Mir Khalid
MY fascination with Srinagar’s upper City Side began as a child whose infantile attention was incorrigibly drawn to the allure of the City Centre bustle, its shops and famous bookstores, record shops and movie theatres running the best and the latest hollywood flicks, but above all the pleasant sights and smells pervading the environs of my maternal granddad’s sprawling estate. My grandfather’s old bungalow and its lawns, where I spent some of my time, were a remnant of his one-time power and affluence. A 10-foot tall guelder rose tree stood alone on the verdant lawns dotted with cypresses and evergreen shrubs, interspersed with peach and walnut trees. The guelder rose tree was my favourite in his garden.
My earliest memories are of me skittering around the lawns, chasing hoopoes and scattering guelder petals. My pre-school life was spent here in my grandfather’s home and not my father’s downtown Safa Kadal house as my young mother was unable to cope with the exigencies of a newly nuclear family’s homemaking chores and two hyperactive kids so close to one another in age.
The wider city with its many outsized characters and idiosyncrasies could well have drawn the envy of Pamuk’s Istanbul in times of yore. A ride from downtown to the City Side negotiated not only the many PIN codes but also the mutually disdainful indifference borne by variant self-images, opinions, social registers and general outlook that separated these two antagonistic swathes of Srinagar. My parents – a quintessential downtown lad and an uber-uptown girl – saw their marriage traverse strong accentual and cultural differences endowed by the city’s geographical determinism. The downtowners, in my mum’s opinion, were innately imbued with ritualistic tribalism and an insular, parochial lot given to intrigue. In comparison, her City Side kindred were congenially open-minded, usually polyglot, straightforward and more aware of the world.
In time, I retained mum’s City Side inflection to my spoken vernacular if not her opinionated judgements providing me a vantage view to experience both ends of the city. This access allowed me to form a rich tapestry of varied memories and associations that have withstood the vagaries of time.
1
Even as the vernal equinox of 1989 turned, I was a pimply teen dating a high school basketball star and harbouring dreams of running the ‘Thousand Lakes Car Rally’ in Finland someday. My friends and I painted the Srinagar roads red in my deep blue family sedan. Emblazoned with Union Jack stickers, its stereo bellowed chartbusters by George Michael, INXS, Iggy Pop, Midnight Oil and Van Halen. In that idyllic high, it never crossed our minds that in a few months’ time our dearly beloved city would mutate into both the crucible and front line of an intense insurgency. The intractable conflict would make the nooks and corners of the wider Vale morph into infamously ungovernable environs resembling Northern Ireland or El Salvador on steroids, claim tens of thousands of lives and shred our social fabric to bits.
2
In the first week of April 1989, my grandfather died quietly in his sleep. We rushed to my mother’s house in Mandar Bagh, a relatively quiet suburban sliver – straddling the tough Maisuma and Basant Bagh neighbourhoods – abutting the City Centre. Here was where the wake and requiem rituals would take place. That week preceding the year of the outbreak of insurgency would memorialize itself with ominous portents of troubled times ahead. The City Side, hitherto considered less volatile than downtown, exploded in violence, which often lasted days.
Under the shade of my beloved guelder rose tree, I reminisced about the life and times of Amir Muhammad Khan, my grandfather. In our infantile imagination, his retinue of exploits, his addictive proclivities towards adventure, horses and guns in the Vale expanses and beyond made him appear as some aged John Wayne doppelgänger. He had introduced me to literary Urdu, Persian poet-chroniclers like Farkhi Sistani, and European historical figures through snippets he would relate now and again. In public, Mr Khan had been a daring second-generation police officer who retained his tall, imposing figure even as he aged. His career had hurled him into enviable positions and allowed him to be an unwitting first-hand witness to the many harsh historical upheavals the Valley had endured in the twentieth century.
Even as the wake and bereavement visits continued inside our hearth, uncontrollable violence broke out outside. I am not particularly sure what triggered it on that spring afternoon. The area had been on tenterhooks for a year, when many demonstrators protesting the supply of fungus-ridden wheat and increased electricity tariffs had been shot dead by trigger-happy policemen.
I watched with trepidation as the crackling sound of bullets and bursting tear-gas canisters rent the air. One shell struck a home opposite ours, injuring a girl watching the upheaval on the Gaw Kadal bridge. Venturing outside, I saw the tough neighbourhood lads – some of my acquaintances and friends among them – sporting hyped up antagonistic glares, their slogans breaching the air. From three sides, they began raining rubble and roughing up the riot-police posse at close quarters.
The City Side precinct’s violent propensities had in the past created street-fighting legends. It surprised no one to see these lads unleashing lethal violence on a level unimagined by the perpetual ‘stone in hand’ downtown counterparts. The disturbances saw police vehicles set on fire and liquor shops laid waste around the City Centre. The mayhem soon spread through the rest of the city and scores of demonstrators sustained bullet injuries in violent confrontations with the police.
In this melee, the young wife of an elder cousin’s childhood buddy – an intrepid ironmonger with matinee idol looks – rushed into the house. The dishevelled woman told us of policemen shooting her husband while he was pelting stones in the nearby Basant Bagh area. My cousin, a recent medical graduate, rushed to the hospital to be at his bedside.
Of the many boys who died in the conflagration was Ashique from Maisuma locality across the bridge. A tormented twenty-something, Ashique had already endured recurrent prison confinements for being an affiliate/member of the Islamic Students League. Though we never had any social interaction, his had been a familiar face ever since he had helped a posse of the local ‘City Side Boys’ gang while still detained at the notorious Kothi Bagh sub-jail.
