A Line Runs Through It

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

http://www.guardian.co.uk/kashmir/Story/0,2763,647840,00.html

My lost country

Muzamil Jaleel grew up in the meadows and mountains of Kashmir. Then he saw friends and family die in its pursuit of independence. His country has become a battlefield - and he knows it can never be the same.

Online debate: what hope is there for Kashmir?.

Observer Worldview

Sunday February 10, 2002

The Observer

Not long ago, somebody asked me what kind of stories I wrote. Obituaries came to mind. As a reporter in Kashmir I have been literally writing obituaries for the past 10 years; only the characters and places change, the stories are always the same, full of misery and tears.

And when in October last year I got a chance to leave Kashmir, I hoped for a change. Every human being has a threshold for pain and agony. I felt mine had been reached. I wanted to escape. But within days, Kashmir was in the headlines and although I was thousands of miles away, I found myself in the middle of it all again.

I was born in Kashmir. I grew up in its apple orchards and lush green meadows, dreamed on the banks of its freshwater streams. I went to school there, sitting on straw mats and memorising tables by heart. After school my friends and I would rush half-way home, tear off our uniforms and dive into the cold water. Then we would quickly dry our hair, so our parents would not find out what we had done. Sometimes, when we felt especially daring, we would skip an entire day of school to play cricket.

My village lies in the foothills of the Himalayas. During summer breaks, we would trek to the meadows high in the mountains carrying salt slates for the family cattle, sit around a campfire and play the flute for hours. The chilling winter would turn the boys and girls of our small village into one huge family - huddled together in a big room, we would listen to stories till late into the night. Sipping hot cups of the traditional salt tea, the village elder who had inherited the art of storytelling would transport us to the era of his tales. He had never been to school but he remembered hundreds of beautiful stories by heart. Kashmir was like a big party, full of love and life. Today death and fear dominate everything.

I was in Kashmir too when the first bomb exploded in 1988. People first thought it was the outcome of a small political feud, although everybody knew the pot was boiling after years of political discontent. Then that September a young man, Ajaz Dar, died in a violent encounter with the police. Disgruntled by the farce of decades of ostensible democracy under Indian rule, a group of Kashmiri young men had decided to fight. They had dreamt of an independent Kashmir free from both India and Pakistan. Although this young man was not the first Kashmiri to die fighting for this cause, his death was the beginning of an era of tragedy.

Separatist sentiment had been dominant among Kashmiris since 1947, when Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan during partition, and the two countries fought over it. But it was not until 40 years later that most of the youngsters opted for guns against Indian rule, in reaction to the government-sponsored rigging of the assembly polls, aimed at crushing dissent.

It is not a surprise that India`s most wanted Kashmiri militant leader, Syed Salahudin, contested that assembly election from Srinagar, nor that, unofficially, he was winning by a good margin. When the elections were rigged, he lost not only the election but faith in the process as well. His polling agents and supporters were arrested and tortured; most of them later became militants.

Neighbouring Pakistan, which occupies a third of Kashmir, also smelled the changing mood in Kashmir and offered a helping hand by providing arms training and AK-47 rifles. Violence was introduced amid growing dissent against India and hundreds of young people joined the armed movement. Kashmir was changing.

I had just completed secondary school then and was enrolled in a college - a perfect potential recruit: the entire militant movement belonged to my generation. The movement was the only topic of discussion on the street, in the classroom and at home. Soon people started coming out onto the streets, thousands would march to the famous Sufi shrines or to the United Nations office, shouting slogans in favour of ` Azadi !` (freedom). These mass protests became an everyday affair, frustrating the authorities, who began to use force to counter them. Dozens of protesters were killed by police fire.

Many of my close friends and classmates began to join. One day, half of our class was missing. They never returned to school again, and nobody even looked for them, because it was understood.

Although the reasons for joining the militant movement varied from person to person, the majority of Kashmiris never felt that they belonged to India. What had been a relatively dormant separatist sentiment was finally exploding into a fully-fledged separatist uprising.

I too wanted to join, though I didn`t know exactly why or what it would lead to. Most of us were teenagers and had not seriously thought about the consequences. Perhaps the rebel image was subconsciously attracting us all.

I also prepared for the dangerous journey from our village in north Kashmir to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where all the training camps were. One didn`t just have to avoid being sighted by the Indian soldiers who guarded the border round the clock, but also defeat the fierce cold and the difficulties of hiking over the snow-clad Himalayan peaks that stood in the way. I acquired the standard militant`s gear: I bought the Wellington boots, prepared a polythene jacket and trousers to wear over my warm clothes, and found some woollen cloth to wrap around my calves as protection from frostbite.

Fortunately, I failed. Three times a group of us returned from the border. Each time something happened that forced our guide to take us back. The third time, 23 of us had started our journey on foot from Malangam, not far away from my village, only to be abandoned in a dense jungle. It was night, and the group had scattered after hearing gunshots nearby, sensing the presence of Indian army men. In the morning, when we gathered again, our guide was missing. Most of the others decided to continue on their own, but a few of us turned back. We had nothing to eat but leaves for three days. We followed the flight of crows, hoping to reach a human settlement. I was lucky. I reached home and survived.

As the days and months passed, and as the routes the militants took to cross the border became known to Indian security forces, the bodies began to arrive. Lines of young men would disappear on a ridge as they tried to cross over or return home. The stadiums where we had played cricket and football, the beautiful green parks where we had gone on school excursions as children, were turned into martyrs` graveyards. One after another, those who had played in those places were buried there, with huge marble epitaphs detailing their sacrifice. Many had never fired a single bullet from their Kalashnikovs.

One day, I counted my friends and classmates in the martyrs` graveyards near our village. There were 21 of them. I could feel the smiling face of Mushtaq, whom I had known since our schooldays. He would have been 31 this January, but the ninth anniversary of his death is just two months away. He was killed in April 1993. His mother could not bear the pain and lost her mental balance. For all these years, she has been wandering around the villages carrying the shirt he wore on the day of his death.

Another friend, Javaid, was his parents` only son. Extremely handsome, he was obsessed with seeing change in Kashmir. The day he died, he was wearing my clothes. He had come to our house in the morning and changed there. He was 23, and even six hours after his death, when they took him for burial, blood still oozed out of his bullet wounds. I will never forget the moment when I lifted the coffin lid away from his face: there was that usual grin. For a moment, he seemed alive to me.

Javaid`s sister was to have been married 15 days later but the shock of his death gave her a heart attack. She died a few days before what would have been her wedding day.

Today, there are more than 500 martyrs` graveyards dotting Kashmir, and every epitaph standing on a grave tells a story - a tragic story of my generation. Engraving epitaphs has become a lucrative business.

