This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Refugees in their own country, most families in migrant shelters were dependent on the few thousand rupees they got from the government. But more than their economic future it was their identity that was at stake. Because of dismal living conditions in the camps, lack of privacy, and late marriages, the displaced Pandits were now worried that their numbers would dwindle. ‘Our sons and their wives sleep in the same room as us. We don’t complain. But are we cattle to be herded together like this?’ asked one elderly migrant. A National Human Rights Commission report in the early 2000s backed this fear. ‘There is a serious erosion in the normal sexual functioning of Kashmiri Pandits living in migrant camps...a fall in birth rate is a natural consequence.’ Even where there was economic comfort, the scare of cultural decimation was very real.

  Shakti Bhan, a prominent gynaecologist at a private hospital in Delhi, said she earned more now than she possibly would have had she not had to leave. ‘It’s about identity. I feel rootless,’ she said to me, her anguish punctuated by bursts of anger. Bringing up children in an unfamiliar milieu meant that as parents they sometimes overcompensated to help their kids assimilate. ‘Your identity is your language,’ she said bitterly, ‘now I live in Delhi and I speak English, Urdu, Punjabi and teach my children the same. So where is our identity? I think a day will come when the Kashmiri Pandit will exist only in name.’

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  In Srinagar’s Habbakadal area, once the throbbing centre of the flourishing Pandit community, where an estimated 30,000 families used to live, there are now barely forty such households. A Ganesh temple stands as a lone witness to what once was. Otherwise it’s like taking a walk through the ruins of the past. There are several abandoned homes that are empty and locked up, others that were once owned by Pandits have been sold, occupied by the security forces, or taken over by squatters. On one of my many visits there, I saw a solitary vulture perched atop a burnt wooden beam that must have once held up a house. The narrow alleys were still and lifeless; the bird seemed to be feasting on the carcass of history.

  There are now less than 3,000 Pandits left in the entire Valley, the numbers a grave challenge to the plurality of ‘Kashmiriyat’, which the people have always claimed defines them culturally. Their decision to stay on was extraordinary for the times they lived in. Among them was one of Srinagar’s best known doctors—S. N. Dhar and his wife Vimla. In the summer of 1992, Dhar was kidnapped by the militant group Al-Umar, and spent eighty-three days in captivity. The rickety Fiat the doctor drove up and down the boulevard was the same car the militants had bundled him off in a decade earlier. In his personal diary, which would later be published as a book, Dhar wrote, ‘There was an acute sense of shame and betrayal. “Why me?” I often wondered. The initial days were full of anguish and fear.’ After he was freed his family and friends urged him to leave, maybe move to Delhi where he had a lucrative job offer or America where could live comfortably off private practice. But Dhar refused, this was home, he said, he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

  Vimla spent those eighty-three days her husband was gone living on prayer, but her trauma was about to be compounded. One morning she woke to the news that Sharda Peeth—the school and research centre her family had run for generations—had been razed to the ground by militant groups. Hundreds of schools were burnt during those years of senseless violence. But Sharda Peeth was special, it was run by a Hindu trust in one of the city’s poorest Muslim neighbourhoods. Its library housed rare Persian and Sanskrit texts and manuscripts that had now all been reduced to ashes. Heartbroken, but determined, Vimla did not let the school shut down for even a day. She created a makeshift room with tin sheets and classes resumed almost immediately. But her husband’s diary entry spoke the bitter truth. ‘Images of a bonfire sent a shiver down my spine. There were hardly any Hindu students or staff in the school. We had hoped it would be spared. But we had committed a grave mistake in understanding the magnitude of this mad violence,’ he wrote.

  As the split between the Muslims and the Pandits grew wider, a ‘separate homeland’ became the demand of Pandit groups who organized themselves into a party called Panun Kashmir. Panun in Kashmiri means ‘our own’. They argued that the state should be split into four parts, Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, and Panun Kashmir—a union territory for the Pandits that would club regions north and east of the Jhelum River.

