What's Wrong With Being A Patriot?

Pankaj Mishra has heaped scorn on my journalistic integrity (Paper Jehadis and the Lie of the Land, October 9). Let that pass. I would like to deal with the substantive points that he has raised in his response to my article. First, nothing he has said dents my crucial observation-that the massacre of the Sikhs was not either sudden or entirely unexpected. On the contrary, I had been warned that something like this might happen by no fewer than three impeccable sources a full 21 months earlier.

This still does not rule out the possibility that the killing was carried out by Indian security forces. As I said in my column, anything is possible in the Kashmir of today. But is it likely? Since Mishra was no more in Chitsinghpura at the time of the massacre than I was, all we have to go on is circumstantial evidence and inference. Mishra has inferred that it probably was the Indian security forces from their murder of local youth at Panchalthan, the failure of either the Hizb or the Lashkar to claim responsibility for the Chitsinghpura massacre, and from the convenient timing of the killing-on the day President Clinton landed in Delhi. What I did was to point out the circumstantial evidence that points the other way-that attacks on the Sikhs were foreseen, and that even if the army and Kashmir police are as stupid and callous as Mishra seems to think, they are not so stupid as to come to the killing ground in army uniforms.

In fact, his observations on their stupidity make me question his intelligence. Is it possible that a 'dirty tricks' authority that was clever and ruthless enough to think up something like this to defame Pakistan would be so stupid as to overlook the need to wear mufti? The same, of course, holds true of the massacres that took place between the afternoon and night of August 1.

Mishra accuses me of misrepresenting what he wrote in his article. He asserts that he did not accuse the Indian forces of having massacred the Sikhs and later the Hindus (and Muslims-I stand corrected) on August 1, but only pointed out the accumulation of 'strange facts' and suspicions that cry out for further investigation. Let me first assure the readers that I am not alone in having 'misrepresented' him. I have been out of India for two months and read his essay in the New York Review of Books. But the nyrb is on the web and its website can be found easily through any search engine. So I invite all readers who have an internet connection to access it and judge what he was trying to say for themselves.

After it appeared I was deluged by e-mails from disturbed American friends at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and in some of the country's major newspapers. The first of these messages read: 'Did you read the latest NY Review of Books? They are running a series by Pankaj Mishra that is very tough on India. Without any supporting evidence, he seems to be suggesting that India was behind-or could have been behind-the recent massacres of Hindus and Sikhs. Pretty strange.'

The others were all in the same vein. So either Mishra is 'misrepresenting' himself now, or lost control of his prose when he was writing his essay. His response to me once again confirms that it is the former. For he alludes to the 'strange fact' that a patrol of the Rashtriya Rifles, which was 1.5 km away from Chitsinghpura, heard the firing but did not investigate. Do I have to spell out what we are expected to infer from this?

Had Mishra thought things through a little more carefully, he would have realised that his conclusion, that the RR patrol knew that an operation was going on and that it had to stay away from it at any cost, is absurd. 'Dirty tricks' departments work on a need to know basis. They do not broadcast their intentions in advance to other branches of the security forces, especially at the company or platoon level where a leak is almost certain. The RR's failure to investigate was most certainly reprehensible, but only because the person in command was a coward. And let me ask once again-if Wagay, the Muslim resident of Chitsinghpura, is the living proof that it was not foreign militants who killed the Sikhs, why does his family want him kept in police custody? Could they be afraid that once he is out, the militants might kill him and put the blame on the Indian security forces, as Mishra himself is so ready to do?

Let me come, at the end, to a point to which he obviously attaches great importance, because he has repeated it in his response to me. This is that since the Lashkar-e-Toiba did not claim responsibility for either the March or the August killings, assertions by the government that it and/or the Hizbul Mujahideen was responsible must be treated with the utmost caution. For unrelated reasons, I would certainly want a great deal more proof before I believed that the Hizb commanders were involved in such a barbaric act. When all is said and done, they are Kashmiris, and part of Kashmir's syncretic culture. I would need less convincing about the possible involvement of the lowest levels of Hizb cadres, because these are now mostly mercenaries who work as guides, interpreters and porters for all tanzeems. But the Lashkar?

I also agree with Mishra that the speed with which the security forces claimed they knew who was behind the killings was suspicious. But once again Mishra was selective with the facts. The security forces made it clear that they had intercepted a radio message giving the order to do in the bearded ones, some days before the massacre. They did not know where and when it would take place. In all fairness to the security forces, I also have to add that they are often unable to furnish proof that we journalists clamour for because it would compromise their sources. The Indian security agencies are no different from others in this. More than a decade ago, a Canadian judge in Kingston, Ontario, threw out a case against the two Sikhs who had planted bombs on Air India planes to London and Tokyo in 1985, and brought down the former, because the Canadian Police refused to produce the undercover agent who had penetrated the Sikh terrorist network in Toronto. Only last month, the US justice department dropped 58 of the 59 charges against Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-born scientist, claiming that although it had clinching proof that he had stolen secrets for the Chinese, bringing the evidence into court would reveal a variety of nuclear secrets and investigative procedures that it felt had to be kept secret. The Indian security agencies are also notoriously chary of revealing their radio intercept capability.

Mishra's belief that militants always claim responsibility for their actions is naive to say the least. The truth is that militants claim responsibility only for actions that they believe will be popular with the local people. The killing of popular local leaders who disagree with their goals and are rival foci of power because of their popularity is never acknowledged. Instead, an attempt is made to pin the blame on the Indian government who, they claim, got rid of the leader precisely because he was popular. Because the charge has a superficial plausibility, it invariably confuses the people. To cite a few examples: No militant group has taken the responsibility for the killing of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq in May 1990, or for the murder of the human rights activist H.. Wanchoo in December 1992. At the time, the Indian government was blamed for both. Today every child in Kashmir knows that the former was killed by two youths of the Hizbul Mujahideen, and the latter by two or three young men belonging to the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen. When the Chrar-e-Sharif was burnt down, Kashmiris blamed the Indian army-until Mast Gul boasted in a ptv television interview that his men had placed explosives in the shrine before leaving. The Harkat-ul-Ansar disclaimed any link with Al Faran, the group that kidnapped and killed five foreign tourists in 1995, until the RR killed its leader and two members in an encounter in December.

Mishra also seems to have forgotten that just days before five Kashmiri villagers were picked up and killed by the security forces at Panchalthan, no one claimed responsibility for the bomb explosion in the Srinagar vegetable market that killed 14 or more extremely poor Kashmiris. Further afield, the ulfa continues to deny that they killed Sanjoy Ghose, and the ltte has not admitted responsibility for most of its black Tiger suicide bomb killings, including that of Rajiv Gandhi.

Lastly, I would like to ask Mishra, precisely what is wrong with being a patriot? Do all patriots lie?