A tale of eternal suffering of Kashmir

Arun Joshi

History moves in cycles, it is the fundamental premise in Moosa Raza’s book, Kashmir: Land of Regrets. This book has a quintessential setting of the times when the author served as Chief Secretary in Jammu and Kashmir from May 1988 to 1990 — the period that shaped Kashmir insurgency-militancy of the next three decades, and whose end is still not in sight. There have been seismic changes since the book was published in mid-summer of 2019 — August 5 has not only done away with the special status of J&K, but also with its statehood. This is typical of Kashmir where putting a full stop to the markings of history is a big mistake, the author has avoided that, and has presciently kept the narration in a pause mode.

The moot question, underlined in the book’s foreword written by former J&K Governor N N Vohra, about the governance structures in the state will stay as relevant as ever, though the geographical and political map would see the state divided into two union territories on October 31.

Vohra’s words matter a lot, for he is one of the most authentic voices on Kashmir. The absence of good governance in Kashmir, he has pointed out, hollowed out the institutions that gave rise to corruption. It distanced the people from the mainstream.

Raza’s arrival in Kashmir was that of a reluctant bureaucrat, who had no intention to leave Gujarat for several reasons. However, he had not factored any other situation than the plague of factionalism in the J&K bureaucracy that had had crippling effect on the governance. Perhaps at that time he was not aware that the rigged polls of 1987 would plunge Kashmir into a whirlwind of self-destruction.

The Kashmir militancy is 30-year-old and it is still continuing. His encounters with Kashmiri politicians, bureaucrats and the people reflect a recurring theme that a majority of people from the Valley are victims of corruption and mis-governance and others are perpetrators. Some were both.

Raza has woven the past history and connected it to the contemporary events, making it easy for the reader to understand the backdrop in which the story is being told. At times, however, the heavy prosaic quotations serve as distractions, but those are compensated by Urdu couplets, summing up dilemmas of the situation.

Quite revealing are the details about the kidnapping and the subsequent release of the then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter, Rubiya Sayeed, in December 1989. These reflect the tussle between Srinagar and Delhi on such critical issues that find a dangerous echo in the subsequent years and decades. He could have revealed more. Perhaps his bureaucratic instincts did not allow him to say that the administration, the police and the political leadership were clueless about the abduction till the time journalist Zafar Meraj conveyed it to some friends of Mufti Sayeed. All of them were sympathetic to Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front — the group that had abducted Rubiya.

The part dealing with his encounters with the ministers in the Cabinet meetings, and also how the top Delhi ministers were more interested in holidaying with their families than making an attempt to understand the day-to-day difficulties of the people in the Valley, gives an insider’s view. It reveals how Kashmir was treated and that became the cause for the militancy that erupted in 1990s. The fast shifting settings from aloof North-South block in Delhi to the enchantingly beautiful places like Gulmarg and Pahalgam, give a firm glimpse of what the Valley had been undergoing, and is still reeling under the impact of such a single-lens view of Delhi.

His conscious attempt to tell things in more than enough details of communal, regional and ethnic fault lines that later came to define Kashmir problem, makes the work heavy, even though their value cannot be dismissed entirely. The connect that he seeks to draw with the life in Kashmir in the late 1980s to what had happened during the Dogra and the Sikh rule — he has written that part quite harshly. It offers a view through the prism of European writers and the tales with which Kashmiris have kept their anti-outsider narrative alive.

The book carries some glaring mismatches between the actual dates and events. That takes away some of the sheen of an otherwise a genuine work on contemporary history of Kashmir.

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act was not invoked by Jagmohan, who was brought as Governor for a second time in January 1990, which made the Farooq Abdullah government resign on the intervening night of January 18-19, 1990. Burhan Wani, the Hizb commander was a school dropout, not educated. He was killed in an encounter in July 2016, not 2017.

His suggestion on the dialogue is all-time relevant. The problem, however, is that there is no listening platform for Kashmiris, the eternal sufferers.