Tag: kashmir

Kashmir in two books Part 2 – A Long Dream of Home by Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma and Our Moon Has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita

Over the past few years, I’ve developed a growing affinity towards memoirs and autobiographies. Non fiction has never been my cup of tea, but these seem to have slipped through the cracks. The last year and a half has seen me grow increasingly interested in the happenings in and around Kashmir. Perhaps it was a year ago that I published the post – Kashmir in two books Part 1 – Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer and Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years by A.S. Dulat. The former gave an average Kashmiri Muslim’s perspective, the other provided insight into the Gordion knot that is the Kashmir problem and the parties involved, all from the perspective of an Indian Intelligence agent.
The two books in this post are about the 1990 exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus from the Kashmir Valley. Hundreds of pandits were forced to flee their land at the time of the insurgency on or after 19th January, 1990 in an ethnic cleansing and Islamisation of Kashmir.

A Long Dream of Home: The persecution, exile and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits by Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma

This is a collection of anecdotes from the time of turmoil in Kashmir from 1989-2003, when the Kashmiri pandits were exiled from the region, the years leading up to it and the time that followed. It is divided into four parts: 

1. Nights of Terror – events witnessed in Kashmir at the heart of the exile movement, in the years 1989-91.

2. Summers of Exile – events the horrible decade and a half spent struggling in exile
3. Days of Parting – events leading up to the exodus, including the tribal raiding in 1947 and the long history of the pandits in the Kashmir valley
4. Seasons of Longing – voices of Kashmiri pandits old and young, the former yearning to return home while the latter wanting move on, home a mere fable told by generations past. 

The tone of the book is its defining feature. It has no pretense. It is not a work of literature, it is a nightmare in written form. It takes great effort to read and not turn a blind eye to the things written in the accounts, but it is also difficult to put the book down. Very enlightening. Through the stories is given a brief history of the pandit community and their rich legacy of nearly five thousand years in the valley. Through the myriad anecdotes, Kashmir emerges as a kind of character and her beauty is palpable… the natural beauty of the valley, the close knit communities, the salty tea and houseboats. 

Then, the atrocities of 1989-90 range from bleak to horrific. The chants of creating a place “without the Pandit men, but with their women,” people being forced to set their watches back a half an hour to match the Pakistan time, that story about the man who was shot in a tub of rice and how the rice turned red… the ever menacing ever present death. That nonchalance with which each of the writers talks about people dying (“We heard the news that he was shot outside his house,” “I learnt later that they had got to him,” “That evening they shot him on the street”…) makes you feel ashamed of your safety… the very ability to wake up and leave the house in the morning is a luxury. 
Part 3, Summers of Exile, talks about the years spent by many in camps and apartments across Jammu, suffering the heat and poverty that had been imposed upon them by circumstance. There are families who had put their entire life’s savings into the house they were forced to vacate. How do you define the value of material possessions – lost as well as lacking? Anecdotes have also been given of generations who have been brought up entirely in the camps. Whose very postal address reads “Jagti Camp.” Children whose futures were cut off even before they started. In the eponymous story, Sushant Dhar writes,

“I became friends with the summer, despite the atrocities it unleashed. But I always dreamt of watching the snowfall. I dreamt of snow, of touching it, walking on it. Whenever I heard reports of snowfall in Kashmir, I would dream of leaving my quarters and going back to the distant land, the land of my birth, just to see the snow. I longed for snow. For many years, before sleeping, I imagined myself walking through a land covered entirely with tress and snow, walking through the fields and reaching the top of a mountain; this helped me sleep in the summers.”

“The years that followed brought mere dejection and anguish among the people. The government provided paltry relief and ration, while assuring us of building better shelters. Little did we realise that these were empty and hollow promises. Our condition was being pitied. We were not even a vote-bank. We were merely a liability for the authorities. We didn’t matter. We were as good as the dead.”
Many of the stories mention the network of the Pandits in Jammu kept alive by their newspaper and radio station – how they keep track of familiar faces in the obituaries on these channels. So many details reappear across stories, so many perspectives mix and mesh. This is not a political book, it will not try to give you insight. It is not unbiased or impartial and it’s not analytical. Its beauty lies in a shared narrative and a collective consciousness. It’s simply a recollection and a plea… to be remembered. It’s a protest and a memorial and an epilogue… an attempt to be unforgettable. 
Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home by Rahul Pandita 

