Kashmir: Fundamentalism Takes Root

Jonah Blank

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1999

Article preview: first 500 of 6,026 words total.

Summary:  Last year's nuclear tests by both India and Pakistan brought world attention to the decades-old Kashmir conflict. Claimed by both countries, the former princely state has been ravaged by a war that shows no sign of ending. Both rivals have invested heavily in blood and treasure to make Kashmir their own. Now Afghan-trained mujahideen are leading the fight, bringing their own foreign brand of radical Islam. Neither New Delhi nor Islamabad has ever asked what Kashmiris want. They would not like the answer: more than anything else, Kashmiris hope to be left alone.

Jonah Blank, an anthropologist, is the author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and a forthcoming study of fundamentalism and Muslim identity entitled Mullah on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras.

A BROKEN PROMISE

In Srinagar's Lal Chowk, the most volatile bazaar in the most volatile city in India's most volatile state, life is as normal as life here ever gets. Merchants and marketers haggle over the price of bruised apples, auto-rickshaws jockey with oxcarts for passage through the bustling alleyways, and soldiers gaze lazily through the gun-slits of their sandbagged bunker. There's a rumor that the separatist leader Shabbir Shah will hold a rally at noon, but nobody seems particularly interested. It's almost time for lunch.

Much closer to schedule than might be expected, Shah marches in with a few dozen placard-waving, slogan-shouting supporters. Almost instantly the procession turns into a melee: riot police with helmets and shields stream out of an armored van, beat the protesters back with heavy bamboo canes, and flood the square with billowy white clouds of tear gas. The rally is over in a matter of moments. The demonstrators are dragged, choking and retching, off to jail; the bystanders are left to gag, sputter, and dash blindly for water to wash the burning, blistering pain from their eyes and throats. Within 15 minutes the shopkeepers have returned to their stools, the police to their posts, and the porters to their handcarts -- all still looking forward to their midday meal.

Almost exactly half a century ago in Lal Chowk, aging locals recall, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru renewed his promise that Kashmiris would decide their own future.

ATOMIC DJINN

Now, with both India and Pakistan brandishing atomic weapons, it is Kashmiris who may decide the future of the entire subcontinent. This summer's battle in the mountains over Kargil was history's first direct combat between two nuclear powers. Every border skirmish between India and Pakistan now carries the potential -- however remote -- for catastrophic escalation, and in Kashmir, such skirmishes are a daily fact of life. There will be no safety for either state without stability in Kashmir, and there will be no stability in Kashmir without the cooperation of its people. The diplomats may forge a framework for nuclear detente and even find a mutually agreeable way of divvying up the prime Himalayan real estate, but any deal imposed from the top down will be a ball of plutonium just short of critical mass.

The Kargil infiltrators were driven from their icy aeries by Indian arms and world pressure, but even in defeat they accomplished their real goal: to put Kashmir squarely in the international spotlight. India refuses to accept outside involvement and the West has so far been happy to oblige, but the prospect of nuclear exchange makes Kashmir too dangerous to ignore. That this fact -- repeated like a drumbeat by local separatists and Pakistani diplomats alike -- conveniently fits the agenda of those who oppose India's rule does not make it any less true. Conjure a nuclear djinn fervently enough, and sooner or later it is likely to appear.

But Kargil may also, paradoxically, have laid the groundwork for a ...

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