--Book Review--
Kashmir in the Crossfireby Victoria Schofield
(London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996)
354 pages, $29.95Reviewed by Subhash Kak
[Editor's note: Subhash Kak is a professor at
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. His most
recent book is The Secrets of Ishbar: Poems on Kashmir
and other Landscapes.]
Kashmir has been on the front-pages of newspapers around the
world during the last seven years. All kinds of ghastly reports have
originated from this beautiful but unfortunate valley: stories of
kidnappings and murders, police shootout and arson, bombings and
terror. To make sense of this, we have now a new book by Victoria
Schofield.
Schofield, who admits to being an old friend of Benazir Bhutto, is a
fairly objective reporter. But her writing is marred by her
over-reliance on the views of the communist Prem Nath Bazaz and the
Islamist Muhammad Saraf. The result is that she has been unable to
find the high ground from which she could survey the events with
command.
But it is to her credit that she recognizes the ethnic and regional
complexities of the Jammu and Kashmir State: if the Muslims are
predominant in the valley, the Hindus are the majority in Jammu, and
the Buddhists in Ladakh. The Kashmir valley, which has about half the
state's population, is only about fifteen percent of the area. What do
you do if one region wants a change in the political arrangement, while
insisting that the rest of the state must go along?
Schofield's book is divided into three nearly equal parts: ancient
history and the Dogra kings; Sheikh Abdullah and the partitioning of
the State; and events since the early 1960s. While it is balanced in its
recounting of events, it is short on analysis. It is clear that
Schofield is often paraphrasing material from sources that she is
barely familiar with. How else would one explain her mentioning that
the Mauryan Chandragupta and Ashoka were brothers (page 7) or spell
Jayasimha as Jayashima? These errors are most egregious for the
ancient period, but for the later periods also she uses her sources
uncritically. She is unaware of important new scholarship related to
the transfer of power by the British which demonstrates that the old
Pakistani complaints regarding a conspiracy between the British and the
Indians--which she repeats at length--are wrong. The result is that
the book presents at best a shadow history which is unable to bring to
life the forces that have shaped events in Kashmir.
Schofield neither understands Kashmiri Islam nor sees how the revolt
in Kashmir is related to larger currents in contemporary Islam. Like
Javanese Islam, Kashmiri Islam has its three categories: the
orthodox; the traditionalists whose religion includes many older Hindu
beliefs; and the professional and business aristocracy. The
traditionalists form the overwhelming majority and they follow what has
been termed Rishi Islam but they are under constant pressure from the
orthodoxy. During his times, Sheikh Abdullah exploited the dynamics
between these groups to cement his leadership, but he remained at heart
the leader of the traditionalists. He did this by meeting the
challenge of the orthodox Mullahs through his own sermons in the
mosques.
By the time Farooq, his son, succeeded him in 1982, the gentrification
of this family had created a wall between it and the peasants and other
traditionalists. While Farooq was chasing skirts and sarees in
Srinagar and Delhi, a new breed of Islamists, inspired by the success
of Ayatollah Khomenei--whose own father had emigrated to Iran from
Kashmir--was dreaming of a revolutionary Islamic state. The revolt of
1990 was for that purpose, but being led by a coalition of the
orthodoxy and the aristocracy, it is riven by its own contradictions.
The traditionalists would rather have an independent state, while the
small minority of the Islamists wish for a union with Pakistan.
Schofield provides no background to geopolitical issues either.
Pakistan and China have both spoken against the notion of an
independent Kashmir. The reason behind such a stand is clear. The
independence of a sovereign Kashmir would have to be guaranteed by the
United States and other major powers. As it is located in a strategically
important region, Kashmir would become a pawn in the great power
rivalries. We have already witnessed the impact on this region of the
power games of the great powers in Afghanistan in the eighties. An
unstable Kashmir, as a neighbour to Tibet and the newly independent
Central Asian countries, will have the potential of destabilizing the
entire region.
