India (52 page)

Three years after this, Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization, harboured in Afghanistan, launched the attacks of 9/11. In the utopian “war on terror” that followed, Pakistan’s leader, General Musharraf, would play much the same game as his predecessor General Zia, presenting himself to the White House as a reliable and plain-spoken ally against extremism. While running for president, George W. Bush had faced an impromptu foreign policy quiz. Asked who Pakistan’s leader was, he replied in general terms, “General. I can name the general. General.”
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Within months of taking office, al-Qaeda had struck and Bush got to know Pervez Musharraf’s name very well indeed, and established a good, jokey rapport with him. Musharraf in turn played a blinding hand in Pakistan, facing down popular discontent, abandoning the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (which the ISI had helped to set up), sacking opponents in the armed forces and throwing in his lot with the U.S., even while playing along with the more respectable extremist outfits. He promised Bush the ISI would help America to unravel the region’s complexities and roll up its terror networks, a promise that would not be kept.

Since 2001 the United States has channelled almost $2bn a year to Pakistan, and not all of it has ended up in the right place. Even while the U.S. was paying the Pakistani army and government to eliminate the threat of terror, the problem grew.
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As one foreign diplomat put it, Pakistan was the only nation that negotiated with a gun held to its own head.
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The mishandling of this process, and the accompanying war in Iraq, left many Pakistanis with the perception that the Americans were funding corrupt and opportunist military and political leaders, and were attacking their religious allies. The deposed prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, told me with a shrug of exasperation in 2007, “Musharraf has been hoodwinking the West.”
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When the Pakistani public finally got the chance to vote a year later, they rejected General Musharraf decisively. The U.S. became increasingly unpopular among Pakistanis at all levels of society, even as its donated dollars propped up the failing Pakistani state.

It is always hard to get a fix on how one country perceives another. Judging by newspaper coverage and the pronouncements of leading Indian politicians in the 1960s, the U.S. was not popular in India while American aid was at its height. U.S. aid to India peaked in the 1960s, dipped in the 1970s and flatlined ever after. Correspondingly, U.S. aid to Pakistan started out low, rose in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and accelerated sharply upward after 2001.

U.S. economic and military assistance, $bn

A rare measure of the strength of public feeling was a Pew opinion poll conducted intermittently in a variety of countries which asked the question: “Do you have a favourable view of the U.S.?” In 2005, 71 percent of Indians and 23 percent of Pakistanis said yes. In 2009, after another $3.7bn had been transferred from American taxpayers to assorted middlemen, spies, generals, NGOs, politicians and bureaucrats in Pakistan, the question was asked again (India had received $0.7bn during the same period). This time, the numbers had shifted even further apart: 76 percent of Indians and 16 percent of Pakistanis said they had a favourable view of the U.S.
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Money did not buy love.
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General Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, along with the American ambassador, not long before the Soviets quit Afghanistan. The CIA bought back the surface-to-air missiles it had given to the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets, but allowed lighter weapons to find their way to Kashmir and to the port city of Karachi, where a war was under way between local people and the descendants of those who had migrated to Pakistan at partition. More important than the guns were the guerrilla fighters. Although some returned to civilian life, many required a new martial cause and remained under the tutelage of the ever more powerful ISI, which had other wars to fight, especially in Kashmir.

