In a remote corner of our seamless world better known to most Americans as a kind of sweater than as a place, the superficially straightforward work of journalism has compelled me to re-examine fundamentally my own heritage as an American and a Christian. In the hopeless tangle of political, moral, and above all factual ambiguity that is the separatist rebellion in Kashmir, I believe I have achieved, if nothing else, a new personal lucidity.
What Kashmiris (and, along for the rhetorical ride, Pakistanis) call “the freedom struggle” and Indian apologists call “Pak-sponsored fundamentalist terrorism” can readily be likened to the American Revolution, though Kashmir lacks the geographic advantages of an ocean separating it from the claimed oppressor and an as-yet-unplundered continent at its back. It is difficult to distinguish Patrick Henry’s call for liberty or death from what Kashmiris believe they are insisting on. Like the Americans of 1776, Kashmiris want something they call “freedom,” or azaadi. “Basically, it is a revolution,” Yaseen Malik, the young president of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (jklf), one of the largest and most “moderate” of many separatist groups, told me of the armed uprising that began in 1989. “We can’t achieve things overnight. Our goal is complete freedom of Jammu and Kashmir. Until then, we will continue our movement.”
And why not? Kashmiris were, after all, promised certain things that have conspicuously failed to materialize over 50 years of diplomatic, political, and military confrontation between India and Pakistan, neither of which inspires much spontaneous warmth in the majority of proverbially “fiercely independent” Kashmiris. A glance at a map shows the problem’s true fulcrum: Kashmir was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1947 the Indian National Congress of Gandhi and Nehru was preparing to govern a new, independent, “secular” India, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League was insisting (unhelpfully and implausibly, many still say, with much truth) that Muslims, whose situation in India resembles that of black Americans, were a separate “nation” who deserved and needed their own state. Part of the program for British withdrawal was a political buyout of the hereditary rulers of more than 500 “princely states” that had not been under direct British rule. The largest of these was Jammu and Kashmir State, a jigsaw puzzle, established in 1846 for reasons that suited British interests, comprising Hindu-majority Jammu; Buddhist Ladakh, geographically and culturally a part of Tibet; various quasi-tribal remote mountain peoples, collectively known as “Dards”; and the heartbreakingly beautiful, long-famed Vale of Kashmir, most of whose inhabitants happen to be devout Muslims but think of themselves first as Kashmiris.
Independence for India and Pakistan came in August 1947. The ensuing history of standing enmity between the two countries is a fascinating case study in what Norman Mailer has called “the fact that there are no facts.” Indians and Pakistanis are not exempt from the penchant we political animals have for finding preferred meanings in otherwise potentially inconvenient facts, and even for making up facts as we go along. Did or did not the Boundary Commission led by Sir Cyril Radcliffe purposely adjust the border in the Gurdaspur district of the Punjab in a way that favored India’s claim to Kashmir? On the other hand, would Pakistan even have come into being but for Jinnah’s demagogic intransigence? Did Maharaja Hari Singh sign the Instrument of Accession to India before or after Indian soldiers landed at Srinagar airport on October 27, 1947? Pakistanis generally have one set of transparently partisan answers to these and other questions, Indians another.
Every state needs an enemy, and Pakistan and India were tailor-made for each other, cut as they are from precisely the same historical cloth. Indeed, each justifies its very existence with an idea that denies the other’s justification. Pakistan–an improbable Lego-like contraption of a country–has no excuse for existing unless to be “Islamic,” whatever that means (and fierce disputes rage among Muslims over what it does mean). India–because of Pakistan a rump–must remain a secular, nonsectarian, modern, “democratic” state or, by the relentless logic of demography, become either a postmodern kind of Hindu theocracy or a chaos of feuding petty tyrannies.
“Secularism” was and remains the byword of the long-ruling Congress, and a bastion against religious tyranny sounds like a good, even urgently necessary idea. But like any creed, secularism has its own fundamentalism. The essayist John Sisk has written that totalitarianism “is utterly hostile to established religions, which ask the individual to acknowledge perspectives and realities that transcend art and the dialectical operations of the material world.” Well may we wonder how totalitarianism thus defined differs from Indian secularism–or, for that matter, from American secularism. As Mark Tully, the distinguished former BBC bureau chief, has written, “What I think is manifestly wrong is to disturb the religious beliefs of those who have no hope of any other comfort, which is exactly what we have taught and are still teaching the Indian elite to do. Not surprisingly, this is producing a backlash in India–Hindu fundamentalism.”