As the death toll of Kashmiris mounted, the world saw the violent movement only as the outcome of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan which had its roots in the 1947 partition. India always called the rebellion a Pakistan-sponsored terrorist movement, while Pakistan projected it as a jihad - a Kashmiri struggle to join Pakistan just because they shared a common faith.

For India, the future of Kashmir is non-negotiable - it is an `integral part` of the country, the only Muslim majority state in the union and thus a cornerstone of its democracy and secular credentials. For Pakistan, Kashmir is also important because the majority of its population is Muslim - it is Pakistan`s `jugular vein`, and an unfinished task from the subcontinent`s partition in which Pakistan was born as a home for Indian Muslims.

With these claims on Kashmir, both countries have choked the voice of Kashmiris. The Indian government has reacted with an iron fist, deployed large numbers of security men and turned Kashmir into one massive jail.

Pakistan`s hands are not clean either. When hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris came out in support of the separatist movement in 1990, Pakistan`s lust for Kashmir`s land was exposed. It hijacked the separatist movement, painted it with religious fundamentalism and introduced pro-Pakistan, and later jihadi groups to ensure it enjoyed absolute control.

Within years, Kashmir turned into yet another battlefield in the pan-Islamic jihad and its warriors as well as its leaders were now made up of non-Kashmiris whose agendas transcend the demand for self-determination. In the process, the genuine political struggle for the unification of Kashmir and the demand of the people that they should be allowed to decide their own future was forgotten.

Whatever attention Kashmir was given was because it was a flashpoint between two nuclear neighbours and not because Kashmiris were suffering. India and Pakistan seem to share one common policy on Kashmir - to force Kashmiris to toe their respective lines. In fact, it seems that both countries want to fight to the last Kashmiri.

The Indian government held state elections in 1996 apparently aimed at ensuring a representative government in Kashmir. But actually it was nothing more than a farce. The security forces herded people to polling stations and even conducted `nail parades` to check - by the indelible ink pasted on the nail of the forefinger - that people had voted.

The man who represents Kashmir - not only in New Delhi, but across the world as India`s junior Foreign Minister - is Omar Abdullah, the son of Kashmir`s Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. He received just 5 per cent of votes in his constituency - after coercion by the police and the security forces - and he won the elections. Who he does actually represent, nobody knows.

I have been a witness to all this. I have seen Kashmir change. I still remember my grandmother worrying whenever the sky turned red. `Murder has been committed somewhere,` she would say. Now that suspicion can no longer be reserved for red skies: the daily death toll is 20.

Kashmir used to be known as a crime-free state. One of my neighbours was a senior police officer in the mid-Eighties; he once told me that the average yearly murder rate in Kashmir was three or four. Today, if three people perish in a day, itis considered peaceful.

I have been fortunate enough to be safe, but my family and relatives have not been that lucky. My younger brother Mudabir was picked up in 1994 on suspicion of militancy, and it took us a month just to trace his whereabouts. We divided up the entire Kashmir valley among our family members. Every morning, each one of us would do the rounds of the security force camps to look for him.

My mother had never been to a police station in her entire life, but by the time she finally located my brother, she knew almost every military camp around Srinagar.

And by the time the security forces were convinced of his innocence and released him, he had already been tortured so much that he spent the next two months in bed.

It is now seven years since his release, but he still has nightmares and the mere sight of a soldier sends shivers down his spine. A late-night knock at the door still gives him goose pimples, and sends his heart rate soaring. But this is not exceptional any more in Kashmir.

A cousin`s husband bled to death after he was caught in the crossfire while coming out of mosque one evening. He could have been saved had he reached the hospital in time. But the security forces did not allow the family to come out of their house and take him to the hospital, and there was no other way to seek medical help. He bled to death crying for help, and his wife, mother and younger brother could do nothing but watch their own helplessness. A boy was born in the family four months after his death.

By 1992, there were hardly any young men left in the few villages in north Kashmir around my home. Many had joined the militant movement. Some had died, while others had gone underground; some had surrendered and become counter-insurgents and were part of the pro-government militias. Many had migrated to the urban area of Srinagar city, which was then deemed comparatively safe.

The complexion of the separatist movement was changing fast, and it no longer represented the genuine political aspirations of the people. The pro-Pakistan jihadi groups who dominated the movement tried to impose their radical religious, social and cultural agendas, ignoring the fact that their extremism was alien to the very ethos of Kashmir.

Kashmir has a history of composite culture and religious tolerance. In fact, Islam did not arrive in Kashmir through the clatter of the sword. It was introduced by mystics and Sufis who conquered the hearts of the people. In the centuries that followed, Kashmir turned into a melting pot of ideas and a meeting ground for Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam; there was no place for religious extremism.

Now, as fanaticism started to dominate, using the power of the gun, the militant movement was rendered a mere tool in Pakistan`s plan to bleed its arch-rival India with a thousand cuts.

I decided to leave my village to move to Srinagar and join Kashmir University. I was so desperate to leave that I applied to almost all the departments. It was mere chance that I got into journalism. And when I started writing about the war later that year, I felt that I had been part of this tragic story from the beginning. I knew the militants and the mukhbirs (the police informers); those who surrendered and those who did not; those who faced death because they had a dream and those who were sacrificed by mere chance, neither knowing nor understanding the issues at stake; those who believed they were fighting a holy war and those who joined for unholy reasons. But, as it turned out, there was more to the story.

My first assignment as a reporter was to visit a city police station and collect information regarding some corpses lying there. I accompanied a few local photographers, who began taking pictures as I stared at the six bullet-riddled bodies. They were in terrible condition: blood-soaked clothes, entrails exposed, faces unrecognisable.

That evening, I was haunted by the picture of bodies lying in a pool of blood - even a drink of water reminded me of blood. I couldn`t sleep for days; corpses haunted my dreams.

A few months later I arrived at the site of a massacre to find wailing women and unshaven men sitting in huddles. Bodies lay scattered, like rag dolls discarded by careless children. I felt a lump growing in my throat, my legs felt heavy. I felt incredibly tired and wanted to throw down my notebook and sit silently with the mourners. The noise of the camera shutters invaded my private thoughts, forcing me to think about the story I had to write.

Over the years, writing obituaries became a routine. When violence rules the day, there is nothing but tears to jerk out of the reader`s soul. If I avoided writing about the gory details of death, I would end up writing about orphans or widows. In the process, my reactions to such incidents also began to change. I could no longer relate to these tragedies. Now killings meant stories and bylines, and there was satisfaction to be found in penning them, even if I knew the victims personally.

The continuous interaction with death and destruction was providing a necessary thrill, and the killing fields of Kashmir were becoming nothing but news pastures for me. Every evening, I would wait for the police bulletin that provides the statistics of the daily deaths. Much as a shopkeeper counts his cash before calling it a day, I would count the dead before leaving the office. I once used a calculator to count the 105 men and women dead across the 12 districts in 24 hours. My newspaper wanted a breakdown and I found myself lost in numbers.