One of General Zia’s achievements had been to establish hardline madrasas, Islamic schools, along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border and elsewhere in order to turn out students who believed it was their religious obligation to kill communists and infidels.
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When the war was over, the military did not wish to tame them: they were needed to fight in Kashmir. While the world turned aside in the 1990s to concentrate on the perceived peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, the problem festered. As Zulfikar’s daughter Benazir Bhutto said when she was elected as prime minister: “Discrimination, intolerance and hatred were the hallmark of the so-called Islamic revolution led by General Zia, supported by the clerics and corrupt unknown charlatans who were made into politicians.”
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Many older Pakistanis found these developments profoundly worrying. As General Zia’s ambassador to Washington, General Ejaz Azim, admitted in 1996: “People like me have a connection with old schoolfriends in India, but the younger generation simply believe all the propaganda. They have no links at all with India, and their attitude to India—say over Kashmir—is very negative and very dangerous.”
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For India, the consequences of Pakistan’s engagement on the issue of Kashmir were to be profoundly harmful, for they linked fatally with a breakdown of trust and good governance in the Kashmir valley itself. After India and Pakistan went to war for the first time in 1947–48, it would have been logical to partition the giant kingdom of Kashmir into its constituent parts, with the Muslim areas going to Pakistan and Buddhist Ladakh and Hindu Jammu going to India. Instead, both sides retained what territory they had at the end of the fighting, and the State of Jammu and Kashmir was given a temporary special position in the Indian Constitution. This laid down serious problems for the future, making Kashmir appear uniquely disconnected from the rest of India. As the decades went by, New Delhi started to erode or ignore the special status. Before he died in 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru narrowly missed reaching a final settlement of the issue with Pakistan’s government and the Kashmiri leader, Sheikh Abdullah.

In 1972, Indira Gandhi made an agreement with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto which yielded few benefits, and as the years went by her main concern was that Kashmir’s state government did not oppose her politically. After the death of Sheikh Abdullah, his fun-loving son Farooq took over as chief minister, and in state elections in 1983 his party triumphed over Congress. In response, Mrs. Gandhi sent a governor to Kashmir who had a reputation
as an enemy of Muslims, and arranged payments of Rs200,000 each to legislators who defected from Farooq Abdullah’s party.
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His administration was soon dismissed. By the time of Indira Gandhi’s death, Kashmiris were more alienated from the central government in New Delhi than they had been since independence.

I was in Srinagar at this time, on my first visit to India, and saw the angry protests in the city’s tight streets, men walking fast holding hand-painted placards and shouting slogans. Pakistan—wanting to challenge India and to support Kashmiri Muslims—became directly involved. Young Kashmiri men in search of azadi, or freedom, crossed the border to Pakistan, where the army and the ISI trained and armed them. The Indian state, abandoning the founding principle of a covenant between the government and the people, responded brutally. The consequence of Mrs. Gandhi’s political machinations in Kashmir, which at the time would have seemed like sly manoeuvring, was the creation of an entrenched conflict, fanned by Pakistan and mishandled by India, with Kashmiris as the bait, which has killed tens of thousands of people—men and women, soldiers and militants, the guilty and the innocent. Kashmir’s indigenous Hindus, the Pandits, were driven out. The worst atrocities happened while weak coalition governments were in power in New Delhi in the 1990s, when the Indian police and army were given impunity to put down the insurrection.

The miseries of Kashmir, the reaction to the events of 9/11 and the new reach of the international media intersected in 2006 in a bizarre way. A Kashmiri man, Shakeel Ahmad Bhat, began inadvertently to be promoted as a global example of Islamic fundamentalism. He had been photographed at a demonstration in Srinagar, his picture syndicated around the world as a classic image of Muslim anger. He had been given a new name by an American website: “Islamic Rage Boy.” Message boards could not get enough of Islamic Rage Boy. He was a “curry-drenched ass-pirate,” an “Islamofascist” who “fucked goats,” he was “Nancy Pelosi’s son” suffering from “post-jihadi virgin shortage.” Shakeel Bhat’s shouting face was put on beer glasses, boxer shorts, bumper stickers—even thongs. On
Slate.com
, Christopher Hitchens called him a “religious nut bag” full of “yells and gibberings” and said he refused to live his own life “at the pleasure of Rage Boy.”
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Looking at Shakeel Bhat’s photograph—his fringed beard, his worried face, his wide mouth—I wondered whether he was mentally disturbed rather than enraged, and went to Kashmir to look for him.

It was the first time I had been back to Srinagar for years, and the airport was like a military base: sandbags, fortified arches draped with camouflage
netting, pill-box bunkers, armoured vehicles with gun barrels poking out of their turrets, roads lined with paramilitary police and razor wire. A Kashmiri reporter, Peerzada Arshad Hamid, took me to what he called “Kashmir’s Gaza Strip.” It was nothing like the Kashmir I remembered, a world of wooden houseboats, chinar trees and long afternoons lying by Dal Lake in the sunshine, eating apples and almonds while the boatmen called, “Chocolate! Coconut ice!”