While it seems wrong somehow to talk about either of these books with a critical eye, I had the advantage of reading this right after the first – so I was a bit seasoned (deadened would be a better word) to the atrocities that were sure to follow. Rahul Pandita’s book is in fact a political statement, possibly because it is one fleshed-out book, and not a series of glimpses. 
From the beginning there is ample clarity on what he hopes to achieve with this book; he also admits to curating history to make his point. He is open about his one-dimensionality, if you can call it that. He doesn’t aim to be objective, he doesn’t seem to care enough. In a long book such as this, as opposed to the stories of A Long Dream, it is conspicuous that the simultaneous tragedies suffered by the average Kashmiri Muslims are not treated with any sympathy. 
An interesting example: One of the stories from A Long Dream talks about the general panic among the Muslims during the exodus. A rumour had been doing the rounds with the Muslims that this was an Indian-government initiative to vacate the Hindus from Kashmir before bombing the area. While the Pandits fled for their lives, their Muslim neighbours were afraid that they would be picked clean once the Hindus were gone. A Long Dream uses this fact ironically, to show how both sides were gravely affected with mass hysteria, and how ridiculously suspicious neighbours had suddenly grown of each other. Pandita mentions the same incident – and scoffs and seethes. He cannot, and will not, try to be “fair.” This isn’t the time, he conveniently feels. 
“Another problem is the apathy of the media and a majority of India’s intellectual class who refuse to even acknowledge the suffering of the Pandits. No campaigns were ever run for us; no fellowships or grants given for research on our exodus. For the media, the Kashmir issue has remained largely black and white—here are a people who were victims of brutalization at the hands of the Indian state. But the media has failed to see, and has largely ignored the fact that the same people also victimized another.”
It’s odd how often Pandita criticises others for being black and white, and proceeds to do the same! But his rage is pure and it burns you. Pandita has fashioned a powerful narrative out of his and his family’s memories. His mother stands out. Throughout the book, his mother reminisces about their house in Kashmir, how it has twenty one rooms. Never mind the fact that they no longer own it, having been forced to sell it while in exile. Pandita describes a point when a few thugs show up outside their house and point to neighbourhood houses, loudly declaring which one they would like to take. That incident illustrated better than any description, the sudden encroachment upon their lives.e Death is everywhere, yet each loss is an unexpected and searing cut. A slow and steady stripping away of humanity.
It seems wrong to scrutinize it so, yet I must say – this is a brilliant, moving, terrifying story of a boy. One boy, plausibly representing many, who has suffered a great injustice, who is stranded in the unfamiliar, torn away from everything he considers his own. I couldn’t stop the tears rolling down my cheeks. I could hardly stop shuddering. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is an intense book. The author’s constant struggle, with his identity, his memory, his history is very evident and this makes it a personal, very emotional book. But both Curfewed Night and A Long Dream of Home capture and subsequently transcend the personal, and make better stories of Kashmir as a whole. 

Kashmir in two books – Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer and Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years by A.S. Dulat

I’ve been on a non-fiction mission these past two months, catching up, one might say, on history the only way I know how – through books. Most of my last reads have been about Kashmir and the territorial conflict between Pakistan and India, written from many points of view and dealing with different times of Kashmir’s tumultuous history. 
Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer
It all started with a review of a book I’d recently read. The review mentioned Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, in some context or the other. Basharat Peer is a journalist from a small city in Jammu and Kashmir, the site of much militant and military violence. Basharat comes from an ordinary family, a government-employed father, with no militant sentiments. And yet he grew up hating India with all his might, fearing the constant army presence near his home. He left Kashmir to study journalism in Delhi, and later, returned to his homeland to tells its tragedies and stories.

I was intrigued by the blurb. I took Curfewed Night along on a trip and devoured it during a five-hour stop at Dubai, in the middle of the night.

“Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book-shops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armored cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning and never being defeated.”

