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

by Pankaj Mishra

  As the Indian Army announced one improbable victory after another, TV reporters and newspaper journalists emerged as cheerleaders, and then, in July 1999, when, under American pressure on Pakistan, the infiltrators withdrew from the strategic heights, the media led the country in celebrating what the Hindu nationalist government described as Pakistan’s military and diplomatic defeat.

  If the battles in Kashmir hardened public opinion in India, the well reported arrests of Muslims, allegedly terrorist agents of the ISI, in various parts of India further fed Hindu suspicions about Muslims in general, and Kashmiri Muslims in particular.

  According to popular Hindu sentiment about the Kashmir problem, human rights violations by the military could be means of reasserting Indian authority over the state. In the southern Hindu-majority city of Jammu, in the plains, I met a leader of the BJP, Mr. Khajuria, one of the up-and-coming men within his party. Supplicants—job seekers, men with big shiny boxes of sweets to offer Khajuria—thronged outside his flat, often spilling into the living room, furnished with the regulation green carpet of government offices and sofas upholstered in dark blue velvet, with model airplanes on display in the glass cabinet, below large framed pictures of stern-looking BJP ideologues. Khajuria, a small, round man with a big wart on the bridge of his nose, would gently scold the waiting group as he pushed his way through: “Can’t you see I am doing an interview?”

  He had been a leader of the student wing of the BJP at Jammu University and still had the sweetly ingratiating manner of the ineffectual student politician. I could have predicted before the meeting most of what he said: India was facing “total war” with Pakistan, which could be ended only by invading and conquering Pakistan; the ISI was encouraging Indian Muslims to increase their population in India through hectic breeding; and Muslims were at best unreliable.

  But I was still taken aback when eager to make an impression, and bolder now in his remarks, he said that Kashmiri Muslims only understood the language of the danda, the policeman’s baton. That was the lesson of the maharaja’s rule. “Give the security forces a free hand,” he said, “and the Kashmir problem would be solved in two weeks.”

  The Kashmiri Muslim politician Mirwaiz Omar Farooq told me that the Hindu nationalists were determined to hold on to the valley but had little interest in the Kashmiris and knew very little about their long history and culture. Still in his early thirties, Farooq is the youngest of the leading separatist politicians in the Muslim-dominated valley. Most of his colleagues were in prison in the western Indian state of Rajasthan when I saw him in June 2000; he himself was under house arrest, and while we talked, policemen outside were asserting their presence by checking all incoming cars for bombs. On the clean-cut lawns where the trimmed tall hedges looked, distractingly, like giant hand grenades, a small group of men waited for an audience. Though much older, they were reverential toward Farooq, who was also the religious head of old Srinagar, a position previously occupied by his father, an opponent of the pro-India chief minister Sheikh Abdullah, until his assassination in 1990.

  At the age of eighteen, Farooq had become the leader of the coalition of parties fighting for liberation from Indian rule; the news, I remember, was greeted with derision in India, as a sign of Kashmir’s political immaturity. But people grow up fast in adverse times, and Farooq spoke with the subtlety and skill of an older, more experienced politician.

  He was among the majority of Kashmiris, he said, who thought the insurgency had failed, and not only that: It had also undermined an ancient and gentle culture by introducing it to the dangerous cult of the gun. The only hope lay in a dialogue between India and Pakistan that would involve representatives of Kashmir. Although he opposed Indian rule in Kashmir and worried about the hardening of attitudes in India, he was also concerned about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Kashmir. There was no alternative to a secular democratic state and rapid economic progress. It was Nehru’s vision for India all over again, although ironically, in Kashmir, that vision had been dissolved by the same Indian state that was entrusted with the great power to realize it.

  Still, the Kashmiris themselves are quick to embrace the modern world whenever the opportunity comes their way. Movement and growth are visible even after more than a decade of damage. Education suffered most in ten years of endless curfews and strikes, and yet even so, one of the most popular small businesses in the valley remains the primary English medium school or coaching institute. A small room and a graduate are all that is initially needed. You are assured of customers, parents who can’t afford anything better but are anxious for their children to make their way into the larger world of jobs and professional careers, their anxiety so great and widespread that even the madrassas, the schools run by the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami that moderate Muslims often send their children to, have had to secularize their syllabus.

  At the time when political activity was restricted by the insurgency, Omar Farooq accumulated degrees in computer science and political science. When I first met him in 2000, he was studying for an M.Phil. degree in Islamic studies. In the market in Pattan, a few miles north of Srinagar, regularly destroyed and rebuilt after each battle between the police and guerrillas, I found two “computer institutes,” tiny rooms really, with a computer in each, full of restless young men—restless because there was no power and they paid by the hour to become familiar with Windows software. At Kashmir University in Srinagar, its vast green campus bordering a lake and monitored by snowcapped mountains, the lines of students for enrollment in the new semester are very long. Students with guns ruled the campus not so long ago. The university, set up in 1948 and already in 1988 known as one of the best universities in India, effectively ceased to function in the nineties. Most of the Kashmiri Hindus on the faculty left. The anomie and corruption elsewhere had infected the university; there was mass cheating, and as a result, the amount of students passing their exams was an unusually high 90.5 percent. The lowest point was reached in 1992, when the university awarded degrees without holding examinations.

