Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  On the evening of the massacre of the Sikhs, a patrol party from Rashtriya Rifles (one of the Indian Army’s units in Kashmir) was less than a mile away from the village; the men heard the gunshots but, for reasons still unclear, did not bother investigating. Forty-five minutes after the sound of gunfire had stopped, the first Sikh ventured out of his house and found the corpses of his friends and relatives. Then came a terrifying five-mile walk through pitch-black darkness to reach the closest police station; given the circumstances, the Sikhs thought it safer to not seek help from the army camp although it was much closer to the village. The police arrived seven hours after the killings.

  I heard the news from Abbas early next morning. He is a Muslim, the Srinagar correspondent of an Indian newspaper. The dignity and solidity of his bearing—the tall, well-built frame, the elegantly cut Kashmiri jackets he wears—made him reassuring to be with in the city where everyone—the tense crowds in the streets, the jumpy soldiers in their bunkers, and the passionate Muslims speaking of the atrocities of Indian rule in bare dark rooms—seemed on edge. A mutual acquaintance had asked Abbas to help me out during my stay in Srinagar, and he had done so dutifully, but not without a certain wariness that I put down to some slight resentment; I wasn’t the first or last of the inexperienced, and possibly biased, journalists from India he had been asked to assist.

  His voice on the phone was calm. In the days I had spent in Srinagar, relatively and unsettlingly quiet days, the news of sporadic custodial killings, land mine blasts, and gun battles between Indian security forces and guerrillas coming in from other places in the valley, I had often heard him say, “If you live here, you have to be prepared for anything. Anything can happen anytime in Kashmir.” His words with their tinge of melodrama had made me wonder if he saw a certain glamour in his job, the dangerous nature of the world he worked and lived in, like the reticent taxi driver, quick to point me toward the vegetable market where seventeen Muslim civilians had been blow to bits by a bomb explosion a few days before in one of the random incidents of violence in the valley.

  But now something even bigger had happened, and Abbas was as serene as always. He had no details yet, but he thought we should leave immediately for the village. When he arrived a half hour later at my hotel with two other Kashmiri journalists, his mood was light. The atmosphere inside the battered Ambassador was already one of good humored banter, and the jokes and repartee in Kashmiri, which I couldn’t follow, got louder after each encounter with the frankly contemptuous Indian soldiers at roadblocks, who poked AK-56 muzzles through hastily rolled-down windows, demanded identity cards, and wanted to know where we were going and why.

  In villages alongside the road men in blue and black cloaklike pherans stood in worried little circles and glanced nervously, out of the corners of their eyes, at the cars racing past. In the rice and saffron fields, stubbly and glittering with frost, soldiers stood with their backs to the road, light machine guns slung over their shoulders. Outlined against the blue, misty mountains in the distance, they were like hunters from a nineteenth-century sketch.

  At the village itself, where there was nothing they could do, they looked more casual, the elite commandos almost dandyish in their black headdresses and bulletproof overalls, sheepishly standing where a group of angry Sikhs had barred their way to the village. There were tiny shards of glass on the ground; some car windows had already been smashed by the Sikhs, and a photographer roughed up, his camera lens broken. The soldiers had watched it all and done nothing; they now quietly watched the Sikhs rage at senior officers from the army and police who had begun to arrive, their cars disgorging more and more men in fatigues.

  The Sikhs were mostly survivors from the night before, mostly middle-aged men, who had stayed in their homes when the armed men came. Others were from nearby villages who had been in Chitisinghpura since dawn. But many of the Sikhs standing before the policemen now had already assumed that the killers were Muslim guerrillas. They were shouting, beating their chests, feeding upon each other’s energy. The army and police officers heard them expressionlessly. “Give us guns, and then we’ll deal with these Muslims,” one man with a long gray beard kept shouting. “They know what we did with them in 1947. We are not cowards like the Kashmiri Hindus! Do they think they can throw us out of Kashmir? We’ll show them!” and then, spittle growing at the corner of his mouth, he added, “This is a country we have ruled.” The historical reference—to the early nineteenth century, when Sikh governors sent out by the king of Punjab had ravaged the valley and tormented the Muslims—made the Kashmiri Muslim policeman before him flinch.

  More journalists and government people arrived. The Sikhs wouldn’t let anyone past and continued to curse and lament. Behind them, a frightful clamor, like that of a thousand crows, arose from the top of the hill where the bigger gurdwara was situated. It was the sound of the weeping and wailing women, and it seemed to bewilder the roosters in the village, which were to go on dementedly for several hours after dawn, their exultant cries hanging discordantly above the village amid the grief and despair of the women.

