In a State of Violent Peace by Meera Khanna

Author:Meera Khanna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Collins India
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bilal looked around the room filled with JKLF big shots and an ISI official. It was the first time he had seen an ISI officer at a JKLF meeting. The meeting was to discuss the next level of strategy. The ISI official did not participate in the discussions, but kept whispering to Raja Muzaffar. Suggestions were made for more selective targeting, aimed at making the Kashmiri people rise against the Indian government and bring down the state government in Kashmir. Threatening letters were also to be sent to non-Kashmiris and Hindus asking them to quit the Valley.

Bilal felt out of his depth. He wanted freedom for Kashmir, but he didn’t want Kashmiri Hindus killed or chased away. They had as much right to stay in Kashmir as the Kashmiri Muslim. He remembered the sorrow he felt some weeks earlier at Rainwari, when he came across an abandoned temple. The doors were wide open to the depressing sight of an uncared-for temple. Somehow the sight of the temple stayed on in Bilal’s mind as a symbol of disillusionment.

‘Islam is in danger.’ The strident voice of a JKLF commander brought him back into the room. Many of the people in the room were nodding in agreement.

Bilal stated flatly, ‘The Indians have never interfered with our faith. We want political freedom; religious freedom has never been an issue with us Kashmiris.’ He saw the ISI official whispering to the people around him and knew he was outnumbered.

In Kashmir, soon the prevailing sentiment was that Islam was in danger. This sentiment, rather than the old-fashioned nationalism that had dominated in the past, began to have a galvanizing effect on the youth of the region. Bilal was commanding cadres that had young men between seventeen and twenty-five years of age and he noted a marked erosion of the secular Kashmiri ethos. Instead, a Muslim identity with fundamentalist overtones was emerging. Bilal was weighed down by a sense of futility. Apart from large-scale killing, there had been no real progress. Two Swedish engineers from Uri had been kidnapped. They were not Kashmiris, neither were they in any way involved with the struggle. A young medical student, Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of Kashmiri politician Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, had been kidnapped. In a conservative society like Kashmir, this could jeopardize the girl’s whole life. But the orders from across the border were that such high-profile abductions would internationalize the Kashmir issue and the world would know the plight of the Kashmiris. The burning of the Vishwa Bharati College anguished Bilal, for he knew that precious manuscripts documenting the literary and cultural growth of Kashmir had been irrevocably destroyed. The nationalists’ struggle for an independent Kashmir had been replaced by the cause of Islamic militants who wanted Kashmir to become a part of Pakistan.

One day, Bilal came out of the Hazratbal mosque feeling at peace. As he had finished his prayers, he had felt a rare sense of hope. He walked with a limp as he had bent his knees slightly to look shorter.

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