These student gangsters had been interned after a massive switchblade-and-knuckleduster assault at the suburban Broadway Cinema left many black marketeers badly injured. The gang members forcibly entered the auditorium and were watching the opening show of the then debutant Aamir Khan–starrer Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak when police raided the precincts and arrested them.
Spared a thorough body check, they were still carrying weapons on their arrival at the Kothi Bagh sub-jail. The recovery of those weapons could have meant stiff jail sentences. Ashique had listened intently as these neighbourhood boys blurted out their predicament; given his resourceful nature, he had the knives and knuckledusters stealthily removed through his contacts. However, his own luck ran out a few months later.
During a lull in the rioting, Ashique had sauntered out of his home, ostensibly pausing to shake hands with an on-duty police official he had befriended during his incarceration. At that very instant, a hand grenade targeting the policemen exploded, killing Ashique on the spot and badly injuring the officer.
A page had turned, but the graduation from pure stone pelting to grenade throwing hadn’t been abrupt. To stymie the intensity of the protests, the policemen frequently resorted to midnight knocks and arbitrary arrests. Consequently, a lot of harassed youngsters seething with vengeance increasingly blew off their steam by street-fighting police pickets. The frisson created by the Kalashnikov rifles stashed in neighbourhood attics by friends and acquaintances hopping back from Pakistani arms training camps congealed into a confidence that fuelled a militant backlash on the streets.
On the Friday requiem, rioting swept the whole city again. From and to the downtown cemetery, a couple of our cars had their windshields battered. Two of my cousin’s friends loitering in the downtown Buhyr Kadal area came across a previously unthinkable situation: Two masked men brandishing AK-47s shooting up police columns sent in to disperse stone pelters, forcing the latter to flee the scene. In a show of revelry, elated citizenry showered the gunmen with confectionary.
Relegated to a corner of the house, I wondered how my grandfather would have viewed this scene of violence. I still remember Dad and the extended family elders sitting on his spacious porch, talking. Since 13 July 1931, the date and year that Grandpa mused over repeatedly, the cycle of violence had never ceased. That was the day Kashmiri protestors, prodded by the incendiary declamations of Qadeer Khan – a Pathan butler incensed by the treatment meted out to the hapless populace by the Dogras – discovered the power of stone debris.
They recalled Grandpa speaking of the 1930s and 1940s, of how, while discharging duties as a station house officer at the city’s Kothi Bagh or Sher Garhi police stations, he repeatedly and distastefully tackled anti-monarchist demonstrators. While he preferred resorting to ‘tiktiki’ – mass whipping of detained demonstrators – in full public view to dissuade others, many a time the monarchist Hussars would spike and maim fleeing protestors. One night, Grandpa came home after a hectic day to find his younger sibling dazed and wounded, his arm slashed by a Dogra soldier’s sabre. Fifty years later, not much had changed.
3
Two decades on, I arrived in Dublin primed mentally and physically to be an attendant observer of upheavals raking the world. Little did I know that Bono’s city would bring me answers to the many questions I still had about what had happened on the City Side streets in 1989.1
Dublin, a city of leafy promenades and the bridges, is much smaller than most other European capitals. The Liffey flows right down the middle, cleaving the city into the North and South embankments, much like the Jhelum does for Srinagar. During my residency in the UK, I had encountered politically apathetic Brits oblivious to their colonial past. On the contrary, the Irish turned out to be very aware politically and proficient raconteurs of their chequered history.
Every year, thousands of visitors come to Ireland from across the world, drawn by the allure of the ‘Old Country’. The Dublin cabbies dish out their rather standardized sightseeing kitty. They point out the humungous pockmarked General Post Office building, the scene of Irish Nationalists’ last stand during the failed 1916 Easter uprising. They regale tourists with accounts of the Irish wars against the British; the role of Churchill and De Valera; the exploits of the Irish war hero Michael Collins and his ‘twelve apostles’, the Cairo gang. They drive you in to the Castle and Kilminhaim Jail, a source of repressive misery and setting of the opening scene of the Michael Caine hit movie The Italian Job.
Interacting with the Irish in general will impress upon any visitor that their repeated insurrections stemmed from vicious British attitudes and policies that led to infamous famines and forced cross-Atlantic migrations and the iniquitous laws made to remind the Irish of being not just a subjugated but a defeated people. My interests went beyond the superficial perusing of Irish history through anecdotes. I read deeper to discern that to this day, in contrast to the atheistic secular confines of Europe, the Irish notion of nationalism is deeply intertwined with strident Catholicism. This curious Hibernian ethno-religious loyalty was the basis of their rallying cry against the British and continues to structure Irish nationalist discourse.
After the Irish Republic came into being in 1921, Irish Catholic communities in the North cleaved off from the rest of the Irish isle and continue to be oppressed. In 1969, the wider Catholic insurrection spearheaded by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) commenced in earnest, claiming thousands of lives.
Within liberated Ireland, the communitarian political mobilization had given rise to another subset of political parties and ideologies such as Fianna Fail, who were prone to be more right wing and somewhat more extreme in their politics than the leading political formations like Fine Gael, whose overarching presence they actively aimed to replace in the Dáil Éireann’s ruling benches. It struck a chord with me, reminding me of what I had seen back home.
