Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

He was polite to the point of being obsequious, but I knew what he was getting at. It was extraordinary; you couldn’t — and still cannot — trust even the ones you assumed were on your side. Not even the damn police .

It had already snowed in the high mountains, but the border passes were still negotiable and small legations of fighters — gullible young Kashmiris and murderous Pakistanis, Afghans, even some Sudanese — who belonged to the thirty or so remaining terrorist groups (down from almost one hundred) were still making the treacherous journey across the Line of Control, dying in droves on the way. Dying. Maybe that’s an inadequate description. What was that great line in Apocalypse Now ? “Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.” Our soldiers’ instructions at the Line of Control were roughly similar.

What else should they have been? “Call their mothers”?

The militants who managed to make it through rarely survived in the Valley for more than two or at most three years. If they weren’t captured or killed by the security forces, they slaughtered each other. We guided them along that path, although they didn’t need much assistance — they still don’t. The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.

Yesterday a Pakistani friend forwarded me this — it’s making the mobile phone rounds, so you may have seen it already:

I saw a man on a bridge about to jump.

I said, “Don’t do it!”

He said, “Nobody loves me.”

I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?”

He said, “A Muslim.”

I said, “Shia or Sunni?”

He said, “Sunni.”

I said, “Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?”

He said, “Barelvi.”

I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?”

He said, “Tanzeehi.”

I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?”

He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati.”

I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?”

He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.”

I said, “Die, kafir!” and I pushed him over.

Thankfully some of them still have a sense of humor.

The inbuilt idiocy, this idea of jihad, has seeped into Kashmir from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, twenty-five years down the line, I think, to our advantage, we have eight or nine versions of the “True” Islam battling it out in Kashmir. Each has its own stable of Mullahs and Maulanas. Some of the most radical among them — those who preach against the idea of nationalism and in favor of the great Islamic Ummah — are actually on our payroll. One of them was recently blown up outside his mosque by a bicycle bomb. He won’t be hard to replace. The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism. For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo — or what we call the “Peace Process,” which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.

The men who came were young, in their teens or early twenties. A whole generation virtually committed suicide. By ’96 the border-crossings had slowed to a trickle. But we hadn’t managed to completely stem the flow. We were investigating some disturbing intelligence we had received about our soldiers at some border security posts selling windows of “safe passage” during which they would look away discreetly while Gujjar shepherds, who knew those mountains like the backs of their hands, guided the contingents through. Safe Passage was only one of the things on the market. There was also diesel, alcohol, bullets, grenades, army rations, razor wire and timber. Whole forests were disappearing. Sawmills had been set up inside army camps. Kashmiri labor and Kashmiri carpenters had been press-ganged into service. The trucks in the army convoy that brought supplies up to Kashmir from Jammu every day returned loaded with carved walnut-wood furniture. If not the best-equipped, we certainly had the best-furnished — if I may coin a phrase — army in the world. But who’s to interfere with a victorious army?

The mountains around Dachigam were comparatively quiet. Still, in addition to the paramilitary pickets permanently stationed there, each time His Excellency visited, Area Domination Patrols would go in a day ahead to secure the hills that looked down on to the route his armored convoy took, and Mine Proof Armored Vehicles would check the road for landmines. The park was permanently closed to local people. To secure the guest house, more than a hundred men were stationed on the roof, in watchtowers around the property and in concentric circles a kilometer deep into the forest. Not many folks in India would believe the lengths to which we had to go in Kashmir just to get our boss a little fresh fish.

I was up late that night finalizing my daily report for His Excellency’s morning briefing. The volume on my old Sony player was turned low. Rasoolan Bai was singing a Chaiti, “Yahin thaiyan motiya hiraee gaeli Rama.” Kesar Bai was undoubtedly our most accomplished female Hindustani vocalist, but Rasoolan was surely our most erotic. She had a deep, gravelly, masculine voice, quite unlike the high-pitched, virginal, permanently adolescent voice that has come to dominate our collective imagination through Bollywood soundtracks. (My father, a scholar of Hindustani classical music, thought Rasoolan was profane. It remained one of our many unresolved differences.) I could picture the string of pearls she sang about being broken in the urgency of lovemaking, her voice languorously following the beads as they skittered around the bedroom floor. (Ah yes, there was a time when a Muslim courtesan could so hauntingly invoke a Hindu deity.)

There had been serious trouble in the city that morning. The government had announced elections in a few months’ time. They would be the first in almost nine years. The militants had announced a boycott. It was pretty clear then (unlike now when the queues at the voting booths are unmanageable) that people were not going to come out and vote without some serious persuasion on our part. The “free” press would be there in all its glorious idiocy, so we would have to be careful. Our Ace of Spades was to be the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, the Muslim Brotherhood, our counter-insurgency force, an opportunistic militant group that had surrendered as a group — lock, stock and barrel. Gradually its ranks were expanded by other disaggregated individuals who began to surrender (“cylinder” as Kashmiris called it) in droves. We had regrouped and rearmed them, and returned them to the fray. The Ikhwanis were rough men, mostly extortionists and petty criminals who had joined the militancy when they saw profit in that endeavor, and were the first to cylinder when the going got rough. They had the kind of access to local intelligence that we could never hope for, and once they had been turned around, they had the advantage of an ambiguous provenance that allowed them to carry out operations that were outside the mandate of our regular forces. At first they had proved to be an invaluable asset, but then had become increasingly hard to control. The most feared of them all, the Prince of Darkness himself, was a man known locally as Papa, who had once been nothing more than a factory watchman. In his illustrious career as an Ikhwan he had killed scores of people. (I think the number now stands at one hundred and three.) The terror he evoked did, at first, weigh the balance in our favor, but by ’96 he had begun to outlive his usefulness and we were considering reining him in. (He’s in prison now.) In March that year, without instructions from us, Papa had bumped off the well-known editor of an Urdu daily — an irresponsible Urdu daily, I have to say. (Irresponsible, virulently anti-India dailies that exaggerated body counts and got their facts wrong had their uses too — they undermined the local media in general and made it easier for us to tar them all with the same brush. To tell you the truth, we even funded some of them.) In May Papa had enclosed a community graveyard in Pulwama, claiming it was his ancestral property. Then he killed a much-loved village schoolteacher in a border village and threw his body into a no man’s land that had been mined with IEDs. So the body couldn’t be approached, there could be no funeral prayers, and the dead man’s students had to watch the corpse of their teacher being picked at by kites and vultures.