Muslims, including Kashmiris, are doubly suspect in India: Hindu “fundamentalists” despise them viscerally, and secularists presume them guilty until proven innocent, like Catholics and Jews elsewhere, of the sin of loyalty to an authority higher than the state. Though the Kashmir uprising is not essentially a religious one, perhaps we do well to recall the Qur’an’s injunction that “Permission to fight is given / To those who are the victims of aggression.” Said Kashmiri women’s leader Asiya Indrabi to me: “Be obedient to Allah, so don’t obey anyone in disobedience to Allah.” Merely for starters, asked Mrs. Indrabi, how could a good Muslim support a government that condoned abortion? Or that, for the sake of “secularism,” refused to allow Muslim girls to wear the burkah or veil to school?
When I first visited Kashmir in March 1994, I knew little of all this. During my time of discovery I was befriended by an old man to whom I owe a great deal, to whom I must refer simply as Haji. He was a man with a strong personality, a presence. He had seen a lot of history in his own valley, but the great adventure of his life had been the Haj, when he and his wife had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He reminded me a little of a similarly venerable man in a similarly troubled place, a Haitian priest I had known who spoke in riddles and who, like Haji, radiated a je ne sais quoi: an indulgent patriarchal air and a seemingly ill-founded calm that was at once alluring and slightly maddening. I had not considered that perhaps the priest’s enigmas were his substitute for answers, carefully cultivated over a long lifetime of asking questions. Nor did I consider, at first, that this might be so for Haji too; I still supposed answers might exist. But people in Haiti and Kashmir know better. Only after some time spent in Haji’s company did it dawn on me what the mysterious something was about them both: It was religious faith, a personal certainty that there exists a world, or aspects of this world, not governed by politics.
Unlike the priest, Haji was willing to be involved in politics, though naturally on his own terms. “Sel-ef-determination. That is my main objective,” he said to me many times. Kashmiris had been promised a plebiscite, he pointed out, and besides, freedom was the birthright of every man. He would get his hands dirty on more particular matters when and only when necessary, but never would he compromise on his bedrock commitment or pledge himself to any party or group, any of them. Why should he? All he wanted was self-determination. Once, he told me, Yaseen Malik had asked him: “Haji, why you don’t join politics? Why you don’t belong some party?”
“I support only one party,” Haji had told him.
“Which party?” asked Yaseen Malik.
“Sel-ef-determination.” In the telling he grinned, in that way of his.
It is at once stirring and disheartening to ponder how genuinely Kashmiris seem to believe that, one of these days, American power and/or the alleged authority of the United Nations will be put at their disposal. It is sad but true that, still today, naïve notions of what an idealized America can or will do to sustain desperate people in nigh-hopeless plights the world over, so that our country exists in the minds of, for example, Haitians and Kashmiris almost as a kind of surrogate God–omnipotent, potentially benign, surely on the side of right though by all means enigmatic. “We Kashmiris, first thing we bleeve in, we bleeve in God,” a friend told me. “After that, we bleeve that if America takes an interest in our problem, it will be solved. America can do anything. When America wants to solve Kashmir problem, he can do it.”
“Which country you are from?” asked a man I met at a rally.
I paused; it is a question I never like answering. “I’m from America,” I said.
“Do you feel that Kashmiris want freedom?”
“Oh, yes. I feel that very much.”
“Anyway,” he said, “you will take your message back to your great America, which rules the whole world?”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “I will take my message back to America.”
It commands a rueful respect to recall that Kashmiris–like Nepalis, Haitians, South Africans, and others–were spurred to act against what they saw as oppression by the implicit promise of the 1989 revolutions in Europe. An intelligent and dedicated young lawyer and human-rights activist said to me: “We thought that if people of Romania can go out on the streets and get rid of a dictator, why can’t we go out on the streets in Kashmir?”
A good question. “Thanks to the bbc, even illiterate Kashmiris knew that the Soviets had retreated from Afghanistan, that the Berlin Wall had come down,” wrote Time correspondent Edward Desmond in March 1993 in the New York Review of Books. “With the egoism and naivete peculiar to people who live in small, isolated places, Kashmiris thought that their turn was next.”
But Desmond’s observation raises questions. Was it not precisely their “egoism” that allowed Kashmiris to cherish freedom in the first place, to believe perhaps that they should fight for it? Is there not virtue and even power in insisting, even naivete, that the world should be different than it is? Are egoism and naivete truly peculiar to people in small, isolated places? How about big, isolated places? Is it all right for Americans to be naivete and egoistic, but not for Kashmiris, or Chechens, or Maya Indians in southern Mexico? “The background–and, indeed, the very substance–of contemporary history is the revolutionary wave that is whelming in the peripheral countries,” wrote Octavio Paz as long ago as 1961.
Out of great evil, some good comes,” opined the Washington correspondent of The Times of India newspaper in May 1995. “The push given by Pakistan to fundamentalist terrorism in Kashmir since 1989 has led to a greater appreciation within India of the problems being faced by Israel.” Citing the possibility that hard-line Islamic regimes could emerge soon in such countries as Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the writer quoted an unnamed senior u.s. official as having told him: “In such an eventuality India, with its non-fundamentalist traditions, would be a natural ally. Both India and the u.s. have a common interest in stopping the spread of hardline fundamentalism in Asia.”