We entered a simple, traditional three-storey Kashmiri house and were taken up steep wooden steps by the light of a gas lamp to the top of the building. Shakeel Bhat was standing in an empty room, dressed in a salwar kameez and zip-up cardigan, with crooked teeth and a quizzical look on his face. Over two days, sitting cross-legged on the floor and smiling shyly much of the time, Shakeel told me his story, speaking in Kashmiri and occasionally Urdu, with Peerzada interpreting his words. He was twenty-nine and a failed militant. His experience, which was repeated in similar ways across Kashmir during the early 1990s, showed the torment of life in a dismembered society.

He came from a family that followed the Sufi tradition, a mystical, humanist form of Islam common in Kashmir and other parts of the subcontinent. His father, who did embroidery and crewelwork for a living, would often take him to the Shah-i-Hamdan shrine, which had a pir, or Sufi teacher, who could do miracles, and gave him two lessons: do not be greedy, and help Islam to spread by peaceful means. Shakeel had difficulty learning to read and write. His teacher thrashed him with a stick, but it did not improve his studies. Aged ten, he refused to go to school and stayed at home with his family.

When separatists started to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, the security forces arrived. Police who were searching for militants raided Shakeel’s home and threw his beloved eighteen-year-old sister Shareefa out of an upstairs window. She broke her spine and died from her injuries four years later. Shakeel, aged all of thirteen, decided to join other young men and go to Pakistan for military training. He was so small that he had to be carried on an older boy’s shoulders when he went over the mountains. In Muzaffarabad on the Pakistani side of the border, he was taken to a snow-covered training camp run by the ISI in conjunction with the militant group Al-Umar Mujahideen. Armed with an AK-47, he returned to a safe house in Srinagar, hoping—in what now seems a very impractical way—to drive out the Indian troops.

“I thought Kashmir should have the right to self-determination,” he said.
Shakeel was not an effective militant. When I asked him how many people he had killed, he looked embarrassed. “I gave scares, but I never killed anyone. I couldn’t. I never hurled a grenade in a public place.” His greatest achievement was opening fire on the cavalcade of a visiting Indian government minister, Rajesh Pilot. “Nobody was injured. I just hampered the visit.” In 1994, when he was sixteen, he was arrested and taken to a military barracks. Of the twenty boys and young men who had crossed the border to Pakistan with him, eight were still alive. Shakeel was stripped naked, doused with water and electrocuted from a truck battery. A nail was hammered through his jaw (he showed me the scar). His head was immersed in water. He was raped with a bamboo cane. When he was released, he remained under police surveillance. An injury to his right arm as a result of the torture left him unable to lift anything, and he relied on his brothers to support him. Not long after his release, the Special Task Force came to the house to look for him, but he was not there. They beat his 75-year-old father instead, leaving him with a broken leg; he spent the rest of his life bedridden, devoting himself to contemplation and prayer.

While we talked, one of Shakeel’s brothers brought in a pot of sweet tea and a plate of cakes. Since there was no furniture in the room, he spread out a plastic tablecloth on the floor and served the tea. It was evening by now, and the Kashmiri night was cold. The brother brought in a rug and spread it over my legs and asked whether I needed a kangri, a clay firepot filled with charcoal to keep close to your body. Shakeel’s understanding of the world was limited by his inability to read or write. If something upset him, he went on a demonstration. He had demonstrated over the exploitation of Kashmiri girls by the army, “encounter” killings and Danish cartoons which were said to ridicule Islam. In its way, this was an Indian form of protest, his continuing belief that the state had an obligation to listen to his concerns; had he lived 2,000 miles to the north, east or south-west—in Russia, China or Saudi Arabia—he might well have stayed at home. He viewed the political arrangements in Kashmir (Farooq Abdullah’s son Omar was the latest ruler) as inadequate: “Omar is just a pawn.”