I belong to Kashmir`s cursed generation - the youth of the Nineties. I have lived all these troubled years in Kashmir and am still well and alive. But in the process my tears have dried up. I have lost normal human feelings to the adventures of reporting day-to-day violence in my country. I am immune to the death of my own people; I have developed an inability to mourn.

And it seems that the outside world too is unable to feel the pain of Kashmir. After more than 50,000 deaths, there still appears to be no headway towards peace. The international community needs to resolve issues between India and Pakistan. It is not only important in order to avoid a nuclear conflict: it is imperative to end the suffering of the Kashmiri people.

muzamiljaleel@yahoo.com

Prose poem by Agha Shahid Ali

Dear Shahid, I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

Rumours break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.

You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Café (everyone there asks about you), a doctor - who had just treated a sixteen-year-old boy released from an interrogation centre - said: I want to ask the fortune-tellers: Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?

This letter, insh`Allah, will reach you for my brother goes south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can`t even manage postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river. Bags and bags - hundreds of canvas bags - all undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it`s from someone you are longing for news of.

Things here are as usual though we always talk about you. Will you come home soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went.

A prose poem taken from The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali (WW Norton, £8.50). Ali was an award-winning Kashmiri poet praised by, amongst others, John Ashbery and Edward Said. He died last December.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/kashmir/Story/0,2763,647840,00.html

My lost country

Muzamil Jaleel grew up in the meadows and mountains of Kashmir. Then he saw friends and family die in its pursuit of independence. His country has become a battlefield - and he knows it can never be the same.

Online debate: what hope is there for Kashmir?.

Observer Worldview

Sunday February 10, 2002

The Observer

Not long ago, somebody asked me what kind of stories I wrote. Obituaries came to mind. As a reporter in Kashmir I have been literally writing obituaries for the past 10 years; only the characters and places change, the stories are always the same, full of misery and tears.

And when in October last year I got a chance to leave Kashmir, I hoped for a change. Every human being has a threshold for pain and agony. I felt mine had been reached. I wanted to escape. But within days, Kashmir was in the headlines and although I was thousands of miles away, I found myself in the middle of it all again.

I was born in Kashmir. I grew up in its apple orchards and lush green meadows, dreamed on the banks of its freshwater streams. I went to school there, sitting on straw mats and memorising tables by heart. After school my friends and I would rush half-way home, tear off our uniforms and dive into the cold water. Then we would quickly dry our hair, so our parents would not find out what we had done. Sometimes, when we felt especially daring, we would skip an entire day of school to play cricket.

My village lies in the foothills of the Himalayas. During summer breaks, we would trek to the meadows high in the mountains carrying salt slates for the family cattle, sit around a campfire and play the flute for hours. The chilling winter would turn the boys and girls of our small village into one huge family - huddled together in a big room, we would listen to stories till late into the night. Sipping hot cups of the traditional salt tea, the village elder who had inherited the art of storytelling would transport us to the era of his tales. He had never been to school but he remembered hundreds of beautiful stories by heart. Kashmir was like a big party, full of love and life. Today death and fear dominate everything.

I was in Kashmir too when the first bomb exploded in 1988. People first thought it was the outcome of a small political feud, although everybody knew the pot was boiling after years of political discontent. Then that September a young man, Ajaz Dar, died in a violent encounter with the police. Disgruntled by the farce of decades of ostensible democracy under Indian rule, a group of Kashmiri young men had decided to fight. They had dreamt of an independent Kashmir free from both India and Pakistan. Although this young man was not the first Kashmiri to die fighting for this cause, his death was the beginning of an era of tragedy.

Separatist sentiment had been dominant among Kashmiris since 1947, when Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan during partition, and the two countries fought over it. But it was not until 40 years later that most of the youngsters opted for guns against Indian rule, in reaction to the government-sponsored rigging of the assembly polls, aimed at crushing dissent.

It is not a surprise that India`s most wanted Kashmiri militant leader, Syed Salahudin, contested that assembly election from Srinagar, nor that, unofficially, he was winning by a good margin. When the elections were rigged, he lost not only the election but faith in the process as well. His polling agents and supporters were arrested and tortured; most of them later became militants.

Neighbouring Pakistan, which occupies a third of Kashmir, also smelled the changing mood in Kashmir and offered a helping hand by providing arms training and AK-47 rifles. Violence was introduced amid growing dissent against India and hundreds of young people joined the armed movement. Kashmir was changing.

I had just completed secondary school then and was enrolled in a college - a perfect potential recruit: the entire militant movement belonged to my generation. The movement was the only topic of discussion on the street, in the classroom and at home. Soon people started coming out onto the streets, thousands would march to the famous Sufi shrines or to the United Nations office, shouting slogans in favour of ` Azadi !` (freedom). These mass protests became an everyday affair, frustrating the authorities, who began to use force to counter them. Dozens of protesters were killed by police fire.

Many of my close friends and classmates began to join. One day, half of our class was missing. They never returned to school again, and nobody even looked for them, because it was understood.

Although the reasons for joining the militant movement varied from person to person, the majority of Kashmiris never felt that they belonged to India. What had been a relatively dormant separatist sentiment was finally exploding into a fully-fledged separatist uprising.

I too wanted to join, though I didn`t know exactly why or what it would lead to. Most of us were teenagers and had not seriously thought about the consequences. Perhaps the rebel image was subconsciously attracting us all.

I also prepared for the dangerous journey from our village in north Kashmir to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where all the training camps were. One didn`t just have to avoid being sighted by the Indian soldiers who guarded the border round the clock, but also defeat the fierce cold and the difficulties of hiking over the snow-clad Himalayan peaks that stood in the way. I acquired the standard militant`s gear: I bought the Wellington boots, prepared a polythene jacket and trousers to wear over my warm clothes, and found some woollen cloth to wrap around my calves as protection from frostbite.

Fortunately, I failed. Three times a group of us returned from the border. Each time something happened that forced our guide to take us back. The third time, 23 of us had started our journey on foot from Malangam, not far away from my village, only to be abandoned in a dense jungle. It was night, and the group had scattered after hearing gunshots nearby, sensing the presence of Indian army men. In the morning, when we gathered again, our guide was missing. Most of the others decided to continue on their own, but a few of us turned back. We had nothing to eat but leaves for three days. We followed the flight of crows, hoping to reach a human settlement. I was lucky. I reached home and survived.

As the days and months passed, and as the routes the militants took to cross the border became known to Indian security forces, the bodies began to arrive. Lines of young men would disappear on a ridge as they tried to cross over or return home. The stadiums where we had played cricket and football, the beautiful green parks where we had gone on school excursions as children, were turned into martyrs` graveyards. One after another, those who had played in those places were buried there, with huge marble epitaphs detailing their sacrifice. Many had never fired a single bullet from their Kalashnikovs.

