The Foreign Hand

PANKAJ Mishra's angry polemic from Chitsinghpura describing the massacre of 35 Sikhs on the day President Clinton landed in Delhi is doing the foreign rounds. After the New York Review of Books and the New York Times it has surfaced in a prestigious British daily. I have no problem with Pankaj writing in foreign journals. We are an open society with a robust press and we can take what Mr Mishra is dishing out. Moreover, he is a distinguished alumnus of the Indian and international literary scene, a position which lends his voice a certain credibility. At any rate, the record of the Indian state in Kashmir is so uniformly disgraceful that one cannot dismiss Pankaj's sensational charge out of hand. 

Recently, I visited Muzaffarabad, the capital of 'Azad Kashmir'. Our Pakistani hosts produced an impressive line-up of victims. While a practised theatricality was unmissable in their howling-husbands shot, daughters raped, houses and villages burnt, sons missing-the sheer wealth of detail they provided suggested, at the very least, partial authenticity. Even if 20 per cent of what they told me was true, there was reason for an Indian to hang his head in shame. 

But that is just one side of the massacre story. Three foreign journalists have approached me in the past months to help them with the Chitsinghpura mystery. I informed them that Outlook had investigated the incident looking specifically for clues of Indian involvement. We had drawn a blank. I recommended to them the name of an organisation which aggressively monitors human rights violations in the Valley. I understand, after their inquiries, the foreign journalists too drew a blank. 

In the Pankaj Mishra-Prem Shankar Jha serial exchange, I present one further complication. If such a criminally audacious act was planned and executed by Indian security forces, the sanction for its implementation could not have come from the local BSF chief or army colonel or RAW agent. Sanction from Delhi would have been mandatory. Even if you exclude Vajpayee and Advani's complicity, someone pretty senior in the PMO and home ministry would have to show the green light. From here the orders would have been passed on to the Valley and then to the executioners. It is difficult to imagine that such a dastardly crime perpetrated by the State on its own citizens, which involved a considerable number of Central and state officials, has not leaked out-even as gossip-in our very leaky republic. 

Therefore, in this controversy, I am on the side of Prem Shankar Jha.