  Even when militant violence declined significantly, the Pandits said a homecoming could not be considered unless they were promised separate enclaves. The Muslims said the Pandits must live as they always did, assimilated and together. For, by now, personal friendships notwithstanding, political beliefs had come to be polarized along religious lines.

  It wasn’t just Kashmiri Pandits but other religious and cultural minorities as well, be it the Sikhs or the Punjabis, who carried within them that strange mix of constant yearning and rage towards their homeland. The filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra returned home only briefly during the shooting of his film Mission Kashmir. When the plane touched down on the tarmac and Vidhu disembarked, setting foot in Srinagar for the first time in years, he knelt on the cold tar and kissed the earth. ‘I miss the seasons, the hawa, the taste of the air I used to breathe,’ he told me. His ageing mother had accompanied him because she wanted to find her home before she died. A small handheld camera filmed her search for her house. Inside everything was gone—the blankets, linen, silverware—but her puja room had been left absolutely intact. ‘Maybe if the Pandits had taken up guns, we would have also been heard,’ declared Vidhu.

  Wandering through the back alleys of Habbakadal, I met Ghulam Mohammed Abdullah, a local photographer, born and brought up in the area. Wiping the dust off long-forgotten images from a time when the Valley was still Bollywood’s Switzerland, he pulled out a photograph of Shashi Kapoor. Then, excitedly, he dug out some more photographs, this time of the Amarnath Yatra. ‘I used to take photographs mostly of Pandits, their weddings, their pilgrimages. Now those times are gone,’ he said, cradling his granddaughter in his lap and plying us with cups of salty tea. Abdullah took out a bunch of silver keys and beckoned us to follow him. He led us into one of the derelict structures, past a metal gate, and up some wobbly stairs. For fourteen years, he told us, he had safeguarded the house of his Pandit neighbour. He described it as his amanat, a treasure of an old friendship given to him by God for safekeeping. Though he controlled access to the house, and it was unlikely that anyone would ever return to claim it, he said he would never rent it. He wanted us to go back to Delhi and tell the Pandits we knew that their temples were safe. ‘Mandir ki hifazat karna hamara farz hai, iss tarah hum Panditon ki rakhwali karte hain. Voh chale gaye. Yeh hamari badkismati hai aur unki bhi (It’s our duty to protect their temples, that’s our way of protecting the Pandits. They had to leave. That is their misfortune and ours),’ he said his eyes welling up with tears. One day, he said, one day they may come back because ‘duniya umeed par kayam hai—the world lives on hope’.

  IX

  As journalists we had become weary witnesses to carnage and conflict but there was also that one time when we were not the storytellers, we were the story. In August 2000, a temporary ceasefire by the Hizbul Mujahideen had just been withdrawn after the collapse of the first round of formal talks between the militant group and the centre. Independence Day was just a few days away. This was usually a time when security was tightened; this year it was even heavier because of the meltdown in the only concrete negotiations to have ever taken place between the highest levels of government and any indigenous militant group. The BJP was in power in Delhi, always strident and hyper-nationalist on Kashmir when in the Opposition, but much more innovative, bold and ready for risk when in power than the Congress had ever been. If there was a strategic mistake made in the first real peace talks it was the haste and enthusiasm to go public with them and convert the moment into a premature press conference. When the Hizbul militants arrived at Srinagar’s historic Nehru Guest House wearing ominous black masks, I r
emember thinking that the moment was filled with possibility, but also grave danger. I dug out my reporter’s diary from that day; notes I scribbled down at the time use one word to describe the image of India’s home secretary standing shoulder to shoulder with the Hizbul Mujahideen—‘surreal’. Hailed as a breakthrough before a detailed roadmap for reconciliation was ready, the initial euphoria dissipated swiftly when from his protected perch across the border, the Hizbul chief, Syed Salahuddin, set a deadline of 8 August for negotiations to be concluded, and warned that his group’s ceasefire would be withdrawn if Pakistan was not involved. The demand was outrageous and the stage was set for a violent confrontation. Two days after the peace talks collapsed and the ceasefire was dead came a day that none of us who report from the state would ever forget.