  Throughout the long drive to the village, I had been dreading the moment when I would encounter the dead men, but when I entered the courtyard of the gurdwara where the bodies had been placed on the ground, my first impression, after the early-morning mistiness of the Kashmir valley, the mud-colored villages and pheran-draped men, was incongruously of color, the reds and yellows and purples of turbans and scarves and shawls and blankets. There was a crush of people inside the courtyard, Sikh men and women everywhere shouting, gesticulating, crying, wailing. I had been standing for some time, unable to move or speak, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a boy, not more than ten years old, his hazel eyes under the crimson headcloth full of curiosity. “Are from the media?” he asked, and when I nodded, he said, “They shot a sixteen-year-old boy.” He pointed toward one of the bodies. I hadn’t wanted to look at any of the faces of the dead men; his words jolted me into doing so. The face had gone white, the flesh tight on the bones, and skull-like hollows had begun to deepen on his cheeks and around his eyes. His middle-aged mother sat beside him, a jade green shawl draped around her head; she would have been grieving all night, and in between lifting her arms and beating her chest, the tears running down her face in an unbroken stream, she forced out a tiny yawn.

  Photographers and TV cameramen were already climbing the trees and the walls of the courtyard for a better view. I saw relatives gathered around a young girl in a red long skirt, talking to her in loud voices, shaking her shoulders, pointing to the dead father lying before her, but the stony expression on her face did not break, the eyes remained glassy, she hadn’t cried at all, someone standing behind me said, and she needed to if she wasn’t to go insane with grief.

  When I walked over to the other side of the village, where another sixteen men had been similarly lined up and fired upon at close range, the bodies were still being transported to the gurdwara in improvised stretchers. There was a delay when a young widow sitting on the muddy ground would not let go of her dead husband. She clasped his head tightly in her lap until relatives prized her hands away and held her arms. Struggling to break free, she screamed as the men quickly carted away the corpse. Her stringy hair was loose, her pale wrists streaked with blood where the glass of her shattered bangles had bitten into her flesh, and her screams were loud in this densely forested side of the village, the ground covered with straw and houses roofed with thatch; the big turbaned men collecting the corpses and the overwrought widow seemed to belong to a scene of medieval cruelty.

  I spoke to a few elderly Sikhs standing near a tea shack. Some of them were away when the killers arrived, others had stayed put in their homes, and after the first few awful hours of confronting what had happened their emotions had been dulled. They didn’t want to speculate about the identity of the killers. They kept saying, “It was too dark; you couldn’t see anyone.” I noticed a wariness; their response to the journalist
s present seemed to suggest what I had heard before from other unprotected people in India: “You’ll come and go, but we have to live here, with the consequences of what we say to you.”

  But there were some Sikhs who seemed convinced that the Muslim guerrillas were the killers, and they were the most aggressive and outspoken, raising slogans against Pakistan and Muslims, vowing revenge (“Blood for Blood”). They surrounded the very senior bureaucrats as they arrived at the courtyard and demanded arms to protect themselves against the Muslims. In one of the groups under attack I recognized the inspector general of police, a Kashmiri Hindu; just a few days earlier, I had seen him in his overheated walnut-paneled office, boasting on the telephone about the number of guerrillas killed that day. He looked anxious and lonely now, as the Sikhs confronted him.

  They were especially rough with the commissioner of Srinagar, one of the few Kashmiri Muslim officers of the Indian Administrative Service in the valley; he was shouted down as he tried to speak. It was a senior Hindu army officer who saved him from unceremonious expulsion from the village—and a previous high-level Muslim visitor had indeed been thrown out—by joining the Sikhs in their slogan shouting, slogans that asserted the military traditions of the Sikh faith, that came from the time of the persecution of the Sikhs and Hindus at the hands of Muslim invaders and conquerors.

  The Sikhs appeared to demand a swift and brutal response. And so when the crowd of villagers, growing in numbers as the news spread across the valley, each new arrival bringing his own outrage, abused and drove out the first VIP, a senior state minister, stoned his car, shattered his windshield; when his bodyguards let loose a few rounds into the air from their AK-47s and there was temporary panic because some people thought that the guerrillas had attacked; when men began sprinting all across the forest outside the village, and the commandos threw themselves on the damp ground and prepared to shoot, the little commotion assuaged the growing need for drama, and suddenly there was relief all around, and the commandos appeared less dandyish and more sheepish when they got up with muddy stains on their bulletproof overalls.

  But something suspect lay in that need for drama, which, in the few hours it took to broadcast the TV images of the widows, was to be amplified all across India. There had been a small war in Kashmir in the summer of 1999, when Pakistan-backed infiltrators, many of them regular Pakistan Army recruits, occupied high mountain positions past the border. Hundreds of Indian soldiers had died while trying to dislodge them, and the media, slicker but also much more coarse after ten years of economic liberalization, had brought about a general intoxication with war in millions of middle-class Indian homes. Opinion polls in English-language newspapers had shown much of the middle class demanding an all-out invasion of Pakistan; letters in the popular press had even called for a nuclear bombardment of Pakistan. The media themselves had joined in the frenzy, young awkwardly helmeted reporters shouting into microphones over the noise of artillery fire, “You have got to be here to know what it is like.”

  And that need for drama, for swift, brutal responses to brutality, wasn’t going to be appeased by Bill Clinton’s condemnation of the massacre. When I left the village and returned to Srinagar later that day, the groups of worried Muslims I had passed in the morning had been broken up. They were already in roped-off enclosures, squatting on the ground while soldiers searched their houses. Buses were being stopped, their passengers lined up and interrogated by the side of the road; a multitude of localized crackdowns was taking place in the region.

