Self-Inflicted Wounds

Two recent articles in prestigious American newspapers by novelist Pankaj Mishra of The Romantics and Butter Chicken in Ludhiana fame have done India great harm. The first, titled "Death in Kashmir", appeared in The New York Review of Books (NYRB) - possibly the most highbrow publication on the East Coast, if not all of America. The second appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, September 16. This near-simultaneous double is a magnificent feather in Mishra’s cap. It is only when one reads the articles, and particularly "Death in Kashmir", that pride gives way to consternation.

"Death in Kashmir" describes his visit to Chitsinghpura the day after the massacre of the Sikhs on March 20. It is the kind of ‘human interest’ story foreign journalists have written a hundred times - the gory ugliness of death amid the unchanging, indifferent beauty of nature. What made a mundane article startling (and so, I suspect, worth publishing) were his conclusions. Cunningly, Mishra saves them 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. Then he goes back to the Chitsinghpura massacre and establishes guilt by association. More and more Sikhs, he asserts, are beginning to suspect that it too was the handiwork of Indian intelligence, designed to impress Clinton and his team of journalists. Fearing for their lives, however, the Sikhs are keeping silent.

Mishra makes this breathtaking assertion without citing an iota of proof. As circumstantial evidence he offers the following: a) no foreign militant organisation claimed credit for the killings. Usually they’re only too keen to do so; b) the family of Yakub Wagay, the Muslim resident of Chitsinghpura who allegedly first gave shelter to and then identified the so-called killers, refuses to bail him out of jail as they are convinced he’ll be murdered too; c) this was the only attack on Sikhs in Kashmir. In short, it was too convenient.

"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. Why after all, asks Mishra, should "Pakistan, which has long bankrolled the Hizbul Mujahideen and which brought about its declaration of ceasefire, cancel its own moves by organising killings in Kashmir, particularly at a time when the world’s attention was fixed on the region?" Mishra also exonerates the Lashkar-e-Toiba and concludes, "There is, as yet, no convincing evidence linking them to any of the more than six separate incidents of extreme violence against civilians."

Theoretically, anything is possible in the dark, brutal world the Kashmiris now inhabit. But if Mishra chose to rely on circumstantial evidence and to establish the security forces’ guilt by association, then he had a duty to examine and present some of the circumstantial evidence that points the other way. First, the attack on the Sikhs was not sudden. In July 1998, I’d been warned by Yasin Malik Sikhs were next on the list. The government, he said, was making the cardinal error of recruiting Kashmiri Sikhs into the Special Operations Group of the Kashmir police, which was even then chalking up half a dozen custodial killings a month. This was creating animosity towards the Sikhs. A prominent Kashmiri Sikh in Srinagar expressed the same apprehension and showed me a bulletin issued by the Hizb in Urdu warning Kashmiris that Sikhs could no longer be ‘trusted’. Similar bulletins had appeared, he told me, in 1990 before the Hindus were driven from the Valley. When I mentioned these warnings to governor Girish Saxena, he shared his own anxiety: a delegation of Sikhs from Tral had told him they were thinking of migrating to the plains. This was 20 months before Chitsinghpura.

Second: the Sikhs’ silence after their initial outburst of grief was almost certainly the product of fear and desire not to attract attention to themselves. The reticence is understandable. Unlike Mishra or myself, they’ve to continue living in the Valley after we have gone. I have encountered this reaction before. For months after Kashmiri journalist Zafar Meraj was pumped full of bullets by militants, but managed to survive through sheer willpower, neither he nor his family were prepared to name who was responsible. That extreme reticence still persists. By the same token, Wagay’s family is right to want him kept in jail. But if they fear his death at the hands of the police, is this where they would want him to be? They know better than most people how easy it is for the Kashmir police to fake a "killed while trying to escape".

As for the Lashkar or Hizbul not taking credit for the killings, this is not the first time guerrilla organisations have shown such reticence. The Harkat-ul-Ansar never admitted that Al Faran, which kidnapped six and killed five US, British, German and Norwegian tourists in 1995, was one of its fronts. This only came out when the Rashtriya Rifles killed the kidnappers’ leader Abdul Hamid Turki and two others. The Harkat then decided to honour its dead publicly.

Lack of space prevents me from touching on the immaturity of his other conclusions. But I can’t resist asking him a question to which I got no answer in Kashmir even from Abdul Ghani and Ali Shah Geelani of the Hurriyat. 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? It’s easy to see why the nrb was so impressed with Mishra’s article. Here was a man whose commitment to the truth was far greater than that to his country. But what if Mishra’s only commitment is to himself?