Kashmir is no longer a magical place ... Indeed the cease-fire line, which was drawn up by the United Nations in 1949 and snakes erratically for about 500miles through some of the roughest terrain on Earth, has been breached far more often than honoured. India and Pakistan each maintain several dozen military outposts along the line of control. Almost daily, duels ... are waged between heavy weapons set no more than eight or nine miles apart from muzzle to muzzle ..
The neighbourhood fight over Kashmir has been going on since 1947, when the British partitioned predominantly Hindu India to create Pakistan as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims. Jammu and Kashmir - a princely state with a primarily Muslim population ruled by a Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh -floundered. The maharaja wanted independence for the state, but he didn't know how to get it. At the 11 hour he signed an agreement of accession to India, but by that time Pakistani-backed tribal fighters had invaded Kashmir.
The leaders of India and Pakistan were desperate to acquire Kashmir to bolster their respective visions of nationhood. India's Jawaharlal Nehru, the secularist, wanted to demonstrate that an Islamic population could coexist with the Hindu majority; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim nationalist, insisted that Pakistan would be incomplete without the Muslim enclave. Almost immediately the two countries went to war, tearing Kashmir apart. Ebbing and flowing, that war has, in essence, never ended. Today there are some 400,000 Indian troops in Kashmir and about half as many Pakistani soldiers.
Beneath the surface of this South Asian geopolitical game board are the aspirations of a people who consider themselves Kashmiris - neither Indian nor Pakistani – but who live divided by an artificial line. Hardly a day goes by without local newspapers in both countries reporting new violence - from artillery shelling across the LoC, from cross-border incursions of Muslim guerrillas backed by Pakistan, from indigenous Kashmiri Muslim militants who have been fighting Indian security forces for independence since 1989. These confrontations have blended together in a single cauldron of blood.
Casually figures from fighting in and over Kashmir since 1947 are notoriously unreliable. In the past ten years - the period of the Kashmiri Muslim militancy – an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Kashmiri civilians and militants and Indian and Pakistani soldiers have died.
Indian police place the toll at 24,000; Kashmiri Muslims say it's more like 80,000. Both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapons, and because Kashmir is the flint against which either could strike a nuclear spark, fatalities of this magnitude could become mere footnotes.
Why these two countries would remain at each other's throat for so long, at such cost in life and fortune, over a remote patch of land comes down to the great truism of real estate location. Kashmir perches like a raja's jeweled turban in the Himalaya at the very top of the great sub-continental landmass. There it is a gateway - or a barrier -between the two protagonists as well as between them and China and Afghanistan. Kashmir also sits astride Pakistan's major rivers: the Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab.
This land exerts a powerful emotional pull as well. Millions of sweltering, plains-dwelling Indians and Pakistanis dream of its green mountains, its blue rivers and lakes, its fertile farmlands and cool, dry climate. Kashmir is their Maui, Aspen and Palm Springs all rolled into one ... When Kashmiris speak of Kashmir, more often than not they're thinking of "the valley", the Vale of Kashmir, which lies wholly under Indian control. Only a fraction of what India rules as J&K state, the Valley is ringed by the high peaks of the Himalaya and the ridges of the Pir Panjal ... Centered on the city of Srinagar, the Valley is the prize ... (One can) see Indian soldiers patrolling the streets in pairs, wearing body armor over camouflage fatigues and hefting automatic rifles chained for security to their web belts. Major intersections were dominated by sandbagged bunkers, their entrances draped in stout netting to keep grenades out. Armed militiamen halt cars and sputtering trishaw taxis, shoving"the drivers around and rooting beneath seats in search of bombs. Burning glances from passersby make plain that Kashmiris regard the soldiers as a foreign army of occupation - much like the British Army in Northern Ireland - not a gendarmerie thereto protect them ...
The military overlay is thick in Kashmir and inescapable in the valley ... People all over the Valley told me that everyone knew at least one family with members killed, wounded, tortured, kidnapped, or arrested by soldiers, insurgents, even next-door neighbors.
The Muslim insurgency traces back to 1987, when Indian officials rigged local elections to install their choice as chief minister, inflaming widespread resentment. In1989 dissent exploded into a full-blown separatist movement, as some young Kashmiri Muslims, traditionally docile, took up the gun and began killing Indian soldiers and members of a Kashmiri Hindu community known as Pandits. The Muslim rebels imposed harsh Islamic regulations throughout Kashmir, which included burning down government schools, banning women from going out of their homes with their faces or hair uncovered, and closing movie halls and wine shops, many owned by Pandits.
Estimates vary, but a decade ago Pandits numbered from 150,000 to 300,000 out of the eight million inhabitants of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a small but disproportionately well-educated and successful minority. They have since been persecuted so ferociously by some of their Muslim neighbors and by infiltrating guerrillas that as few as 5,000 remain in their homes...
While Muslim Kashmiris share condemnation of India, they have begun to distance themselves from Pakistan. They gladly accept money, arms, and guerrilla fighters from Pakistani extremist groups, but few say any longer that they want Kashmir to become a part of Pakistan.
Pakistan's leaders deny giving the rebellion material aid, but a Muslim leader I spoke with in Rawalpindi confirmed that money originating in Saudi Arabia and Iran is funneled through Pakistan to the militants in Kashmir.
They money is also used to pay Islamic fighters – among them Pakistanis, out-of-work Taliban zealots from Afghanistan, and other soldiers of fortune from as far away as Libya and Chechnya - who infiltrate the Indian-held side on the pretext of waging jihad, holy war ..
Not surprisingly, given their recent history, Kashmiri Muslims yearn for independence. Even without the turmoil of recent decades their desire would be understandable, for they were once a self-contained people, evolved mainly from Central Asia and Persia, with characteristically fair skin, light eyes and hair, their own interpretation of Islam, a distinct language, architecture and style of dressing.
The few Indians who take Kashmiri separatism seriously are those who know the most about the place and its people. A senior Indian administrator in Srinagar, who spoke candidly only when I agreed not to use his name, put it this way: "The truth is that the Kashmiri does have a case. He says, 'Give me my rightful place in the sun, give me my dignity, my religious sensibilities, my cultural identity. Don't impose yourselves on me'. That's legitimate. But the militants are chasing up a blind alley when they go in search of azadi (independence). We will never grant them independence. Never. India is a hard state."
India feels obliged to show Pakistan its intention to bend Kashmir to its will. After years of street battles Indian troops had weakened the separatist militants to the extent that touches of daily life had recovered ...
... It has taken India nearly a decade to limit the revolt, and in doing so soldiers raped, tortured, illegally detained, and robbed thousands of Kashmiris, according to international human rights organizations. The Indian Army has weakened the militants, but people are by no means ready to forgive, nor to forget the dream of independence. And so Kashmir remains an armed camps, in which not even the simplest farmer is free to come and go ..
Although India and Pakistan seem incapable of coming to a resolution, it's not for want of talking ... In much the way that Tibetans have been forcibly surrounded by the dominant Han culture of China, Kashmiris are being subsumed by India and used by Pakistan. In both places, as in other parts of the world where larger powers determine the fate of smaller ones, the land matters more than the people. With no other country willing to intervene on behalf of the Kashmiris, it is evident that they have no way out. (Source: The National Geographie, September, 1999)
