This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  The most important change in India today, when it comes to the place of women, is that finally, gender is not a marginal issue. It is no longer confined to the feature pages of magazines or treated as a ‘soft’ reporting beat by journalists. It is finally at the heart of our conversations and at the centre of our politics. Who knows, tomorrow, we may even see elections being won and lost on the mobilization of women voters.

  Till then, for those who still say feminism is impossible to define, I am going to make an attempt. Feminism is about freedom. Ismat Chughtai knew this as a girl growing up in the early twentieth century. Her reminiscences about her childhood are just as true for millions of young Indian women today:

  When I turned twelve my mother dug out an old gharara and told me to make a drawstring for it. ‘Your hand will get better at it,’ she remarked, placing the needle and thread in my palm. She watched me sew. I felt as if I was suffocating. When I saw my brothers running after the chickens and climbing trees, the needle would prick me and draw blood. Thankfully, Mother had a lot of housework to take care of. Whenever someone beckoned her I would shove my unfinished handiwork between the folds of the quilts on the shelf. When winter arrived and they were unfolded, my needlework came tumbling down.

  Then my mother wanted to teach me how to cook.

  ‘I won’t learn,’ I insisted.

  ‘Why not?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Why doesn’t Shahnaz Bhai learn how to cook?’ I counter-questioned.

  ‘When he brings his wife home, she will cook for him,’ she replied.

  ‘Who will cook for him if she dies or runs away?’ I enquired.

  Shahnaz Bhai burst into tears at the suggestion that his wife would run away. At this point, my father entered the room.

  ‘Ismat, when you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?’ he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him.

  ‘If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook,’ I answered.

  My father realized his daughter was a terror and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  ‘What do you want to do then?’ he asked.

  ‘All my brothers study. I will study too,’ I said.

  In the end, whether it was Ismat who was born in Uttar Pradesh or Germaine Greer who is from Australia, these women shone a light for those who were trying to find their way out of the darkness. I read Greer when I was still a teenager. In my middle age her words still ring so true. ‘All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.’

  Two

  * * *

  THE COST OF WAR

  I

  HE SPOKE IN brusque, staccato sentences, the matter-of-fact tone in dramatic contrast to the enormity of the moment. To some he would have seemed clinically cold, his face and manner shorn of any obvious emotion. But all I saw was his lack of guile, and the gentleness in his eyes. And, as the roar of guns drowned out his voice to a barely audible whisper, he suddenly seemed childlike and vulnerable. Vishal Thapa, a captain with 16 Grenadiers was twenty-three years old. I was twenty-seven. It was 3 July 1999. This was the first war either of us had experienced.

  We were huddled together in the safety of a tiny underground bunker, high in the Himalayas. In a space no larger than a double bed, eight of us—soldiers and journalists—had been brought together by the vagaries of war in a moment of unlikely but intense intimacy. Outside, cloud bursts of orange lit up the skies over the mountains of Drass and Kargil, as Indian soldiers fought to reclaim territory from Pakistani intruders. The silence of the night was broken by the intermittent thunder of the Bofors gun and the sharp snap of the multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) as it catapulted rockets into enemy lines. Every so often, a crackly update would be relayed to us on the internal communication line. In the background, in a disconcerting semblance of normalcy, a decrepit cassette recorder was sputtering out old Hindi movie songs.

  The war, which had already been raging for nearly two months, seemed to be entering its final and decisive phase. From the Indian perspective, one of the most important objectives of this part of the campaign was the recapture of Tiger Hill—the strategically crucial mountain peak that loomed perilously close to the national highway that connected Srinagar to Leh.

  Marked on the map as Point 5062, Tiger Hill was over 16,500 feet high. Although it was about ten kilometres north of the highway, the Pakistani fortification right on the peak enabled the enemy to dominate large stretches of the road below. Approximately one company of Pakistan’s 12 Northern Light Infantry held the feature.

  The Indian Army was about to mount a final assault on Tiger Hill. Just an hour earlier, I had been holding my satellite phone up to the sky to try and bring it into signal range. I had been desperately trying to get word to the news desk in Delhi about the imminent assault when I was pulled into the bunker by a total stranger.

  This was the age before satellite transmission vans could broadcast live from the front line. Forget iPhones, Androids or Blackberries, even the un-smart mobile phones of the time were blocked across the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir for security reasons. As shells from the Pakistani side poured down on the highway, we were trying to capture it all on our camera—the guns that spat flame into the dark sky; soldiers emerging from the trenches to fire their weapons and then quickly ducking for cover from the instant counter-attack; the fallen bodies that lay unmoving on the tarred road. Nothing in my experience could have prepared me for reporting from the front lines. I remember recoiling sharply the first time I heard the Bofors gun blast its way across the expanse that separated the highway from Tiger Hill. And on TV, people saw me jumping out of my skin. War did not allow for any second takes.

