarette and calls out in Kashmiri, "Tell the shikara (row boat used for transporting passengers to houseboats) man to wait for us." Meanwhile his cousin, a travel agent who is fluent in English and French, tries to the corral the maid of honor on to the dance floor. He succeeds only for a brief moment.
The mehndi ended up taking too long, and the exodus was necessarily hurried. The taxi drivers, including Rashid, are grumbling about the late hour-not because they want to sleep, but because it can be dangerous to be on the road late. In the 20-minute drive back to the houseboat, the bride and groom pass no other cars, and at each of three military checkpoints the taxi driver must stop, get out and provide his identification and his license. The soldiers all shoulder heavy weapons, and demand the answers to their questions in Hindi. The exchange, even with a few foreigners in the car, is not a pleasant one. The boat ride back home will come with an extra companion: the army keeps shining a spotlight, searching in the dark, uninhabited waters of the lake for the madman who would be out in a boat after 10 p.m. There is some madness in this affair: It is mad to believe that the hope and the enthusiasms of a new bride and groom can persist in the violence and pessimism of their Kashmir.
Mark Drajem is a journalist in Delhi. His article, "The Silicon Wallas," was published in the summer issue of WorldView.