4
It was 1977, I think, and I, a child of a couple of years, running around the garden egging my aunt (also my foster mum) to catch me. This was when a bearded young man entered the driveway and came into the garden. He wanted a couple of the guelder roses. My aunt assented and so the chap picked up a bunch and left. Sometime later, as my aunt led me to the neighbourhood stationery store, we found the Gaw Kadal–Habba Kadal road clogged with hundreds of people. We stopped out of curiosity, and in a few moments, an open carriage passed by. It carried a smiling Sheikh Abdullah, waving his hands at the people. There was a retinue of cars and supporters shouting slogans, whose wording now seems erased from my memory. The child that I was swiftly noticed the two guelder roses adorning his achkan, which I guessed had been sourced from our tree.
My aunt divulged the happenings to Grandpa, who was sitting as usual on the big porch working his Mar Paech2 and exhaling plumes of tobacco smoke.
It would be many years before I learnt that Grandpa saw the popular Abdullah as an odious figure, repeatedly dismissing him as an impetuous man whose stature had been built by peddling a mythologized version of his role in the Vale’s recent history. Grandpa saw Abdullah as a self-centred demagogue and blamed his short-sightedness and naivety for much of the violent mess and uncertainty in the state. It would be years before I learned that my grandpa’s antipathy dated back to the Jammu pogrom of Muslims in 1947, whose aftermath he had witnessed first-hand.
Operating from the Peer Mitha precinct in the heart of Jammu, my grandfather’s efficient handling controlled the blood-curdling situation, earning him plaudits. But on the flip side, the local Dogra organisations ran a concerted campaign seeking his removal from the scene.3
On the other hand, the sea of humanity that formed Sheikh Abdullah’s funeral cortege and flagellated themselves in grief in 1982 seemed to see him as some deified leader. Abdullah’s voluble exposition of peasant-socialism politics and the halo of living martyrdom endowed by his long incarceration stirred the hearts and fogged the minds of his followers so much that his shifty stands and 360-degree turns did little to dampen their support. Their repeated hagiographic utterances around the shopfronts and faucets lining downtown and Safa Kadal in particular portrayed Abdullah as a benevolent patriarch whose relentless struggles guaranteed their dignity and alleviated the sufferings of the Kashmiri Muslims.
Years later, walking around the topiary-laden Dublin suburbs, it hit me again. Much like the Irish nationalists, the Kashmiri political project melded republican politics with the assertion of ethno-religious identity as an organizing basis. In 1931, Abdullah midwifed this by blending the dreamy quest for definitive Kashmiri nationhood by resting its political pivot on assertive confessional identity.
Abdullah achieved this through repeated displays of showy confessional piety, interspersing Quranic verses into his speeches, and bandying about themes of victimhood and injustice. This saw him harvest raw political support from an overwhelmingly Kashmiri Muslim base and morph into an overarching patriarch of Kashmiri politics and masses, successfully leading a sweeping mobilization. But at the same time, much like the Irish and Ulster Catholics, this exposition of confessional identitarianism awakened the sense of dignity of the Kashmiri Muslim masses enough to prompt them to aggressively seek the justice hitherto denied them by the Dogra feudocracy.
In the following decades of upheaval, this political ideation would come to define notions of Kashmiri patriotism strictly within the rubric of ethno-religious loyalty. But whether Abdullah ever countenanced this or whether his self-image and the clumsy tackling of its long-term ramifications by his successors would become a key factor in destroying his earned stature and place in posterity is debatable. What his followers themselves didn’t realize was that ideologies or sentiments are hardly subject to rise and decline secondary to someone assuming to be its embodiment. Abdullah was a man of his generation and his mass appeal and authority couldn’t have lived beyond its time. When his persona got shop-soiled, or when the metaphorical clueless kids wanting a hard-headed father figure morphed into their opposite in the next generation, the dyslexic generational exchange encouraged ominously shocking portents.
What I witnessed on the streets of the City Side in 1989 was perhaps the contentious claiming of the legacy of that 1931 ethno-confessional political assertion Abdullah had helped spawn. The City Side youngsters sought a violent reclamation as well as redefinition of their claim. Having been denied the one chance to be its new heirs, they saw violence as a means of political progression. They were actually the Vale’s Fianna Fail; furthering their claim on the mantle of a renewed Kashmiri Muslim political assertion, envisaging a culturally bonded ethnic-confessional group resuming its quest for what they saw as a denied political identity, melded with an overarching control of specific territory by effectuating it on the streets.
5
But there was another jarring note of a different history long neglected. My Grandpa repeatedly harped on the persuasive coercion that Abdullah perpetuated after 1947. Abdullah saw himself as an embodiment of Kashmiri redemption after years of feudal exploitation, but at the same time, his peremptory nature exacerbated his aversion to carry its real burdens through consensus. He tried legislating a sociocultural, economic and educational transformation, but found it difficult to become an absolute ruler. Though his hero worship within the constituency he considered his own – the peasant class – was secure, he could never get along with urban educated segment in Srinagar.
His thorough lack of imagination saw him failing to venture beyond the narrow triptych of personality cult perpetration, arbitrary repression against pro-Pak opponents and dishing out patronage to his nomenklatura. For him and his unrepentant Bolshevik-minded followers, violence was an effective, easy option to get on with the affairs of running the state and get out of the conundrum ingathered from the partial failure and partial success of his contradictory dreams.