  ■

  That evening in July 1999, the assault on Tiger Hill began from a Bofors gun position; individual guns had been ranged so as to directly fire at the three flanks of the mountain. An intricate fire plan prepared by the 41 Field Regiment provided covering fire to the soldiers of 8 Sikh and 18 Grenadiers who were stealthily moving up escarpments and sheer cliffs from three different directions. Usually, six guns were deployed to provide covering fire to every infantry unit. In Kargil this was increased to eighteen guns. Kargil has often been called a classic gunner’s war and the Bofors gun was its mainstay. The gun could fire three rounds in twelve seconds, and it had a range of thirty kilometres in high altitude terrain; 250 of them were deployed at the front line and 250,000 rounds were fired during the fifty-day war. During the Tiger Hill operation alone, 9,000 shells were used. The artillery points had become both the first tier of attack and defence in the war. Field gun positions were now veritable forward posts, inviting attack on themselves as soon as the Bofors gun fired the first round; 80 per cent of the casualties on both sides were from mortar fire.

  Writing in Artillery: The Battle Winning Arm about the peak period of the war, when each artillery battery fired one round per minute for seventeen days continuously, senior military analyst Major General Jagjit Singh (who started his career in the Royal Indian Navy and saw anti-submarine action during World War II) said, ‘Such high rates of fire over long periods had not been witnessed anywhere since World War II… The men at the guns had blisters on their hands from carrying and loading shells and cartridges. Very few of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep in every 24-hour cycle.’

  With the advantage of height, Pakistani observation posts had a clear line of vision on Indian gun points. So assault positions had to be shifted as soon as they became vulnerable to counter-attack. As they moved, so would we, jumping on to the back of a Jonga jeep or just darting across the smoke-saturated road, unsure of where it might be safe to halt even for a second, trying all the while to keep pace with the magnitude of what was unravelling before our camera’s gaze.

  Two hours into what would end up being a thirteen-hour battle, an enemy artillery shell landed close to a 122 multi-
barrelled ‘Grad’ rocket launcher right outside the headquarters of the 56 Mountain Brigade, which had just taken over the sector. With forty rockets stacked upon the back of a single carrier, the Grad was a fire-breathing dragon that spat flames into the sky. In Russian, its name meant ‘hailstorm’, a fitting appellation, as it hailed destruction down upon the intruders.

  Suddenly an enemy shell landed within spitting distance of the launcher. It was time to move to a new vantage point; the commander of the Grad immediately halted the operation so that the MBRL could be shifted. Four soldiers had already been killed in a counter-attack on a gun position earlier and he wasn’t taking any chances. Over the next twenty minutes the battle escalated. The town of Drass was carpet-bombed by Pakistan. A curtain of grey closed over the highway as the final acts of the fight to take back Tiger Hill began.

  ‘Run, Run, Run, Now, Now, Now, Run,’ shouted out an anxious voice behind us, and so we did, our bodies bent over, our hands forming a useless protective cover over our heads, our camera shaking and jerky, but still switched on and filming, trying to get some of this across to the news centre, our hearts pumping with adrenalin—it offered a temporary antidote against paralysing fear. At this point in the battle I got separated from Ajmal Jami, my cameraman. As Pakistani shells began to pound the area right around the rocket launcher, I took shelter behind a broken wall, and frantically worked the satellite phone. Suddenly, a long arm lunged out and pulled me back, unfailingly polite even in that life and death moment. ‘Ma’am, you’re standing next to an ammunition dump,’ said the soldier. ‘If a shell hits the target, this place will explode and you will be finished.’ He waved me towards the shelter of his own underground bunker.

  ‘I need to call my office in Delhi,’ I insisted, ‘and I have lost my cameraman, I can’t go down leaving him out here.’

  He offered to find Jami for me and urged me to hunker down immediately before I got injured in the shelling. I still had the call to make but there was no way the satellite phone would pick up any signal underground. I sat with my legs inside the dugout and the rest of me leaning out of it, holding the phone outwards. ‘I can’t talk long; I’m calling from a bunker,’ I said, ‘just tell everyone, the assault on Tiger Hill has begun.’ We would spend the next few hours here, trying to make sense of the latest war between India and Pakistan.

  II

  ‘I sincerely hope that they (relations between Indian and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do…and think that we can be of use to each other and the world.’

  In August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, declared that Partition had resolved the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims and India and Pakistan could now live in harmony. Mahatma Gandhi echoed the sentiment. Both ‘fathers’ of their respective nations turned out to be grievously wrong.

  The partition of India was a bloody and cataclysmic upheaval and the largest forced mass migration of people in the world. Between 1 and 2 million people were killed and an estimated 17 million were uprooted from their homes. The violent rupture proved impossible to heal.

  In both countries, many families put locks on their doors but left most of their possessions inside as if they were going on a brief journey from which they would be coming back home very soon. My own family was among them. My grandfather, Krishan Gopal Dutt, a freedom fighter who went on to become Punjab’s finance minister in independent India, used to live in a palatial kothi called Pillar Palace in Sialkot, famous for its manufacture of sporting goods. My father was a child of eight when the mob violence spread like a forest fire across both sides of the Punjab province. My grandfather reached out to his friend Chet Ram, the then governor of Jammu, for help in crossing over to the newly demarcated territory of India. A truck with armed guards was sent into Sialkot on the pretext that the governor had to retrieve money from the Imperial Bank (which later became the State Bank of India) in Sialkot. On this truck, my grandfather, dressed only in his dhoti-kurta, left with his family. When he arrived in Delhi, he was penniless and homeless like millions of other refugees.