  In a craftily designed attack, militants first threw grenades at security forces outside the city’s State Bank branch. The bank was situated close to Srinagar’s Residency Road, where most media had their offices. As the reverberations were heard across newsrooms we ran out in the direction of the explosion. This was our reflex reaction formed over the years—hear bomb go off, drop everything, pick up camera, run, report, run back. We all knew that there was an inherent risk to our lives and yet whether we were dedicated professionals or danger junkies or both, nothing so far had prepared us for our community actually being singled out for assault. The grenade attack was nothing but a booby trap, a distraction designed to lure a large number of journalists to one site where an improvised explosive device had been planted in a white Ambassador car and fitted with a timer for maximum impact. It detonated with a roar as we charged towards it. There were screams, then blood and mutilated bodies everywhere. The Hindustan Times photographer Pradeep Bhatia had sprinted the fastest among us. He now lay dead on the street, his camera by his side. Another photojournalist, Fayaz, was covered in blood and sobbing. I cradled him in my arms, tears rushing down my face, as I tried to pull him to safety. For a moment, the rest of the scene receded into a blur—the sirens, the shouts for help, the retaliatory firing by shell-shocked security forces. I just sat on the crowded street holding Fayaz tight, rocking him.

  When the bodies were counted, eleven people were dead, twenty-nine injured, among them eight journalists. There were worries that one of them, Irfan Ahmed, was so badly injured he could be maimed for life. Intelligence agencies believed that although the strike was timed to coincide with the collapse of talks with the Hizbul, it was actually the Pakistan backed Lashkar-e-Taiba that was responsible for it. That night after I had filed my report—because that still had to be done—I took the phone off its hook in my hotel room. My family and my colleagues were all calling repeatedly, insisting that I fly back to Delhi the next morning. I refused. One of our own had just been killed, we couldn’t be cowards and leave. There was no question of it. On the cold floor of the room, I sat with my friend Muzamil Jaleel, one of the several outstanding Kashmiri journalists I had gotten close to. I poured myself a small glass of Old Monk and Coke and we shivered just a little bit, unable to find the words we used so swiftly for other moments when we were not directly in the firing line. In that moment I felt some fear, but acute sadness as well. I felt the loneliness of the conflict reporter bonded to her area of work by an unspeakable emotion, an attachment that perhaps only others in the same situation could understand.

  We were battered and bruised but we had survived. Those who had enabled the now-dead talks between the Hizbul ‘commanders’ and the centre would pay the price over the next few years. One by one, all the significant militants who had participated in the direct dialogue with the government were eliminated by their own brethren who accused them of being sell-outs. Not one was spared. Fazul Haq Qureshi, the low-key separatist, who had been the principal mediator and negotiator on the back channel between the two sides had firmly declined the offer of government security. He said before there was a larger plan for rehabilitation no separatist or militant could afford to be seen as appropriated by the government; that would be more life-threatening. And, as it turned out, he was chillingly right. Underlining the peculiar uncertainty of his efforts at bringing militants to the table, he said the men who were part of the talks had ceased fire but had ‘neither surrendered nor dropped the gun yet.’ They were waiting for a fuller understanding of what lay ahead for them. This remained the conundrum for every government looking for lasting peace. An amplified, hysterical, mass-media fuelled narrative of what was patriotic and what was treacherous only further shrank the space for manoeuvrability. On the other side, those who contemplated a life without the gun also battled labels of traitors and deserters. Qureshi himself came under a life-altering militant attack and quietly faded away from political life.

