I was at our friends’ house for dinner on the 4th of August when the husband asked me if my parents were okay. Then he asked what Article 370 was. This was a question I have been repeatedly asked by both my Indian and non Indian friends, since August 5th.
Our friend mentioned about heavy security in Kashmir and I quickly looked at the headlines on my phone about Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti being under house arrest. I frankly don’t watch the news over the weekend. It is good to keep away from all the doom and gloom that has become a norm and Sunday had already been a really a terrible day with shootings in Texas and Ohio within hours of each other. So I let it go that night.
But you can’t escape the inevitable.
I woke up Monday morning (August 5th) to the news of Article 370 being scrapped and Jammu and Kashmir being downgraded to a Union Territory from a State – a first in the history of India. It is usually the other way around. Ladakh too was separated into a stand alone Union territory. The jubilation amongst the Kashmiri Hindus was loud and vociferous. The silence from Kashmiri Muslims was equally deafening.
And miracles of miracles, I got through to whoever I wanted to get through to in Jammu – my Mom included. Usually even my sister who is currently in Delhi cannot get to Mom or Dad even locally. Kashmir was not accessible at all although I saw tweets galore from Abdullah and Mufti even after hearing of internet and cell phones being blocked. “Sitting in their ivory towers, blabbing because they have to,” said a friend who I had called.
The onslaught in the media brought back memories of my birth in Jammu, growing up in my grandparents’ mansion in the 1960s and 1970s, revisiting Jammu frequently over the years and seeing all the changes. But being a Hindu from a respected family in Jammu kept me isolated from the after effects of politics during partition and beyond. All our family members who left Pakistan or remained in India did not suffer any loss of life. And my paternal grandmother, upon arriving in Amritsar, was able to afford a room away from the tragedy of the refugee camps. Her 6 sons were shielded from the loud wails of grief and trauma that others had been subjected to.
My childhood memories were sprinkled with the sounds of Hindu bhajans from the temple, Muslim azaans from the mosque and Punjabi ardaas from the Sikh temple near our home in Jammu. They would harmonize or follow one after the other as we all were waking up. People lived together in Jammu as a close knit community. Everyone loved and respected each other irrespective of caste and religion, even though my maternal grandmother was an orthodox, ritual-practicing Hindu and my grandfather a very secular military man. Kashmir had been as welcoming to my family who owned some property there.
My grand father later headed many high positions, but was close friends with both the Maharaja Hari Singh and Sheikh Abdullah. My uncles and brothers have known their sons Maharaja Karan Singh and Farookh Abdullah as well. I would hear stories of partition, of people leaving Kashmir to move to Jammu and starting all over again… and much more. We were not told the reasons, but just that things weren’t good. And I certainly had no idea that another Kashmir existed beyond our borders.
My father, a military man, participated in the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars. But I was too young to understand the trauma and loss brought about by war. My Dad coming back home each time was something I took for granted.
Mercifully , my parents never instigated us against the Pakistanis. My father always told us that the biggest tragedy in the Indian subcontinent was the partition of Hindustan. He remembered fondly, the Pakistani Muslim man they called Tauji, who looked after their lands. He sold them to send the family the money once they became refugees because promises of getting the equivalent of what they left behind were never fulfilled by the Indian government. They had been living hand to mouth since my grandmother had to leave in a hurry, straight from a wedding after being told not to return due to riots. All she had was the jewelry she had on and some money.
However, when my father was posted as military attache in Afghanistan, we saw the warmth and love extended to us by many Pakistanis on a personal level. But whenever politics reared its ugly head, things were not as they seemed, and hostilities would emerge from time to time between the representatives of both countries. Even then, it was a Pakistani insider who warned my father not to take the nostalgic drive he was planning via Pakistan on his return to India. My father wanted to stop and visit his old hometown near Lahore, but was warned quietly that an attempt on his life and that of his family was being planned. And so he cancelled his plans.
Its funny that discussion of partition and the accession of Kashmir and Article 370 were told in bits and pieces by my grandmother as little engaging stories. It would be evening time and all of us kids would be pressing her feet and tired legs. She would begin: “You see our brothers and sisters in Hindustan were separated by the bad politicians. But when your Mom was little, we would spend summers in your grandfather’s houseboat on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Then we had to divide even Kashmir into pieces. Brothers no longer remained brothers – just like it is in the Mahabharata. But your grandfather’s houseboat remained on Dal Lake until the day he died. Your mom would take you there with her, and all the Kashmiris loved you.”
