Written by: Dr. Dushka H. Saiyid
Posted on: February 04, 2022 | 
| 中文
Seer Hamdan
It is Basharat Peer’s ode to his home, Kashmir. His strong Kashmiri identity shines through, and so do his secular credentials, as he discusses the loss and dislocation of his Pandit friends with similar angst as the harrowing accounts of the brutal treatment of his fellow Muslim Kashmiris. First hand accounts from a Kashmiri are rare, and that is the strength of Basharat Peer’s book, although published over a decade ago.
Author Basharat Peer
It is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in the village of Seer in Kashmir in the 1980s, an idyllic harmonious community. He lovingly describes the landscape surrounding the village: meadows and streams, with the mountains forming the backdrop. His endearing account of the everyday struggles, gentle cultural traditions and customs of the people living in this breathtakingly beautiful vale of Kashmir has a lyrical quality to it. He describes the cycle of farming of mustard in spring, and the planting of rice seedlings in summer by the women as they sang. Villagers voluntarily showed up to help at harvest time. Radio Kashmir played Peer’s favorite song in spring, “And the nightingale sings to the flowers: Our land is a garden!”
Seer Hamdan
The India-Pakistan cricket match acted as a lightening rod for test of loyalties, even before there was any sign of militancy. The author mentions how Kashmiri Muslims always rooted for Pakistan’s cricket team, while the Pandits for the Indian team. There is a vivid description of the cliffhanger played between India and Pakistan at Sharjah in April 1986. As the villagers congregated around the radio and listened to the commentary, the village butcher became so tense at the prospect of Pakistan losing that he smashed his transistor on the ground, while Peer’s grandfather was on his prayer mat praying for Pakistan’s win. However, when Miandad hit a six and Pakistan clinched the match, jubilation followed. Ironically, there is a strange continuity to this day in the emotions generated when Pakistan and India play a cricket match. After the October 24, 2021, T20 World Cup in Dubai, a number of Kashmiri students studying in Indian universities were arrested and thrown in jail for expressing satisfaction at Pakistan’s win over India. Two months after the cricket match, three students are still rotting in jail in Agra, India accused of sedition: Arsheed Yusuf, Inayat Altaf Sheikh and Showkat Ahmed Gilani.
Seer Hamdan's beautiful landscape
However, darkness and violence descended on the Elysian fields of Kashmir in the ‘90s. Sheikh Abdullah, the popular leader of Kashmir who had supported the accession of Kashmir to India, had been kept incarcerated in jail for eleven years because he had demanded plebiscite for the state of Kashmir that the UN had recommended. He was released after he abandoned that demand, and his remaining years in power were peaceful. However, five years after his death, rigged elections were held in 1987. Yasin Malik was one of the polling agents, who was arrested and tortured. In December 1988, Malik and his band of militants kidnapped the daughter of the governor and demanded the release of their jailed friends. The government gave in, and the Kashmiris hailed the guerillas as heroes.
The town of Seer Hamdan
This was the beginning of the war, and the main thrust of Peer’s book is how the war transformed and brutalized peoples’ lives, turning the Elysium into killing fields. Peer discusses the attraction of militancy for young Kashmiri boys, their crossing of the Line of Control (LOC) to get training in Pakistan and returning armed with a new sense of empowerment and swagger, and with the youthful idealism that their sacrifices would result very soon in azadi (freedom) for Kashmir. The author himself was drawn to militancy, but then is taken away by his grandfather, a highly respected headmaster, to study at the Aligarh Muslim University. He later moved to the Delhi University, which he found more fulfilling, and discovered the charms of that city. However, the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, by which time Peer was working as a journalist, made finding lodgings for a Kashmiri Muslim difficult, until an old Kashmiri Pandit lady agreed to have him as a lodger; a statement about Kashmiri solidarity, notwithstanding different religious identities.
A wintry scene of Seer Hamdan
Peer’s method in the book is to write only about subjects that he had either interviewed or witnessed first hand, making it a very authentic read. He recounts how a totally innocent thirty-two year old Arabic lecturer, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani of Delhi University, is accused of being complicit in the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and arrested. Judge Dhingra, nicknamed “the hanging judge”, sentenced him to death under the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO). However, the High Court of Dehli, which was independent at the time, threw out the case. Geelani was re-instated by the University, which had suspended him.
Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani
Peer dwells at length on the gentle Sufi Islamic traditions practiced in Kashmir and the importance of shrines in their lives, a far cry from the fundamentalist variety of Islam, which failed to take root there. Peer seeks out his Pandit schoolteacher, Kantroo, in Jammu, living as a refugee in poor conditions, with many other dislocated Pandits from Kashmir. He recalls his visits to the Martand temple with his friend Vinod, when it was not unusual for Muslims to visit temples and there was hardly a divide between the two religious communities, except when cricket was played.
The author searched out and interviewed Farooq Wani, a golf playing water works engineer of Srinagar living in an upscale house, who survived the infamous massacre at the Gawkadal Bridge in Srinagar. A procession of demonstrators shouting slogans of azadi (freedom) was crossing the bridge on the 21st of January 1990 and he trailed behind them, hoping to cross the bridge to go and visit his uncle. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) stationed on the other side of the bridge, began shooting at the procession as it was crossing the bridge. Figures vary from 50 to 280 of those killed. An Indian army officer was checking to see whether any of those fallen was still alive, and if so, spraying them with bullets to ensure their death. Farooq Wani lay on the pavement and pretended to be dead, but feeling the heat of some hot coal, he moved. The officer spotted him and exclaimed, “this bastard is alive”, and fired a volley of shots at him, and Wani passed out! Miraculously, Wani survived, and after many months of hospitalization and treatment, Wani went back to work.
Gawkadal Bridge, Srinagar
Among the many real life stories that Peer diligently researched, was that of Mubeena Ghani, the bride who was raped in May 1990 by the Border Security Force soldiers. It happened when she was on her way to her husband’s village after her nikah or Muslim marriage ceremony. She bore the stigma for the rest of her life, since the community perceived her as having brought bad luck to the family.
Between four and eight thousand men are supposed to have disappeared after being arrested by the military, paramilitary and police. The government refused to hold an enquiry saying that they had crossed over into Pakistan and become militants, while the Kashmiris believe that they had been killed in custody and buried in mass graves.
Lal Chowk, Srinagar
The tales of torture are countless as Peer seeks out some of the victims, or at least those who survived it. The most brutal form of torture seems to have been electrocuting them while inserting a copper wire through their private parts, which left them impotent, and psychologically and emotionally damaged for life. Peer sought out Shameema, whose two teenage sons, Bilal and Shafi, had been randomly picked off the street by the Indian soldiers and sent to the militants’ hideout with grenades. By the time Shameema arrived, Shafi had already perished, but she threw herself on Bilal and offered to carry the grenade herself rather let her second son be killed. Seeing her determination, the Indian officer relented and let Bilal and Shameema go.
The author’s angst and pain reflects that of his fellow Kashmiris in a war torn state. But his book stops much before the conditions in Kashmir took a turn for the worst after its annexation and removal of article 370 in August 2019, which had guaranteed Kashmir its autonomous status. India lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Kashmiris a long time back, while the passion of the Kashmiris for azadi (freedom) burns brighter than ever before. The increased persecution and violence by the Indian state will only prove to be self-defeating in the long run.
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