If the independence option is foreclosed by Pakistan, the prime backer
of the Kashmir insurgency, what can the militants hope for? Kashmir as
a part of Pakistan will become a cultural colony of Pakistani Punjab
and most Kashmiri Muslims will not like that. Such an analysis was a
factor in the politics of many leaders in the Jammu and Kashmir State
in 1947. The leader of the Punjabi speaking Jammu Muslims was Ghulam
Abbas who headed the Muslim Conference. It is believed that Abdullah,
in his meetings with Jinnah's emissaries who were trying to get his
agreement to an accession to Pakistan, did not receive guarantees of
free rein. Moreover, Abdullah was also concerned with the
immediate challenge to his position by Ghulam Abbas and the reality
that within the undivided state the Kashmiri Muslims formed only about
one third of the population. Nevertheless, it would not have escaped
his notice that in a Punjabi-dominated Pakistan, J&K State with a
majority of Punjabi/Dogri speakers would have become a de facto
Punjabi province.
As a self-professed leader of Kashmiri Muslims, Sheikh Abdullah must
have considered political decisions that affected the identity of the
Kashmiri Muslims. As the longstanding war between the Kurds and the
Turks or the Kurds and the Arabs or the one amongst the Somalis
establishes, amongst believers Islam ceases to be the glue that binds
people.
How do we explain Pakistani obsession with Kashmir? It is a nation in
search of an identity. Predominantly a Punjabi state, it has failed to
develop a federal structure where the Sindhi, Baloch, and the Pathan
minorities would feel equal partners. No wonder, since its creation,
its politics has been driven by urges of self-definition in relation to
its neighbors. United primarily by its enmity for India, it has also
attempted definition as a member of the Islamic world and more recently
as an aspiring leader of the newly independent Turkic states of Central
Asia. Pakistani preoccupation with Kashmir might serve internal
political ends but it only postpones and makes more difficult the
resolution of its own basic problems.
Pakistani declaration that it will not accept an independent Kashmir,
and given the impossibility that Kashmir will join Pakistan, makes it
clear that its primary objective is to encourage disorder in the
valley. This is useful for domestic politics and can also be exploited
to further its strategic agenda internationally.
For their part, Kashmiri politicians themselves have exploited the
ethnic and religious differences in the State in cynical and dangerous
ways. I argued recently in my book India at Century's End
oneway to break the impasse is to divide the State into three different
administrative provinces of Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh. Each of these
provinces would be linguistically and ethnically quite homogeneous.
Kashmir valley could be turned into a centrally administered
territory. In this province Kashmiri should be made the official
language. If the militants articulate alienation from an
administrative arrangement where the official language, Urdu, is known
only in the towns and where the Kashmiri sees himself as different from
the residents of Jammu and Ladakh and thus not quite in control of his
destiny, then the Valley as a separate state would answer such
aspirations.
As a separate small state, it would become easier to safeguard
legitimate interests of the Valley minorities. The Kashmiri politician
is also likely to snap out of the current emotive rejection of an open
economic policy in the region, and see the benefits of such changes in
the law that encourage outside investment. In the long run one could
hope that the politics in the state will be based on the concept of
circumscribed power, a system of checks and balances. It is then that
the resolution of the Kashmir problem will become possible.
We must also see the events in Kashmir foreshadowing revolts elsewhere
in India. There has developed a great divide between the bureaucracy
and the people. Deep frustrations find expression in terms of
religious, linguistic or ethnic vocabulary.
I remember vividly a very sad incident in Srinagar in 1986 that
illustrates the collapse of civic order long before the revolt. I was
riding a bus from Hazratbal to Lal Chowk. It happened to be a
government bus with an old driver. We were followed by a private bus on
the same route trying to pass us but the road was very narrow.
Eventually, the private bus did overtake us as the street widened and
it suddenly screeched to a halt. The driver, a young fellow, jumped out,
rushed to our bus, and began to pummel and beat up the old driver
accusing him of deliberately not having let him pass depriving him of
passengers! It was a false charge, and even if it had been true our
driver would have been within his rights. But no one came to his
rescue. I am sure he did not seek justice from the police either.
Victoria Schofield does not tell us anything about all these
fascinating questions. Nevertheless, her book is a well-intentioned
effort at understanding the complexities of the Kashmir situation. But
since she does not understand the forces that have shaped history in
that region she does not provide any real insights. Even as a
second-hand account the book fails because she has not chosen her
sources wisely.