New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff, until there was sufficient poetry and iconography of godlessness, these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power...***
Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honoured and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honour and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honoured and all other attitudes were dishonourable and consequendy illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favour disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonour the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.Initially, the fight was for "Kashmiriyat": a free country independent of both India and Pakistan, with its unique culture.
In those days before the crazies got into the act the liberation front was reasonably popular and azadi was the universal cry. Freedom! A tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant's teeth, wanted to be free. Its inhabitants had come to the conclusion that they didn't much like India and didn't care for the sound of Pakistan. So: freedom! Freedom to be meat-eating Brahmins or saint-worshipping Muslims, to make pilgrimages to the ice-lingam high in the unmelting snows or to bow down before the prophet's hair in a lakeside mosque, to listen to the santoor and drink salty tea, to dream of Alexander's army and to choose never to see an army again, to make honey and carve walnut into animal and boar shapes and to watch the mountains push their way, inch by inch, century by century, further up into the sky. Freedom to choose folly over greatness but to be nobody's fools. Azadi! Paradise wanted to be free.Soon, however, the conflict took on religious undertones. The Kashmiri Pandits who wanted to integrate with India were seen as patriots and those who wanted independence were seen as Muslim subversives. And when Pakistan got into the act, and the twins born of the bloody partition went to war over a piece of frozen land, the "Kashmir problem" was born.
War, whose highest purpose was the creation of clarity where none existed, the noble clarity of victory and defeat, had solved nothing. There had been little glory and much wasteful dying. Neither side had made good its claim to this land, or gained more than the tiniest patches of territory. The coming of peace left things in worse shape than they had been before the twenty-five days of battle. This was peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment, peace with deeper mutual contempt. For Colonel Kachhwaha, however, there was no peace, because the war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of every day, the livid green dampness of the trenches, the choking golf ball of fear in the throat, the shell bursts like lethal palm fronds in the sky, the sour grimaces of passing bullets, the iridescence of wounds and mutilations, the incandescence of death. Back in Elasticnagar, he immured himself in his quarters and pulled down the blinds and still the war would not cease, the intense slow motion of hand-to-hand combat in which the glassy fragility of his own pathetic, odorous life might be shattered at any moment by this bayonet that knife this grenade that screaming black-greased face, where this twist of the ankle that swivel of the hip this duck of the head that jab of the arm could summon up the darkness welling out of the cracks in the jagged earth, the darkness licking at the bodies of the soldiers, licking away their strength their legs their hope their legs their dissolving colourless legs. He had to sit in this darkness, his own soft darkness, so that other darkness, the hard darkness, would not come. To sit in soft darkness and forever be at war.Yes, the war, the forever war... the "freedom fighters" became "Pakistani terrorists", irrespective of whether they were from India or Pakistan. The conflict became a dirty battle, pitching brother against brother. And the army, assigned special powers, unsurprisingly became the principal oppressor.
The political echelon's decision to declare Kashmir a “disturbed area" was also greatly appreciated. In a disturbed area, search warrants were not required, arrest waffants ditto, and shoot to kill treatment of suspects was acceptable. Suspects who remained alive could be arrested and detained for two years, during which period it would not be necessary to charge them or to set a date for their trial. For more dangerous suspects the political echelon permitted more severe responses. Persons who committed the ultimate crime of challenging the territorial integrity of India or in the opinion of the armed forces attempted to disrupt same could be jailed for five years. Interrogation of such suspects would take place behind closed doors and confessions extracted by force during these secret interrogations would be admissible as evidence provided the interrogating officer had reason to believe the statement was being made voluntarily. Confessions made after the suspect was bearen or hung by the feet, or after he had experienced electricity or the crushing of his hands or feet, would be considered as being voluntary. The burden of proof would be shifted and it would be for these persons to prove the falsehood of the automatic presumption of guilt. If they failed so to do the death penalty could be applied.The impact on the Brahmin Pandits was also devastating. Forced to flee the valley under fear of genocide, they got short shrift at the hands of the Indian government too. Like the Palestinian refugees, they struggle to this day, useful only as pawns in a political battle between the Right and the Left.
There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.***
In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of "Kashmir" instead. Whenever she said "Kashmir" she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often her love for this encoded "Kashmir", arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated "Kashmir" for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of crimes committed against him. "These crimes," he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, "these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you're talking about?" At that moment she decided that the term "Indian armed forces" would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, "Yes, that's it," she cried, "the Indian armed forces, raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?" Again, those telltale slips of the songue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. "Yes, dearest," he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, "I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?"Five glorious stars!
We are no longer protagonists, only agonists.
The explosion--the gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomit--taught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and that, no matter now profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis.
The fall of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris's fault.
"Be so good," he said at the conclusion of an eloquent tirade, "as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life."
