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Respect All, Suspect All

By Rafiq Kathwari

06 November, 2009
Countercurrents.org

The bunker is at the foot of the shrine, below the steps that lead up to the entrance. Like so many other bunkers in the Kashmir Valley, it is enclosed by barbed wire, manned by a couple of soldiers, automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. What distinguishes this bunker is a command, a credo, bold white letters on sky blue background: RESPECT ALL, SUSPECT ALL.

An oxymoron written on a bunker at the foot of the shrine of Baba Rishi, a Sufi mystic, who devoted his entire life to preaching respect for all human beings and their environment, is not coincidental. It is an eloquently fascist credo packed with sad irony, encapsulating the stated policy of the world’s most populous democracy to subvert the teachings of Baba Rishi, and by extension the teachings of other Sufi mystics who brought Islam to Kashmir or Kashmir to Islam.

I drove with a friend to Baba Rishi for the first time last Saturday on the insistence of my 85 year-old mother who says her father, a wealthy merchant of his day, had married three times in the hope of producing an heir to his substantial wealth, but his wives sadly proved barren (or perhaps it was him). Hopeful, he trekked to the shrine where he tied a thread to a wooden rose and prayed for an heir. Upon returning home, he learnt that his fourth wife was pregnant. In due course a baby girl was born who was to become my mother.

Faith in Sufi mysticism has for centuries been the defining characteristic of Islam in Kashmir, commanding awe and respect, never shock and suspicion.

Let me test, I thought, to what extent Respect All, Suspect All is being enforced as a policy. I walked around the barbed wire to the bunker, a bag slung over my shoulder. I smiled at a soldier, greeted him warmly in the lukewarm October sunshine.

Where are you from? he asked

Mumbai, I lied.

Where in Mumbai? The soldier asked.

Andheri. And you? I asked, jovially.

Allahabad, he said.

O, where the Ganges merges with the Yamuna!

He nodded, waved me through without checking my bag, but asked where my friend was from.

Kashmir, I said.

The soldier’s tone changed. He commanded my friend to open his bag, regarding him suspiciously, asking him the usual who, where, why, to which my friend responded truthfully, clearly and the soldier let him through, reluctantly.

Respect a Mumbaiwallah, even when he lies. Suspect a Kashmiri, even when he speaks the truth.

Baba Rishi preached, as did all Sufi mystics of Kashmir, respect for the environment in which we live. Kashmiris respect and revere their Sufi mystics to the horizon of love, mark their birth and death anniversaries religiously, solicit funds for the upkeep of shrines, even want to name the new airport after a great Sufi mystic

But judging from what I saw on the road to Baba Rishi Kashmiris do not respect the environment. We suspect it. We destroy it. Is it because we cannot bear too much beauty we have to either veil it (as many do their women) or cut it down to a stump (as we do our grand pines and poplars, and deodars and even the mighty chinar [Kashmir’s plane tree])?

I saw grand trunks felled by the roadside, grieving stump after stump after stump on the hill side. No sign whatsoever of any re-forestration. Inevitably, there will be devastating mudslides downhill, all the way south, possibly to the outskirts of Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer Capital, resulting in loss of life and property, surely. We are ill prepared to deal with any calamity in Kashmir, especially one we have ourselves created.

From Baba Rishi I drove three kilometers to Gulmarg, once a meadow of flowers, boasting the highest golf course in the world, on a treacherous old, pot-holed road where, because it is a road rarely taken, the devastation is heart-rending. More trunks, a stream sobbing, choking on polythene bags, soda cans and the general detritus of neo-liberal global consumerism.

A green and white sign proclaimed, NO POLYTHENE ZONE. The NO should be painted over, for the state itself is using reams of polythene to protect the golf greens, but it serves no or little purpose to blame the current state administration, even if it came to power in a highly choreographed 2008 election. The state, which has little financial resources, is unable to meet even the payroll of state functionaries. Seemingly, the state treasury is empty. If there is a vision, it is not visible on the street or in the meadows.

Meantime, people I talk to are slowly beginning to realize that they have no choice but to organize in every neighborhood and reclaim their environment, block by block, one meadow or marg at a time. Without a mass popular movement, the environment is doomed.

When human endeavor fails, as it is in Kashmir, prayer begins, and we are indeed very good at shunning our responsibility or blaming all on India’s occupation, good at raising our cupped hands to God or to a Sufi mystic, pleading for deliverance. Okay, then, let us pray.

Rafiq Kathwari, a Kashmiri- American poet and photojournalist who lives in New York, Ireland and Kashmir, can be reached at [email protected]



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