These proclivities could be only sustained through abuse of power, which was well-nigh impossible without disenfranchising people. But who were these dissenters? Apart from the pro-Pakistan lobby of Maulvi Yusuf Shah, who had been consigned across the LoC through self-exile early on, there were many educated men who had previously rallied under National Conference’s ethno-religious identitarianism banner but hadn’t come to terms with his watering down via accession to the Indian Union. Abdullah’s defiance of the two-nation theory, born of his proximity to Nehru, seemed ironic and illogical to these educated men. Many were recent pass-outs from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) a pro-Jinnah bastion at the time. This cohort saw Nehru as representative of the overlordship of a Hindu state not very different from the previous Dogra monarchy. It is debatable whether Abdullah’s Indian leaning was driven by the exigencies of the aftermath of Partition, plain naivety, conviction or pragmatism. The Indian state would avowedly resist the prospect of another Muslim nation state congealing in its entirety.4
Abdullah’s grip on the polity wasn’t uncontested. The dissenters witnessed his 1938 changeover, which saw the Muslim Conference being renamed the National Conference. They saw this as a conceptual trespass but vying to hitch the Kashmir wagon to Indian state made them decry Abdullah as a traitorous comprador who had succumbed to the cunning and artifice of Nehru, a seasoned politician. Student delegations handed visiting United Nations official’s memoranda, calling for a plebiscite. There was an assassination attempt in 1951 that saw the arrest of the two main plotters, Kashmiri law graduates Muhammad Ali Bhat and Ali Naqvi. Hemmed on one side by dissent, many of the opposition figures were exiled across the LoC. For Abdullah’s Bolshevik cohorts, there was no room for engagement with this educated class.
Abdullah was powerless to put a check on Nehru’s efforts to essentially bring the Kashmiri state fully under Indian sovereignty. Nehru and the Indian establishment seemed averse to Abdullah’s idea of accepting the definition of the Jammu and Kashmir state as one with an essentially Muslim character. To this end, he pestered Abdullah to follow up on the state’s full amalgamation with the Indian Union without seeking new ‘terms of endearment’. In the absence of cast-iron constitutional guarantees, this step would have put paid to Abdullah’s ambitions of ruling an autonomous Muslim-majority state with a strongman like him at the helm.
In August 1953, Nehru’s nationalist compulsions saw Abdullah dethroned and imprisoned. To squelch any potential uprising, his successor Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad institutionalized a repressive template on an industrial scale. He tried sounding Grandpa out as a hatchet man, an enforcer of a malignant version of socio-political control meted through his Peace Brigade toughs working in cohort with the police. Grandpa’s outright refusal saw him relegated to non-functional duties before being prematurely retired.
Abdullah’s Plebiscite Front reverted to ethno-confessional discourse to press for the Kashmiri right to self-determination. This persisted till 1975. Now ageing and ill, Abdullah buried the hatchet through his agreement to forge an accord with the Indian political establishment. The Plebiscite Front, having endured twenty-two harrowing years, trimmed their ideological sails much like their Great Leader, and followed him on this propitious journey.
This emotional upswing saw the NC cadres renew their addiction to a sense of violent righteousness. Even as the 1977 election got under way, Abdullah, like the ever-overarching medieval seigneur habituated to tribute but not opposition, oversaw his storm troopers as they mounted a very violent riposte to the political challenge posed by the then Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq. An orchestrated political pogrom, branding the Mirwaiz and his supporters as Indian stooges undermining consensual Muslim unity, set the whole of downtown on proverbial fire.
On the City Side, no such thing happened. There was no ‘other’ with the temerity to hitch his wagon to the ruling Janata Party’s efforts to derail Sheikh Abdullah’s re-election effort here. However, I do have a faint recollection of my grandfather conversing about the brutal thrashing meted out to the Congress candidate Dr Jagat Mohini, who ran the popular Rattan Rani Hospital a half-furlong away from our Mandar Bagh house.
6
Ashique’s repeated incarcerations are a case in point that proves how contentious Abdullah’s political legacy was. Maisuma was a particularly contrarian pocket of the City Side area and had fervently supported Sheikh Abdullah and his NC from the beginning. Unlike the Downtown’s bakras (as the followers of Moulvi Farooq were called) who despised Abdullah and saw everything in terms of perpetual victimization, the City Side had no grisly addendums, rifts and rivalries vying for Abdullah’s place. The lives of this working-class area’s older generation spanned Kashmir’s turbulent history and had their collective imagination bidden to the NC brand of politics in the twentieth century.
Abdullah’s ratchet shift in his politics and the 1975 accord were seen by City Siders as a self-mutilation of the Kashmiri denominational political sentiment. But their sentimental allegiance to their leader and the ideological dead freight they had carried for two decades saw them unable to reorient themselves politically and decisively. Within a decade or so, their children, the Genext, whom they had suckled and weaned on their twenty-two years of ‘political vagrancy’ – read anti-Indian sentiment – came of age at a very propitious time during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The tumult of the late 1970s – the Iranian revolution and Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan – had stirred the imaginations of these youngsters on university and college campuses. Even as a kid, one couldn’t miss the mention of new undercurrents, especially downtown, where this Genext increasingly decried their hesitant elders as doddering fools who had been done in by their leader.
Times had changed since Sheikh Abdullah had sung a redemption song and led indentured serfs. These youngsters scoffed at the cheap irony of the NC’s ubiquitous red posters with ‘the great leader’ portraying himself as a stand-in for Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity. His previous espousals of the right to self-determination while opposing the coercive policies of the Indian state had been carried out from the Hazratbal Mosque pulpit, and were too big an irony to miss.
