This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

The scars of the Jammu and Kashmir insurgency have often been measured by body bags and coffins and by statistics and sorrows. What’s tougher to understand and easier to forget is the impact of this continuous, unabated violence on the deepest recesses of the mind. In many ways the full horror of how the violence is unsparing to the sanity and mental stability of everyone who comes in its path—man, woman, child, soldier, renegade, militant—is best understood by a visit to Srinagar’s only psychiatric hospital. Long after the headlines have faded, it is here in the damaged landscape of the mind that the real stories are to be found.

  The numbers are telling. In 1990, when the insurgency first erupted, only 1,762 people were diagnosed with mental disorders. After a decade of inexorable violence, those numbers shot up to 38,696. Behind these figures was the fatigue, mental and emotional, of a people both battered and bruised. This was their private hell, one that remained invisible to the cameras and the public gaze, this was the loneliness that came with the feeling that you were losing your mind.

  At the hospital we met Mushtaq Margoob, the state’s most famous psychiatrist, a soft-spoken doctor who had devoted his life to shepherding people through the cobwebs of the mind with a messianic zeal. He allowed us in on the condition that we would not reveal the identity of the patients we met. Whether azadi-seekers or counter-insurgents, soldiers or secessionists, children or adults, men or women—in different ways, they were all haunted by the mental imprint of the bloodshed they had seen.

  We met a young girl, still in her teens, who saw a stray bullet kill her father. For years, the doctors said, she had slumped into a wordless depression that took away her will to live. ‘She has been suffering very badly,’ Dr Margoob told us. ‘Her father was killed eight years ago. But she saw his mutilated body and ever since that time she completely withdrew from social and other activities. She refused to go to school. Finally she refused to eat her meals.’

  Then there was the elderly man who had been trapped inside the venerated Hazratbal Shrine during the month long siege in 1993. He was among the 170 civilians held hostage by militants who were in the midst of negotiating a safe passage with the army that had surrounded the dargah. Venerated by Muslims because it was believed to house a holy relic of Prophet Muhammad (a hair from his beard), in those years it had become a haven for militants who believed no government could afford a repeat of an Operation Blue Star style storming of a place of worship by its army. Though the man we met at the hospital eventually came out unhurt, it took a few years for him and his doctors to understand that the scars were emotional. ‘He says that he had gone there to pray and thought that Allah had decided his time had come,’ Margoob explained. ‘He still thinks he will never recover and that there is nothing in this world for him.’

  Analysing why the trauma here was different from that of a mental hospital in any other part of the country, Margoob wrote, ‘Beginning in 1990 the whole population was abruptly exposed to severe stress arising from mass destruction of life and property, overwhelming fear and uncertainty. It is well documented that exposure to this kind of stress means more and more apparently normal people suffer from palpitations, insomnia, anxiety disorders, hysteria, depression and even major disturbances.’

  Other doctors at the hospital explained that almost every single patient they had treated had at some stage been witness to a violent death. They would not come immediately in the aftermath of the incident for treatment. In fact it would usually take another smaller incident of violence, for instance, a grenade blast that they saw on television, to trigger the panic that had been lying dormant.

  In the land of pitched battles, both political and militaristic, the hospital was a sad but effective equalizer. When the demons struck they were unsparing; there were no favourites, no exceptions. At the entrance we met a group of men in police uniform lining up alongside ordinary civilians. ‘I suffer from depression,’ admitted one, talking about how troubled and restless he feels, adding hastily, ‘I shoot quite well. I stood first in the competition between eight units. It’s just that I get tense sometimes.’ A group of security personnel at the hospital that morning were from Tripura in the Northeast where they had seen their own share of conflict. The Valley, they said, was their toughest assignment. They spoke of jawans pulling out their guns and turning the rifles on themselves. Why were we hearing about such incidents so often, we asked. ‘Problems at work, there’s a lot of tension,’ explained one soldier.

