The Spirit Of Kashmir
By Beena Sarwar
The News, Pakistan
10 March, 2004
“If there is a ray of hope for humanity, it is there on the soil of Kashmir,” says Yasin Malik, Srinagar-based chairman of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, quoting Gandhi’s words after the 1947 bloodbath, in which Hindu mobs massacred thousands of Muslims in Jammu – but no Hindu was harmed in revenge.
As another example, the frail-looking Malik, speaking at a seminar on ‘Moving Towards Peace in Kashmir’ at the recently concluded World Social Forum in Mumbai, talks about the Amarnath shrine which Hindus believe to be an abode of the god Shiva but which is located in an area no Hindus live. The shrine is managed by Muslims, who receive forty per cent of the shrine’s income in return. “Where else will you find such examples?” asks Malik.
“Our emotional bonds are very strong,” says Malik, whose role in the struggle for Kashmir’s freedom has led to several incarcerations in interrogation centres and prisons. During one such time, he was hospitalized while on hunger strike, and his drip began to bleed. The nurse, a Kashmiri Hindu Pandit who lived in a migrant camp, prayed and wept for him “like a mother”.
“She had been forced to become a refugee. And yet she wept for me. It is people with vested interests who are doing business in the name of religion and spreading hatred. But they will not succeed,” vows Malik in his quiet way.
The pain of those who have been forced to leave their land burst out in the occasional slogan during Malik’s talk. “Kashmir belongs to India,” shouts one man, quietened by the organizers. Malik does not rise to the bait. He continues patiently trying to explain his position, competing with the din outside the tent, where procession after procession thunders by, banging drums, dancing, and shouting the WSF slogan: “Another World Iiiiiiiiis… Possible!”
Like many other Kashmiris, Malik would like to see the Pundits return. Also like many others, he believes that their departure was a political ploy by the government, engineered in order to defame the uprising.
“Even now, more than 10,000 Kashmiri Pundits live in the Valley. Those who left, they are our mothers, sisters, brothers, we want them to come back,” says Malik. “This is their land. They have as much right to live here, they are the sons of the soil. Let them come back and let us work together to restore our culture.”
His words are echoed at another seminar on Kashmir by People’s Conference Chairman Sajjad Lone, son of the slain Kashmiri leader Abdul Ghani Lone and brother of Hurriyet leader Bilal Lone. “I am ashamed as a Kashmiri Muslim that the Pundits have left,” he says. “But I hope they understand that I couldn’t even save my own father. I hope that one day they will bury us in the debt of magnanimity by forgiving us and returning. The pain of the past must not become an impediment for the future.”
“The problem of Kashmir is not the problem of Kashmiri Muslims alone,” says Professor Rekha Choudhry of the University of Jammu. Like many others, she believes that the “politics of identity have failed. It is not possible to create a homogenous Muslim identity in Kashmir, just as it is not possible to appropriate a Hindu identity for India.”
It is ‘Kashmiryat’ that ties Kashmiris together, cutting through all the diverse Kashmiri identities – and this is, as Balraj Puri, author of “Kashmir: Towards Insurgency” says, “the most diverse state.” Kashmiryat unites Kashmiris in a strong emotional bond. It is a romance with the soil, says Malik, and its foundation is embodied in the spirituality based on the philosophy of the Hindu woman saint Lal Ded, and her political and spiritual heir, the Muslim male saint Noordin.
Pakistan and India have failed to recognize and appreciate this spirit in their struggle to control Kashmir – like two dogs fighting over a bone, allege Kashmiris. They and their sympathizers on both sides agree that it was the determined insensitivity and the “criminal negligence” of successive Indian governments to the Kashmiris’ discontent that led to their going against their fabled gentle nature and taking up arms, and that Pakistan exploited the situation for its own interests.
In the process, both have “denied the right of the Kashmiri people to self-determination,” says Ved Bhasin, the respected head of the Kashmir Times group of publications in Jammu.
