Between the Great Divide

by Anam Zakaria

  The November 2016 protest was followed by extreme winter in December and January. The women tell me that even during the 1990s, when cross-LoC firing was at its peak, the winter months would be calmer because of the logistical difficulties faced by both the armies in the mountainous region. The harsh temperatures and snow would cool the tensions for a couple of months. The locals hold the protest and the accompanying winter months as responsible for bringing momentary peace to the area. As of late 2016, the road has opened and firing has halted. Schools have also reopened and some families have started to make their way back into Neelum Valley. Even tourists, who had been avoiding Neelum Valley after the incident at Keran resort in October, have started to slowly trickle in. The women confide that they find some comfort in that. ‘We feel that if tourists are here, then maybe the forces will not fire and there will be some peace,’ says Ayesha. But even they know this is no guarantee. The Keran resort was fully booked when Indian shelling took place last year. A tourist had got injured in the process.

  Before I leave, Ayesha gives me a tour of some of the bunkers in the area. She tells me that those who could afford it have made new ones, furnishing them to ensure basic comfort in case shelling resumes. Some of the bunkers even have a TV, sink, heating and beds inside. Others are more basic, carrying just a few utensils and water. Ayesha’s tai and her family spent the entire winter in her bunker, of about 7 x 13 feet. ‘We were too scared to come out,’ she tells me. Unfortunately, she hasn’t had the money to build a bigger and better-equipped bunker. Unlike some of the other bunkers I see, which have inner passageways that take one to safer compartments where mortars would not easily reach, Ayesha’s tai’s bunker is a single room. If a mortar came in that direction, it is unlikely she will survive.

  I leave the women that day with a tight hug, hoping against hope that they remain safe in the months to come. We drive for another 45 minutes before reaching Nagdar, where a passenger bus was hit in November 2016. It is an ordinary spot on the road but one in close proximity to the LoC. Two young boys are walking on the road and we ask them to confirm if the attack took place in this exact spot. They answer in the affirmative but tell us not to stop for too long. It seems as if everyone is scared of when the firing could resume. Our car could be one of the casualties, just as the bus was. Fear has settled into the valley like a layer of dust that refuses to be washed away.

  We then make our way to the Keran resort. I expect at least a few tourists, for I have been there three times before this and each time have seen a large number of visitors, people from all over Pakistan. It is one of the most popular resorts in Neelum Valley. However, a strange silence seems to have taken over the property. Even the resort staff is nowhere to be seen. Haroon goes inside to call a waiter and I find us a table by the Neelum river. As we order food, I enquire if the lack of activity at the resort is because of Ramzan, which is starting tomorrow. Most tourists prefer not to travel in the month, staying within the comforts of their home while fasting in the heat. The waiter tells me that that is partially the reason. There were four to five families staying at the resort until yesterday. I then ask him if he witnessed the attack a couple of months ago but he says he wasn’t here. Instead, he calls another colleague from inside, who was present during the incident. This is what he had to say: ‘We were fully booked… all twenty-three rooms had guests. A couple of families were sitting outside by the river as you are now while we were inside preparing for a ceremony that was taking place at the resort that morning. About 250 people were expected in a couple of hours. A private company had booked a hall for some launch ceremony. It was about 8.15 am when a mortar hit the river, causing a loud roar in the water. Two children and their mother who were sitting close to the river started to scream. Then another mortar hit one of the guest rooms. Luckily the guests had just gone out for a walk or else they wouldn’t have survived. There was frenzy everywhere; we quickly escorted all the guests inside and told them to stay put. Three persons were injured, which included a villager, a policeman and a tourist.’

  The resort was closed right after it was safely vacated and travel restrictions were imposed in the valley. It was only two months prior to my visit, in March 2017, that it opened up again. ‘Guests are coming as there has been no firing incident since November-December 2016, but there’s a 90 per cent reduction in the number of tourists who come to our resort. At most, we only book four to five rooms at a time now,’ says the waiter.

  The bustling tourist industry has received a blow. The locals are hopeful that if the firing doesn’t resume, tourism will pick up again, but from my last visit in May 2017, I saw that the numbers were low and visitors infrequent.

  The last stop we make is at Shahkot, which is 3-4 kilometres from Athmuqam. It is a hot May afternoon and not many people are outdoors. We walk towards one of the houses that was hit by a mortar in 2016. Red chillies are drying outside in the sun. A woman is sitting in one of the rooms inside, the door ajar. She sees me and comes out to greet me. I ask her if Haroon, Sharjeel and I can come inside and she guides us upstairs without asking any questions. She assumes I am from the media. She has probably had some local journalists come in to ask questions about the firing. After seating us, she goes out to call her husband.

