Check the balkanisation of India

I lived for several months on a houseboat in a quieter part of the Dal Lake in the early 1980s. Yasin of indeterminable age and caretaker of the moored craft, part of which was also my quarter, had recently returned from the Haj with a bag full of dates and a head full of stories.

Nothing amused him more than to tell me about his encounter with the Haj pilgrims from Pakistan especially from those parts of Kashmir no longer with us.

If one were to believe him everything was a mess out there compared to the parts of his state with India.

He was pretty certain that while Kashmiris badly wanted a better deal in India, going over to Pakistan was hardly an option, still less freedom as a landlocked country at the mercy of Pakistan.

It was not so much the politics of our western neighbour that worried him or its administrative and economic mess – it was the frightening level of intolerance of other faiths under General Zia ul Haq that scared him most.

Kashmir, he often stated with pride, was different — “we live with the Pandits and the Sikhs.”

For those of us who have experienced it, the early 1980s was a period of substantial calm and extraordinary tolerance in the Kashmir Valley.

I could then still send Yasin out for a beer or drop into one of the many restaurants for a drink, feast on the best and fearlessly walk back home close to midnight.

Then, unlike now, the streets were patrolled mostly by unarmed Kashmiri policemen, rarely soldiers of the Indian army.

Women almost never were in burqas and many a traditional shop in the middle of nowhere was smartly managed by a single — usually Muslim — lady. Yes, there was the odd riot and stone pelting but nothing more than most Indian cities experience from time to time.

My job frequently took me to rural Kashmir where Pandits quietly lived their lives as they wished with their temples and their festivals in villages that were overwhelmingly Muslim.

All that changed for the worse, seemingly irrevocably. The period I lived through in J&K was truly the Belle Époque — an era that now survives only as nostalgic memory — an ache for the Pandits and as an inexplicable question mark (“how did this happen?”) for the tolerant and accommodating Muslim community left behind in the Valley.

A combination of fear, fanaticism and aggressive bullying drove the Pandits out of Kashmir.

Most of those who left are now either too old or too unwilling to return even if given the chance.

Small sections of radicalised Muslims had successfully frightened and scared their community’s majority into silent acquiescence of a religious cleansing reminiscent of the Nazis.

Fortunately for us, a few factors we all tend to overlook have kept Kashmir in India. The rest of the country provided the vast space into which hundreds of thousands of Pandits could flow and make a life.

To some extent, the lack of serious economic activity in the Valley for over two decades led to a surprising exodus of entrepreneurial Muslims from there to the rest of India as well.

They now constitute the face of handicraft retail at many tourist spots in the country — be it Panaji in Goa or Jew Town in Kochi.

India, Kashmiris realise, is their home as well, and nothing stops them from getting to any part of it regardless of some unhappy happenings in their backyard.

However, there are lessons for all of us to derive from the religious cleansing in the Kashmir valley. We must recognise that an intolerant minority within a majority is arguably the most destructive force in human history.

It has the will and staying power to harangue, riot, scare and bludgeon the rest into sullen and temporary submission.

Israel’s ongoing effort to make its non-Jewish people second class citizens is only matched by the extreme xenophobia of the Russians since the break-up of the multi-religious, multi-racial Soviet Union (USSR).

Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy laws have left its minorities in constant fear of being killed. Across West Asia non-Muslims are getting out of even seemingly liberal countries such as Egypt and Lebanon.

In some strange way these examples are used by some to justify a scapegoating of religious minorities in our country as if they are responsible for the excesses of their religious counterparts elsewhere in the world and, therefore, fair game to be persecuted or harassed here.

The fanatics leading the charge against religious minorities in India indeed have a lot in common with the Taliban which blew up the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forcibly converting Yazidis in Iraq.

Secularism has served India well. It has done the Hindus no harm while leaving the minorities feeling safe. Learning from what happened to the Pandits in Kashmir, the Hindu majority in the country needs to take on and not be cowed down by the few fanatics in their midst who are striving to fit a religion that neither has a centre nor a periphery, into a fundamentalist bag.

It is their kind that led to Partition in the first place and we need to stop them now or pay the price — the balkanisation of a country. India had for long remained an idea; if the Ashok Singhals and the Pravin Togadias of the country are to have their way, it may not exist even as a thought.

The writer is with the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

COMMENT NOW