  Retribution was the theme of the slogans the Sikhs had shouted. It was what motivated the policemen, and the great need for some kind of retaliation would partly shape the events of the next few days.

  It had begun that very morning, even as I stood there among the corpses and the wailing women. A minute’s walk from the gurdwara. away from the Sikh-dominated part of the village, an official from the Special Operations Croup (this is one of the draconian Indian security agencies set up to suppress the insurgency, and it is dominated by Sikhs) had arrived at the house of Sonaullah Wagay, one of the few Muslims living in Chitisinghpura.

  Wagay is less well off than the Sikhs; he is a peasant who makes some money on the side by selling milk from his cow, and he would have been bemused when the Hindu subinspector, arriving in a Jeep and abruptly barging in, told him that the police were looking to recruit some local young men. Wagay told him that his youngest son is—strangely for a Kashmiri Muslim—a soldier in the Indian Army, but that the eldest one is deranged, and the middle one, Mohammed Yaqub Wagay, has been unemployed since finishing school and spends his time leading the prayers at the local mosque—he was being considered as an imam—and playing cricket with the children in the village.

  It was Yaqub who had tried to prevent Wagay from rushing to the Sikh side of the village after the killings. Yaqub had returned from his evening prayers and was sitting on the timber logs outside the house, chatting with four friends, including a Sikh, when they heard the rattle of automatic guns. All five immediately ran to their homes and locked themselves in.

  When they mustered up the courage to emerge some time later, they were warned by Sikh neighbors returning from the sites that they might be attacked by angry Sikhs and that it might be better to stay inside their homes, and that’s where Wagay and his sons spent the long, tense night, until the arrival of the police in the morning.

  After the first confusing lie about recruiting local youth into the police, the SOG subinspector didn’t waste time in getting down to business. He asked for the middle son, Yaqub Wagay. When the diminutive and very frightened Yaqub arrived, the subinspector gently caught hold of his arm and then ushered him toward the waiting Jeep. “Don’t make a noise,” he told Yaqub’s maternal uncle, a retired soldier. “We have to talk to him.” And then he was off.

  “We have to talk to him”: That line has been heard in thousands of Muslim homes in the past decade. Young men suspected of being guerrillas have been taken away by Indian security men and returned if not as corpses, then badly mutilated, the torture marks still visible in places where hot iron rods have been applied. The chances of a man’s returning unviolated from interrogation and third-degree torture were greater if you knew someone in the civil administration or the many Indian military organizations. But you had to get in your application very fast, and Wagay, though relatively well connected, was under no illusions about what could happen to his son. He simply ran from his house, past the rice fields, the minesweepers in the rice fields “sanitizing” the road for the VIPs descending upon the Sikh village, past the carloads of Sikhs and journalists and army officers hurtling down the broken dusty road, to the police station in the nearby town of Mattan.

  There he pleaded that his son had nothing to do with the guerrillas and that the Muslim families living in the region had a very good record; none of the young men had ever gone to Pakistan or Afghanistan for training in light weapons, none of them were jihadis, and indeed several of them like his son, and Yaqub’s maternal uncle, had been in the Indian Army. The police, some of whose members were Kashmiri Muslims and sympathetic to Wagay, registered his FIR (first information report), but there was little else they could do; they had no influence over the Special Operations Group, which had its own murky ways of functioning. All Wagay could do was hope for the best.

  Two days later I was watching the premier Indian TV news channel at my hotel in Srinagar, the capital of India-ruled Kashmir. I had been thinking about the killings in Chitisinghpura. The question of why the guerrillas would kill Sikhs, who had never previously been targeted, and then invite international censure kept troubling me. But the news on TV didn’t seem to offer any answers. It was full of Bill Clinton’s state visit to India—the first by an American president in more than two decades—which had begun hours after the killings in Chitisinghpura; his condemnation of the massacre and well-planned tributes to Indian democracy had been met with great enthusiasm and gratitude among the up-and-coming middle cla
ss, which, like many third world middle classes, is fiercely nationalistic but at the same time craves approval from the West.

  The killings of the Sikhs overshadowed everything Clinton said about Kashmir and Pakistan. Interestingly, the correspondents of the two major TV channels from New Delhi had arrived a day before the massacre in Kashmir in expectation of a major incident. But it was the potential shifts in the American position on Kashmir that occupied the media; the mysterious circumstances of the killings were hardly mentioned. There appeared to be little mystery at all: India’s national security adviser had already blamed the massacre on Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the two major Pakistan-based guerrilla outfits. L. K. Advani, the Indian home minister and a hard-line member of the BJP government in Delhi, had spoken of a deliberate policy of “ethnic cleansing” pursued by Muslim guerrillas, and that had more or less settled the matter. No one took any notice of the strident denials from Pakistan-based guerrilla organizations that are normally very eager to claim credit for any spectacular act of violence in the valley.