The Times of India

Rajat Pandit

ANANTNAG: If the killers wanted to create a deep rift between the two communities, they appear to have failed miserably. Though tension did grip the area after the brutal killings, Kashmiriyat has prevailed over the religious divide as of now.
``We have lived with Sikh like brothers for decades... the bhaichara will continue,'' says Sheikh Ghulam Rasool, a 55-year-old shopkeeper of Ranbirpora village. 
Ranbirpora is a small village, where around 95 per cent of the families are Muslims and the rest are Sikhs, about two kilometres away from the Sikh-dominated Chithi Singhpora village, where 35 were gunned down on Monday.

Asking questions makes the villagers immediately defensive. ``Yahan koi militant nahi hai (there is no militant here),'' they promptly say. They open up gradually.

``We don't know who was responsible for the massacre but we have already announced in our masjids that the incident was wrong and unfortunate. Only the innocent common people suffer in the wear between the militants and the fauj,'' says Rasool.

Adds Afeez, another resident, ``It was a shock for us. We never imagined such a thing could happen.'' Though some young Sikhs are going around in the area, shouting Jo Bole So Nihaal, and asking shopkeepers to down shutters, local
Muslims are not apprehensive of any retaliation from the Sikhs.

``There is no problem here... we have not been threatened by anyone,'' says Sajjad Ahmed, a student living in Ranipora, which is about four kilometres from the massacre site. 

``We are like brothers and go to each other's houses. Sometimes, we even eat together,'' he adds. Another student says, ``We have nothing to fear from them. Aapas mein bhaichara hai (we live peacefully)... goli koi bhi chalaye, marte hum hain.''

The police and security agencies, who were also taken by surprise by the carnage, also do not fear any retaliation as such. ``In the first few days, the talk of retaliation was an emotional outburst. The Muslims in the area have also expressed their sadness at the incident,'' said a senior police officer of the district. Most of the Sikhs, too, are not talking about revenge. ``Gussa nahi, afsos hai (we are sad, not angry). Even if there is talk of migration, it is due to a sense of insecurity, not because of trouble by the local Muslims,'' says Devender Singh of Ranbirpora. Adds Rasool, ``We
also want to know who responsible for the killing.''

Incidentally, five ``foreign'' militant were reportedly killed in an encounter with security agencies barely 20 kilometres away from Chithi Singhpora on Saturday. The police suspect they were among the group which was responsible for the killings.

The police are also trying to strengthen the security in over 150 places in Kashmir where around 80,000 Sikhs live. ``Pickets have come up in 65 of these places. In some places, Sikhs and Muslims have come forward to say they do not want the pickets,'' says a senior police officer.

Several Sikh leaders said ``vested interests'' were trying to create problems between the two communities. They have also decried moves by the government to ask Sikhs to join village defence committees (VDCs).

Be that or it may, the authorities have decided to form a ``Model VDC'' in Chithi Singhpora. The residents of this ill-fated village have, however, left any move to the collective decision which the community will take on March 31.

New York Times,  March 22, 20000  

                              

By PANKAJ MISHRA

A here were horrifying scenes all around on Tuesday when I  reached Chattinsinghpura, the village in Indian-held Kashmir where, the  night before, more than 35 Sikh men had been killed, allegedly by Muslim  separatists. In the courtyard of the local gurudwara (the Sikh prayer  site), the dead men were being brought in on ladders improvised as  stretchers. Covered in bright blankets, the corpses dripped blood on the  muddy ground. Placed on thin rugs, the bodies were immediately  surrounded by relatives, mostly women hysterical with grief and despair, their long hair loose, their bangles broken.

  The local journalists I came with had seen worse things in the  valley, and they were back to their bantering selves after the first few  subdued minutes. But my own reaction surprised me: for someone who had  never witnessed such a grisly event, I felt grief, even fear, but  strangely little shock. There seemed something too familiar in the scene before me: the remote village, the corpses on the ground, the wailing  widows and, in the background, the snow-capped mountains where the  murderers lurked unseen. To anyone who has lived in India for the past two decades,  such scenes have become almost commonplace after two prolonged  separatist conflicts in Kashmir and the Punjab, quickly spread across  India by the numerous TV channels created by India's globalized economy.  But the news media, which are deeply nationalistic, are much  less likely to report violence inflicted by the Indian state in Kashmir.

  The one-sidedness cannot but have disturbing consequences in a poor,  semiliterate country where national greatness has become dangerously  confused with nuclear bombs and military strength, where rivalries of class, caste, region and religion have enfeebled democratic institutions  in recent years. Not surprisingly, regular exposure to extreme violence has  hardened Indian attitudes, and brutality is now increasingly met by  brutality. The hard-line stance of the present government, dominated by  Hindu nationalists, perfectly represents the wishes of the middle class,  which, while more and more affluent, is still without an intellectual  and cultural life of its own and seeks an identity in the form of aggressive nationalism  just as the fractious political establishment  in Pakistan strives to hold itself together by supporting the anti-India  insurgency in Kashmir. 

At the massacre site in Kashmir, I met a middle-level officer  from Border Security Force, a paramilitary organization fighting the  Muslim insurgency. He was a Kashmiri Hindu, and he wasn't worried at the  prospect of large numbers of Sikhs fleeing Kashmir in the way the Hindus  had done after becoming the targets of Muslim separatists. "Isolate the Muslims in Kashmir," he said, "and then we'll be free to deal with them." He thought that all Kashmiri Muslims fighting for autonomy  were traitors and that Pakistan's henchmen deserved no mercy. In the six years he has lived in Kashmir, he claimed, he hasn't let any separatist  he has captured go alive. "I don't believe in this human rights nonsense," he said. "Do  you want us to fight Pakistan with one hand tied behind our back?" This general view echoed a very popular solution to the  Kashmir problem. The military arms of all-powerful political authorities  in New Delhi have been used to suppress regional discontent. Few people seem bothered that this crackdown undermines the  very foundations democracy and secularism  of the Indian state.

  The  impulse toward regional autonomy is always identified with secessionism,  as a Pakistan-fomented plot to break up India. The presence of an  unstable and fundamentally hostile neighbor further deepens the Indian  sense of being under siege, and pushes the country, in Kashmir at least,  into what looks like an endless cycle of violence. At a town in north Kashmir, I met young Muslim men who said  his shops and houses had been burned down by a policeman angered that  separatists had killed a local officer. A week later, separatists  launched a grenade and rocket attack on the local police station. Almost  every Muslim you meet in Kashmir, even people with relatives and jobs in  India, claims to have a story about torture, extortion or deaths at the hands of Indian soldiers. 

Kashmiris say that separatism and local  support for it are made almost inevitable by the heavy-handedness of the  Indian military in Kashmir. That's why it seems unlikely that India could solve the  Kashmir problem by defeating Pakistan-backed separatists or by getting  the United States to denounce Pakistan. For peace in Kashmir to become  even a possibility, India would have to renew its commitment to democracy and human rights, which the middle class, with its support of  Hindu nationalism, has no time for at present.

  Pankaj Mishra is the author of "The Romantics," a novel.