Ashique’s Islamic Students League (ISL), and its contemporary Muslim Students Federation (MSF) in particular, professed assertive religio-centric identity politics of an avowedly irredentist kind, much like the 1930s vintage ethno-confessional political discourse. Formed on the Kashmir University campus in the early 1980s, ISL founder Shakeel Bakshi tried enforcing gender segregation and an overly Islamic atmosphere among the students. Later, his theocratic phase saw Bakshi restarting the annual Milad-un-Nabi5 procession, utilizing it as a vector for identitarian assertion.
The early 1980s also saw arrests of university students who, according to police, were carrying out or planning acts of sabotage. The generational change hadn’t struck Abdullah’s stagnant self-image; given their revanchist appeal of seeking renewal of identitarian politics adumbrated within overly Islamic overtones, he decried this new breed of dissenters as interlopers on his political franchise. Unlike their parents, this new generation of straight talkers was no longer bemused by cliché-ridden politics spewed by what they saw as unimaginative windbags. Their success, in their view, definitely held the potential of not only weakening Abdullah’s hold on power but most importantly, rewriting his political legacy out of existence.
In July 1980, Indian soldiers, riled by the thrashing of one of their drivers after an accident, ran amok and rioted in Srinagar City Centre. Abdullah’s seeming powerlessness to control it and the subsequent praise of the Indian Army as protectors at a public rally was widely decried by his detractors as a geriatric travesty, and by his assenters as a betrayal of his core Muslim constituency. For many observers, these riots and the reaction to them were a watershed moment that exposed Abdullah as a redundant general whose conceit and vanity had mistakenly led him to believe that he still embodied the people’s sentiment and commanded their support while leading an emasculated, senile regime.
7
Abdullah had always warned of explosive situations and usually disparaged the new generation ‘interlopers’ as Indian agents. Instead of engaging them, all he could offer was to send them bouncing from one prison to another while offering his elder son Farooq Abdullah – whom the renowned leftist Tariq Ali described as being ‘not very bright’ – the sceptre of succession.
Farooq Abdullah came to power in 1982, riding the goodwill that the masses had for his father. NC supporters welcomed him and, given their quasi-filial romantic loyalties, portrayed him as a star, a heroic reflection of his illustrious father. However, his reign was less than tranquil. The Central government, acting through a pliant governor, inveigled the elected representatives and upended the popular mandate. Dismissing his government through a mix of intrigue and chicanery, Jagmohan foisted Ghulam Muhammad Shah, Farooq’s brother-in-law and a restless pretender, to the post of chief minister. The common people’s tones appeared incensed. The authorities clamped down a curfew to forestall a violent backlash, but to no avail.
According to an old hard-core NC worker, at an informal meeting at the party office after his removal, Farooq Abdullah ruled out following in his father’s footsteps, that is, launching a plebiscite agitation or anything that posed a risk of incarceration. But even as Farooq washed his hands of the workers and decamped to enjoy less serious pursuits, the youngster lot roused the city into protests and came out on the streets.
Widespread disturbances ensued in the city, including in our Safa Kadal locality. For days on end, demonstrators rained rubble and havoc on the police phalanxes. In much of downtown, protestors were shot and killed. The police not only beat the arrestees badly but also publicly stripped scores of them as a punitive measure before detaining them for months on end. I remember the bleeding welts on the back of one of my uncles, who was severely belted by policemen in front of our house for his display of defiance.
Underneath the surface though, a subtle change in the air became palpable. I was still a pre-teen and watched the bands of brickbat-hurling young men up close. These were the stone-pelting mob’s mobile vanguard bound by college student fraternities, with their defiance and anarchist behaviour patterns ostensibly untrammelled by the repressive measures. These boys fired up by some inexplicable fury, led the mobs from the front, rotating through various downtown neighbourhoods, sometimes opening new fronts by rushing to curfew-bound trouble spots by canoeing across the Jhelum. The lads would be seen carrying trophies: police batons and belts, helmets, shields, khaki caps snatched from policemen who suffered the ill luck of being cornered by them.
Within Safa Kadal, I saw many of them graduate to Molotov cocktails in violent confrontations with the police, who to them symbolized corrupt unrepresentative power. Years later, even as the insurgency erupted in 1990, I came across at least one of the Molotov cocktail pelters, this time patrolling a downtown street with a gleaming Kalashnikov clutched firmly in his hand. Not many older people could discern the generational change or the mood of the young protestors and the disquieting political shifts. Old school patrimonial types overlooked the very divergent rationale behind the then youngsters’ overt attempts to radicalize the consciousness of the younger cohort by indulging in extreme anti-state violence on the streets. Like many others, the NC cadre mistook their ferocious rhapsodies not as attempting a final break with their older generation’s politics, but as fervent support for the grand old political party.
Even as Governor Jagmohan dismissed the Shah administration in early 1986 and promulgated laws against consuming meat on Hindu holidays, widely perceived as skewing the professional exam lists to favour minority Kashmiri Pandits, and came down on demonstrators with a vicious force, it was hard not to miss the street-side elders and youngsters emphasizing his work as an Indian state gambit to extend its successful reversal of historical norms that now stipulated repressing Muslims to an inferior level, as the broader aim of its latent policy in the Valley.