  Every morning there were so many people at the walk-in clinic of the hospital that people would spill over onto the streets. Many had made the trek from far-flung interior villages. There were not enough doctors to cope with the swelling numbers. Margoob calculated that there was only one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people in the state.

  Even in the crowd their haunted eyes gave away their inner turmoil. Waiting his turn was a young boy of fifteen with a vacant look on his face who had come to Srinagar from hundreds of kilometres away. When he spoke, it was in barely audible whispers. ‘I have headaches, I feel dizzy.’ And then, after a pause, ‘I consumed poison,’ he said, his tone betraying absolutely no emotion. Dr Vinay Bhat who was treating him told us that this was not uncommon. ‘Every day in the emergency we tend to at least two to three suicides.’ The irony, of course, is that Islam forbids the taking of one’s own life. And yet, here in violence-torn Jammu and Kashmir, insecticides—used to keep the Valley’s lush apple orchards in bloom—which are inexpensive and easily available have become the favoured tool of suicide.

  We asked the young boy what had driven him to attempt killing himself. ‘I used to feel scared,’ he said softly. What were you scared of, I asked. ‘Ghosts.’ Why were you scared of ghosts? ‘I thought they would kill me.’ This was a state where the gun had become the ghost and there was nothing friendly about its fire.

  In the worst years of violence when the city would shut down at sunset and the security environment did not permit tourism or any other commercial activity, many young boys fell back on drugs as recreation. Brown sugar, heroin, even cough syrups had become the emotional crutch to cope with the nothingness of existence.

  Down the corridor in the hospital we met a woman who broke down in tears. More than a decade ago she was interrogated by the Ikhwanis. Her son was also taken away for questioning and has been missing since. Her doctor, Maqbool Dar told us, ‘She feels sad most of the time. She also feels acute restlessness and is unable to sit at home. Whenever anybody knocks on the door her heart starts beating faster, she starts palpitating.’

  In Jammu and Kashmir, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not the affliction of adults alone. Dr Margoob had surveyed orphanages across the Valley to find that 40 per cent of the children he spoke to were suffering. Many of them had major depressive disorders especially those who had lost one parent before the age of eleven. ‘Because of loss of [a] social support network which chronic conflict is known to cause, many of these young traumatized children landed up in orphanages,’ Margoob’s paper argued.

  At one such orphanage for young boys I met Aijaz and Shahnawaz, who had become the best of friends. Aijaz was the son of a militant, Shahnawaz’s father had been shot by militants. ‘I want to run very far away when I see a gun,’ Shahnawaz said. His buddy agreed. We asked the two boys what they dreamt of becoming. ‘We want to help the poor,’ they both said shyly.

  Six

  * * *

  OF POLITICAL DYNASTS, JUGGERNAUTS AND MAVERICKS

  I

  IN THE WINTER of December 2013, just as the BJP’s star was ascending on the political horizon, I received a surprise call from Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. It was unexpected because, while we had exchanged more than a few text messages over the years, I was not in regular journalistic contact with her. This was partly because she was not in active politics and partly because the Gandhis were famously inaccessible and media-averse. Once we were beyond the niceties she proposed a freewheeling interview with her brother Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the belea
guered Congress party. He had been elevated to the post that year, nine years after he first entered Parliament in 2004 at the age of thirty-four. The general perception was that he had taken too long to step up to the plate; now everyone wanted to know whether he would finally lead his party’s campaign in the elections of April 2014.

  Priyanka told me candidly that I would not be the only broadcast journalist to get the opportunity but added that I’d definitely be the first. This was a potential scoop—Rahul had never gone on television to take questions before. She wanted me to come by her brother’s Tughlak Road residence for an informal chat so we could discuss logistics and schedules.

