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My interests and activism on issues of peace and human rights, and my work as a travel consultant and travel writer, first intersected for me on a 1989 trip to Kashmir.
My mother's parents spent most of their lives as expatriates in South Asia, where my grandfather was a university professor in Lahore, Punjab. Until the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, they spent their summer vacation in the Kashmir Valley. (It would later become a major tourist destination, but at that time, there were still relatively few foreign visitors or tourists in Kashmir.) After partition, it became a condition of their continued residence in Pakistan, even as US citizens, that they not visit India. This barred them from the Kashmir Valley, since it was on the Indian side of the Line of Control, which came to separate Pakistani- and Indian-controlled portions of Kashmir.
My grandparents never returned to the Kashmir Valley. But I grew up with my grandmother's watercolors and stories of their summer camp on Nagin Lake. It was with joy that I first went there in 1989, together with my partner and and my Lahore-born but USA-raised mother. We visited both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir on that trip, as well as other parts of both India and Pakistan. In the Kashmir Valley, we were hoping for a restful vacation within a longer trip that had included some hard traveling elsewhere.
As it happened, our arrival in the Kashmir Valley coincided with the outbreak of the latest stage of the Kashmiri nationalist struggle. It started mainly as a movement for self-determination, and its tactics were those of nonviolent civil disobedience. But as the Indian government responded with crude repression, it increasingly became a campaign for human rights and simple survival. An army of half a million Indian soldiers, police, and spies now occupies most of Kashmir and enforces martial law over ten million Kashmiris. At least thirty thousand and perhaps as many as seventy thousand Kashmiris have been killed since 1989, including many medical and human rights workers and Kashmir's most-respected spiritual leader. Despite some attempts at armed retaliation by Kashmiri guerrillas and terrorists, most of the killing has been done by Indian soldiers, police, and death squads.
While in Kashmir, quite by chance, I met and talked about the situation with the Mirwaiz (a title of spiritual leadership unique to Kashmir) of Kashmir, Mohammed Farooq. I was extremely impressed with his modesty, deference to the will of the people, and recognition of the distinction between his roles as spiritual and political leader. About six months later, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq was assassinated by an Indian army death squad. No public funeral was permitted, and an unauthorized funeral procession was machine-gunned by Indian troops, killing more than a hundred people. After the assassination of Mohammed Farooq, his son, Umar Farooq, succeeded him as Mirwaiz.
In the years of martial law that followed, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq used his position, and the minimal tolerance of the Indian regime for religious gatherings even during periods when all other popular gatherings were prohibited (common under martial- law regimes), to catalyze the formation of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC) as an umbrella nationalist organization and shadow government, of which he was selected as chairman.
Unlike the Dalai Lama of Tibet, with whom he might be compared as the spiritual and political leader of a nation under occupation, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq remained in Kashmir even after his father's assassination. This is commendable, and has kept the APHC much more responsive to the Kashmiri people than it would have become in exile. But it has severely hampered his ability to promote the Kashmiri cause to the world. In April of 1999, for example, with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq under house arrent by the Indian authorities, a delegation of other representatives of the APHC was detained at the airport in New Delhi (India permits no direct air service from Kashmir to anywhere outside India) and prevented from boarding a flight to Geneva to present the Kashmiri case to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. And again in September 1999, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and another senior leader of the APHC were detained at the airport in New Delhi, their passports and tickets confiscated, and prevented from boarding a flight to New York to present Kashmir's case to the world and the American people.
If anyone is interested in what Mirwaiz Umar Farooq of Kashmir, and other representatives of the Kashmiri people, might have said, had they been allowed to travel to the U.S. and the U.N. and to speak to us directly, here's a transcript of an earlier address to a U.N. subcommittee (several years ago, but unfortunately the situation has to not changed in any significant respect since then), and a profile and interview with him (also from a couple of years ago, but also still relevant and very revealing).
Kashmir's struggle for freedom continues today, increasingly unified in its demands but still with little support or awareness abroad. (See, for example, this reprint of an op-ed column on Kashmir by Salman Rushdie, perhaps the world's most famous -- and/or infamous -- person of Kashmiri ancestry, originally published in The New York Times in 1999.) USA policy on Kashmir, as on other regions, is shaped more by the economic and "strategic" interests of the USA than by concern for democracy or human rights. India's government continues to betray its long-standing promises of self-determination, promises made not only to the Kashmiri people but also to the United Nations. As a friend of Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, I try to do what I can to call attention to the moral and political entitlement of the Kashmiri people to determine their own destiny, not to have it decided for them by India, Pakistan, or any other foreign power.
Some Indian nationalists will probably think me anti-Indian for my views on Kashmir. But while I deplore the Indian occupation of Kashmir, I actually think that India and modern Indian political thought deserve more, not less, attention and respect in the USA and the rest of the North. It's sad that India's Kashmir policy sullies India's record and is one more obstacle to foreigners realizing how much they could learn from India and Indians. I'm pretty cynical, but I was appalled when I found that a friend's doctoral degree program in political science at a well-reputed US research university did not require any familiarity with Gandhi, Nehru, or any other Southern political thinker or statesperson.
Some will also think me a Muslim dupe for supporting Kashmiri self-determination. I don't think I'm biased toward Islam. I think it's just that, as an atheist, I'm less biased against Islam than is mainstream Christian opinion in the USA. Not all that's bad, or good, about countries where most people are Muslim is attributable to Islam, any more than all that's bad or good about the USA is attributable to Christianity. Religion is only one of many influences. I'm not a fan of religions in general, but I'm fairly neutral among different religions. In any case, I try to base my judgements on what people do, regardless of their beliefs--or lack thereof. Interestingly, the Kashmiri nationalist organization with the most widespread support is the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which is secular, socialist, and as opposed to Pakistani occupation as to Indian. The same is true of the principal voice of Kashmiri opinion in the USA, the Kashmiri American Council.
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