One day, I counted my friends and classmates in the martyrs` graveyards near our village. There were 21 of them. I could feel the smiling face of Mushtaq, whom I had known since our schooldays. He would have been 31 this January, but the ninth anniversary of his death is just two months away. He was killed in April 1993. His mother could not bear the pain and lost her mental balance. For all these years, she has been wandering around the villages carrying the shirt he wore on the day of his death.

Another friend, Javaid, was his parents` only son. Extremely handsome, he was obsessed with seeing change in Kashmir. The day he died, he was wearing my clothes. He had come to our house in the morning and changed there. He was 23, and even six hours after his death, when they took him for burial, blood still oozed out of his bullet wounds. I will never forget the moment when I lifted the coffin lid away from his face: there was that usual grin. For a moment, he seemed alive to me.

Javaid`s sister was to have been married 15 days later but the shock of his death gave her a heart attack. She died a few days before what would have been her wedding day.

Today, there are more than 500 martyrs` graveyards dotting Kashmir, and every epitaph standing on a grave tells a story - a tragic story of my generation. Engraving epitaphs has become a lucrative business.

As the death toll of Kashmiris mounted, the world saw the violent movement only as the outcome of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan which had its roots in the 1947 partition. India always called the rebellion a Pakistan-sponsored terrorist movement, while Pakistan projected it as a jihad - a Kashmiri struggle to join Pakistan just because they shared a common faith.

For India, the future of Kashmir is non-negotiable - it is an `integral part` of the country, the only Muslim majority state in the union and thus a cornerstone of its democracy and secular credentials. For Pakistan, Kashmir is also important because the majority of its population is Muslim - it is Pakistan`s `jugular vein`, and an unfinished task from the subcontinent`s partition in which Pakistan was born as a home for Indian Muslims.

With these claims on Kashmir, both countries have choked the voice of Kashmiris. The Indian government has reacted with an iron fist, deployed large numbers of security men and turned Kashmir into one massive jail.

Pakistan`s hands are not clean either. When hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris came out in support of the separatist movement in 1990, Pakistan`s lust for Kashmir`s land was exposed. It hijacked the separatist movement, painted it with religious fundamentalism and introduced pro-Pakistan, and later jihadi groups to ensure it enjoyed absolute control.

Within years, Kashmir turned into yet another battlefield in the pan-Islamic jihad and its warriors as well as its leaders were now made up of non-Kashmiris whose agendas transcend the demand for self-determination. In the process, the genuine political struggle for the unification of Kashmir and the demand of the people that they should be allowed to decide their own future was forgotten.

Whatever attention Kashmir was given was because it was a flashpoint between two nuclear neighbours and not because Kashmiris were suffering. India and Pakistan seem to share one common policy on Kashmir - to force Kashmiris to toe their respective lines. In fact, it seems that both countries want to fight to the last Kashmiri.

The Indian government held state elections in 1996 apparently aimed at ensuring a representative government in Kashmir. But actually it was nothing more than a farce. The security forces herded people to polling stations and even conducted `nail parades` to check - by the indelible ink pasted on the nail of the forefinger - that people had voted.

The man who represents Kashmir - not only in New Delhi, but across the world as India`s junior Foreign Minister - is Omar Abdullah, the son of Kashmir`s Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah. He received just 5 per cent of votes in his constituency - after coercion by the police and the security forces - and he won the elections. Who he does actually represent, nobody knows.

I have been a witness to all this. I have seen Kashmir change. I still remember my grandmother worrying whenever the sky turned red. `Murder has been committed somewhere,` she would say. Now that suspicion can no longer be reserved for red skies: the daily death toll is 20.

Kashmir used to be known as a crime-free state. One of my neighbours was a senior police officer in the mid-Eighties; he once told me that the average yearly murder rate in Kashmir was three or four. Today, if three people perish in a day, itis considered peaceful.

I have been fortunate enough to be safe, but my family and relatives have not been that lucky. My younger brother Mudabir was picked up in 1994 on suspicion of militancy, and it took us a month just to trace his whereabouts. We divided up the entire Kashmir valley among our family members. Every morning, each one of us would do the rounds of the security force camps to look for him.

My mother had never been to a police station in her entire life, but by the time she finally located my brother, she knew almost every military camp around Srinagar.

And by the time the security forces were convinced of his innocence and released him, he had already been tortured so much that he spent the next two months in bed.

It is now seven years since his release, but he still has nightmares and the mere sight of a soldier sends shivers down his spine. A late-night knock at the door still gives him goose pimples, and sends his heart rate soaring. But this is not exceptional any more in Kashmir.

A cousin`s husband bled to death after he was caught in the crossfire while coming out of mosque one evening. He could have been saved had he reached the hospital in time. But the security forces did not allow the family to come out of their house and take him to the hospital, and there was no other way to seek medical help. He bled to death crying for help, and his wife, mother and younger brother could do nothing but watch their own helplessness. A boy was born in the family four months after his death.

By 1992, there were hardly any young men left in the few villages in north Kashmir around my home. Many had joined the militant movement. Some had died, while others had gone underground; some had surrendered and become counter-insurgents and were part of the pro-government militias. Many had migrated to the urban area of Srinagar city, which was then deemed comparatively safe.

The complexion of the separatist movement was changing fast, and it no longer represented the genuine political aspirations of the people. The pro-Pakistan jihadi groups who dominated the movement tried to impose their radical religious, social and cultural agendas, ignoring the fact that their extremism was alien to the very ethos of Kashmir.

Kashmir has a history of composite culture and religious tolerance. In fact, Islam did not arrive in Kashmir through the clatter of the sword. It was introduced by mystics and Sufis who conquered the hearts of the people. In the centuries that followed, Kashmir turned into a melting pot of ideas and a meeting ground for Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam; there was no place for religious extremism.

Now, as fanaticism started to dominate, using the power of the gun, the militant movement was rendered a mere tool in Pakistan`s plan to bleed its arch-rival India with a thousand cuts.

I decided to leave my village to move to Srinagar and join Kashmir University. I was so desperate to leave that I applied to almost all the departments. It was mere chance that I got into journalism. And when I started writing about the war later that year, I felt that I had been part of this tragic story from the beginning. I knew the militants and the mukhbirs (the police informers); those who surrendered and those who did not; those who faced death because they had a dream and those who were sacrificed by mere chance, neither knowing nor understanding the issues at stake; those who believed they were fighting a holy war and those who joined for unholy reasons. But, as it turned out, there was more to the story.

My first assignment as a reporter was to visit a city police station and collect information regarding some corpses lying there. I accompanied a few local photographers, who began taking pictures as I stared at the six bullet-riddled bodies. They were in terrible condition: blood-soaked clothes, entrails exposed, faces unrecognisable.

That evening, I was haunted by the picture of bodies lying in a pool of blood - even a drink of water reminded me of blood. I couldn`t sleep for days; corpses haunted my dreams.

