Sunil Sethi: Ten days in Kashmir

AL FRESCO

Srinagar: Returning to Kashmir after some years, in the days just preceding the recent grenade attacks, I found a town straining hard to be normal. March, April and early May had been good for the tourist trade but with the first round of blasts in May the visitors vanished and cancellations poured in thick and fast. The hotels emptied out and the houseboat-owners on the lakes offered cut-price rates to stragglers. By June, as the crisp spring days melted into long summer afternoons, things had picked up once more, principally on account of undeterred hordes of yatris on the Amarnath pilgrimage. On July 3, the papers reported that their number had swelled to a record 1.57 lakh in 18 days.

They were everywhere, arriving by plane and bus, littering the western boulevard of Dal Lake""where a glittering sign "Nathu's Sweets" signalled a homely welcome""climbing in serpentine queues to the top of Shankaracharya Hill and swarming round the green meadows of Gulmarg. It was the worst of budget tourism, grumbled Kashmiris, in search of a high-spending clientele, but at least it was something. The shikaras gliding on the lake had business and the Mughal gardens were thronging with tourists posing for pictures in the waterfalls alongside picnicking parties of locals.

The administration, fully comprehending the risk in the annual spurt of religious tourism, had taken all precautions. In the ten days I was there the Valley was crawling with police and paramilitary forces at every corner. Triple checks at the airport and CRPF men every few yards in busy areas like Dal Gate and Lal Chowk. We stayed in a tranquil old house and garden called Dar-es-Salam, now restored to perfection after the years of insurgency, on the shores of Nagin Lake but the suburban route to it was barricaded with barbed wire and pickets. There were frequent vehicle checks everywhere and lonely jawans patrolled the forested road to the sanctuary at Dachigam or to Pattan along Baramulla, where we spent an afternoon among the sunlit orchards and 12th century ruins of Paraspora.

The ubiquitous, often intrusive, presence of security forces (that continues to provoke confrontation, bitter anger, bandhs and protests) Kashmiris have learnt to live with sporadic rather than the ceaseless violence of previous years. In fact, for the first time in years, I found conversation veering to issues of everyday governance.

Whether the latest revelations in the sex scandal, which feverishly grip the state like a steamy serial, or, more important, issues of cleaning the lakes, clearing illegal settlements, which have mushroomed along the waters, or rebuilding roads, talk centres on issues of civic corruption, administrative delays and unfinished projects""the sort of issues that engage citizens who want to move on.

Quite by chance I ran into a Pakistani family who were visiting close relatives in Kashmir after a gap of 40 years. They had not come on the trans-border bus (which runs half-empty) but by the conventional air route and it had taken months of string-pulling for permissions. In the evenings we would sit outside and have spirited discussions on Indo-Pak relations. But as the sun went down and the shikaras shimmered on the water framed by a landscape of willows and lotus gardens we would fall silent. "Just think," said the Pakistani. "If there was no view like this there would no Indo-Pak problem. If there were no lakes, Srinagar would just be another dirty town with a bypass around it."