  Decades later, as a college student, I travelled with my father to our ancestral home in Pakistan; its fifty rooms were too expensive to maintain for the family that now owned it—they occupied only one of its residential wings. We had arrived at the house without warning the new owners. Yet, although we were complete strangers, they welcomed us without any questions or suspicions—and having heard our story—handed over the keys of the kothi to us. As we wandered through empty rooms, past bare walls—‘the piano was in this corner, your grandmother slept here, that’s the fountain made from marble’—I understood for the first time, the anguish that my father, and millions like him, had felt at being displaced in a manner that was so violent, unforgiving and permanent. It was one of only two times I’d seen my father cry (the other time was when his wife died) and it came home to me, in that instant, standing in the abandoned old house in Sialkot, just how deep a wound Partition had carved into the psyche of both countries.

  ■

  Barely two months after Independence, the first military conflict erupted between India and Pakistan when the Pakistani military sent thousands of raiders into the Valley to try and capture it by force and oust the then Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh. Apart from its strategic importance, as India’s only Muslim-majority state, its staying within the Indian union was a direct challenge to the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was predicated. It would thus remain a perennial theatre of conflict. The first military war between the two nations lasted till January 1949. It ended inconclusively with Pakistan managing to retain nearly 13,000 square kilometres of territory, including Gilgit-Baltistan and Skardu and control over an area that came to be known as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). India’s forces were able to retrieve two-thirds of the territory that the raiders had tried to occupy. The war of 1947-49 would be the first of four wars between the two nations.

  In October 1962 India fought a brief war with China in the only clash that has not been with Pakistan—4,000 soldiers and officers lost their lives and India had to officially give up on Aksai Chin in Kashmir, which had been under Chinese occupation even before the hostilities started. It was a humiliating defeat and India lost face internationally. However, despite the simmering hostility with China that continued after 1962, there was never any real threat of war.

  The situation with Pakistan was something else altogether. In 1965 came what would become the prelude to Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 Kargil incursions—Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Operation Gibraltar. Bhutto, then the foreign minister, convinced Pakistani President Ayub Khan to send thousands of Pakistani guerrillas into Kashmir on the assumption that the theatre of war would remain confined to the state. India was quick to open another front on the Punjab border (something the army would also contemplate in 1999). A decisive Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri sent Indian troops across the international border into West Pakistan. A ceasefire was brokered by the Russians in what came to be known as the Tashkent Treaty.

  After the 1965 hostilities, in 1971, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s aggressive support for the Bengali nationalist force Mukti Bahini erupted into a full-blown war, one in which India’s decisive victory fundamentally shifted the balance of power in South Asia. Bangladesh was created from East Pakistan. The British historian Percival Spear described Mrs Gandhi’s great triumph in the following way: ‘Indira Gandhi now bestrode the subcontinent like the winged victory of the ancient Greeks. The spirit of the country was transformed; both she and they had formed a new confidence; the snowy sorrows of 1962 were forgotten...’

  Many believe that this was India’s moment to reclaim the captured territory of Kashmir from Pakistan and push for a final settlement; India had the advantage as it held more than 90,000 prisoners of war.

  Either in a moment of hubris or serious miscalculation, Indira Gandhi agreed to hand back the 93,000 Pakistani soldiers, as part of what came to be known as
the Simla Agreement of 1972. Hammered out between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—who was now the prime minister of Pakistan—the text of the agreement only said that both sides would respect the Line of Control (LoC) ‘without prejudice to the recognised position of either side’. They agreed to resolve all disputes bilaterally without third party mediation. Indira told her aides that Bhutto had assured her that he would gradually make the Line of Control into a permanent border but he could not politically afford to put it in writing at this time. The international media heralded the agreement as the beginning of a new phase of peace between the two countries. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The most recent war in Kargil was one in a series of attempts by Pakistan to alter the LoC.

  Jinnah’s hypothesis about Hindu–Muslim conflict being linked to the larger equation between the two countries had always been simplistic because it failed to take into account the fact that the ongoing hostilities between India and Pakistan were much more than just conflict between Hindus and Muslims. For starters, half the pre-Partition population of Muslims in the subcontinent had chosen to remain in India; eventually there would be more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. The only politician who was prophetic about the future of India and Pakistan was Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad. More than a decade before East Pakistan was reborn as Bangladesh, Azad said, ‘It is one of the greatest frauds on the people to suggest that religious affinity can unite areas which are geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally different. It is true that Islam sought to establish a society which transcends racial, linguistic, economic and political frontiers. History has however proved that after the first century, Islam was not able to unite all Muslim countries into one state on the basis of Islam alone… No one can hope that East and West Pakistan will resolve their differences and form one nation.’