Author: John Kifner
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 29, 2001
SRINAGAR, Kashmir, Oct. 28 - Word
travels fast in this corner of paradise, the narrow twisting streets of
the Maisuma quarter, a hotbed of Kashmiri separatism. Among the narrow
stalls of copper craftsmen pounding out kitchen utensils and little halls
decked with ribbons for bridegroom receptions this wedding season before
Ramadan, people craned to look around corners, and young men walked in
the opposite direction at a pace a little quicker than casual.
Someone had been shot, dead.
It was hardly unusual in this once-
legendarily peaceful valley - now a crisis point between America's allies
against terrorism, India and Pakistan - where a dozen or so people are
killed every day in a struggle over identity simmering for more than 50
years, now a brutal proxy war between Pakistan and India.
The response was quick - and routine.
A machine gun-mounted armored truck
of India's paramilitary Border Protection Force, "Dragon" painted in white
on its olive-drab side, pulled into the intersection. The victim, identified
as Mairaj-ud-Din, a block captain for the governing pro-Indian party, the
National Conference, joined the list of the more than 24,000 people India
says have been killed since the insurgency began in 1990. Or is it 40,000
or, as some say, even more? Lt. Col. K. S. Banyal sent squads of his troopers
through the street, peering into the alleyway crime scene by the Bhat Brothers
shop, purveyors of diesel engines and water pumps, and rounding up slower-moving
young men for identification checks. A second armored truck arrived, labeled,
without apparent irony, Messenger of Peace.
As the United States tries to hold
together its alliance against terrorism, it is running into a tough, international
version of the late Tip O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local,"
and not just in the once-obscure differences between Pashtun tribesmen
and Afghanistan's ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. The geography
is bookended by two volatile struggles, intractable for more than half
a century: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Kashmir. Either could unravel
the American effort.
History's "Great Game" is reversed
here as the two rivals on the Indian subcontinent try to manipulate outside
powers to their advantage, for instance by the lifting of sanctions imposed
for developing nuclear weapons. On Kashmir, Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell has been squeezed between Islamabad and New Delhi.
India and Pakistan cannot compromise.
Each claims Kashmir as a matter of national honor, and they have fought
two of their three wars over it since 1947.
"No government of India can surrender
a single inch of Kashmir," said Muhammad Shaffi Qureshi, the leader of
the Congress Party here. "No government in Pakistan can give up, because
they have been feeding this tiger for a very long time. Any indication
they were selling out to India, I don't think any government in Pakistan
can afford to do it."
For Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, the issue is particularly delicate. A general who seized power,
he reversed policies to back the American campaign against Osama bin Laden
and the Taliban government sheltering him, and is now under tremendous
pressure from Islamic militants. Pakistan, through the powerful Inter-Services
Intelligence, or ISI, created the Taliban to counter anarchy among Afghan
factions after the Soviet occupation ended in 1989, and trained and armed
Islamic guerrillas fighting here. With Kashmir an emotional, central issue
since statehood, there is no sign that Pakistan is pulling back its proxy
militants.
On the contrary.
"The problem we are facing is Pakistan,
basically," said Maj. Gen. G. S. Gill, commander of the Indian border force,
the top anti-insurgency official here, his spit-and-polish compound an
echo of the Raj, the turban of his Sikh faith khaki to match his uniform.
"Fifty to 60 percent of these militants
are foreigners," he went on crisply, in an assessment widely shared here.
"Even the local people who have joined, they have gone across and come
back with arms, equipment, training."
The problem stems from the "Partition"
of 1947, the division of the British empire here into mostly Hindu India
and the Islamic state of Pakistan, a move that unleashed an orgy of intercommunal
violence.
The rulers of 565 princely states,
maharajahs, nizams and nawabs - men who hunted tigers from specially fitted
Rolls-Royces and amassed gold and jewels - were told that they had to choose
one of the two new nations.
The maharajah of Kashmir, Hari Singh,
was a Hindu ruling a population with a large majority of Muslims.
He dithered past the deadline.
Meanwhile, in a chain of events
now familiar, the nascent Pakistani government secretly gathered fierce
Pashtun tribesmen from the Khyber Pass and sent them into Kashmir for a
jihad, or holy war. The Islamic raiders were delayed on their march to
Srinagar by a penchant for looting and pillaging, which gave the Indian
authorities time to fly Sikh soldiers to seize the capital. Hari Singh,
having fled, was forced to sign an Act of Accession to India, and the troops
landed the next day, Oct. 27, 1947. The date was marked here on Saturday
by a general strike, and 24 deaths from grenade attacks, assassinations
of policemen and a shootout in a mosque.
It is little wonder that Kashmir
is coveted. While the entire state, formally known as Jammu and Kashmir,
contains several districts, some largely Hindu, others half Buddhist, it
is the lush valley at the foot of the Himalayas - the Vale of Kashmir -
that is the prize. Mostly Muslim, with the practice softened here by Sufi
mystics and the mosques topped by a pagodalike structure rather than domes
and minarets, it is the only region where people speak Kashmiri and have
a sense of national identity. The British made it a resort, with houseboats
floating among the lotus blossoms on Lake Dal.
The rebellion began in 1990. Since
then, according to an official in New Delhi, 9,515 civilians have been
killed, along with 2,911 members of the security force and 13,711 "terrorists,"
of whom 2,186 were said to be foreigners.
