After 60 years, Kashmir is threatening to boil over and we cannot just blame Pakistan for it.
If the Army and armed policemen could be used to give yatris a safe passage to Amarnath, why couldn’t they be used to give Kashmiris’ trade a safe passage through Jammu? It’s a simple question, but very pertinent. One concerned people’s lives while the other involved people’s livelihood. Yet, there was a positive response in one case and a negative one in the other. Why? We, who are in the middle between politicians and agitators, can only ask. We know there won’t be an answer.
There are so many questions about Kashmir to which there aren’t answers. They came to my mind, on a recent visit to the troubled state, when I came out of Srinagar airport amid security even tighter than what I had experienced at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut at the height of the Vietnam War; when my car was held up for hours on the way to Kargil to let a yatri convoy pass; when Iqbal, owner of a Dal Lake houseboat, said his next confirmed booking was only in October; or when a policeman guarding the road to the Shankaracharya temple above the Dal Lake frisked me and my camera.
This was happening 60 years after our making Kashmir an integral part of India and I didn’t feel amused. Neither did they who waited in vain for tourists in their empty shikaras or whose produce rotted on the Srinagar-Delhi highway. By one estimate, livelihood loss because of the current turmoil could go above Rs 10,000 crore. For a people living in a state of flux for six decades, that’s no laughing matter.
Why should it be so for Kashmiris and how are they expected to react? It isn’t so in Leh-Ladakh. The bazaar at Leh is teeming with foreign backpackers and hotels have to be booked months in advance. Even the narrow lanes are lined with restaurants and cafes, filled with customers having a good time. Yes, there are army check posts to go through, army camps to pass, and permits to obtain and produce, but one doesn’t feel scared. One can actually relax and enjoy.
In Srinagar and around the valley, one does feel scared. Outside Srinagar one day, I aimed my camera at the surrounding hills, and a passing army truck promptly drew up to make sure I wasn’t photographing army vehicles. Returning from Pahalgam, I stopped by the road to photograph a huge Chinar tree, and two soldiers came out of its shadows to ask what I was doing. Soldiers parade roads everywhere. Sandbagged bunkers and coils of barbed wire remind you that you have intruded into a virtual war zone. The only time one feels relaxed is when one is afloat on a shikara as evening falls on Dal Lake.
I know all the usual arguments in support of such a pervasive military presence. I am only wondering, if, even after 60 years of trying, we haven’t been able to win the hearts and souls of Kashmiris, what have we achieved? If Hindu yatris are made to move in armed convoys on their journey through Muslim land, which was never the case before, what are we headed for? If all the thousands of people who went out to demonstrate on the streets of Srinagar have become separatists, as the government wants us to believe, where do we stand with our vaunted Kashmir policy? If the communal divide between Jammu and Kashmir is now sharper than ever before, what were we doing all these years?
Among the people I met on my trip — boatmen, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, newspaper vendors, shikara-borne handicraft sellers, little boys working at roadside dhabas, sellers of shawls, saris, and dried fruit — there were no separatists. I saw no hostility in their eyes. I heard no bitterness in their talk, not even against yatris. They are ordinary people, like ordinary people anywhere, anxious to earn a living and lead their lives in peace. We could have helped them earn a better income. We could have created conditions to swamp them with tourists and orders for their products. We could have given them a greater economic reason to belong while we fought Pakistan along the Line of Control.
Instead, we swamped them with soldiers and policemen in search of a final solution. We fought on the LoC as well as in the hamlets of the valley. We looked for terrorists and separatists in people’s homes and killed thousands in dubious encounters. In no time, we began to look like an occupation force. Resentment swelled, anger began to explode, and, as we used more muscle, tourists stopped coming, the economy suffered, and anger became even more difficult to suppress.
That’s Kashmir for you, after 60 years, threatening to boil over, the whistle rising to a scream. Don’t just blame Pakistan for it.