  But the India-backed drive to restore peace to the state after the elections in 1996 benefited those in education. During the brief respite, the faculty was restaffed with more Kashmiri Muslims occupying senior teaching positions. Seminars and conferences were held again. The percentage of students passing their exams returned to normal. Some of the Muslim students who had been attending colleges and universities in India also returned, after being continually harassed by the police; the university set up new departments of biotechnology and geology for them.

  For more than a century after 1846, when the British left, the Kashmiri Hindus had dominated the Muslim-majority population of the valley. Then the land reforms of Sheikh Abdullah, introduced during his time as the India-backed leader of Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and the spread of free primary education created a new class of ambitious Kashmiri Muslims. However, no new institutions were provided to accommodate these Muslims, and existing facilities were monopolized by the minority of Hindus who ran the schools and colleges and had a disproportionate presence in the state’s administration.

  At first, the abrupt departure of the Hindus after the insurgency began in 1990 was felt as a blow. Over time the space vacated by them has been filled. Alongside the insurgency and the bloodletting, a new generation of Kashmiri Muslims has emerged to take their positions in the bureaucracy, the universities, and the media, and it is hard not to be impressed by this new middle-class intelligentsia, by the journalists, academics, and politicians in the valley, people like Abbas, my Muslim guide in Kashmir; Dr. Khan, the thoughtful scholar whom I had met in Srinagar; and Omar Farooq himself, They make it possible to believe that along with immeasurable suffering and pain, Kashmir has acquired a new political and intellectual life; that as had taken place once in India, the struggle for greater liberty has turned out to be a rite of passage, an awakening that owes as much to modern education as to the still-strong Sufi Islamic traditions of tolerance and civility.<
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  Pakistan, busy exporting jihad everywhere even as it slowly imploded, couldn’t have been expected to be responsive to that awakening; the section in northwest Kashmir which it continues to hold is the most underdeveloped part of the country, and Pakistan has done little for it. India is the bigger, economically stronger, more democratic country that can accommodate Kashmir, make it part of its overall growth. But the gap between India and Kashmir has grown even wider in the last decade.

  The government keeps inviting the separatists to renounce violence and engage in dialogue; army and police officers speak routinely of “winning back the hearts and minds of the Kashmiris.” But this isn’t going to be achieved simply by sending Kashmiri schoolchildren on tours of India, one of the Indian government’s populist measures, which, as one army officer told me, would not only appease the new generation of Kashmiris but would make them realize what a big and powerful country India is. That is a message that has already been conveyed by hundreds of thousands of Indian troops in Kashmir—the various army and paramilitary groups, some of whose more protected members, more than ten years after the insurgency began, have done well for themselves.

  In Srinagar in March 2000, I met Mehbooba Mufti, the daughter of a senior pro-India Kashmiri politician, who was then one of the brave people who traveled around the valley investigating the excesses of both the security forces and the guerrillas. When I saw her, she had just returned from visiting the border with Pakistan near the distant north of the valley. The area was known for timber smuggling, and three timber smugglers, caught while murdering some villagers, had fingered the commanding officer of the local army unit as their protector. That wasn’t all. The fabled beauty of the women in the area invited trouble from the Indian soldiers stationed there. There had been accounts of prostitution and rape in the past and, just a few months ago, an incident with a commanding officer who wanted to marry one of the seven daughters of a peasant. The woman was already married, and so was the army officer. The peasant father, who refused to sanction the relationship, was taken away; pieces of his body were later returned in a sack to the village. The army claimed that the man knew of a guerrilla hideout and was leading an army patrol to it when he stepped on a mine.

  There were similar stories everywhere—stories either left unreported in the Indian press or deemed too dangerous to investigate, since what was at stake was the “national interest.” It was the excuse the India-backed chief minister of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah, had himself used in 1999 in the state legislature when asked by Yusuf Tarigami, the lone Communist in the state legislature, to reveal the killers of fifteen Muslim villagers in Jammu. It was also, Mr. Tarigami told me, why there was going to be no independent investigation into the killing of the Sikhs at Chitisinghpura, despite repeated requests by human rights organizations.

  One of these organizations, Amnesty International, identified Indian intelligence agents and “renegade militants,” whose patrons are the Indian Army, alongside armed opposition groups on its list of those likely to be responsible for the killings. These “renegade militants,” so called after the army began to recruit captured or “reformed” guerrillas for operations where the costs in human lives and the army’s reputation were likely to be too great for the army to use its own men, are the most dreaded group in the valley, more feared than the jihadi guerrillas, more than the army and police officials in remote areas or the jumpy soldiers in their bunkers.

