View from India—Yearning for Kashmir

I had planned to travel from London to Kashmir in August to celebrate Eid-ul Adha with my parents. Two months earlier, I booked my tickets to fly to its largest city Srinagar on 5th August, after changing at New Delhi. Friends and relatives warned me that I should put my visit on hold because they foresaw, after thousands of Indian troops were deployed to the Valley from July onwards, that a calamity was going to befall the region. I decided to try anyway.

I stopped over for a few days in Gurgaon, a city southwest of New Delhi, en route. During my stay a friend who lives near Lake Dal rang to tell me that foreign tourists in hotels and houseboats had been ordered to leave Srinagar by the security forces. I was still keen to go. In 2016, I flew into Srinagar during a 72-hour curfew. It took me exactly that long to reach my parents’ home, which was hardly 10 miles from the airport. But when I spoke to my mother on the phone from Gurgaon, she didn’t want me to visit while the situation was so dire.

I had also planned with friends in Srinagar to make a trip to the distant Himalayan valley of Gurez. I have always found its remoteness alluring. It is cut off for several months of the year due to heavy snowfall and it snowed there as late as June. For months, I dreamed of pitching a tent on the banks of River Kishanganga and breathing pure mountain air. But a relative pointed out it was insensitive of me to think of travelling through Kashmir to the paradise that is Gurez if all hell is going to break loose.

When I awoke on the morning of 5th August, I discovered that the phone lines in Kashmir had been cut during the night.   (The communications blockade in Kashmir seems to have come full circle. Back in 1990, I had to travel 500 miles from Srinagar to Delhi to make an overseas phone call.) Travelling to see my parents was also impossible. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had decided to bifurcate Jammu-and-Kashmir and downgrade that state into two Union Territories. This thereby revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution. In 1950, Article 370 granted Jammu-and-Kashmir special status, including the right to make many of its own laws.

At the start of August, Satya Pal Malik, the governor of Jammu-and-Kashmir, had tried to assure people that the rumours were untrue and Article 370 was not going to be revoked, with a caveat that he didn’t know what was going to happen the next day. It was an unsurprising statement from New Delhi’s man in Kashmir. The official line was that troops were sent to Kashmir because of insurgents trying to cross the de facto border with Pakistan. It was clear by mid-morning on 5th August that this was a pretext and the troops were on hand to suppress any uprising after the revocation.

I had chosen to stay in Gurgaon without a TV set in order to avoid the news. A friend emailed me to say that, according to Wikipedia, Gurgaon has earned the dubious accolade of being the most polluted city in the world. Driving through the streets in a cab at night, I saw shops selling “English Beer and Wine.” In fact, the wines might be from anywhere, but “English” is a generic term used for imported drinks. During the Raj the word vilayati (meaning “foreign” in Urdu) was used instead; it was then corrupted into “Blighty,” which became a nostalgic name for the mother country.

Businesses in Gurgaon were going into overdrive in preparation for Independence Day on 15th August, the celebrations of which have turned into one big commercial enterprise. Some businesses were offering a discount of 47 per cent to celebrate freedom from colonial rule in 1947 and others were offering 72 per cent to match the number of years since India had become a sovereign country. The next day I saw a newspaper advert for a company that makes dairy products which gleefully celebrated the revocation of Article 370.

But the celebration of Eid in Kashmir was a muted affair, as is customary if there has been a death in the family. In the words of an Urdu poet, “How could I celebrate Eid, when I am bereaved?” The demise of Article 370 a few days before will have felt like a loss to many Kashmiris.

It rained often in Gurgaon during my stay, bringing the level of air pollution down. I saw butterflies fluttering and even heard birdsong in the morning. Yet I still yearned for the cool mountain air of my beloved Kashmir.