Throughout the book, Peer tells numerous stories of Kashmiris, Hindu Pandits and militants and separatist poets and pro-India Muslims and everyone in between, and there are so many in between. He talks about not reducing people down to labels, about a Haryanvi soldier who said to him once, “I was a different man before I joined the force and came to Kashmir.” Peer insists – talk not about India, and Pakistan, talk about Kashmir.
The writing is poignant but precise, a journalist’s hand. Curfewed Night is an incredibly humbling book. Blurbs by Khushwant Singh & Pankaj Mishra, among others, describe it as “brutally honest and deeply hurtful,” and a book that “challenges our most cherished beliefs.” Peer begins the book with stray incidents from his childhood, to give a glimpse of the world he grew up in, happy incidents, fond memories. But each has offhand references that impress upon you just how different your Indian childhood was from his – how his friends could name the gun from the sound they made, how easily influenced they were as kids and dreamt of carrying around Kalashnikovs and wearing cartridge-studded jewellery even before they knew exactly what the militants were, how in every cricket match, they would cheer for whichever country was playing against India, the loudest if it was Pakistan. 
There is a lot to say and it is packed tight in a slim book. The Mint blurb on the back cover says, “it represents the anger and loss of a whole generation.” Checking out other reviews, I notice this book has been called ‘biased.’ I didn’t see anything of an unfair agenda-pushing, perhaps only in the insistence of looking at the Kashmiri point of view​, yet nowhere does he say that he means his own separatist view. I don’t know who reserves the popular “sympathy” but this book is not a plea for pity. I feel it is a memoir everyone should read. How better to understand history than to start by understanding the people immersed in it, with their biases and other human “failings”?
Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years by Amarjit Singh Dulat
Written by A.S. Dulat, ex-special director of the Intelligence Bureau and ex-chief of the Research & Analysis Wing, whose main focus of work had been Kashmir, who is considered the go-to man on everything about the Kashmir conflict; Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years was the book I read right after Curfewed Night.
Okay, first of all, A.S. Dulat is eminently unlikable, a callous man with a big ego. Not surprising from a seasoned politician, but it did get in the way of reading this book quickly. It’s a useful book for someone like me who doesn’t know a lot about the Kashmir conflict, or even otherwise, has big gaps in their knowledge. Dulat sort of gives a summary of what happened in Kashmir in the fifteen or so years that he worked with it, from the 1990s to 2004. Since this was during Vajpayee’s first thirteen-day tenure as the Prime Minister following Narasimha Rao and his second time in office for obviously much longer, Dulat may be right to title the book – The Vajpayee Years. 
Dulat characterises Vajpayee as not just another politician or worse, military man, but a Chanakya-figure. An intelligent man who thinks a lot and reveals little. The more significant reason for this title is Dulat’s claim that Vajpayee has been the Kashmiri populations’s favourite PM yet. Dulat credits him for assigning the intelligence agencies the task of talking continuously with the Kashmiris. Vajpayee was the only one who recognized the importance of dialogue with the Kashmiris to cut the Gordian knot that was the India-Kashmir-Pakistan struggle. And who, in his time, made significant progress in achieving this goal. Dulat spends plenty of time explaining just how. And even so, perhaps twenty percent of the book talks about Vajpayee. 
A big chunk, nearly half the book, deals with the Abdullah family. Dulat particularly stresses on the senior Sheikh Abdullah, Sher-e-Kashmir as he was called, and his son Farooq Abdullah, the on-and-off CM of J&K. A long chapter towards the end is dedicated to how Vajpayee and his principal secretary supposedly betrayed Farooq by promising and failing to make him Vice President. Whereas he openly idolizes Vajpayee, Dulat tries very hard to exonerate Farooq of the flak he received from his critics over the years. 
Dulat switches back and forth in time a lot, so it is actually not easy to get a straightforward timeline of events from the book, which is what I was looking for. (Foreshadowing has no place in non-fiction, and Dulat needs to learn about footnotes.) He talks about various kidnapping cases including Jammu and Kashmir CM Mufti’s daughter’s kidnapping, about the hijacking of, among others, Indian Airlines flight IC-814, breezes over the effects of 9/11 on India-Pak, and describes his conversations and “friendships” with a number of Kashmiri militants and separatists. Of course, sworn to secrecy in his position, there is no big revelation (other than Dulat’s utterly odious personality) but there are quite a few surprises. 
What is most interesting to see is how the Indian intelligence agencies work, both the Intelligence Bureau and our spy agency, the Research & Analysis Wing. Dulat, who has headed both in his time, is perfect to talk about either. My takeaway from Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night was the need to engage with and understand the ordinary Kashmiri, which Peer says is not done by the Indian government. Dulat’s book brought out the impracticability of Peer’s proposed solution. 
For all his time conversing with Kashmiris, for all his expertise, Dulat has no empathy, and mocks those who show any (i.e.: Rajesh Pilot, who according to Dulat has the rare patience “to listen to the Kashmiri bitching”) Dulat is simply doing his job, and his job requires him to be pro-India, to simply “humour” the Kashmiri sentiment. Every time he makes sweeping observations of the Kashmiri psyche (a Kashmiri never looks you in the eye, a Kashmiri can’t tell the truth, Kashmiris exaggerate everything) he negates his own aim to understand them. He is single-mindedly pro-India, and goes so far as to breeze casually over serious allegations which put the country in a negative light. These include the government bribing the militants, and certain officers in the army using their extensive power in Kashmir to torture or rape civilians, along with the authorities’ reluctance in dealing with such cases. 
There is a sort of ‘Chalta hai,’ ‘Kya karein’ tone when he talks about India’s mistakes, which is despicable, but seriously, kya karein? Reviews on Goodreads say that this book offers insight into possible solutions for the Kashmir conflict. What it does show very well is what has been tried so far. And it tells us how immensely complicated the issue is, how difficult it is to find a singular solution. Even a book about Kashmir, which claims to put the Kashmiri interests center-stage ends up doing quite the opposite. Dulat quotes someone (can’t remember or find) saying that Kashmir is like a courtesan surrounded by vile spectators who are enjoying her dance, laughing at her.
It’s an interesting phrase that Vajpayee apparently used to describe Kashmir, the Gordian knot. Cutting the Gordian knot means finding a bold and creative solution to an impossible problem. But there’s a myth attached to it. According to Greek mythology, when the peasant Gordius became the ruler of Phrygia, he tied his chariot to a pole with a tight knot and dedicated it to Zeus, the king of the gods. Gordius’s knot seemed impossible to untie. It was predicted that whoever unraveled the knot would be the future King of Asia. Many tried, and many failed. Finally, Alexander the Great arrived in Phrygia. He was a man of action. After a few tries, Alexander was overcome with impatience. In one swift move, his took out his sword and simply cut off the knot. He then set out to conquer Asia, leaving defeat and bloodshed in his wake. So, using that phrase does make sense, in ways unintended too. Kashmir is indeed our Gordian knot, and we are cutting it to shreds.