Changing seasons in Kashmir

The political change that will soon occur in Kashmir is along the lines that the Valley — not just Jammu — expected, even if analysts in Delhi are confounded. This is why there are no critical voices in Srinagar, which has taken the shift in its stride. The popular sentiment is for getting on with it, not to give credence to theories and gossip.

In Kashmir, the terrorists have made the same mistake that the Indian state had made once — they did not account for the people; their sensibilities, their temper. The militants and their masterminds are finally paying the price. The denouement has come in slow stages but it has surely arrived. The ordinary Kashmiri, as became obvious during a recent trip to the Valley, does not now seem to have any sympathy left for what has euphemistically been known as ‘ the militancy’.

Go anywhere in the state — towns and country, villages, forded rural streams, in Srinagar and even the parts hit by the earthquake, the feeling is palpable — the old days are gone. A striking aspect of the changed scene is that one doesn’t any more hear the litany of complaints that one did before against the behaviour of the uniformed forces.

Indeed, now they talk of the gross indecencies heaped by terrorists on ordinary folk over many years, of the arm-twisting and extortions, of violating of women, of wanton killings on the excuse that the “executed” person was an informer.

The constant cry against human rights abuses by the security forces one heard earlier has now given way to the breaking of silence over the acts of grossness that the terrorist groups engaged in.

Perhaps this is why the question of thinning out the troops on the ground — for which General Pervez Musharraf made such a pitch in his UN speech last month, naming even sectors in northern Kashmir where he thought this brooked no delay — finds no echo among the populace.

It is common to hear that the people can lodge complaints against abuses by instruments of the state, and courts do provide relief. But against rights violations by terrorist elements, there exists no forum of appeal.

It is important to remember that while Delhi believes in democracy, in respect of Kashmir it appointed a series of political contractors to run the show. Before 2002, elections were just a game. Democracy’s outer shell was maintained, the insides were kept hollow. The result was the turbulence of the nineties.

Worse, while Kashmiris craved democracy, the Pakistan-backed putschist elements and their Kashmiri collaborators gave them stiff doses of Wahabism as a part of their wider project to establish “Nizam-e-Mustafa” — Kingdom of God for the faithful — and incorporate the Valley as a part of Pakistan.

In day-to-day life, this meant that the Kashmris were told to behave not like heathens, but like ‘true Muslims’ — in effect, to renounce their syncretic indigenous faith which was a glorious mix of Kashmiri Shaivism and Sufi Islam propagated in the fourteenth century by the ascetic order of Muslim “rishis”.

This really meant that the ‘brothers’ who had come from across the frontier to render solidarity and to liberate were asking the people of Kashmir to change their basic values and treat their own home-grown faith in contempt.

This was nothing less than wholesale cultural subversion, and the Kashmiri rebelled. The inner pulse and personality of Kashmir had no place in the intruder’s scheme. Therefore, the purported Islamic thread did not prove to be enough of a binding force.

When the people perceived that their essence as a community was being sought to be trampled, they just walked away from the ‘liberator’ who is now viewed as a trouble-making alien. This is why people do not cheer any more when terrorists hit a target.

Terrorists can still strike at will as they have of late. But this is because infiltration continues (and given the terrain, stopping ingress is not easy) and at any given time there is present in Kashmir a reasonably-sized force of armed irregular foreign troopers. But the vital element of local support is now almost entirely absent.

The Kashmiri now wants to get back the lost tempo of everyday living. Every village has a hallowed sufi shrine at which muslims and hindus used to congregate for their spiritual sustenance, and there are several major shrines across the Valley. In the high noon of militancy, people would be afraid to visit them. That phase has ended. 

Interestingly, many Kashmiri muslims now think that the pandits who fled to Jammu have been more successful than them at keeping the flame of Kashmiri culture, language, and art forms alive and they want to re-discover that flame. As a local Kashmiri Muslim poet Farooq Nazki said, “They had fled because of people like me.” Now everyone wants them back.

The writer is a political affairs analyst based in Delhi