A few months later I arrived at the site of a massacre to find wailing women and unshaven men sitting in huddles. Bodies lay scattered, like rag dolls discarded by careless children. I felt a lump growing in my throat, my legs felt heavy. I felt incredibly tired and wanted to throw down my notebook and sit silently with the mourners. The noise of the camera shutters invaded my private thoughts, forcing me to think about the story I had to write.

Over the years, writing obituaries became a routine. When violence rules the day, there is nothing but tears to jerk out of the reader`s soul. If I avoided writing about the gory details of death, I would end up writing about orphans or widows. In the process, my reactions to such incidents also began to change. I could no longer relate to these tragedies. Now killings meant stories and bylines, and there was satisfaction to be found in penning them, even if I knew the victims personally.

The continuous interaction with death and destruction was providing a necessary thrill, and the killing fields of Kashmir were becoming nothing but news pastures for me. Every evening, I would wait for the police bulletin that provides the statistics of the daily deaths. Much as a shopkeeper counts his cash before calling it a day, I would count the dead before leaving the office. I once used a calculator to count the 105 men and women dead across the 12 districts in 24 hours. My newspaper wanted a breakdown and I found myself lost in numbers.

I belong to Kashmir`s cursed generation - the youth of the Nineties. I have lived all these troubled years in Kashmir and am still well and alive. But in the process my tears have dried up. I have lost normal human feelings to the adventures of reporting day-to-day violence in my country. I am immune to the death of my own people; I have developed an inability to mourn.

And it seems that the outside world too is unable to feel the pain of Kashmir. After more than 50,000 deaths, there still appears to be no headway towards peace. The international community needs to resolve issues between India and Pakistan. It is not only important in order to avoid a nuclear conflict: it is imperative to end the suffering of the Kashmiri people.

muzamiljaleel@yahoo.com

Prose poem by Agha Shahid Ali

Dear Shahid, I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

Rumours break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.

You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Café (everyone there asks about you), a doctor - who had just treated a sixteen-year-old boy released from an interrogation centre - said: I want to ask the fortune-tellers: Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?

This letter, insh`Allah, will reach you for my brother goes south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can`t even manage postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river. Bags and bags - hundreds of canvas bags - all undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it`s from someone you are longing for news of.

Things here are as usual though we always talk about you. Will you come home soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went.

A prose poem taken from The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali (WW Norton, £8.50). Ali was an award-winning Kashmiri poet praised by, amongst others, John Ashbery and Edward Said. He died last December.

WEDNESDAY JANUARY 09 2002



Cover story

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C7-2002013426%2C00.html



A state of war



BY TREVOR FISHLOCK



The dispute over Kashmir has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. But why has this beautiful state become the subcontinent`s powder keg?



Poets hymned it as a land of love and languor. In 1627 the dying emperor Jahangir, who shaped its blissful gardens, was asked to name his last desire. “Only Kashmir,” he murmured. “Only Kashmir.”

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised melodramatically that its name was written upon his heart. Today, millions make the same emotive claim.

Passions for Kashmir run hot and bitter, the bayonets almost touch and the urge for war is strong. Two rivals, two ideas, two faiths stand nose to nose in one of the world’s most dangerous places. One mistake or misjudgment and the spark falls on the fuse.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. The great bulk of their armies are based along the frontier that runs through Punjab and Kashmir. The border is always tense.

In Kashmir there has been an almost permanent grumbling small war of artillery bombardment. Apart from the all-out conflicts, India and Pakistan have two or three times pulled back from the brink, and now the assessments of their military power have to include their nuclear capability. There was a particularly dangerous stand-off in 1990.

It was inevitable that the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 would bring India and Pakistan once more to the edge of the abyss. It was an echo of the October suicide bomb attack on the Kashmir assembly. The Parliament in Delhi is the heart and emblem of what India stands for. Now India is raging.

Poor Kashmir. It lies in the Himalayan ramparts where the borders of India, Pakistan and China rub together. Reality mocks its beauty. There is no escaping the permeating melancholy of a land that lies under the gun. It is as if malevolent gods, jealous of its loveliness, placed a curse upon it.

The poison entered the garden in 1947 when the war-weary British quit their Indian empire and partitioned it. They had no wish to cut it up: one of their imperial achievements, they said, was to have united India and made it secure. They divided it to meet the demands of Muslim leaders who said that Hindus and Muslims could not live together in one country, that the communities formed two separate nations. Pakistan was therefore created as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Britain ruled India with the co-operation of more than 500 Indian princes, a galaxy of maharajahs, rajahs, ranas, raos, khans, mirs, jams, nizams and nawabs, loyal to the British crown, well-oiled with flattery, some fantastically rich and a few of them barmy. In the summer of 1947, these rulers had to choose whether to take their states into India or Pakistan. It was a personal decision, without referendum.

Public opinion hardly came into it. Most princes joined India. Most knew that they would be extinguishing themselves as a ruling class, but it was clear to all but a few that the game was up. On the eve of independence, all the princes had made up their minds except four.

The Maharajah of Kashmir, Sir Hari Singh, was one of the ditherers. He was vain, pompous and addicted to hunting bears and shooting ducks. As a young man he had an unfortunate scrape in London, being found in bed with a woman at the Savoy Hotel and milked for a lot of money by a blackmailer pretending to be the woman’s husband.

At Partition, Kashmir, more fully known as Jammu and Kashmir, was in a key position: a prize because it was a large state and famously beautiful, a honeymooners’ resort of lakes and cool alpine meadows.

Given its place on the map, it could have swung either to India or to Pakistan. Because of its overwhelming Muslim majority, Pakistan’s new leaders expected that it would join their Islamic entity. But the maharajah had to decide — and he was a Hindu. This was not unusual. In princely India, Muslims often ruled Hindus and vice versa. But Hari Singh dithered. He could not believe that the British would really go home. He did not want to join Pakistan because he could not bear the thought of his state being subsumed. He dreamt that Kashmir could somehow be an independent country and he could keep his power.

India and Pakistan became independent in August. Hari Singh was still dithering in October. As he fiddled, the storm broke. Thousands of Pathan warriors from the North-West Frontier, bordering Afghanistan, rushed into Kashmir, vowing to seize it for Pakistan. Although they were a rabble, they might have succeeded. They were close to Srinagar, the capital, when they were delayed by their lust for loot and women. While they pillaged towns and raped girls and nuns, the hapless Hari Singh gathered up his diamonds and Purdey shotguns and fled his palace in a motorcade.

India acted fast and decisively. In a flurry of action the maharajah agreed to join India, and Indian forces flew to save Srinagar. This was the first Kashmir war, not an all-out confrontation but a series of fights and communal conflicts. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of Pakistan, wanted to send the new Pakistan regular Army into action, but did not do so when the absurdity of the situation was pointed out to him: the forces of India and Pakistan shared a commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, while many officers on both sides were British.

