India (53 page)

Shakeel had no time for Osama bin Laden, although he believed the attacks of 9/11 had been organized by the American government. I asked him why the U.S. might have done this. “They wanted to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. President George Bush had to justify that to his own people.” Did he know about the bombings in London in 2005? “I heard that a train was bombed. It pains me when innocents are killed. It pains me.”

Although he did not use the Internet, he knew about his infamy. He
showed me a pair of folders. Some friends had trawled through sites and printed off Photoshopped pictures of him: Islamic Rage Boy being force-fed a pork chop, as Hillary Clinton, as a vampire, as a woman in a bikini, as “Adolf Mohammed Rage Boy.” What did he feel about the photos? “I surely get hurt when I see these pictures. This is terrorism for me. The people who do this are showing their own culture, so why do they tell us that we are uncivilized? You can’t bring peace by beating the drums or killing people.”

Shakeel’s only source of news was the street. Surrounded by people who lacked knowledge of the outside world, it was not surprising he believed conspiracy theories about the attacks of 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s brand of terrorism had little in common with his upbringing or experience. The mystical Sufi traditions of the Kashmir valley were a long way from the rigid and outdated Arab customs that had given rise to Osama bin Laden’s interpretation of Islam, even if the Western world tended to link them all together. Shakeel became a militant at the age of thirteen because he believed Kashmir deserved better, and his adored elder sister had been thrown out of a high window. When the Islamic Rage Boy phenomenon began and he had his face reproduced around the world, the local police brought him in for questioning. Shakeel was taken before one of Srinagar’s senior police officers, who offered him a government job and said he would find him a girl to marry. (The Indian authorities have a policy of trying to rehabilitate militants who are no longer an obvious threat.)

“They said they would drop all the cases against me if I quit going to demos. But I refused.”

I suggested to Shakeel he must have been tempted by the prospect of a job and a wife. He was unlikely ever to get such a good opportunity again. He looked shy and covered his face with his hands. “I want to marry a non-Muslim woman and convert her to Islam,” he said. “I have been told that if I can convince a non-Muslim woman to marry me—but not convert her by force—there will be a place for me in heaven.”
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The Western or American response to “Rage Boy” was a part of the howl of baffled anger after 9/11, in this case assuming Shakeel Bhat was an example of Salafist extremism. The initial Indian response to him and other Kashmiri men—justice based on delegated torture—came out of indifference; since the quashing of the insurgency in the 1990s, no Delhi government had made a serious attempt to repair the lives of the Kashmiri people. For most Indians it remained a detachable problem, and their usual lack of jingoism was forgotten or abolished in the case of Kashmir.

On the road to Gulmarg, once a fashionable mountain resort and now
nearly deserted, I saw a helmet every few hundred metres. Every road and every village in the Kashmir valley had bunkers and razor wire and mine detectors. The troops were so deeply embedded or institutionalized that, rather than military rule, it felt like an extended army manoeuvre in which local members of the public were incidental. The Kashmiri economy, which had once been dependent on tourism, was now oriented around supplying the estimated half a million troops in the valley. Everywhere we drove, men were standing at the roadside: a helmet, a dark face from the south, a khaki cape, hands holding an SLR. I sensed that Peerzada, the reporter who was travelling with me, saw them only as an army of occupation—during a demonstration some years earlier, forty-three people had been killed in his village.

Some men from the CRPF, the Central Reserve Police Force, were standing by maple trees. They were national paramilitaries, stationed alongside the predominantly Muslim local Kashmiri police. When we stopped a little way from them, they became very tense. We approached, walking past an old Kashmiri house with a slim verandah, wooden shutters and matted reeds for its roof. The CRPF men wore camouflage jackets, canvas shoes and 16 kg metal breastplates—the army had not bought lighter ceramic ones for them. They came from several different states, including Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Haryana. Each day they had to stand at this spot for twelve hours, with a break for lunch, which was delivered by a military truck. They were not allowed to sit at any time; they had to be moving targets. At night they stayed in a house fringed with razor wire. I asked a CRPF man from Kerala what he thought of Kashmir. “I don’t like it,” he said forlornly. “It’s very cold in Kashmir.”

