Paper Jehadis And The Lie Of The Land

Prem Shankar Jha's writings on Kashmir illustrate the truth of an amusing remark British journalist Christopher Hitchens once made to me: he became a journalist, he said, because he could no longer trust the press. Now Jha (Self-inflicted Wounds, October 2) has joined Swapan Dasgupta of India Today in accusing me of being unpatriotic. The immediate provocation is a three-part article on Kashmir I recently published in The Hindu and The New York Review of Books. It's always a tricky business trying to clarify things said elsewhere, in a different context; and I would request interested readers to look up the articles in The Hindu and on nybooks.com. In the meantime, I'll try to nail some of Jha's falsehoods.

I was in Kashmir when 35 Sikhs were massacred, hours before Bill Clinton began his state visit to India. Soon after the news of the massacre, New Delhi blamed the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Toiba. There was no evidence for this accusation at this stage - there still isn't, after a failed attempt to manufacture it at Panchalthan where five local Muslims were murdered, defaced and presented to the press as hard-core militants of the Lashkar.

Once you are in Kashmir, that scepticism about the government's ability to speak the truth returns, and multiplies fast. Not a single Kashmiri I spoke to believed the government's story; and as the days passed it began to seem less and less the final word on the subject it was taken to be by the Indian press - if not any other press.

I still don't think anyone is in a position to identify with certainty the killers of the Sikhs. The scope for private investigation remains limited; there are areas in Kashmir journalists just can't go to. People have their own suspicions; there are theories; there are the strange facts: for instance, that a patrol party of Rashtriya Rifles, which was 1.5 km from Chitsinghpura at the time of the massacre, heard the gunshots but did not bother to go and investigate. Suspicions and theories and some strange facts are not perhaps the best way to get to the truth but when the men in power declare, without offering any evidence, that they have the complete truth in their possession, and that there is no need for an inquiry; when those men go on to murder innocents in their attempt to make lies seem like truth, then it becomes all the more important for journalists to take some untrodden paths.

What doesn't help in these uncertain conditions are misrepresentations and accusations of bad faith from other journalists. Jha writes that Death in Kashmir "concludes with the assertion" "that not only were many of the pilgrims killed at Pahalgam victims of crossfire by the crpf (true) but that all eight attacks on that day, which killed 100 Hindus, were probably the handiwork of Indian security forces".

Careful readers of this sentence will notice how Jha begins his argument quoting me with some very unambiguous language - Pankaj Mishra concludes with the assertion. He then develops cold feet and quickly tries to hedge himself in with the adverb "probably": "were probably the handiwork of Indian security forces".

Jha's grudging little bracket with the word 'true' refers to the only truthful thing in this sentence - the killing of pilgrims at Pahalgam by the crpf - and that comes from my article. Let's now look at the facts Jha manages to get wrong in just one sentence: 1. Death in Kashmir does not conclude where Jha thinks it does; it goes on for several thousand words. 2. The eight attacks did not take place on the same day. 3. Less than 100 Hindus were killed in early August - the inflated figure Jha quotes includes about 20 Muslims murdered in Pahalgam and Doda.

Let's now look at some of my cautiously-phrased 'findings' which Jha found so objectionable.

"It is still not clear - and probably won't be for some time - what actually happened."

"These killings thus take their place, along with the murder of the Sikhs, with some very relevant but ultimately obscure and unexplained incidents in Kashmir's recent history."

"The turnover of atrocities on both sides in Kashmir is so high, and the situation in general so murky, that it is hard to get to the truth, to confirm, for instance, India's claim, in both late March and early August, that Muslim terrorists are always responsible for them."

It doesn't require much close reading to know that no one is being blamed here. I am simply making a general point about the uncertainty surrounding events in Kashmir and the difficulty of going along with the government's version when it is not supported by sufficient evidence, or a will to investigate.

Jha obviously thinks he can tell his readers whatever he likes. Here is more of his hit-or-miss polemic: "Cunningly, Mishra saves them (his conclusions) till after he has first described in equally harrowing detail how the security forces and the Kashmir police picked up five innocent young men in Anantnag district, killed and burned them and claimed that they were the foreign militants who'd committed the killing."

As I've said, I reached no conclusions but the question still has to be asked of Jha: has he forgotten that conclusions usually come after the events they refer to have been described? What on earth could be so cunning about a writer following the simple rules of prose narrative?