8
The right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami’s office in Srinagar used to be situated right in the middle of a nondescript lane in Maisuma, a furlong away from the ruling NC office in Gaw Kadal. It didn’t have many local recruits but was more of a nodal point for its rural-based party’s cadres arriving in the city. The Jamaat’s political mobilization in 1970 saw them venture forth and indulge in an experimental courtship with what was then popularly seen as a cynically manipulated polling exercise that won some seats, as well as the ire of the NC. Sheikh Abdullah, still vying for a plebiscite, never forgave them and as soon as he came to power, designated the Jamaat as Enemy No.1, proceeding to emasculate it by closing down its schools. When Bhutto was hanged in Pakistan, the NC cadres laid waste Jamaat-sympathizing villages in south Kashmir.
The Jamaat affiliates made a contesting bid in the March 1987 elections against the Farooq Abdullah–Rajiv Gandhi combo, and foremost among them was Mohammad Yusuf Shah, later known more by his nom de guerre Salahudeen, the de facto head of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen militant group. But the watershed point was reached when the City Side student organizations, including ISL and MSF, acquiesced to throw in their lot to support the MUF candidates within both Downtown and City Side constituencies.
To this end, the 1987 elections saw the youngsters’ unprecedented political mobilization as an alternative vox populi. These lads were wary of the patronizing shrugs and smiles of the shop-soiled NC or their cohorts. In street after street, the MUF workers emphasized the threat to Kashmiri Muslim identity, and ethno-religious assertion became a rallying point against Farooq Abdullah. The photographs of Farooq Abdullah sporting vermillion marks on his forehead, or his temple visits were exhibited in a bid to expose him as someone who couldn’t be trusted to safeguard the assertive form of collective political heritage.
It was grey and raining on that fateful March day when elections were held. The canvassing youngsters’ feelings of resentment and dislike denounced the previous generation for being blind to what the Abdullah family and its ilk had wrought in the Vale. Political lines pitted fathers against sons and nephews against uncles, neighbours against neighbours. In Maisuma, the election day turned violent as MUF supporters made a serious effort to prevent bogus voting. Seeing the extent of polarization and antagonism of the young voters, the NC polling agents tried scuttling the vote and in one bizarre incident, the son of an NC bigwig stabbed the MUF chief polling agent.
In what came to be viewed as a massively rigged election, the MUF won only four seats. Many observers surmised that the MUF would have mustered not more than a dozen seats in the eighty-odd-member assembly, but the rigging gave them a new lease of life as victims. Instead of finding a middle ground, the new government could only muster noxious provocation. In massive repressive measures, hundreds of MUF activists as well ISL and MSF cadres were charged under the notorious Public Safety Act and jailed without trial. ISL never recovered from this and shrunk away, ceasing to be a cogent force in student politics.
A few brave NC workers were astute enough to feel the ground slip beneath their feet. Their wised-up utterings were drowned in the cacophony of victory dances. Farooq Abdullah and his circle of passionless and flat-footed lackeys lacked the counterpoint of their ideologically intent opponents, who took pride in the bigger struggle for the Kashmiri political identity. The repression had only emboldened them.
On Eid-ul-Adha festival day in 1987, even as thousands of people including myself gathered for the collective festival prayer, truckloads of MUF workers descended on the Eidgah grounds. The Eid day and the Eidgah venue had for years been a converging and canvassing spot for NC’s religious tokenism, and Sheikh Abdullah in particular had mingled with the masses and sometimes led prayers. The MUF workers’ rampage disrupted the gathering. As the imam was manhandled, Farooq Abdullah thought it better to skip the prayer and leave the venue.
Little did anyone know that this, the heightened antagonism between Kashmiri society’s many layers, would exact a future price, opening a new chapter of political turmoil full of pathos and terrifying violence that would both interlock and mangle many lives and fates in the years to come.
9
Standing astride the O’Connell bridge’s balustrade on a balmy summer afternoon in 2012, I hit the eureka moment and saw through the paradox that till now had seemingly escaped the grasp of both journalism and recent history. It became paramount that I revisit my memory and the City Side area to gain a perspective from the many people I had seen fighting in 1989, many of whom had been insurgents and spent time in jail. I would have to do this to get an idea of how a generational shift produced such a cataclysmic upheaval in Kashmir. My revisit was enlightening, to say the least.
In a de-provincialized provincial place, the individual and his self-realizing quest could willy-nilly have been expressed only as part of a community image, offering absolutely no place for those who abhorred being defined by the same. Propelled by political tensions and instabilities, the new generations’ radically different collective egoism made them assertive janissaries, the new vanguard subconsciously laying a revanchist claim on the 1931 sentiment.
This new generation couldn’t just be derisively dismissed as malcontents, given the assertive ethno-confessional mores that had been so ingrained within their society’s DNA through anti-Indian political mobilization by Sheikh Abdullah. This sentiment’s claims to a distinct, non-subcontinental particularism kept the society on edge. The MUF workers’ action in their view was a message that the Abdullahs and NC had forfeited the right of representation by compromising on the struggle on the key question of self-determination. Their situation had transmogrified a violently disruptive claim on the symbolism of identitarian political legacy in downtown and the City-Side belts, the heartland of support for Sheikh Abdullah, and they were teetering on the edge of a violent revolt which in its first stage sought physically rooting out NC’s claim and appeal from rank and file.
Farooq Abdullah was grasping at straws. By the summer of 1989, he had relocated to the Hazratbal Mosque where his misdirected bombast threatened denizens with breaking the shutters of their shops for their temerity in adhering to mass strike calls. Many felt he wanted to hasten his own undoing.
