Pakistan Vs Pakistan: Semblance Of Closure For Kashmiris

In his seminal book Chasing the Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, Tarek Fatah wrote: 

Seeing the events unfolding across the border these past few weeks with the arrest of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf Party Premier and former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, Tarek's observations once more ring true. 

Jinnah was a latter-day caliph and despite his famous 1947 Lahore speech which every secular, rational Pakistani has memorised about safeguarding the rights of minorities — he left behind authoritarian precedents, inherited by the Pakistan military — that are still practised and implemented in Pakistan today. 

The Muslim League's rallying cry of religious frenzy which ultimately sold the idea of Pakistan to the Indian Muslim masses of 'Islam is in Danger' 'Islam khatre mein hai' became the bonding agent between the military and civilian dictators and the mad mullahs which today comprise the US-sponsored deep state of Pakistan.

With the birth of Pakistan, created to keep the Hindu-majority of the Indian civilisation from ever wielding power, the Indian Muslim population got divided by the political machinations of the Muslim League and the ever-helpful British into 150 million in Pakistan, 140 million in Bangladesh and 160 million in India (today roughly 174 million). 

The civil strife which has plagued the Islamic world since the death of the Prophet in 632 AD further took the lives of one million fellow Muslims when the Two-Nation Theory was exposed as bogus in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.

Yet not happy with an Islamic State, the Pakistan Army which found itself with a country to run, chose the erstwhile former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh as its reason to launch a war for ‘bleeding India with a thousand cuts' Ghazwa-e-Hind (Islamic Jihad) for the next 75 plus years. 

So, it is surreally satisfying to see karma visit the country today with the videos of Pakistani civilians wielding AK-47s and firing them on the Pakistan Army personnel.

The same Ak-47s that destroyed two generations of Kashmiri youth, now buried six-feet under and a third one radicalised enough to not consider India as our home, as our roots, our civilisational identity. 

We, the children of the conflict saw the pre-conflict period of the 80s with relative peace and lost our childhood and youth to the three-decade ISI sponsored proxy war by Pakistan, witnessing the forced exodus and ethnic cleansing of not only Kashmiri Pandits (indigenous Hindus) but also secular Muslims.

We saw Kashmiri communal leaders rhetorically spew Jihad speeches from the mosque pulpits and recruit entire generations into the carnage while raking in moolah from the anti-India network of disinformation groups and NGOs — to build their palatial bungalows, sustain their jet-setting lifestyles and send their sons and daughters to elite universities across the globe.

It was later through Pakistani journalist Arif Jamal's Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, published in 2009, that we came to know what had hit our generation in 1989 and how the Jihad had been long in the making in not just General Zia's war room plans of 1965, but further in 1947 itself (Raiders in Kashmir  by Major General Akbar Khan (Retired) of the Pakistan Army).

Arif Jamal’s Shadow War delves into the Jihad in Kashmir, exploring the various dimensions of the armed insurgency and the role of terror groups, particularly those influenced by jihadist ideologies.

It even shed light on the tactics and strategies employed by jihadist groups operating in Kashmir and their connections to wider global jihadist movements. 

In the book, Jamal drew upon his research and first-hand experiences (interviews with Kashmiri terrorists in training camps, men we grew up with) to present an account of the Kashmir conflict that went beyond the mainstream narratives, aiming to uncover the lesser-known aspects of the armed insurgency or as it would be known as The Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties' (Manoj Joshi, 1999).

The azadi war cry which until a few years ago reverberated on the campuses of Left-bastion universities across India, is today now heard on the streets of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Quetta, in the provinces of Sindh and everywhere in Pakistan.

Instead of 'we want azadi from Endia' (a derogatory, deliberate misspelling of India signifying its end), the people were screaming for azadi (freedom) from the Pakistan Army and its alliance with the ‘mad mullahs’, another term made popular by author Salman Rushdie, a victim of jihadi interpretations of Islam for decades. 

I cannot visit the graves of my male peers, male batchmates, and my late husband due to the sharia interpretations of Islam in Kashmir but it was a kind of closure to see the mayhem in Pakistan; a country which spilled so much blood on the streets of Kashmir for thirty long years and challenged the territorial integrity of India to which its Army and paramilitary and security personnel had to respond. 

The State did act like a bull-in-a-china-shop often with its knee-jerk reactions, but by the time the State got its counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism act together, Kashmir had lost entire generations with half-widows and orphan children scattered across its beautiful landscape. 

Today the Kashmiris themselves — the older generation who are alive and remember the 1947 'kabaili' raid by Pakistani Rangers and tribesmen and the younger generations who have lost their loved ones — realise their folly of the 1970s, 80s and 90s to take on the Indian State and Indian Army with AK-47s. That too funded by an Islamic State which itself failed to maintain its initial objective of a ‘state of Islam’ in the Prophet's message.