  Akbar (the name has been changed to protect his identity), who is in his forties, greets us and sits on a bed in front of us. He tells us that the day the shelling took place (he cannot recall the exact date although he mentions this was around late October or early November 2016), Pakistani and Indian forces had already been firing on each other’s posts for a couple of hours, ever since the morning. His father, who had witnessed enough shelling in his life to know the course it usually took, advised him to take his family and go hide in a nearby bunker, built by their uncle in the 1990s. His father said he would follow after saying his magrib prayers. While Akbar and his family squatted down in the bunker, they heard a huge explosion. ‘It seemed as if the mortar had landed right in the middle of our house because there was smoke everywhere and we couldn’t see anything.’ Luckily, it had hit the fields right outside, damaging the house but sparing his father’s life.

  By the time of my visit, Akbar and his family had already repaired the damages. ‘My sister is getting married so we had to repair the house.’ He tells me he has witnessed firing before as well. ‘In the 1990s, it seemed as if it would never stop. And when it stopped, we thought it would never start again. This is a huge jolt to us.’

  As he walks us to our car, he points towards an old man across the street. ‘A mortar hit him and injured his leg badly in the 1990s. He had to undergo three surgeries. This area has suffered a lot.’ I ask him if he anticipates more firing and he lets out a long sigh before responding. ‘We are all frightened that it will restart. It’s been five to six months since the last firing incident but we can’t stop thinking about it. We keep asking each other, “When will it happen again… when will it happen again…?”’

  ***

  I leave the valley that day feeling anxious. I don’t know what the future holds for the people who had opened their homes to me, who had welcomed me so warmly, who had looked at me hopefully, thinking that my writing about them might make a difference to their lives. I pray that the firing has halted for good but I know that is unlikely.

  Though Neelum Valley has seen a relatively peaceful 2017, a firing incident jolted the community in July, soon after my visit. Pakistan would allege that Indian troops had targeted a Pakistan Army vehicle, resulting in the death of four soldiers, who drowned in Neelum river when the truck plunged into it due to the firing.20 Just a few days earlier, India had alleged that the Pakistan Army had killed two of its soldiers in sniper fire.21 For the locals, this tit-fortat firing means more distress. For now, as I write this in January 2018, Neelum Valley is more or less calm again but no one knows for how long. Uncertainty has become the norm and I can only hope that this isn’t just another fleeting moment of calm before the storm, before the sound of
another mortar uproots the valley and its residents yet again.

  PART TWO

  State Policies

  6

  FIGHT TO THE FINISH

  The army in Kashmir

  On 5 February 2016, while most Pakistani schools, offices and businesses were closed to observe Kashmir Solidarity Day, a national holiday in Pakistan to reinforce that ‘Kashmir and Pakistan are like one soul in two hearts’1, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) held a ‘Solidarity with Kashmir’ conference outside the National Press Club in Islamabad. Led by the notorious Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, who India believes is the mastermind behind the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the JuD is said to be the ‘charity’ front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group the UN has classified as a terrorist network,2 and operates in and out of Kashmir. Various religio-political parties which have, over the years, argued for jihad in Kashmir, are said to have attended the conference.3

  One of the pictures published in Pakistan’s leading newspaper, Dawn, shows Hafiz Saeed standing in front of a large banner depicting photographs of alleged Indian atrocities. The top of the banner is smeared with red paint, dripping down to symbolize the blood lost by Kashmiris. It reads in Urdu, ‘Kashmir Pakistan ki Shah Rag aur Bare-Sageer Pakistan aur Hind ki taqseem ka namuqqamal agenda hai,’ (Kashmir is Pakistan’s main artery and the unfinished agenda of the partition of the subcontinent).4

  During the conference, where many JuD party workers and followers were present, the political leadership of the country was criticized for developing friendly relations with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; and Hafiz Saeed cautioned the then Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to ‘not betray the Kashmir cause’5 in his pursuit of better relations with the Indian government. The JuD has been at the forefront of opposition to any peace efforts with India. In 2011, when Pakistan granted the most favoured nation (MFN) status to India to improve trade and business relations, the JuD organized countrywide protests against the decision taken by the then ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Criticizing the PPP government for keeping silent on Indian policies in Kashmir, the JuD said: ‘Peace in the region is related to peace in Kashmir, not by building terms of friendship with India and increasing economic relations with India… If they have to do so, they had to declare it in their mandate.’6

  Throughout Pakistan’s history, Kashmir has always played an instrumental role in its imagination. State and non-state actors have used the Kashmir cause to earn popular support. From Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s potent speeches in the sixties and seventies, declaring that ‘Kashmir is not an integral part of India… the people of Jammu & Kashmir… are a part of people of Pakistan, in blood, in flesh, in life, kith and kin of ours, in culture, in geography, in history, in every way and every form,’7 to his daughter, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s speech at the United Nations in 1996, where she urged the international community to take notice of the ‘tools of murder, torture, rape, persecution, arson, incarceration, assassination attempts that were ruthlessly used by the 600,000 military and paramilitary forces’8 deployed in Indian-administered Kashmir, to Benazir’s son and current PPP chairperson, Bilawal Bhutto’s speeches where he emphatically stated that he would ‘take back Kashmir, all of it… not (leaving) behind a single inch of it because, like the other provinces, it belongs to Pakistan’,9 the Kashmir dispute has time and again taken centrestage in Pakistani politics, used by those in power and those in opposition to gain political mileage. Though Kashmir does not ignite the same fire in Pakistanis today as it did in the early 1990s—a transition I address in the next section—political parties (and organizations like the JuD) continue to present Kashmir as an existential issue to gather support as and when required.