And the media on either side have refused to allow a true picture of the situation in Kashmir to emerge. “Please convey my message,” says Sajjad Lone, “We never see a proper Kashmir viewpoint in the Pakistani media.” The issue is not religious, as projected in Pakistan, nor one of national identity, as projected in India.
“Pakistan and India are romantically involved in Kashmir, but they also have national security interests in the region,” as Yasin Malik says. He reiterates the position articulated by peace activists from both sides: “Kashmir must not be seen as a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, but as an issue involving the lives and aspirations of the Kashmiri people”.
His letter of Dec 31, 2003 to Indian PM Vajpayee and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf also called for tripartite talks on Kashmir if the peace process between their two countries is to succeed. Malik has already collected 800,000 signatures endorsing this position from over a thousand villages in just two districts and three constituencies. He compares this number to the 2,81,000 votes (official figures) polled by Mufti Mohammad Saeed from the entire state, including Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir Valley. “I ask Vajpayee, as a poet and an artist, how he can say that India has won the democratic battle just because polls were conducted in which the people of Kashmir participated?”
Politics aside, on a human level, the people of Kashmir have for too long been kept apart and not allowed to meet. Their stories are heartbreaking, more than those of the “partition families” of India and Pakistan who have been able to maintain some contact, particularly during the last decade when hundreds have been able to meet thanks to people-to-people dialogues like the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy. No such platform exists for the Kashmiris, regrets Yasin Malik – and this is now vitally needed.
The day before a faction of the Hurriyet met the Indian government in breakthrough talks in New Delhi, some two thousand Kashmiris braved cold and rain along the banks of the Neelum River at the village called Chiliana on the Pakistan side and Tithwal on the Indian side, which is bifurcated by the LoC. When word got out that the security forces would not try and prevent this “family reunion”, according to front page AP report printed in The Asian Age (Jan 22, 2004), they began making their way to the river bank, to one of the few spots where divided families used to be able to meet before the road was closed by shelling from both sides.
They held up babies, and threw letters and gifts weighted with rocks across the 20 metre wide river to each other. Some gifts were swept away in the raging current, the roar of which prevented the people from being able to hear each other. Hajra, 26, held up her one-year old baby son on the Pakistani side for her mother on the opposite bank to see.
“I haven’t seen her in 14 years,” she said, sobbing. “She’s standing right over there.” Across the river, three men had to hold Hajra’s mother from jumping into the icy current. One woman from the Indian side did jump in and try to cross, but was rescued before the current carried her off.
Mohammad Karim, 50, threw a coconut across to his brother Mujid. “This was only a coconut, but it’s more than the whole world to me, because I have seen my brother after 14 years,” said Karim. Mujid nearly fell into the water, but managed to catch the gift. “Now, he has kids, and I am growing old. A day will come when we will speak with each other, close-up”.
The proposed Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus might yet make his dream come true. But the idea is viewed with trepidation by many. “Re-opening this road is a good step. It has created hope. But there is an apprehension that this is part of the Indian government’s designs to make the Line of Control permanent,” says Ved Bhasin.
Many Kashmiris agree. They say they will not accept the passport system to cross the border. “They will have to work out some system of permits,” says Malik, talking to The News. He also points to the logistical problems with this plan. “Kashmiris on the Indian side will have to go to Delhi for visas, then come back to go to the Pakistani side of Kashmir. It will be a huge problem.”
A way must be found to get over these hurdles. The Kashmiri people must be allowed to meet. “So many confusions are cleared up when we can meet directly, face-to-face, and talk,” says Aysha Maqbool Butt, who was able to meet with Ved Bhasin and Yasin Malik at the WSF. The daughter-in-law of the Kashmiri leader Maqbool Butt who was tried and hanged for treason by New Delhi, Aysha is a political activist based in Muzaffarabad, part of whose family lives in Baramulla on the Indian side.
“We Kashmiris must be allowed to dialogue among ourselves,” reiterates Ved Bhasin.
It is time this dialogue was allowed to begin, so that the River Neelum need never again witness the tears of a people divided.