Here we go again...
The reimposition of Governor’s Rule on J&K means that 71 years after independence, the Centre still hasn’t a clue about how all Kashmiris can be reconciled to their Indian identity
When Governor’s Rule was again imposed on Jammu and Kashmir, I happened to be reading one of Han Suyin’s less well-known novels, The Four Faces, that had been gathering dust on my shelf for nearly 50 years. It describes a writers congress in Cambodia where Chundra Das, an Indian delegate, says to Ahmed Fouad from Lahore, “Obviously one day Kashmir will return to Pakistan, and East Pakistan return to India”. Das thought it “would be a much more sensible arrangement than the present one”.
It was perspicacious of the Eurasian Han (born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou) to make the connection between Kashmir and East Bengal. I can think of two other occasions when this was done. One was by a Bangladeshi academic in Singapore about the time East Timor was seceding from Indonesia, and to whom I will return later. The other was by Jawaharlal Nehru who told Selig Harrison of the Washington Post that he wanted a confederation of India and Pakistan that would allow the two restive territories space for peaceful manoeuvre. That was almost like Arthur Moore, editor of The Statesman, suggesting to Gandhi that Kashmir “be treated as an equal third party” in “a federated Commonwealth state, with common foreign affairs, common defence, and such finance as concerned these subjects, but all three to be separate self-governing states.” Nehru didn’t want Harrison to publish his views, which Harrison did all the same to the alarm — as Nehru had feared — of Ayub Khan who promptly accused India of hegemonistic ambitions.
Similarly stubborn and suspicious, Han’s Fouad thought Das was trying to short-change him. “Kashmir will come to us,” he thundered. “But we will never abandon the east wing. Do not think that we shall sacrifice so many millions of Muslims into the bloodied hands of fanatical Hindus.” Published in 1963, The Four Faces is set in the high noon of “neutralism” — as the West initially called non-alignment — against a back drop of renascent Asian nationalism, Europe trying to claw back something of what it lost at Dien Bien Phu, and the charming and effervescent Monseigneur — Norodom Sihanouk after he shed his kingly title — steering a jovial path amidst coups, corpses and conspiracies leavened by ballets and road-building.
Han’s fiction is contemporary history, all the more vivid for being life as she lived it. The brilliant, ambitious and viscerally anti-communist Muni Multani in The Four Faces sounds faintly like a grotesque caricature of my dear friend, the late Minoo Masani. With a Flemish mother and Hakka father, Han was extra sensitive to cultural and political vibes. Her many worlds straddled several cultures. She was familiar with discrimination. Her third husband, Vincent Ratnaswamy, was an Indian Army colonel with whom she spent some time in Bangalore.
If Indians are passionate about Kashmir, Pakistanis are hysterical on the subject. As Moore warned, “Pakistan canal disputes, boundary disputes, displaced persons disputes — all these may be solved; trade between the two countries may be developed; but there will never be satisfactory relations between India and Pakistan till the Kashmir issue is amicably settled.” Pervez Musharraf candidly admitted in Agra, “If India expects that I should ignore Kashmir, I better buy back the Neharwali Haveli (his former family home in Old Delhi) and move back over here.” Pakistanis would give short shrift to a leader who hadn’t stood up for their pretensions to a territory that was compared to the Austro-Hungarian empire because of the demographic diversity of Hindu Jammu, Buddhist Ladakh and the predominantly Muslim Valley of Kashmir.
The reimposition of Governor’s Rule means that 71 years after independence, the Centre still hasn’t a clue about how all Kashmiris can be reconciled to their Indian identity. The Peoples Democratic Party was sacked because New Delhi still yearns for Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s “ek nishan, ek vidhan, ek pradhan” (one flag, one constitution, one leader) polity. That was exactly what Pakistan also once demanded from East Bengal whose refusal to comply India rapturously defended. Mehbooba Mufti’s warning against a “muscular policy” recalls what Nehru told Harrison.
The Bangladeshi academic in Singapore mentioned earlier wondered if Kashmiris would ever be able to decide their own destiny like East Timor. I retorted loyally that they had done so on 26 October 1947 when Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession. The Bangladeshi demurred. If East Bengalis hadn’t been allowed to change their minds, he said, and India hadn’t fought to defend their right to do so, there would have been no Bangladesh in 1971.