Kashmir was left divided along the line where fighting stopped in 1948. A United Nations ceasefire came into force on January 1, 1949. In 1965 Pakistan tried and failed to annexe Kashmir and was defeated in brief and bitter fighting. At one stage Indian forces were almost at the gates of Lahore and could easily have taken it. Pakistan’s leaders believed that Kashmiris would welcome Pakistani troops as liberators. It was a shock that they did not. In 1971 India and Pakistan went to war again, India assisting the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. Pakistan was left truncated and humiliated.

Yet the story of a vacillating maharajah and the ensuing bloody quarrel over territory is only the half of it.

Kashmir is a tragedy for its divided people and a continuing source of danger in a subcontinent inhabited by a fifth of the world’s population. The tragedy has deep roots. Kashmir is the offspring of bitterly divorced parents. Pakistan aches for it but will never possess it. India will never let it go: it is not negotiable. The trouble is that both sides define themselves by this feud.

Their mutual suspicions date from the 8th-century Muslim conquest of western India and the many hundreds of years of Mogul rule that were brought to an end by the British Raj. For India’s Hindu majority, independence in 1947 was a reclamation of their vast land, the end of centuries of foreign domination. Nehru and others believed passionately that this new India would be a daring concept, an embracing of all its religious, linguistic and regional diversity, a magnificent secular state.

The steely and intractable Jinnah did not believe it. His new country of Pakistan grew out of that scepticism, the belief that Muslims in India would be vulnerable, second-class citizens.

Pakistan was an invented state, a by-product of the great Indian struggle for independence. It evolved in the last few years of British rule among people who wanted to escape religious and political discrimination in the new order. Landowners especially thought they would lose out in India. Democracy barely made the journey to Pakistan.

In a sense Pakistan remains stranded in 1947. Its great debate has centred for half a century on what it is for and what it should be. Jinnah mused that it could be a secular country. But in that case, what was the point of Partition? Some of his successors said that Pakistan was nothing if not Islamic and determined to make it more so, a military theocracy.

Yet Islam proved an unreliable glue. It did not cement Pakistan and East Pakistan. Bangladesh erupted as the assertion of Bengali language and culture. Nor did it cement the disparate parts of Pakistan itself — Punjab, Baluchistan, Sindh and the North- West Frontier — or, indeed, the many shades of Islamic belief. Thus Kashmir is useful, the “unfinished business of Partition”. However much Pakistanis disagree about the nature of their society, they find common cause in Kashmir, the belief that they were robbed in 1947. This is the unifying insult. It is why Pakistan has supported Kashmiri insurgents. India’s treatment of Kashmiris during the long years of internal strife are held as proof that Jinnah was right, that Muslims needed their homeland.

It is true that India could have managed Kashmir more wisely, less roughly. But Pakistan has to live with the fact that there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world: evidently Hindus and Muslims do live together in a secular society, Nehru’s idea of India, even if it is not always easy. And Kashmir, the only Indian state with a Muslim majority, is in Indian minds the shining fact of secular India. Its existence throws the question to Pakistan again: what was Partition for? India has a powerful idea of its identity. It is the giant of South Asia, its Armed Forces are huge and it is proud of its democracy, even if this is somewhat battered. Pakistan, on the other hand, does not enjoy such a positive identity. It thinks of itself in terms of its neighbour and endures the negative of being Not India.

It means that even if the impossible were to happen, that Kashmir should somehow become part of Pakistan, the anxieties and insecurities of Pakistan would endure. There would have to be another issue by which Pakistan could seek to establish its identity and purpose.

In the meantime the two nations face each other again — and judging from what we see and hear, there are many on both sides desperate to fight. Centuries of prejudice are poured into the funnel of Kashmir.

People on both sides treasure the slights of history. There is an endless misunderstanding of each other’s beliefs and opinions. Estrangement is total. Trivial matters become huge. Hindu nationalists complain that Muslims cheer for Pakistan during Test matches. In both India and Pakistan, keen teams of monitors comb through guide books and encyclopaedias searching for maps that might contain instances of “cartographic aggression” — inaccuracies that seem to favour one side or the other.

Words are traps, and there is a sense that a comma could cause a crisis. But the opinions of outsiders are not welcome. For this is a feud between cousins, a quarrel in the family. It could hardly be more acrid and perilous.

Everyone knows that Shahbuddin Ghauri was an invader of India. He killed millions of people( Both Hindus and Muslims), plundered India, destroyed temples and mosques. Yet when India named it surface to earth missile `Prithvi` (Prithvi means `Earth` in Hindi) , Pakistani politicians tried to name their missile `Ghauri` in honor of the Muslim invader who defeated the Hindu king Prithviraj Chauhan. We have lost sight of the fact that not all of the `great Muslim heroes` were actually so.

Tomorrow we would see barbarous Chengez Khan turned into a Muslim super hero. Most of the Muslim rulers we consider ``heroes`` behaved abominably by ordering the slaughter of an embassy numbering some three hundred - most of them Muslims and also Hindus.Those rulers who defeated the Hindus are portrayed as heroes and their achievements are glorified and admired such as Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, and Shahabuddin Ghauri. Among the Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb is preferred to secular Akbar.

This is not only outright ignorance, but an ignorance born out of fifty three years of misconstrued history. Successive governments and bureaucrats with vested interests unaware of the fact that history has no religion, but that all religions have a history have attempted to convert the history of the Indian subcontinent to Islam. Consequently, for most Muslims in Pakistan (and perhaps even in India) any personage with an Arabic or Persian name is a supposed Islamic hero. For most ignorant folks it does not matter how disreputable that person may have been -- only the name suffices.

The History taught in Pakistan is so distorted. The view among the decision makers is that Pakistan`s history should begin from the Arab invasion of Sindh (A.D. 711) in order to give it an Islamic character. Ancient history when most Muslims in India were Hindus, prior to the Arab invasion, should be set aside, as it is not part of the Islamic history.

The process of Islamization and related ideologies have changed the approach to history as well as archaeology. All Indians and Hindus are treated as villians and Muslims heroes. Pakistan does not have any good role model, so it tries to create role Models of any Muslim. What has this produced, an entire generation of ignorant Pakistanis who are unaware of real history, but have one thing in common ie. ``Indians and Hindus are our enemies``.

Here is an article in Asia Times by Ms. Jabbar on what some Kashmiris want.

-- http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/BD05Df01.html

Hindu minority refuses to bow out of Kashmir

By Sonia Jabbar

NEW DELHI - Adding to the complexity of the ``Kashmir Problem`` which has dogged India and Pakistan for more than 50 years has been the fate of the minority Hindu population of Kashmir, otherwise known as the Pandits.