  A couple of days later, I was shepherded into an anteroom done up in minimalist style. I had been a journalist for two decades but this was only the second time I had been here—the first time I was part of a larger media group, for an off-the-record meeting in which we didn’t get beyond the side lawns of the house. Priyanka walked in dressed casually in a skirt and black tee. Her laid-back vibe had always been a charming contrast to the relatively stiff and aloof personalities of both her brother and mother. I suspect I had been considered ahead of other TV journalists because four years earlier my televised interview with her in Amethi had gone well.

  In 2009, when we sat down to talk on the lawns of the guesthouse where she was staying, Priyanka was still idealized in the larger public imagination. She was charismatic, photogenic and stylish without being fussy or precious in any way. She came across as a people’s person in politics. However, I had always felt her spontaneity—suddenly hugging a village woman, affectionately pulling her mother’s cheeks on stage at an election rally, wading through crowds while shrugging off her security—was marked by inner turmoil and unvoiced angst.

  For a country that had only known her until then through photographs in newspapers and short clips on television, she remained an enigma. So when she opened up to me in that very first full-length interview, and spoke publicly of both private and political issues, people were absorbed by what she had to say. They wanted to know her better. Criticisms of her husband Robert Vadra’s contentious business dealings had not yet dented her brand. She disarmed me because she spoke without any guile or sophistry and I was unused to that in interviews with politicians, where the truth was often obscured by platitudes or deflected by spin.

  The part of the interview that drew the most attention was her reason for making a quiet visit in March 2008 to a prison in Vellore to meet a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the terrorist squad responsible for the assassination of her father. He was killed in May 1991 when a suicide bomber blew herself up after touching his feet. ‘In the beginning, when my father was killed, I didn’t realize it, but I was furious. I was absolutely furious inside. I was furious not with particular individuals who killed him, but I was furious with the whole world,’ she said, her calm tone in contrast to the wrath she had admitting to feeling.

  Yet, she disagreed with the media narrative of her ‘forgiving’ Rajiv’s killers. She had a startling challenge of the very notion of victimhood. ‘The minute you realize that you are not a victim and that the other person is as much a victim of the same circumstance as you, then you can’t put yourself in a position where you are anyone to forgive someone else. Because your victimhood has disappeared.’ She added later in the interview: ‘People ask me about non-violence, I think true non-violence is the absence of victimhood.’

  As we continued to chat, she confessed freely to ‘one moment of terror’ in 2004, just after her mother had led the Congress party to an unexpected victory, dislodging the popular Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Elaborating on the days right before Sonia famously invoked her ‘inner voice’ to turn down the sycophantic Congressmen who wanted her to take the country’s top political job, she said she had peeped into her mother’s office and seen, ‘Laluji and everybody surrounding her and saying you have to be prime minister... I had this one moment of complete terror and I burst out crying.’

  At the time of this conversation, Sonia Gandhi was the most powerful politician in India. In 2005, I had asked Sonia whether Rajiv would have been surprised to see her leading the party. ‘No, maybe, not,’ she had laughed. And then came the revelation. ‘He was very keen that I fight an election when he was alive. Of course I resisted it…he always felt that (though) I used to make a fuss in politics and all that, I could certainly manage a constituency. So, I think, perhaps, he would not be that surprised.’

  From Priyanka’s perspective, though, her mother’s decision to embrace politics was totally counter-intuitive. She had envisaged Sonia retiring to a cottage in the hills, spending her hours reading and gardening. ‘People ask why she joined politics. She explained it in one simple sentence—I can’t look at the photos in this room if I don’t. These were the photographs of my father and my grandmother. She went completely against her grain to do this.’

  The young woman whose broad forehead, sharp nose, sari-draped frame and firm stride had drawn many parallels with her formidable grandmother had often been described as more naturally suited to public life than her brother. ‘There was a time when I was a kid, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, when I thought that this is absolutely what I want to do with my life…the question has existed for me since I was fourteen,’ she admitted. Growing up as Indira Gandhi’s grandchild—‘I did idealize my grandmother, I grew up in a household where she was the head and she was an extremely powerful woman. Not just politically powerful, she was a powerful human being to be around’—had confused her sense of self. It took her a while, she explained, to separate the strands of who she actually was and who she imagined herself to be because of Indira’s overwhelming impact on the family.