  In the early years of the conflict, 1994 to 1996, these renegades had proved very handy: They helped the army rebuild its intelligence network in the valley and also assisted in tracking down and killing hundreds of guerrillas trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They proved less effective against the fidayeen, the new “suicidal” guerrillas, often Pakistani citizens, who had started arriving in the valley in larger numbers after the battles of 1999; in fact, many renegades had been murdered by the fidayeen. Nevertheless, they still threatened, and sometimes killed, the families of guerrillas living in the valley or those journalists and human rights activists who were seen as too eager to report the excesses committed by the army. In return, the army and the civil administration looked the other way when the renegades kidnapped and killed for money. A senior government official spoke of them to me as Frankenstein’s monsters; the renegades were, he said, the most visible and hated symbol of Indian rule over the valley, and it wasn’t going to be easy to tame them.

  At Anantnag, the town thirty-five miles south of Srinagar, I tried to see the local “commander” of the renegades. But he was away in Delhi, an unexpected sign of his status with the Indian government; the renegades had recently helped set up the BJP office in Anantnag. A polite policeman directed me to the home of another commander in the same protected compound. Parts of the house looked relatively old, and the rest was under construction, the money for it coming, it seemed, in installments. When finished, it was going to be a huge house, its size and the high walls topped with glass shards making it look like something from an affluent Delhi suburb.

  A young, good-looking man in kurta pajamas came out after much apprehensive peeking through the holes in the heavy iron gate. It transpired he was the brother of the commander, Rashid; Rashid himself was at his headquarters a couple of miles away, and the brother drove me there.

  The headquarters was a large building that had been vacated by a Kashmiri Hindu family. It had been transformed into a minifortress, with boarded-up windows and a tall corrugated iron gate, behind which, in the courtyard, young men stood dramatically poised with light machine guns to repulse any attack. There were good reasons for their defensiveness. One of the commanders of the renegades had been shot dead a week before in a crowded bazaar, and some months ago the improvised explosive device hidden in an auto rickshaw and intended for the renegades had turned the house ten meters away into a huge mound of rubble.

  Rashid was waiting outside the gate, and to see his bodyguards, teenage boys with oversized guns, was to feel the fear and uncertainty their presence brought to the neighborhood, to the tense men in the little meat shops and bakeries lining the alley. As for Rashid himself, his lean, wiry frame, sharp features, and thick mustache, his thick gold ring and blue jeans gave him a Bombay movie star glamour and an impression of brute power until the moment he spoke. Then the quivering jaw and broken syllables betrayed his jitteriness, the jitteriness, I thought, of the doomed man; it made him an attentive host and keen talker. He saw me as taking back an important message to the Indian government conveying his anger at what he perceived as India’s disregard for the renegades, the poverty and isolation to which they had been reduced, the temptation they felt to go back to Pakistan, and he shouted at the bodyguards when they showed up with lukewarm tea.

  It was hard to get him to talk about the things I was interested in, which he mentioned indifferently when pressed: the bachelor’s degree in science from the local college, the lack of work, the journey to Pakistan with no clear motivation with twenty-eight other men, the training in light weapons in Pakistan and Afghanistan for eleven months, then the return to the valley as a guerrilla, the sudden disillusionment with the armed movement for independence, and the recruitment by the army. He was frankly puzzled when I asked him to expand on little details in his narrative, about the camp commander in Pakistan named after Aurangzeb, the last great Moghul emperor and persecutor of Hindus; the deception in Pakistan where he’d had to present himself as a fundamentalist pro-Pakistan Muslim in order to receive his training and small salary. But he elaborated at some length about his local patron, a brigadier in the Indian Army.

  The brigadier had asked him to lead an antiguerrilla operation very recently, and he had obliged by killing the two guerrillas who had infiltrated an army camp. Here Rashid pointed at the thin, unshaven middle-aged man in grimy kurta pajamas I had assumed was a supplicant awaiting his turn; he was the one who had covered Rashid as he stormed, guns blazing, the little room where the guerrillas were holed up, the one who shot a dying man to pre
vent him from reaching for a hand grenade. This thin, unshaven man, Rashid said, had been rewarded by having a police report lodged against him for “asking” a rich merchant in the town for some money. But what, after all, could he do with the little money he was given by the government?

  It was at this moment that something hit the high corrugated iron roof sloping into the courtyard; at the deep, heavy sound, everyone—Rashid, I, the three boys with guns—froze for an agonizing second. It was several minutes after the scruffy cork cricket ball had pattered off the roof into the open drain around the courtyard that I heard my heart pounding wildly.

  Rashid’s face had gone white, and the shame of that inadvertent confession of fear was, I think, what made him grow wild when I asked him about the fidayeen, the suicidal guerrillas. He and his men were the true fidayeen, he shouted, people who were being martyred for being faithful to India. Then he added that he was ready to take on the fidayeen anytime. All he needed was a “free hand.”

  A “free hand”: I heard those words very often in the valley, and it spoke, as nothing else did, of the breakdown of communications, the end of dialogue, and the unthinking preference for violence and terror. Rashid was bemused when I asked him to explain what he meant by a “free hand,” because he had already done so, at least indirectly. He had made it clear, without saying so explicitly, that the government, and busybodies from the press and human rights groups, should turn the other way while the families of the guerrillas were harassed, and suspected informers were tortured, and civilians mistreated.