The term’s pernicious vagueness aside, anyone who knows of the alarming rise in “fundamentalist” Hindu nationalism in India knows that such self-serving drivel leaves the door wide open for a JKLF leader to tell me, “India has been propagating since 1988 that this is fundamentalism going on in Kashmir. [But] it is India that is putting a tinge of fundamentalism to the situation.”
If Kashmir recalls 1776, it also evokes a more recent, less buoyant America. The 1995 fires at Charar-e-Sharief that ended a standoff between Indian troops and pro-Pakistan militants–and destroyed much of the town as well as a mosque and the 500-year-old shrine of Kashmir’s most revered Sufi missionary, Sheikh Noorud-din Wali–were all too reminiscent of Waco in the recriminations and not entirely implausible conspiracy theories they spawned. If at Waco religious liberty was among the things at stake, at Charar-e-Sharief it was religious memory. Kashmiris revere the Sufis as synthesizers of Islam with their valley’s previously prevalent Hinduism. “Many things Sheikh Noorud-din gave to Kashmir,” Haji told me the day we visited to see the aftermath for ourselves. “He was the great man of Kashmir. The Kashmiris are indebted to these saints, for the reason that they have Islamized this whole region. ‘My grandfather was Hindu,’ Sheikh Noorud-din used to say, ‘and I am his grandson.’ Therefore Hindus used to come pray here. They pray their way, we pray our way.”
“God is one,” the saint had said, in Haji’s translation. “He has millions of names. Not a single leaf of the tree or the vegetable is without the name of God. Everybody takes the name of God in their own way.”
On the eve of the Fourth of July, 1995, Haji and I talked for a long time. We discussed Islam (his favorite topic), the Qur’an and the Bible, religion in general, the coming end of the world. He sat calmly, wisely, knees drawn up, puffing away on his hookah (his “hubble-bubble,” he called it). I told him I had heard an explosion and gunfire a few minutes earlier. Yes, he said, he had heard it too. There was a certain part of the old city where clashes were occurring daily now.
“I don’t think they can stop these militants,” he said.
I pondered for a moment how no war or rebellion that I could think of seemed ever to have ushered in a permanently better state of affairs. I considered how I might express this. “Two hundred years ago,” I said, “we had a revolution in my country.”
He drew on his hubble-bubble.
“Who was there?” he asked. “British?”
“Yes, British.”
He nodded sagely as though to say it figured. “British ruled almost whole of world,” he observed. “Almost whole of world.”
“We kicked ’em out,” I added, not without pride.
It was an almost physical pleasure to be back in the presence of this remarkable man. His very mannerisms gave me a kind of joy, a melange of affection, respect, familiarity, and comfort. Be involved and be aware, was his message to me; write, try to change the world, but don’t let it get you down. The preponderance of evidence to the contrary, something better may well be in store for us. At any rate, one day you too probably will be 71 years old. Pace yourself.
“Last fourteen hundred years there have been no amendments to Qur’an,” he said. “There’s no way.” This, he noted with high disdain, was in marked contrast to the Indian constitution. The Qur’an had been translated into many languages, but its proper language was the original Arabic. A great deal was lost in translation, he said, and besides, almighty Allah had given the Qur’an to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Arabic, not in English or Kashmiri or any other language. But that was unfortunate for people who can’t read Arabic, he observed generously.
“I can only read the Qur’an in English,” I said.
He had had a Qur’an in English, he said, but he had given it to a visitor some years before, a Russian who expressed great interest in Islam. The Russian had told him it was forbidden to take religious books into the Soviet Union, but not to worry; he would find a way. Later, Haji had happened to see the man again in a group of Russians at a hotel in Delhi. To Haji’s satisfaction, the Russian told him that indeed he had succeeded in smuggling the Qur’an into Russia.
“Restrictions make men clever,” observed Haji.
“So maybe restrictions are a good thing,” I suggested.
“Well, some of these boys, they smuggle drugs,” he said. “Government puts restrictions, but boys, they find ways.”
Kashmiris’ final and most reliable refuge, for want of much cause for hope elsewhere, is in their religion. “God knows,” replied the son of the man V. S. Naipaul portrays as “Aziz” in An Area of Darkness, when I asked when the Hotel Leeward might reopen. “We can’t say anything. If the situation will be okay, then we hope that the tourists will come again.”
I kept coming back to the situation’s labyrinthine intractability, seeking a way out. “If tourism stops here,” I asked Haji long ago, during my first visit, “how will people survive?”
He grinned in his smug way.
“I will give you an answer from my religion,” he said. “God is great!”
Ethan Casey is a journalist based in Bangkok. He contributes to U.S. News & World Report, Christianity Today, and National Public Radio, among other outlets.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
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