Friday, January 02, 2015

Kashmir - for whom?

I read 2 books on Kashmir over last couple of months. Not the travel kinds, which if there are I guess are long obsolete or told on a land that once was than is. These are books about the history of Kashmir over the last 3 decades, a slice of which I have been a witness to. One is 'Our Moon has Blood clots' by Rahul Pandita and the other 'Curfewed night' by Basharat Peer.

Both books are great assets to India's history, presented through eyes and experiences of men who grew and lived in Kashmir. Both are around my age. Perhaps somewhere in early middle age we are all tempted to explore our roots, seek answers for why things happened. Those that faced the turmoil first hand are among the best placed to answer those questions. That is what Basharat and Rahul have commendably done through their books.

To call out their work as perspectives of 2 different communities would be belittling the idea of Kashmir or India. Whatever its ills, India has generally succeeded in instilling a deep secular belief in its vast, urban middle class - to whom the question of religious identity is generally a secondary one to the question of National identity.

In that sense, I just see their books as work of 2 Kashmiris. Albeit different perspectives, that their circumstances and the unavoidable influence of the communities they grew up in led them to see things as. Both books dwell in the background of an idyllic land of green valleys, rivers, mountains, crisp unpolluted air and water and a rich culture of knowledge and arts. Both dwell on the sheer, mindless savagery that man is capable of against man when gone astray.

Either book does not fully answer the deeper truths behind Kashmir problem. Nor they can, for the real answers I believe are hidden in a complex tapestry of state archives, people sworn to secrecy and a large part perhaps with people who are no more. It does not help that where the state is involved, history in India is by en large condemned to classified vaults and dust mites.

What the books do convey though is - that injustice, real or perceived, combined with political insensitivity, combined with religious fault lines, combined with propaganda is a lethal mix. A mix that Kashmir has been brutally subjected to since the last 2 decades. A state that perhaps should have been the beacon of the region in communal harmony, in natural beauty, knowledge economy, a cultural gold mine - is instead a tattered piece of heavily militarised land where hope and despair are in constant battle with each other, the latter winning more than the former.

The victim of this has been Kashmir, its people, India in its constant state of high security alert and the wider subcontinent. Has all the trouble been worth it? If at all for whom?