What had made these paramilitary police choose this life? Why were they here? Were they the villains or victims too? Up in Ladakh, I met soldiers who had spent two months sitting in bunkers in the snow waiting to fight to defend the border. At their military museum, they even had the effects of dead Pakistani soldiers on display: their snapshots, ID cards, family letters, Qurans. The rival troops skirmished from time to time on the mountainous border. For the Indian government to impose its will on Kashmir, it needed large numbers of recruits, and if the people on whom the state’s will was imposed spoke a different language, looked different and followed another religion, it made the task of suppression easier. Hemant, a Hindu CRPF officer from the plains of India, told me that he would much rather be in a different job, but Srinigar was where he had landed up. He had been posted to Kashmir twice, in the 1990s and in 2004.

“You catch a terrorist,” he said. “You hand him over to the police and off he goes. A local VIP makes a request, and the terrorist is freed. The Kashmiri police are with you when you patrol. I wanted to be a deputed driver at the high court in Delhi, but that didn’t work out for me. My childhood years were spent in Aligarh, and I ended up working on a taxi stand in Panchsheel Park in Delhi. I joined the force and my first posting was by the side of Dal Lake here, at the headquarters of the CRPF. They think of themselves as Pakistanis in this place.” Yet almost everyone I spoke to in Srinagar had no allegiance to Pakistan; they were Kashmiris who had asked for azadi and now wanted an end to the killing. At the start of the insurgency in the 1990s there had been enthusiasm for Pakistan, but it had soon diminished with the realization that the government in Islamabad was a fickle, self-interested ally.

“Sometimes we talk to the Kashmiris,” said Hemant, “but they only want Muslims to live here. They hide and throw hand grenades at us. When there’s an Indo-Pak cricket match they celebrate right in front of us when India loses, and when India wins it’s like there’s been a death in the family.” I told Hemant I had heard some of his officers were corrupt, selling timber and pursuing other lines of private business. “Our officers? Even the bad ones become good when they are patrolling, because you are all together and your life depends on it. You have to show them respect. There’s so much camaraderie because of our fear of the terrorists. My comrades are from all over, from Bihar, Punjab, Himachal, Assam, Kerala. Even the ones from the south learn to speak Hindi in the force. They pick it up. We’re all like brothers when we’re out patrolling, because that man might save you. The officers can behave very badly. In the 49 battalion in Srinagar there was one senior havildar [sergeant] called Bir Chand. The 2IC, the second-in-command, started abusing him when he was giving a report, saying your mother, your sister and all. Bir Chand went to him afterwards and said, ‘I’ve had thirty years in the force, how can you humiliate me in front of my juniors?’

