Essay: On the Indo-Pak conflict

It was 31 years ago, in the spring of 1994, that I first traveled to Indian-held Kashmir. I was 28 years old and still had a lot to learn. I had quit my desk job at the Bangkok Post because — well, because I had not come to live in Asia only to sit behind a desk. History was unfolding all around me in real time, not only around Southeast Asia but further afield in the Subcontinent. The siege of the Hazratbal mosque that began in 1993 piqued my attention on the news wires: “Pro-Pakistan” militants were occupying the mosque and Indian forces had surrounded it, in a months-long standoff. I wanted to understand what that was all about, so on my own recognizance, I went to Kashmir.

That experience led to many others, a selection of which are recorded in my travel book “Alive and Well in Pakistan.” I made many friends in Kashmir and later in Pakistan, and I learned many things, but after all these years I’m afraid the most relevant thing I’ve learned is that human beings never learn from history.

In those pre-9/11 days I felt, and unabashedly made use of, the presumed safety granted me by white skin and a blue United States of America passport. Those two assets opened a lot of doors all around Asia for an enterprising young journalist. They meant that, for example, I could spend weeks at a time having frank conversations and interviewing public figures and armed militants in Indian-held Kashmir, all on a tourist visa. Not something I would advise attempting these days, though perhaps I say that because I’m older and less brave than I was then.

One evening toward the end of my last trip to Kashmir in 1995, sitting alone on a wooden pier and watching the world go serenely by on the Dal Lake between me and the typically stunning sunset, it came to me to what an extent my experience of Kashmir had hinged on the kindness and friendship of one particular family. The citified elder son was home from Delhi, preparing to take a rare group of tourists on a long trek, and other young relatives were around, going about their lives. Suddenly, I found myself on the verge of tears.

But I challenged myself not to indulge in the sadness of leaving a place, pleasurable though I knew that to be. “Tears were running down his cheeks,” writes V.S. Naipaul in the Kashmir section of “An Area of Darkness,” about his 1962 parting with Aziz. “Even at that moment I could not be sure that he had ever been mine.”

I now knew, as Naipaul had learned, that it is a Kashmiri trait to be ultimately inaccessible. I was to have a disturbing similar experience the morning I bade farewell to the family’s patriarch. I wanted to say something to him that would last, that would ensure my attachment to him. He was polite as ever but distracted, perhaps thinking of his own worries.

I would move on, I realized that evening on the pier, and life and death would go on in Kashmir as before. This was their life; it was only a slice of my varied, attenuated experience. Lucky me, not to be stuck there as they were, between the rock of India and the hard place of Pakistan.

It should go without saying — but here I am saying it anyway, for fear of being misunderstood — that pointing out the culpability of the Indian state for what has happened in and to Kashmir since 1947 is not equivalent to being either anti-Hindu or pro-Pakistan. What I am — what any decent person should be — is pro-humanity. Another thing I’m in favor of is taking the time to learn. Reality is always multi-sided and nuanced, even — especially — the reality of intractable standoffs such as those in the Middle East and in South Asia.

The kind of rhetoric that both Indian and Pakistani political and military leaders have routinely hurled at each other for decades — which we’re hearing all over again now — is not worthy of any thoughtful human adult, let alone anyone presuming to run a whole country. What’s happening right now in Kashmir has everything to do with what happened there in 1947, and we all know darn well, as my late grandmother would have said, that none of the parties to the travesty that was Partition came out of it blameless or righteous.

Except, perhaps, for ordinary Kashmiri families like the one that hosted and gently educated me. During my three long stints there in 1994 and 1995, I learned all that I really needed to about the truth of the situation. My main Kashmiri mentor cited a saying: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.” Professor Abdul Ghani, a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, told me: “When you are big, you do not need any excuse. You simply display your wanton strength and annex.”

The clear and present danger in today’s world is the proclivity of dominant ethnic and religious groups to press their advantage to the hilt. We’re witnessing it everywhere from Germany to Israel and India to Texas and Florida. And, by all means, to Pakistan, which is a messy and artificial conglomeration of ethnicities held together, barely, by the duct tape of religious identity. When I lived in Lahore for half a year in 2003-04, I made a point of seeking out Pakistani Christians — I even attended a church service — because I knew that to understand any society, it is crucial to know and cultivate sympathy for its most vulnerable communities. One thing I learned in Pakistan is that — to the country’s shame — the words “Christian” and “sweeper” are essentially interchangeable there.

Was the murder by an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba of at least 26 Indian tourists justified? Absolutely not, no more than the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas was. But there are other things that are also not justified. We should have learned from Bosnia and Rwanda and, yes, from the Holocaust where unchecked bigotry leads, especially when whipped up and egged on by ambitious political leaders. And we should acknowledge the truth that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. For decades Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist, not only by the apartheid government of his own country but by powerful Western leaders and the millions who followed their lead.

Chronic geopolitical plights like those in the Middle East and South Asia are, in some ways, complicated and hard to understand, never mind untangle. But in important ways — as Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly insists about Palestine — they’re very simple. The fundamental truth of the matter is that might does not make right.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and the publisher of Blue Ear Books.

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