  However, apart from non-state actors, politicians and political rivals, another focal force, the Pakistan Army, has played a critical role in Kashmir. In its seventy years of existence, Pakistan has seen multiple martial laws. Even when civilian governments have been in power, many believe that the army pulls the strings, particularly when it comes to India-Pakistan relations and the Kashmir dispute.

  Pakistani author Ayesha Siddiqa, whose book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy generated much controversy in Pakistan upon its publication in 2007,10 reveals the extent of control the army exercises over Pakistan’s economy and politics. She writes that Pakistan ‘is representative of states where politically powerful militaries exercise control of the state and society through establishing their hegemony’.11 This hegemony in itself is in many ways linked with Kashmir. Siddiqa notes: ‘Pakistan’s military is the most powerful institution in the country. This relatively superior capacity can be attributed to the organization’s role as the saviour of the state. Such a role was launched soon after the country’s independence in 1947. The first war with India (over Kashmir) set the political discourse of the country. Allowing the military to initiate a major operation without sufficient civilian control propelled the army into significance.’12 She further quotes the Pakistani author, Brig (Retd.) A.R. Siddiqui, who said: ‘The use of tribals who had gone into Kashmir to take control of the Kashmir Valley led to the (first Indo-Pak) war, thus sealing the fate of Kashmir and turning Pakistan into a military-dominated state.’13

  I thus felt that it was necessary to reach out and collect narratives of military personnel on the Kashmir conflict. In my quest to do this, I reached out to retired Pakistani military officials—majors, colonels, brigadiers, generals and a former chief of army staff—to understand the decisions they were involved in and to explore the successes and failures they had in Kashmir from their very own perspectives.

  1947-1948

  One of the first interviews was conducted with a retired army officer based in Lahore. The officer (who spoke on condition of anonymity) and I spoke one evening at his house, our conversation beginning with a discussion of the 1948 Indo-Pak war. ‘The Pakistan Army didn’t participate officially, at least in the beginning,’ he begins. ‘Muhammad Ali Jinnah had been advised against any official aggression in Kashmir. Pakistan was afraid that the British forces, who were still operating in India and Pakistan at this time and were essential for our security and defence, might leave in protest. Jinnah was also worried that any aggression on Pakistan’s part could mean Indian retaliation in Junagadh.’

  The situation in Junagadh, a princely state, ironically mirrored the situation in J&K at the time of Partition; only in this case a Muslim nawab ruled over a Hindu-majority population. If Pakistan went ahead with an operation in J&K premised on the fact that it predominately consisted of a Muslim population, India could use the same logic to invade Junagadh. It is believed by some that this prevented overt action in Kashmir at the time of Partition.

  ‘So, instead of acting directly, we facilitated the Lashkars (loosely translated as battalion)—mostly Pathans from north and south Waziristan. People from the army were involved as well, but only unofficially. They took leave from their posts and then joined the movement because it was not permitted otherwise. In an official capacity, the army only came forward to protect the line at Chakothi (a village by the LoC, now located in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and a focal crossover point for travel and trade between the two sides of Kashmir since the 2003 ceasefire); beyond that, the Lashkars went alone.’

  ‘The fervour was very strong at that time,’ the officer adds. ‘Everybody thought Kashmir was an integral part of Pakistan, and ordinary people risked their lives fighting for it. They didn’t need official support to go and claim what they thought was their right.’

  ‘In the 1980s, President Zia-ul-Haq also wanted to use the Lashkars to create instability in makbooza Kashmir, followed by an operation by the army to conquer the Valley,’ the officer tells me. The alleged training of militants and their infiltration from Pakistan-administered Kashmir into Indian-administered Kashmir during the late 1980s could make sense in view of this. However, between 1947 and the late 1980s, another significant event had also taken place, which too reli
ed upon the Lashkars to infiltrate and spark another uprising in Kashmir. This was Operation Gibraltar, launched by the Pakistan Army in 1965.

  1965 War

  In 1963, when the Moh-e-Moqadis, believed to be a hair of Prophet Muhammad, vanished from the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir broke out in protests. Indian journalist Inder Malhotra, who travelled to Kashmir to document the unrest, wrote about the brewing resentment and the sense of sacrilege in the community. Some people, he wrote, alleged that the relic had been stolen to insult the Prophet of Islam. ‘Hundreds of thousands of mourners… surrounded the Hazratbal shrine… absolutely inconsolable, and refused to move away from there, as days passed without any trace of the missing relic. They greeted the state government’s reassuring noises with contempt… it (seemed) as if the whole Valley was hanging by a slender thread.’14