“The 2IC took up his AK-47 and threatened to shoot him. Bir Chand went back and got his own AK-47 and came in the room and the others all pulled him away. After that, he knew he would go to jail, so he turned the gun and shot himself dead. There was a very bad atmosphere in the camp and the DIG had to come and sort it out. The other officers said to him: ‘We won’t let you see the dead body unless you swear on your life that the 2IC will be dismissed.’ He promised, but it didn’t happen: he reported Bir Chand as mentally ill, and the 2IC only got a transfer. If you’re junior in the
CRPF, you get scared by the officers. A jawan like me, the officer can just kick you out of the service. In the CRPF, I get a salary of Rs16,000–17,000 a month, and if you get put in a special unit you get some extra, you can even have Rs22,000 ($475) a month. For me, I was able to get my children admitted to a central school and have two months’ home leave and fifteen days’ casual leave every year. If I retire at the age of sixty, I get 50 percent of my salary as a pension for life. So I will do my service.”
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In 1858, a year after the suppression of the great rebellion, a Royal Proclamation was read out in towns across the Bengal, Bombay and Madras presidencies “amid great rejoicing,” with flag-raising ceremonies, brass bands and firework displays, the whole watched over by hand-picked soldiers. The richer Parsis of Bombay decorated the streets with triumphal arches, and in Calcutta the Auckland Hotel displayed a picture of the imperial monarch Victoria surmounted by a cross “above which, in brilliant jets of gas, were the words ‘Long Live our Noble Queen!’ ”
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To the surprise of the viceroy, there was no open unrest. The proclamation pardoned those who had taken up arms unless they had been directly engaged in “the Murder of British Subjects,” and offered a ceremonial contract between the “Native Princes” and the queen. The tone of the proclamation was heavily self-conscious, projecting an image of benign, liberal and just rule—and the idea that empire was a shared endeavour. This was a common enough practice in the nineteenth century, the British ingratiating themselves with existing rulers in order to take over trade and territory. By making Victoria the queen of India, the East India Company—a front for imperial rule—was replaced by direct power. The British were now politically incorporated into India in a way they had never been previously, and the subcontinent could be envisioned through the imperial crown. This image of coherence would be appropriated and expanded by India’s nationalist leaders after independence.

The most important section of the “Royal Proclamation to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India” specified that in future no attempt would be made to interfere with religious traditions—the doctrine of multiculturalism. Providing a community did not engage in open revolt, it could continue with whatever obscure social and religious practices it liked. In the half-century leading up to the rebellion, English evangelical Christians had promoted the abolition of practices like sati, the burning of supposedly willing widows who did not wish to live without their husbands. Progressive
Indian organizations like the Brahmo Samaj had also made vigorous moves to encourage social reform. Although he had never been to India, the anti-slavery man William Wilberforce thought Hinduism “mean, licentious and cruel” and its deities “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty,” whereas “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent.”
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Now, on the instruction of Queen Victoria, the natives were free to follow whatever they declared their customs to be. The queen proclaimed:

Although there were some subsequent reforms, such as the abolition of child marriage, most of the religious and social practices in place at the time of independence had not been substantially altered or codified for centuries. Imprisoned in Ahmadnagar Fort in 1944, Jawaharlal Nehru tried to help his sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, when she was widowed: her late husband’s family were preventing her from accessing money, saying that under existing Hindu law it was common ancestral property to which she had no rights.
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It was a close reminder of the social injustices and archaic customs the Indian National Congress intended to reform in the new India. Mohandas Gandhi was explicit about the need to abolish social controls on women, calling purdah “a vicious and brutal custom” that “was doing incalculable harm to the country.”
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Indians would soon be in control of their own destiny, and they had to make important reformist decisions.

While the Constitution was being framed after independence, the law minister Dr. Ambedkar (who himself had plenty of experience of the unkindness done in the name of religion) sought to introduce a new Hindu civil code which would also apply to Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. It would abolish polygamy and restrictions on inter-caste marriage, legalize divorce and maintenance, give women full legal control over their own property and divide the assets of a man who died intestate equally between his male and female children. Conservative Hindus, some of whom were senior Congress leaders, opposed this strongly, believing it would undermine the customs on which their religion was based. Traditionally, a daughter was
no longer part of the household once she was married off, and she became the property of her husband’s family. Any changes would impinge on structures of male power dating back into antiquity. Religious activists objected openly to an untouchable—Ambedkar, someone who would traditionally not be permitted even to read the scriptures—trying to change the codes of Hinduism. The dharma was the preserve of the Brahmin. A speaker at a meeting called by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Ram Lila Ground called the proposed reforms “an atom bomb on Hindu society.”
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Nehru found to his discomfort that many of his colleagues had turned out to be less revolutionary in office than they had been in opposition, and that they agreed with the protestors. Rajendra Prasad asked, why not leave time-honoured customs alone, at least until after the first general election? This was hardly the time, another senior Congress politician told Nehru, “to multiply or accentuate differences.”
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