Beautiful visions of the house boat, the shimmering waters of the lake and incredible Kashmiri food served there would be conjured up, taking me to a magical land I could only imagine. I did not visit Kashmir until I was 18. It was beautiful, welcoming and peaceful in the 1970s and early 1980s.
My grandmother talked about my grandfather being head of the “militia” and not officially an army in Jammu. The difference became more relevant when I heard stories of how when the British left and divided Hindustan, ultimately leaving it to the Maharajas to decide who they wanted to be with. I was told that Maharaja Hari Singh’s Prime Minister was anti-India and wanted to join Pakistan. The King himself wanted to stay independent. And Pakistan fed up with his dilly-dallying sent their own militia to attack his kingdom. The militia, I was told, was made up of soldiers in the army who usually retire when they are in their thirties and are still young and well- trained. Once they had infiltrated Uri and Baramullah, the King ran to India and asked for help. In return he agreed to accede to India. And Article 370 was born. It was provisional and India was only given four areas it could dabble in ” foreign affairs, defense, communications and currency”. “But,” added grandmother, “it was Sheikh Abdullah who graciously expanded the number of things India could do in Kashmir once he won elections in a landslide victory. He wasn’t treated well by his friend Jawaharlal Nehru, and was removed from office under suspicion that he was dilly-dallying with America for an independent Kashmir. A commission investigating the alleged dalliance found out the rumors to not be true.”
Stories of Maharaja Hari Singh coming home and playing with me when I was just an infant were mixed with stories of him being anti-Kashmiri Muslims. My grandmother was loyal to the Maharaja, and would not comment but our Muslim neighbors were not. So when I was old enough to start understanding that our neighborhood utopia I grew up in did not reflect the rest of India, they added their stories of injustice to the positive ones I knew. I shrugged them all off, as kids are often known to do.
But all I could see growing up was that the state was not progressing as well as other states. People just moved on as people often do in life, taking everything in stride.
I left India in 1984 just before Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Little was I to know that slowly but steadily, the beautiful, loving land where everyone coexisted peacefully was going to become a distant memory. And my grandmother’s home which was a gathering place for everyone, would lose its luster with her untimely death in 1976. Along with atrocities on the Sikhs (many who left India fearing for their lives), I started hearing stories of Pakistani terrorism along the Jammu/ Kashmir border and highways. Kashmiri Pandits who were a very small segment of the people in Kashmir, largely populated by Kashmiri Muslims, began to look over their shoulder, afraid to be in their homeland. They were told to leave or die. The only way out was to convert to Islam in a state that was predominantly Muslim. Talk of infiltration by Pakistani terrorists was circulating as well. Suddenly some friends had turned foes. And others were afraid to help, fearing for their own safety.
It was in 1990 through mid 2004 that we, living so far away in the United States, became surrounded by news of the atrocities being inflicted on the Kashmiri Pandits and Hindus in the valley, and about their fleeing to Jammu and beyond. The news was a trickle as there was no internet or WhatsApp then. The displacement was painful, and very traumatic all around. Reactions were varied (- I will bring those stories too as well). I would have arguments with many uncles and aunties, when I visited India, who would crib that Jammu was being overloaded by the Kashmiri Pandits and the infrastructure could simply not handle it. There were other members of my family who stood up for the community with compassion and empathy. They appreciated the hard work and courage shown by the Kashmiri Pandits who strove to rebuild their lives and become productive members of the community.
I would hear of Article 370, not by name, but in reference to Jammu and Kashmir having their own constitution, their own flag and their own laws. Outsiders were not welcome, even though they could go outside and invest wherever they wanted and live wherever they wanted.
The term “State Subject’ was often thrown around. The significance of that term only hit home in 2017 when my niece was informed that she could not attend an engineering school or a medical college in the state because she was not a State Subject. She was born in Assam, but had lived all her life in Jammu. But that was still not enough. She eventually got admission in a great college in Delhi and is pursuing technology, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Any girl who married outside the state lost her right to inheriting property and so did her kids. I know many of my relatives have everything under their names because their husbands or wives cannot legally own property in the state. Critics had challenged its legality as this provision did not have any parliamentary sanction and discriminated against women. My parents used to keep telling me they will sell my share in the lands they owned and send me the money as I had no right to their property under the Jammu and Kashmir law. Until August 5th 2019.