  She told me it was during the 1999 election, when she had to decide whether she was actually going to run for Parliament that she had made up her mind not to get into active politics. ‘Actually I went for Vipassana meditation. I was so troubled by the fact that I didn’t know my own mind, I just disappeared for ten days of meditation to better know my own mind, rather than what other people wanted of me.’ Ten years later, she was insistent that apart from the seasonal forays into her brother’s and mother’s pocket boroughs ‘this is not for me’. Defying public perceptions she described herself as ‘personally, a complete recluse’, much more so than Rahul. ‘I’m very happy living my life the way I am. I think there are certain aspects of politics I am just not suited to.’

  ■

  That interview took place in 2009. Now, as I began to prepare for the interview with Rahul in early 2014, much had already changed. The polls had begun to forecast a clear victory for Narendra Modi, the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in the general elections that would take place in April. Priyanka had suddenly and unexpectedly taken full control of the entire Congress campaign. Her life so far had been mostly about baking, bringing up her two kids, pursuing photography (an interest inherited from her father), studying to complete her masters in Buddhist Studies, working on a book about her mother—and of course, periodically helping her brother and mother with their parliamentary constituencies in Uttar Pradesh. Now she was calling the shots on every campaign decision. From spin-doctoring to selecting candidates, even the party’s strategy meetings had shifted to her Lodi Estate residence.

  So what had happened to her oft-stated disinterest in electoral politics? Priyanka told a friend that she had not been able to sleep for five straight nights thinking about the prospect of Modi as prime minister. She also believed that Modi—who had taken several swipes at her husband Robert—would come after him and his business. Contrary to persistent Delhi gossip about trouble in their marriage, she was absolutely and totally in love; Robert was definitely her blind spot. Their detractors sometimes spoke of him as her ‘Asif Ali Zardari’—a reference to Benazir Bhutto’s husband who came to be known as ‘Mr Ten Percent’ because of corruption allegations. But she saw him as a victim of the political battle between the Congress and
the BJP.

  Robert himself was hard to read. Though he was initially a Facebook ‘friend’ of mine, we did not know each other well beyond the cursory exchange of hellos at large gatherings. His friends insisted that he was a down-to-earth, unfussy guy. I wasn’t so sure that description fit his flamboyant and loud persona, figure-hugging t-shirts and beefed up body. Before the surfacing of accusations that he had made his wealth off sweetheart business deals enabled by political influence, Robert even contemplated joining politics. In an interview to me in 2012, he did not rule it out saying he would think about a political career, ‘the day I feel that I can make a difference for the people, and the people would like me representing them, and it’s a complete focus; because I feel you can’t do two things, business or something else and politics. I want to do it for the right reasons and make a difference. That calling will come at some stage, I feel.’ Curiously, on that same day, Priyanka told reporters that Robert was a ‘happy businessman’ and he was ‘not interested’ in entering politics.

  Priyanka was enormously protective of Robert. Some months after the 2014 election was over—when I and other members of the media criticized him for the tantrum he threw when an ANI reporter quizzed him about his dubious business dealings (the reporter had door-stepped him at a gym opening and Robert had snarled back, ‘Are you serious?’ summoning his security guard to delete the footage from the reporter’s camera) he sent me a message on Facebook informing me that he had decided to ‘unfriend me’. ‘Get a life’, he told me in his irate message and that was the last time I ever heard from him. I suspect that little incident is what would change the friendliness of Priyanka’s dealings with me.

  All this lay in the future. In the run-up to the election, Priyanka was fully involved in the ‘Halt Modi’ attempt of the Congress. She told people she met that if Modi won and his government pursued a case against Robert she would reconsider her decision not to run for Parliament. And though she officially denied any such plans word was that she had already volunteered—though she was probably just thinking out loud—to run against Modi in Varanasi.