My grandmother grew up in Kashmir in the 1930s, and at her knee I heard stories of crystalline rivers meandering through the fruit orchards of misty green valleys. Her nostalgia about Srinagar was intoxicating, almost unreal. It grew from a place of love, but also from the deep and radiating regret she felt at not being able to go back to her father’s house in the valley after 1947.
My own parents are lucky enough to have gone to Kashmir a few years ago. They, too, had heard my grandmother’s stories, and it was from these tales that they mined details that eventually led them straight back to her father’s house. It was still standing despite the fact that no one from the family had lived there in decades. Although the mansion was now divided into smaller shops and apartments, there were still people around who knew the story of my great grandfather’s home and the family that lived in it. Indeed, one of the older shopkeepers even directed my parents to the graveyard where Nano’s father was buried besides his own parents in an unmarked grave. My parents had the graves rebuilt and came away with pictures of my grandmother’s memories made real again. As they shared their story with the rest of the family back in Pakistan, I was surprised at just how much the gesture of reaffirming our own family’s roots to Kashmir made me rethink what the place means to us.
My grandmother’s version of Kashmir - the idyllic haven of peace and tranquility where she played hide-and-seek in orchard groves – didn’t make sense to me. Throughout my life the valley I saw on the news was made up of blood and violence, an occupied paradise-turned-prison that I would likely never see. I was told by the state that this far away land constituted a mysteriously integral part of my Pakistani identity. But the truth is it didn’t; practically no one realistically expected the whole of Kashmir to ever become part of Pakistan. To admit that shouldn’t be a radical idea.
My grandmother’s version of Kashmir - the idyllic haven of peace and tranquility where she played hide-and-seek in orchard groves – didn’t make sense to me
I don’t think I am alone in this idea. Practically anyone born after the 1947 Partition in Pakistan (and India, for that matter) grew up in a time when Kashmir was a disputed territory. And perhaps it was because so little changed in the status quo for so long that India’s recent move to dissolve the state’s special status comes as such a shock. But after the initial surprise of movement wore off, I’m left wondering as to what else we expected to happen. Is it surprising to me that India would shed off the pretense that Kashmir could ever be a separate entity? No. Is is surprising to me that Modi, so closely tied to massacres of Muslims and a far right-wing ideology, would voluntary disenfranchise the Kashmiris? No.
If we are honest about it, this is where it was always headed. Short of war, there is nothing the world can do to actively prevent India from absorbing and dividing the state. The BJP is increasingly an extremely right wing, rabidly nationalist, blatantly populist party that is predicated on making India a Hindu state. They’ve repeatedly told the world they intend to do away with Kashmir’s special status, and now they have.
Troops stand guard in Srinagar as leaders of political parties are put under house arrest
In doing so, Modi has shattered the pretense that Kashmir was ever going to be decided bilaterally. He’s also finally dropped the pretense of India being a liberal democracy, no matter how many sex scenes they show in the movies. The move to disenfranchise the Kashmiris is just the latest in a long march towards his vision of Hindutva Hindustan.
If the tactics they used - expelling tourists, silencing journalists, cutting the internet - seem sort of familiar to you, its because they should be. We, too, have national narratives that allow us to think we are on the right side of history. We, too, have a right-wing party pushing a populist agenda. We ,too, have an establishment that isn’t above rigidly silencing the press in order to get what they want. But I also believe it when our PM says his signs of peace were interpreted as weakness by the Indians, that they had been inching towards this eventuality for ages.
I do not have much hope that Kashmir will be saved, that it’s people will be able to decide their own fates, that they won’t live like prisoners of war in their own homes like the Palestinians. I am disappointed in India, a country to whom I have often turned in my own search for what a progressive South Asia could possibly look like.
With the removal of the special protection, now anyone in all India can buy land and property in the valley. In a short time the sheer population numbers are going to determine what government negotiators couldn’t. The violence is sure to get worse, and it will come to us.
The Kashmir that my grandmother remembered was a dream, and maybe it didn’t ever really exist except in her head. No perfect place can. But be sure that the nightmare the Indians are turning it into now is as real as it is terrifying.