Perhaps he too surmised that these protests and protestors would in time eat their humble pie, passed over by history, adding another pentimento on Kashmir’s political canvas. But the times were different. A hundred odd miles as the crow flies, the Soviet Red Army was being beaten twig and branch by the raggedy Afghans, and the Pakistani state was the main conduit of this war. It was perhaps a dint of circumstance or plain chance that under Gen. Zia’s patronage, the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan was one of the most powerful non-state actors involved in this war.
10
The LoC, an eccentric line dividing semi-impassable ragged terrain drawn approximately near the lateral third of the Vale’s western wing in 1947 by the UN, marks the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled areas along their ceasefire positions. By the 1980s, it had largely realized its main objective and ceased being the escape hatch for dissenters fleeing to Pakistan by restricting movement. Through laws, fences and guards, the Indian state had successfully compartmentalized and isolated the two sides socially, politically and economically.
In early 1988, even as the four MUF legislators tried out boilerplate denunciations to force the government to listen, young Jamaat sympathizers with hard-line nationalist self-images crossed the LoC. These first recruits to the arms training camps organized by the Pakistan Army comprised rural and suburban Srinagar lads, including Bilal Siddiqi, Aijaz Dar, Ashraf Dar and Abdullah Bangroo. This opened the floodgates for the mass departure that reached its peak in the 1990s. Thousands made the journey and thousands died.
It was a sultry mid-September night of 1988. The signal event heralding the insurgency saw its many leaders, led by Aijaz Dar and consisting amongst them notably of Maqbool Ilahi – another pioneer militant who later became one of the founders of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen group – launch an assault on the heavily fortified residence of the deputy inspector general of Kashmir Police. The botched raid ended abruptly and resulted in the death of Aijaz Dar. The state responded with war-like swiftness and scores of insurgents who had gone across the LoC were arrested, and others unable to bear the heat scurried back to Pakistan to cool their heels and to regroup and start anew.
Back in the Valley in mid-1989, after another round of disturbances, Srinagar had come back to some degree of normality. I was about to witness an incident that would indelibly imprint itself on my memory. Having paused my car, I was waiting my turn at this famous traditional kulfi joint at downtown’s Buhyr Kadal bus stop. Glancing around, I watched an ice-cream vendor ask a smoking youngster to steer away from his handcart. In response, the young man brutally roughed up the vendor. The locals intervened and broke up the fight. One vociferous man repeatedly reprimanded the assaulter, shouting, ‘You want to end up in jail again? You were released this morning and this is what you get into!’ Someone remarked that the lad had been picked up during a night-time raid by the police as part of their intensified harassment campaign but let off without charge a week later, but not before he had been soundly thrashed.
Why was this generation so politicized? Some imaginary line had been crossed, especially by those who witnessed or were victimized by the crackdowns of the late 1980s. Their radicalization saw them cross some Rubicon, which no Cassandra could have possibly prophesied. In retrospect, I could only surmise with such frustrating elements around, and an insurgency already under way, that the wheels of Kashmir’s history had started revving their pace and grinding faster.
Epilogue
In the winter of 2012–13, I was back home, on and about loitering the City Side and the Gaw Kadal bridge area. I intently listened to the now middle-aged acquaintances, smart and determined veterans of those yesteryears’ street agitations and the insurgency.
These greying friends, some wearing hooded denim jackets, others in quilted tartan shirts and jeans to fend off the cold, dry wind that chilled up the atmosphere down to our bones, looked like doppelgängers of Bruce Springsteen’s Philadelphia video Avatar. Their weather-beaten looks, furrowed faces and intense expressions made up for their serious demeanours, which abhorred victimhood labels. They discussed families, their children and the future, the challenges posed by their past and adjusting to suburban relocations.
Surprisingly, after their stints in street fighting, insurgency and prisons, none of them had ventured into the overground separatist polity, nor vied for a place as players or claques. Listening to them and their profoundly grounded ethno-religious-denominational motivations one could figure that the 1989 spring was a watershed point in a way. Their ideations seemed literally like leafing through UCLA historian Perry Anderson’s LRB Partition essay,6 given the concurrence between his studied opinions and their views. These former insurgents that I spoke to, derided the pro-India political groups and dispensations ruling the state as unrepresentative and forcibly inflicted on the local populace. In their opinion, the uninterrupted disturbances and political entropy afflicting the Vale since 1947 were a direct outcome of the indiscriminate use of force by the Indian state to muzzle protest and dissent against the indelible humiliation inflicted through political disenfranchisement. These hostile policies and browbeating of the Kashmiri populace, in their view, stemmed from the denominational identity of the Indian state – its innately confessional ‘Hindu’ character – which in their opinion is inherently irreconcilable and mutually antagonistic to the Kashmiri – specifically Kashmiri Muslim – political aspirations.7
Back in the 1980s, many of these lads putting their own futures at stake had sought self-realization through extreme political imperatives, defined by a meld of ethno-religious kinship and
AK-47 guns, to mount a violent challenge to the Indian state. Breaking the monopoly of state-inflicted violence using AK-47, on behalf of themselves and others would, in their view, alter what they saw as an unfavourable political status quo. This inevitable cataclysmic confrontation would, in their opinion, end the poignant inadequacies of political engagement that the previous generations had encountered.
The advent of Kalashnikovs in 1989 had provided the battle space with new militantism and its lead elements coming to the fore. The decks were being cleared for a headwind to blow, wherein revanchist para-militarism could gain a proximal place in Kashmiri political consciousness. Within a few weeks in January 1990, this militarist section of Kashmiri society had staged an effective coup d’état on the pro-India dispensation, rolling over Sheikh Abdullah’s presumed heirs and sending their Shangri-La of patronage systems crashing like a house of cards. The insurgency campaign, predicated by the ‘sentiment’ of daring the power of the Indian forces by targeting them and, by extension, the Indian rule in Kashmir, commenced in earnest.