If little is known about the 300,000 Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley between 1989 and 1991, at a time of popular support for militancy, to become refugees in India, less is known about the tiny number of 17,860 Pandits who chose not to leave.

Unlike the Kashmiri Sikhs who rallied around in huge numbers after the massacre of the 36 Sikhs of Chittisinghpora earlier in March, the Pandits were unable to organize themselves effectively in the face of selective killings of their community, choosing the safety of tented refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi instead.

The mass exodus of the Pandits is still shrouded in mystery. Why they left is a question still levelled at them by the Muslims of the valley.

``Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims have died either at the hands of security forces or militants, but we are still here,`` says Shafi, an artist in Anantnag whose group of friends was almost entirely Pandit before the exodus. That there was a real, palpable fear among the Pandits of being exterminated is a fact dismissed by Shafi. He feels, like most Muslims, betrayed by them. They left without saying goodbye.

In Delhi, an old man`s sense of betrayal is of equal intensity. He was a government servant in Kashmir who trusted his Muslim neighbors. He feels they gave him no choice once the killings of the Pandits started in 1989, that they did nothing to allay his fears, that they drove him out of his homeland. ``I asked my Muslim friend why did you throw us out, why? Did we murder you? Did we rob you? Did we rape your women?`` he shouted, ``we taught you to read and write, we taught you . . . `` His friend, he said, had no answer.

The Pandits of Kashmir are all Brahmins, and pride themselves on being the only caste to have resisted conversion when Islam was introduced peacefully to the Kashmir Valley in the 14th century by the Sufis of Central Asia. They held considerable power, as they were the only people who had a tradition of being highly educated. But this also meant that they bore the brunt of the tyranny unleashed by certain ruthless invaders, particularly during the Afghan occupation of Kashmir in the mid-eighteenth century.

Even though the Kashmiri Pandits have had greater sympathies and links with the Indian Union than their Muslim counterparts, they bore severe economic losses after the Maharaja of Kashmir acceded to India when, in 1949, Kashmir`s leader Sheikh Abdullah introduced land reform measures, redistributing land largely held by the Pandits to the Muslim tiller.

``We have suffered at the hands of tyrants through history,`` says Yuvraj Raina, a Panun Kashmir activist in New Delhi. ``There have been four migrations of Pandits. This is the fifth, and the last.`` Panun Kashmir is an organization of Kashmiri Pandits formed in 1991 which believes that the only solution to the problems faced by Kashmiri Pandits is a separate homeland carved non-violently out of the Kashmir Valley.

This portion of the Valley, called Panun Kashmir, would be a secular state autonomous of Srinagar, and would abide by the Indian Constitution. They feel this is the only way to safeguard the interests, values and culture of the Kashmiri Pandit.

``Look, we told those who remained behind, it`s just a matter of time before they get you,`` says Raina. ``The Muslim fundamentalists want to ensure a pan-Islamic State from the Middle East and Central Asia to Kashmir and the world keeps quiet.`` He recounts the recent killings of the Pandits in the Valley - five last month, one more a couple of weeks later. ``We told them it is either homeland or perish.``

But this is not a sentiment shared by the Pandits who choose to remain in the Valley. In Mattan, south Kashmir, a young school teacher, Jyoti, continues to live with her family and extended family amongst her Muslim neighbors. ``This is the only home I`ve known. These are the only friends and neighbors I have ever had and they`ve been very good to us - so why should we leave?`` she asks.

``Yes, we do feel scared sometimes,`` she concedes. ``You see, no one knows anymore who the killers are. It`s not like the old days where everyone knew who belonged to which militant outfit. Now they are nameless, faceless.``

About the Pandit exodus she says, ``We never knew they were leaving. No one told us anything. In the evening they`d be chatting with us quite normally, perhaps a little afraid, and then the next morning we`d find a big lock

on their front doors.``

The exodus of the Pandits has also meant that it becomes increasingly difficult for someone like Jyoti to find a

suitable husband. In Srinagar there is a sizeable concentration of Pandits, but in rural areas there are barely a

few families among the larger Muslim population. ``I really don`t know what I will do. My parents don`t want me to marry into a family who lives in some isolated hamlet. They`d worry for my safety. I suppose they`ll marry me off to someone in Jammu and I`d be forced to leave the Valley,`` she says quietly.

In Srinagar, the Hindu Welfare Forum, founded in 1991 to protect the interests of the Pandits who chose to remain behind, are an angry lot. They are visibly upset by the recent killings of the Pandits and fear another migration. ``Neither the state government nor the government of India has done anything to protect us.Nobody even knows we even exist. Neither the Indian media nor the international media has bothered to see how we live, highlighted our problems. Even our own community in India and abroad calls us traitors because we refused to leave,`` said a Forum member.

Apart from the myriad problems faced by this tiny community, they are a determined lot. Says Wanchoo, a businessman and a member of the Forum: ``We will never leave Kashmir, and we don`t believe in a separate homeland.

``This is our homeland and we wish to live in peace here. As for the killings, well it`s a problem faced by all Kashmiris, not just the Hindus. Everyday you read that 8-10 people have been killed and they`re usually Muslims. But the militants must realize that they only get discredited when they kill the minorities.``

His wife, who has lived through these terrible 12 years, witnessing much of the violence, experiencing much of the pain, relates a recent experience which makes her smile with delight and hope. ``At a wedding recently a whole lot of us had gathered after a long, long time - Muslim women as well as Sikh and Pandit women - and we really had fun, singing and dancing late into the night just as we used to before the militancy started.

``As I was turning in to sleep I heard the Muslim women whispering among themselves in the kitchen. `After so long,` they said, `after so many years all of us have come together`.

``It`s true, isn`t it, that a garden is most beautiful when there is a profusion of many kinds of flowers.``

Stephen Cohen on Kashmir

For many years there were few Indian-Americans or Pakistani-Americans in the US, let alone Kashmiri-Americans, so the political pressures were not there. Second, the uprising 1989 surprised everyone, including most Pakistanis, transforming the Kashmir situation. Finally, it was not until India tested nuclear weapons that the full dangers of Kashmir were widely appreciated. My concern is that domestic political pressures will polarize the issue further, that the Kashmir uprising (which was pro-democracy and relatively secular) will be submerged by Jehadists,

and that the nuclear threat will frighten outsiders away, not draw them in.

You will then have the worst of all possible worlds, a torn Kashmir, dominated

by extremists, a disinterested outside world, and the prospect of a nuclear flashpoint.



http://www.brook.edu/comm/chat/cohen000321.htm

-

Former Indian Prime Minister IK Gujral on Kashmir

Mr. Gujral asserts that the Indian-Kashmir must remain with India, and both

the countries (Pakistan and India) should accept the Line of Control as the

permanent border. Why? Because if Kashmir goes, the 150 million Muslims in

India will suffer heavily; there will be a civil war, a truly catastrophic situation.

