Book on Kashmir is a spine-chilling mindset log

Rahul Magazine’s ‘And the Valley Remained Silent’ is different as it is able to bring to the reader not just ‘heard’ accounts but experienced personal accounts of many ordinary people.

When I began reading And the Valley Remained Silent, I was sceptical. The last one decade has seen a plethora of books by Kashmiris in exile, giving outside India a certain kind of glimpse into a situation that is fully internal—that is, a state in India—something one cannot imagine after the Bangladesh War. How can a military might like India let a bunch of hooligans from a neighbouring country walk into a border state and drive thousands of people away? Pakistani forces could not engineer this in refugee-flooded West Bengal in the 1970s, so how could this happen or rather be allowed to happen to Kashmir in 1990?
The questions regarding Kashmir in my mind as an ordinary Indian citizen have never been answered. For instance, during partition and creation of Pakistan, Muslims from all over India were supposed to go west—states like Punjab were divided. “The Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir were committed to the Muslim League’s struggle for a separate homeland” and once Pakistan was born, this struggle ought to have ended. After that, where was the scope for dividing Kashmir and letting an Azad Kashmir come into being?
Western Punjab is part of Pakistan, Azad Kashmir is not. For the international community, it is “administered” by Pakistan, whatever that means. Then in 1963, Pakistan gives away a large bit of this land to friend China. In the 1971 war, India could have made Bangladesh an “India-administered” entity. It was Pakistan that had declared war on 3 December but by 9 December, Karachi was for the taking, Murid was compromised, 4,000 air sorties into mainland Pakistan had taken place, and in the west, Indian tanks had rolled considerably deep into Pakistan. If India had to prove its capabilities, there could not be a better example. This confuses me—what made the Muslims in Kashmir ever think in 1990 that the Pakistani Army could walk into Srinagar and “liberate” the Valley? Twenty years after Bangladesh, India was that much stronger than Pakistan.
Over the years I have read different writers presenting different perspectives on Kashmir then and now but, it was my first encounter with the saga of Kashmiri Pandits’ exodus from the valley in the 1990s that left the biggest impact. These were Dr Kundanlal Chowdhury’s stories. He was a medical practitioner and his writings are filled with real-life accounts of ordinary people and their sufferings. These are stories about withstanding sufferings and living with fear—not just accounts of leaving home and hearth out of hearsay and because the comfort zone was breached. Physicians are great storytellers and one does not have to love Maugham to know that. When I discovered Professor Rahul Magazine teaches respiratory medicine, my expectations increased and as I read through his portraits of those harrowing times 30 years later, I realised how skilled a narrator this writer is.
I have one querulous bone to pick, however. The use of the term aboriginal. The word is used in a particular context—the context of indigenous inhabitants, tribals and others in a specific landmass. The Red Indians and the various tribes of the American continent are not aboriginals. They are the “Original” people of the American continent, also called Native Americans. Similarly, in Kashmir, its 12 tribes would be “aboriginals”, like the Balti, Beda, Bot, Brookpa, Changpa, Garra, Mon, Purigpa and many others. The Kashmiri Pandits are better described as the “Original” people of the Valley. There is a concerted movement now to describe Pandits as “aboriginals”, however etymological accuracy matters.
Nevertheless, And the Valley Remained Silent is an arresting title. This work is different as it is able to bring to the reader not just “heard” accounts but experienced personal accounts of many ordinary people—householders, teachers, government officials, students including college girls, old women, transporters, prayer groups, agitators, protestors, neighbours with changing mindsets, vegetable sellers, dress-makers—everyone who make up a pro-active community in any social setting, cutting across religion and country. This paints a powerful picture of the “prevailing atmosphere”, so riveting that the reader is compelled to finish reading the account.
Without taking away from your reading experience, allow me to give you some descriptions of the festering wounds, as a really clinical assessment would do:
“Sneaking a peek at the road from his safe spot, he saw an anguished Hindu girl, her hands soaked in blood… The terrorists had killed her brother and it was his blood that smeared her hands. Devastated, she was calling out to her parents and telling them over and over again that her beloved brother had been murdered…”
“One day a colleague told Moza that the terrorists had told everyone to adjust their watches to Pakistan time… The employees as the treasury say the terrorists have ordered them not to cut taxes…” Imagine this happening in the border state of Rajasthan or Gujarat. “Almost the entire state machinery was teeming with terror sympathisers and getting someone to hear your grievance… was next to impossible.”

So taken over were they by hate that not even the dead and the bereaved were spared. “A young Kashmiri Hindu had been shot dead and his listless body was lying on the road surrounded by local men. A young man took off a shoe from the victim’s foot, filled it up with sewage from a nearby drain and then came back to pour the filthy drain water over the face of the dead body…” The graphic detailing creates more than just disgust. It raises the question: Can this kind of thing happen again in a free India’s state? Nadimarg 2003,Wandhama 1998 do not tell us, this kind of thing cannot happen again soon.
The author asks a pertinent question in his closing pages. In distant Manipal, heartland India, why was the Azadi chant used for the anti-CAA protests? Azadi from what? Perhaps someone needs to do a psychological study of the Pandit exodus and its aftermath and the use of the word “azadi” to really understand what happened in Kashmir. It makes us ask, why was Kashmir treated differently from other border states on India’s west? Has any lesson from Kashmir been learnt by civil society and administration in the greater India outside of Kashmir? Rahul Magazine’s work is an important contribution to mindset studies, a memory log that will be a beacon in understanding Kashmir.