The New York Times,
June 3, 1999

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Kashmir, the Imperiled Paradise By SALMAN RUSHDIE

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[Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses," "The Moor's Last

Sigh" and, most recently, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet." ]

 

LONDON -- For more than 50 years, India and Pakistan have been arguing and

periodically coming to blows over one of the most beautiful places in the

world, Kashmir, which the Mughal emperors thought of as Paradise on earth.

As a result of this unending quarrel, Paradise has been partitioned,

impoverished and made violent. Murder and terrorism now stalk the valleys

and mountains of a land once so famous for its peacefulness that outsiders

made jokes about the Kashmiris' supposed lack of fighting spirit.

I have a particular interest in the Kashmir issue because I am more than

half Kashmiri myself, because I have loved the place all my life and

because I have spent much of that life listening to successive Indian and

Pakistani governments, all of them more or less venal and corrupt,

mouthing the self-serving hypocrisies of power while ordinary Kashmiris

suffered the consequences of their posturings.

 

Pity those ordinary, peaceable people, caught between the rock of India

and the hard place that Pakistan has always been!

 

And, as the world's newest nuclear powers square off yet again, their new

weapons making their dialogue of the deaf more dangerous than ever before,

I say, A plague on both their houses. "Kashmir for the Kashmiris" is an

old slogan, but the only one that expresses how the subjects of this

dispute have always felt; how, I believe, the majority of them would still

say they feel, if they were free to speak their minds without fear.

 

India has badly mishandled the Kashmir case from the beginning. Back in

1947 the state's Hindu maharaja "opted" for India, and in spite of United

Nations resolutions supporting the largely Muslim population's right to a

plebiscite, India's leaders have always rejected the idea, repeating over

and over that Kashmir is "an integral part" of India. (The Nehru-Gandhi

dynasty is itself of Kashmiri origin.)

 

India has maintained a large standing military presence in Kashmir for

decades, both in the Vale of Kashmir where most of the population is based

and in mountain fastnesses like the site of the present flashpoint. This

force feels to most Kashmiris like an occupying army and is greatly

resented.

 

Yet until recently the generality of Indians, even the liberal

intelligentsia, refused to face up to the reality of Kashmiris' growing

animosity toward them. As a result, the problem has grown steadily worse,

greatly exacerbated by laws that threatened long jail sentences for any

Kashmiri making anti-Indian statements in public.

 

Pakistan, for its part, has from its earliest times been a heavily

militarized state, dominated by the army even when under notionally

civilian rule and spending a huge part of its budget -- at its peak,

around half the total budgetary expenditure -- on its armed forces. Such

spending, and the consequent might of the generals, depends on having a

dangerous enemy to defend against and a "hot" cause to pursue.

 

It has therefore always been in the interest of Pakistan's top brass to

frustrate peacemaking initiatives toward India and to keep the Kashmir

dispute alive. This, and not the alleged interests of Kashmiris, is what

lies behind Pakistan's policy on the issue.

 

These days, in addition, the Pakistani authorities are under pressure from

their country's mullahs and radical Islamists, who characterize the

struggle to "liberate" (that is, to seize) Kashmir as a holy war. But

Kashmiri Islam has always been of the mild, Sufistic variety, in which

local pirs, holy men, are revered as saints. This open-hearted, tolerant

Islam is anathema to the firebrands of Pakistan and might well, under

Pakistani rule, be at risk.

 

Thus, the present-day growth of terrorism in Kashmir has roots in India's

treatment of Kashmiris, but it has equally deep roots in Pakistan's

interest in subversion. Yes, Kashmiris feel strongly about the Indian

"occupation" of their land; but it is also almost certainly true that

Pakistan's army and intelligence service have been training, aiding and

abetting the men of violence.

 

The fact that India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons makes urgent the

need to move beyond the deadlock and the moribund 50-year-old language of

the crisis. What Kashmiris want, and what India and Pakistan must be

persuaded to offer them, is a reunited land, an end to Lines of Control

and warfare on high Himalayan glaciers. What they want is to be given a

large degree of autonomy; to be allowed to run their own lives.

 

The Kashmir dispute has already exposed the frailty of the cold war theory

of nuclear deterrence, according to which the extreme danger of nuclear

arsenals should deter those who possess them from embarking even on a

conventional war. That thesis now seems untenable. It was probably not

deterrence that prevented the cold war from turning hot, but luck.

 

So here we are in a newly dangerous world, in which nuclear powers

actually are going to war. In such a time, it is essential that the

special-case status of Kashmir be recognized and used as the basis of the

way forward. The Kashmir problem must be defused once and for all, or

else, in the unthinkable worst-case scenario, it may end in the nuclear

destruction of Paradise itself, and of much else besides.