I had written in my article about Wagay, a Muslim resident of Chitsinghpura, who was randomly picked up after the murder of the Sikhs and tortured into signing declarations of his links with the Lashkar and Hizbul. No less a figure than the home secretary appeared on TV, while Clinton was still in India, to announce his arrest. He had apparently escorted the 'Lashkar militants' to the massacre site; and he also knew all about the hideout in Panchalthan where the army and the sog killed the five 'dreaded' Lashkar terrorists responsible for massacring the Sikhs.

All rubbish, as it turns out. Wagay was with four other men, including a Sikh, when the massacre happened. The 'Lashkar terrorists' killed in Panchalthan were local civilians, kidnapped, murdered, defaced and then burnt so that no one would know who they were. I had written how Wagay's family realises that he is a crucial figure in the Chitsinghpura cover-up, a living negation of all the stories we have been fed about Chitsinghpura, and how they fear for his life once he is out of prison.

At some point in my reading of Jha's piece, I began to realise that he seems to be doing nothing more intellectually sophisticated than pressing the hot button of patriotism in his readers in the hope they will be so incited against me that they will stop noticing how far below the journalistic standards of truth and accuracy Jha has slipped. An example of this can be seen in the scandalised tones of the sentence, "Mishra also exonerates the Lashkar-e-Toiba". The subliminal message to his readers is: Mishra must surely be unpatriotic, perhaps even an isi agent, if he can exonerate the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which we all of course know is a bunch of bloodthirsty murderers.

Much as I would like to blame the Lashkar, an undoubtedly nasty lot, in the 10 separate incidents of violence I write about, I can't do so yet. I am still waiting for evidence more convincing than the five murdered civilians produced by the authorities in March.

Both Jha and Dasgupta deride me for mentioning that the Lashkar has issued strong denials of their involvement in the March and August killings. As both put it in their not dissimilar ways, we can expect nothing from these Pakistani brutes but brutality - in which case, one might ask why should these brutes, who are so unconcerned about their notoriety and rush to claim their attacks on the Indian army, should even bother denying their involvement in the killings of civilians? And why would the US State Department, whose opinion Jha so clearly values, consistently refuse to join the Indian government in blaming the Lashkar?

I realise I am only playing into Jha's hands here. As he sees it, neither the denials from Lashkar nor lack of evidence should interfere with the patriotic duty of Indian journalists to join their government in blaming all inhuman acts in Kashmir on the vicious monsters in Pakistan. But if the Lashkar's involvement is so obvious to Jha, he would perhaps like to mull over the single-most mystifying thing about the March and August massacres: that the government should not only refuse to hold an inquiry, even when it is demanded by political parties in Parliament, but also produce no evidence of the Lashkar's involvement except the defaced corpses of five innocent men, an innocent man in jail and, in August, a couple of assault rifles with Lashkar stickers on them.

What troubles me is that Jha doesn't realise how shaky and narrow is the ground he presently stands on. Consider, for instance, his 'clinching' argument: "If the 'army' had killed the Sikhs in March and 19 Bihari labourers in August with the intention of pinning blame on Pakistan, would it have gone to the village and the camp in uniform?"

Though I'm eager to remove all doubts of the army's involvement in these killings, I don't think Jha's pathetic argument is what I'd use. He has a very exaggerated idea of the skill and caution all-powerful men need to kill in the moral void of Kashmir; it merely underlines his naivete about the subject. He does acknowledge, in an abrupt moment of truth, that "theoretically, anything is possible in the dark, brutal world the Kashmiris now inhabit". The word 'theoretically' is another hedge against the possibility of knowledge. Jha really should pursue this line of thought and perhaps spend more time in Kashmir.

But Jha is not much interested in what goes on in Kashmir, even less in what Kashmiris think. He is obsessed with how it all looks in the US. Consider the way he starts off his piece, with the assertion that writing for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times is a matter of 'pride'. Here, Jha betrays his own vulnerability to the glamour of American periodicals. It was The Hindu which originally commissioned and published the three-part article that later appeared in an slightly altered form in The New York Review of Books - a significant fact that Jha doesn't even think worth mentioning.

His exaggerated reverence for US periodicals is crucial as it is the root of all his problems with my articles. It explains his absurd assertion that my articles have 'done India great harm'. One wonders: in what way? I think the reason lies in the idea of India Jha has bought into. This realpolitik simulation of India leaves out all that should be of value to him: India's people, their immense struggles, dreams and hurt. It is no more than a foolish and vain fantasy: the fantasy of being a world power, which is so insubstantial that in order to maintain it in the actual conditions of life in India, people like Jha are forced to turn away from their own world. Blind to the violence and anarchy around them, they go gaping at the remote indifferent mirrors of the US press and are then outraged to find images of India that don't match their little fantasy, that remind them too much of the dark realities they are trying to suppress.