  The intricate reality of the state means that there are many simultaneous and seemingly contradictory truths; the inbuilt volatility of the situation creates pressure to take sides and be boxed in by simplistic labels of for and against. If you feel empathy with or admiration for the men in uniform who have over the years battled both venom and violence, dubbed ‘occupiers’ by separatists in a conflict that was not of their making, you are instantly called a jingoist and a status-quoist. If you speak honestly about the emotional alienation in the Kashmir Valley or condemn any violent subversion of the law or extra-judicial killings you are classified as treacherous and anti-national. It was rare to have both labels foisted on the same person—that privilege was mine. During the floods that submerged Srinagar in 2014, I was vilified by young Kashmiris for praising the military’s mammoth rescue operations; they accused me of running a public relations campaign for the army, privileging the stories of soldiers over those of local volunteers. But on social media, I was mocked—as I still am every day—for my non-existent Kashmiri husbands and my softness for separatists. I was apparently both a hyper-nationalist and a seditious traitor. It didn’t bother me; Jammu and Kashmir had been a more profound journalism school than any Ivy League institution I had attended. Its beauty, its scars, its hostility, its warmth, its danger, its tragedy had all enveloped me, and provided me with a lifelong attachment to the place. I could only be grateful for the learning.

  X

  Pakistan’s obsessive-compulsive Kashmir disorder and the use of terrorism as a strategic extension of state policy have locked India into decades of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. As I’ve said earlier, some of the blunders have been ours. We have missed opportunities and lost trust where faith could have been easily built. Among the biggest mistakes that I have witnessed in two decades was the staged encounter at Pathribal. Presented to the world as an operation that had eliminated the perpetrators of one of the worst massacres in recent history, it ended up being the ruthless murder of five innocent civilians wrongly linked to the mass shooting of Sikhs in the village of Chittisinghpura.

  The year was 2000. It had only been a few months since President Bill Clinton had intervened and read Pakistan the riot act on withdrawing their remaining infiltrators from Kargil. Now as he was about to touch down in Delhi the visit was already being hailed as a turning point in Indo-US relations. I was in Srinagar keeping an eye out for imminent trouble. Fresh from covering a war on the front lines, I was not unused to death and coffins and the heartbreak of those left behind. But I had never been exposed to what I was about to witness next. The sight of thirty-six bodies, all Sikh men, draped in white sheets and spread across a village courtyard splattered with bloodstains and littered with broken shoes chilled every sense. This was a meticulously plotted massacre designed to draw Clinton’s attention and internationalize the Kashmir problem.

  We had driven out three hours from Srinagar to the interior village of Chittisinghpura in south Kashmir. When we got there helicopters were hovering over the village. On the ground a maze of jeeps, ambulances and soldiers formed a wall around the site of the carnage. Even from a kilometre away, we had been able to hear the women weeping, their cries rising in a crescendo of pain. But now the sound of their pain was drowned o
ut by the wave of sickness and panic that rose within me. At the entrance to the gurudwara, I saw the bullets that had pierced the wall. The men had been separated from the women and children, lined up with their backs pressed to the wall and shot at point-blank range. Their murderers had masqueraded as an army patrol, dressed in battle fatigues and claiming to be on a combing operation. They came bearing not just AK-47s and grenades but also alcohol. ‘Their “commanding officer” was very polite and spoke in soft Urdu,’ recalled Nanak, the night’s only survivor, his voice shaking as he spoke. As gunshots raked the ground and bodies collapsed into lifeless heaps, one of the shooters threw his head back and laughed. ‘This is our way of playing Holi,’ Nanak recalled him saying.

  The terror attack was clearly aimed at driving a wedge between the Sikhs and the outlying Muslim majority neighbourhoods. That morning, those who had survived were already debating leaving. As army and police officers waded through the grieving crowds, they were almost lynched. Angry slogans were raised against them; the villagers wanted to know why they were not provided enhanced security if trouble was expected to coincide with the Clinton visit. The police freely admitted that they had been taken by surprise; they had never expected the Sikhs to be targets of mass violence.