If we hold plebiscite in Kashmir, then Tamil Nadu and other areas will also

ask for the plebiscite. We cannot allow it.

Mr. Gujral does not accept the special status of the state of Kashmir, which

has been given special rights in the Indian constitution. He says the Kashmir

issue was solved after the 1971 war. An excerpt from his comments:



Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi had agreed that the Control Line (LOC)

will be the permanent border, but Bhutto told Indira that since [he] has

recently taken over and the army is still bruised after [the] defeat in

East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), he [Bhutto] cannot sign the dotted line.

He said he needed another six months when he will come back and sign the

agreement. Indira Gandhi was naïve. She let Bhutto go back. And you know

Bhutto as he was, he changed his mind.

MOHAMMED AYOOB, Professor of International relations at Michigan State University.

He`s written extensively about South Asia. Born in India, he`s now an Australian citizen.

: I think, as far as India is concerned, it has to recognize the fact that

the United States is a global power and has global interests. And I think

it has begun to do so. The talk of unipolarity, while it does continue and

aversion to unipolarity in terms of the public media and so on -- but the

government of India I think clearly recognizes the fact that there is only

one super power in the international system today, and that it has to come

to terms with that reality.

On the part of the United States, there must be a clear recognition of the

fact that India is the regional, managerial power; it is the preeminent and

predominant part in the region, and it is able to provide public goods to

its neighbors, which means that is essential to maintain the stability and

security of the region. The United States must also recognize that it cannot

either mettle on the Kashmiri issue, and also that it should put pressure on

its friends in Pakistan to desist from the dangerous game they have been

playing now, because in the context of a nuclearized subcontinent, infiltration

and aiding and abetting insurgencies, even if you take the moral high ground on

that, is a very, very dangerous affair.

And there is, I would argue, no give on the Indian position on Kashmir, no

matter what, because it would reopen -- any concession on Kashmir would reopen

all the wounds of partition, the trauma of partition. India cannot afford another

division of the country on the basis of religion because it would have a tremendous

negative impact on the future of the 130 million Muslims in the rest of the country

who are citizens of India and equal citizens of India and should be treated as so.

Opening up this Pandora`s Box would pander to the basis instincts of those Hindu

chauvinists who consider all Muslims fifth columnists. So there is no give on the

Indian position on Kashmir. The 120 million Muslims of India cannot be sacrificed

at the altar of so-called rights of the three or four million Kashmiris.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/jan-june00/clinton_3-22.html

Fareed Zakaria on Kashmir:

http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/in/a17748-2000mar26.htm

The conflict in Kashmir won`t be solved until there is a marked evolution of attitudes

within India and Pakistan, something unlikely to happen any time soon.

If India`s ruling class had the courage to move boldly and integrate their country into the world, many old, seemingly intractable problems like Kashmir might even yield to solutions. After all, it is surely not a coincidence that Ireland came closer to resolving its troubles after moving forthrightly into the European Union and experiencing the heady economic growth that came with it.

I`m afraid i cannot agree with your conclusion here Feroz. In fact, no proud self-respecting muslim Paki could ever concieve of capitulating to India in this matter. Khar is the type of leechar keera politico who would sell his own mother if he could, and Pakistan with it (See Tehmina Durrani, My Feudal Lord). Your solution would undoubtedly please the likes of him. I say nuclear annihalation is preferable to the status quo. Lets see if after Pakistan throws/drops 30-50 nukes on India whether the LOC stays the same. Its time to put the Hindus in their proper place.

It ain`t over till the last nukes been launched/dropped.

Omar

well you have done a good job by writing this piece. it is quite in order if one has some differences with some of your observations. now it is quite a matter of chance that there is a 52 year long kashmir disoute between india and pakistan. it is my firm belief that if for the historical reasons you have so carefully enlisted, if there had been no kashmir dispute, then perhaps the indians and the pakistanis would have invented one. it is all a question of attitudes. all of us understand that india and pakistan have actually no reason to figh with each other. that religion is not the dividing line can be easily proved by the fact that hindus and muslims have ben living as friends for centuries. your site itself is another example, if any fresh one was needed. the establishments of india and pakistan,and this does not exclude anyone have to develop the attitudes that prevail right royally at the man to man level. the development of this attitude, rather than the recognition of the line of control as the final border will be a lasting solution to the kashmir , nay india-pakistan problem. moreover, the pakistanis must realise that no one in his saner moments in india wants to gobble up that country. partition may not have been the right solution to the hindu-muslim problem, but having found a solution, howsoever imperfect, no one wants to go back to the problem again. thanks.

this is the first time i am trying to join an ongoing chat.

I feel that the ``status quo ante`` on the LOC refers to the 1972 maps agreed to by the DGMO of both countries that have been signed and preserved. Any violations since then of the LOC by any country would be void if the status quo ante thus defined is restored.

Further as a third generation Indian, I feel that

Pakistan is acting in a childish fashion by sticking to `` no we shall not give up the nuclear

first use option``. Remember the Clint Eastwood film endings. The villain`s bluff is called each time.

Has the Pak establishment pondered as to their own country`s fate after they have dropped a nuke or two or ten?

A country that has been surviving on foreign aid making such statements is like a patient on a hospital bed challenging the WWF champions. While there has been and continues to be wholesale aggression of the LOC from the Pak side (the whole world believes it, even most Pakistanis believe it), when your leaders talk of nuclear bombs if India violates the LOC, it sounds farcical.

If any Indian believes that they can wipe out Pakistan or if any Pakistani believes that India will not be there after some time, they better restructure their thought process. A hundred years from now, both countries will still be around, hopefully better and stronger.What is required is to invest in themselves and not against each other. Investing in guns and missiles and not in drinking water and industry and agriculture is only due to political compulsions of narrow minded political parties and archaic mindsets of drawing room politicians.

I am sorry if I have hurt any ones feelings but I find this a good place to vent my feelings.

Re: rohanoberoi # 51

An excellent point!

In a sense, India is for the status quo along LoC, but this Indian sense of the status quo is based on the idea of legitimizing its violations of the LoC leading up to Siachen. India wants a reversion to the status quo ante in this crisis, because it wants to recover the heights it lost and maintain its dominant military position on the LoC, but what is more important it wants to prevent its main supply link to Siachen from being servered by Pakistani artillery, which is is shelling the Drass-Leh road. India is for status, after violating it, because it favors its interests and it is the reason why Pakistan is supporting the militants as to re-equate the tactical balance of power on the LoC.

Hence, this is the argument which Pakistan took to New Delhi and which was rejected by the Indians. Pakistani position is that LoC needs to re-discussed, but the Indians do not want that, because it might cancel out their gains on LoC, which they have made illegally since 1972. This is why India is for status quo and the question, which really should be asked is, if India was for status quo on LoC all along, then what was it doing in Siachen?