Twenty-five years later, these City Siders, original veterans of the conflict I sat around with, had an astute grip of the situation; they weren’t politicians but serious attendant observers. They confessed they hadn’t surmised then the rapidity with which the idea of political para-militarism morphed into a source of national pride for their constituency: the Vale’s populace who proffered unconditional support for the war effort and suffered its consequent vagaries. The erstwhile claimants of the ethno-confessional sentiment had successfully claimed the power for themselves, but that wasn’t the end of it.
The confessional politics and its leadership make its way into the hands of these militarist sections who, in their view, weren’t prepared enough to handle the political ramifications. According to them, there were other hitches; the inherent dynamics of the insurgency transcended state boundaries, gaining the Pakistani state an unprecedented physical access and influence in the Vale unimaginable before. It was no longer a bystander staking claims dating back to 1947 and content with peddling rhetoric on world forums. On the flipside, the Pakistani establishment couldn’t extricate themselves from their whims of viewing Kashmir and the conflict as anything else than another arena where the primacy of their India-centric military-strategic interests mattered more than anything else. This agenda imposed its own limitations on the Kashmiri engagement with the political part of their project. I realized, listening to this declamation, that no wonder no overarching political figure like Martin McGuiness or Gerry Adams could emerge in that situation.
As I mouthed this loud thought, these City Siders poignantly pointed out that the leadership thrown up by the cataclysmic events had been unimaginative; they went back to reprise the Plebiscite Front tactics, their idea of leadership was giving rousing speeches to a sea of humanity at Hazrabal Mosque and raise slogans; these guys had no idea that a sea change had occurred within the social environs since the 1950s and ’60s. The Indians, on the other hand, actively sought to suborn and coerce them to the extent that many of them got shop-soiled.
The situation led to other ramifications that had never crossed anyone’s minds. As an example, my old friend told me, stamping out the Abdullahs from the political scene was part of the script; but after a few years, the counter-insurgent lads’ fratricidal campaign created a situation that saw the former stage a comeback. Who could have thought, he further elaborated, that the platitude-spewing mediocre sort Mufti Sayeed, who never had any political support base, would one day rule the state? But civil wars always have chancers lurking around, he commented dryly, strategic strivers whose vested interests manage to make most of the conflict.
That was a very cynical view of the whole thing, I interjected. Not really, others spoke up, opining that the physical and social cost of the violence suffered by the wider populace propelled the dynamics of this political mobilization to a renewed, confessionally grounded nationalism that has over time acquired not only a definitional clarity but actively sought its own independent agency which went beyond beating the drums of racial and cultural separateness. The mass agitations of 2008 and 2010 are a pointer, the first one declaimed, that the Genext has laid the claim to the 1931 ethno-confessional sentiment. These particular numbers oscillated in my mind; there was no emotive harping on dates – 1931, 1947, 1953, 1965, 1971, 1977 – one usually encountered in downtown Srinagar.
As the winter sun went down, I took their leave and walked back to my Mum’s ancestral house across the bridge, gleaning a look on to the grounds of my Grandpa’s house, I looked around to find it forlorn, shorn of the trees I had so adored; the deaths of an entire middle generation and overseas migrations had taken its toll.
I ventured into the home of another aunt who lives next door. She led me into her drawing room, even as she prepared tea, I couldn’t help but go through old family albums. One of them taken in 1951 featured my grandfather in full uniform, brass stars and buttons, baton and all, sitting on the chair with Grandma, with my Mum and aunts standing around. He had been a first-hand witness to the July 1931 events, from then on, as he had said decades ago, the Vale, the people, the ideas and the politics would never be the same again, which was quite prescient of him.
Dr Mir Khalid is the author of Jaffna Street: Tales of Life, Death, Betrayal and Survival in Kashmir (Rupa Books, 2017), a coming of age chronicle of the Kashmir conflict and Asbaat-e-Khudi (2011) an anthology of Urdu poetry. He has contributed to The Hindu and The Scroll. Trained as a surgeon, his clinical and genomic research project papers have been published in the prestigious British Journal of Surgery. He currently works in the Department of Neurosurgery, Government Medical College Super Specialties Hospital in Srinagar.
NOTES
1Bono is an Irish musician, lead singer of the famous band U2.
2Mar Paech: Hookah with a rubber-tube pipe rather than bamboo.
3For more details on Jammu pogrom, see Copland, I., State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c. 1900–1950, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Also see Snedden, Christopher, The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, Columbia: Hurst Publishers, 2012.
4See Lamb, Alastair, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846-1990, London: Roxford Books, 1991. Also see Noorani, A.G., The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012, Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 2013.
5A holy day commemorating the birthday of Prophet Muhammad [editors].
6Anderson, Perry, ‘After Nehru’, London Review of Books, Vol. 34, No. 15, 2012, 2 August 2012, pp. 21–36, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n15/perry-anderson/after-nehru (accessed on 29 September 2018).
7Conversations with former insurgents. For more discussion on this, please see Khalid, Mir, Jaffna Street: Tales of Life, Death, Betrayal and Survival in Kashmir, New Delhi: Rupa Publishers, 2017; and Anderson, Perry; ‘After Nehru’, London Review of Books, Vol. 34, No. 15, 2 August 2012, pp. 21–36.