Many IAS officers who had served in Jammu and Kashmir all their lives but were from somewhere else would request that they be allowed to retire in the state as they really had no connection to the state of their birth but were denied the request. Jammu and Kashmir did not want to dilute their population of the purebreds with the outsiders. You may have given your life for the state but you would remain an outsider all your life. Until 5th August 2019.
Our friend Sanjay Kaul sent all of us a message on WhatsApp early in the morning. It spoke of the new reality, and of a promise kept by the BJP of revoking Article 370. His message said:
- No dual citizenship
- No separate constitution
- No separate flag
- No special status to Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh
5.RTI AND RTE now aplicable to these 3 areas. - Reservations for minority nd backward classes.
- Any citizen of India can now buy land, make investments and settle in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh
- .State jobs will be open to all
- .No discrimination against the women if they marry someone outside the state.
- All citizens considered equal.
- Indian constitution prevails.
- Security, law and order issues not just the domain of these union territories.
I realized that this was a new beginning. Many thought they would not see this happen in their lifetime.
When I called people from different walks of life for the Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Hindus or Hindus in general, the scrapping of Article 370 was welcomed with jubilation. But what was interesting was that no one was willing to speak to me unless it was anonymously – not just officials, past and present, but the common man. “There is so much unrest, who knows what may happen. We will now know how much these corrupt politicians and their honchos have benefited in all these 70 years. We keep hearing of funding provided by the central government to improve our cities, our roads, our health care system etc but we do not know where that money went. We hope this will no longer be the case.”
The Kashmiri Muslims – the handful that would speak to me – were really devastated. Their fear of dilution was strong, but strangely some cribbed that now Muslims from other states will start moving to Kashmir and they will lose their identity. It was not just the Kashmiri Muslims, but some of the Muslims at large in India, who said to me that they have always felt like second rate citizens in all parts of India. The Kashmiri Muslims who spoke with me said they still do not expect to be respected the way they should be irrespective of Article 370. I was also told that if I was to put this question before the Modi government, they would be offended and would likely give me politically correct answers. “But if you really look at it, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. Pakistan thinks of us as traitors, and Hindus think of us as outcasts. Kashmir was all we had to feel safe. Now we will lose our identity.”
Many also said they were happy that their Hindu neighbors will be coming back. They told me they have deep sentimental attachments to the neighbors they helped escape – a fact confirmed by a Kashmiri Pandit who teaches at an elementary school in Jammu. She told me how their Muslim neighbors hid them in their house and then made sure they were able to leave safely. “My Muslim friend’s father stuffed our handbags with cash so we would not be short of money. A few years ago I went back and found that they were taking care of our house. They cried tears of joy on seeing us and told us they were waiting for the day we would return to ‘our home’. Now it will become a reality.”
It was also interesting to see that many Indians really like Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in spite of the recent rhetoric against Article 370. “I didn’t think much of him and always wondered where his head was at when he was in the opposition, but I really like the way Imran Khan has conducted himself as Prime Minister so far,” said an official to me. “I certainly don’t appreciate his bringing a buffoon like Trump into the fray when the Shimla agreement states very clearly that ‘the two countries are resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them. Pending the final settlement of any of the problems between the two countries, neither side shall unilaterally alter the situation and both shall prevent the organization, assistance or encouragement of any acts detrimental to the maintenance of peaceful and harmonious relations’, but I understand why. Pakistan is in a state of great crisis. They just regulated the price of flour a few days ago. He (Khan) needs America, and is doing the right thing by his people. But Kashmir is a bilateral matter between the two countries and he is fully capable of doing his own negotiations.”
It will be a few years before the impact of the revoking of Article 370 will be really felt. Today we also lost a woman I admired very much – Sushma Swaraj. I am glad she was alive to see the scrapping of Article 370, and mentioned it in her last tweet before she passed away. On a humanitarian basis, I pray that the revoking of Article 370 is embraced by all as a step in the right direction, and that we truly embrace the spirit of what Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had set out to do with his slogan of Kashmiriyat, Insaniyat, Jamhooriyat (“inclusivity, humanitarianism and democracy is the real culture of Kashmir.”)