The History and Geography of the Kashmir Problem

Image: Courtesy USA Today

Booker prize winner and Human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, while addressing a seminar titiled "Whither Kashmir? Freedom or enslavement?” and organized by Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) in Srinagar in 2010, said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” It’s a matter of conjecture as to what India she was referring to and what history she had dug into. Let’s do some simple facts check.

First, let’s see what’s India.

The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang (also written Xuanzang), who visited India in the seventh century (almost a millennium after Alexander) during the reign of Harshavardhana, rightly wrote, “It (India) was anciently called Shin-tu (Sindhu, the river), also Hien-tau (Hindu); but now, according to the right pronunciation, it is called In-tu (India)… The entire land is divided into seventy countries or so… Each country has diverse customs…” So India, according to him was a super country of seventy or so countries. I think that’s the most apt definition of India, as it has been since many millennia.

The Greek historian Megasthenes too, a millennium before, had referred to the “entire land” by one name – Indica. And the Persian polymath Al-Biruni, four centuries later, wrote the book Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah, Confirming (tahqiq) all Topics (maqul) of India (Hind), Acceptable (maqbul) and Unacceptable (mardhul), referring to India as Hind, in the 11^th century. The Arabs still refer to India as Hind – the granularity of the provinces and languages and ethnicities are not visible from outside, as it has been over the past few millennia.

This country of countries, India, which appeared as a single homogeneous entity, seen holistically, was perhaps united administratively for the first time by Ashoka in the third century BC. Ashoka also created a large Asian Union comprising almost all the existing governments in South and South East Asia, enabling seamless trade and exchange of commodities, peoples and cultures across a very large area, something much more than the recent European Union.

During Ashoka’s time India was the largest economy comprising almost 35% of the world GDP. (China’s GDP was around 25% and that of the Greeks little more than 10%). India’s dominance in the world economy remained intact for the next two millennia, always maintaining a staggering 25-30% share of the world GDP, till the beginning of the 18^th century, when the British arrived. There’s indeed a reason behind this.

In just 120 years, between 1700 and 1820, India’s GDP fell from 25% to 15% of the world GDP, and by 1947, when India was partitioned, it was at a mere 4%. So what exactly did the British do? They just broke the scaffolding which supported the Indian economy for millennia – the security of uninterrupted production and the safety of free trade across the entire subcontinent. They broke the federal structure of the subcontinent that functioned like an efficient and united country for millennia, and disintegrated it into isolated regions, cutting the seamless trade. The entire economy collapsed in no time. Suddenly the people of India were not allowed to produce and trade freely. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is the best chronicle of this devastation. People who had been cultivating their own food aplenty were suddenly forced to cultivate opium and indigo, and trade only with the British. Soon, for the first time, India saw hungry people, and famines.

India’s independence in 1947 didn’t do much good. The truncated India was severely bereft of the entire trade network which was the lifeline of her economy for more than two millennia. The “Kabuliwala” (immortalized by Tagore in a very poignant eponymous short story), the Afghans, who were household names in Bengal disappeared soon, like the Kashmiri shawl not much later, from Bengal and elsewhere. Free movement of people and trade collapsed between the frontiers.

It’s not for no reason then, that Sri Aurobindo had cautioned on 15^th August 1947, when India was portioned, and which was also his 76^th birthday, “India today is free but she has not achieved unity… In whatever way, the division must go; unity must […] be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.” It was therefore not a surprise to anyone in the know, when the spiritual flag of united India, designed by him, was hoisted at the Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry after the Article 370 had been abrogated by the Govt. of India in order to integrate Kashmir completely into India. Aurobindo had wanted the flag to be hoisted whenever a separated part of India would rejoin, thus celebrating the idea of a united India.

Now let’s come to Kashmir.

Hiuen Tsang talked in length about Kia-shi-mi-lo (Kashmir) as one of the seventy Indian countries, “enclosed by mountains… The neighboring states that have attacked it have never succeeded in subduing it. The capital of the country on the west side is bordered by a great river.”

A verse from the Rig Veda, The Ode to the Rivers, (Book 10, Hymn 75, Verse 5) goes like this:

Shutudri stomam sachataa Parushni aa| 

Asiknyaa Marudvridhe Vitastayaa Aarjikiye shrinuhya aa Sushomayaa ||

O Shutudri (Sutlej), O Parushni (Ravi), [you] favor this hymn [of mine].

With Asikni (Chenab) [and] with Vitastaa (Jhelum), O Marudvridhaa (the combined river of Chenab and Jhelum); with Sushomaa (Sohan) O Arjikiyaa (upper Indus), hear [my hymn].

All the major left tributaries of the Indus are enumerated in anti-clockwise manner, starting from Sutlej, barring Beas. It can be argued that the mere mention of Jhelum (Vitastaa) doesn’t mean that Kashmir was a part of the Rig Vedic India. But the fact that the ancient word Vitastaa is still preserved in Vyeth, the Kashmiri name for Jhelum, surely says something else. The very next verse talks about three rivers Trishtaamaa, Susartu and Sveti, which, from the order they are mentioned, could be very well the right tributaries of Indus in Kashmir, with a possibility that Sveti could be Gilgit. But much more striking, as the Harvard Indologist and Vedic scholar Michael Witzel has pointed out, is the fact that the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which gave the identity to India, her peoples and cultures, is very likely a loan word from the much older Burushaski language, remnants of which are still spoken in few isolated pockets of Kashmir. In the Burushaski, Shina and Dumaki languages of Kashmir “sinda” means river and that explains why there are multiple rivers in Kashmir with the name Sind (Sonmarg is on Sind).

The Greek historian Hecataeus, in his description of India, referred to Kashmir as Kaspapyros (surely related to Kashmir’s old name Kashyapapura, the city of the Rig Vedic sage Kashyapa), in the sixth century BC.

Rajatarangini, the first Indian book of secular history written by Kalhana in the 12^th century, is a chronicle of the history of Kashmir and India since the time of the Mahabharata war. The 102^nd and 104^th verses of its first book says, Ashoka, who has killed all his sins, shaanta-vrijina, embraced the doctrines of Jina (Buddha), prapanna jina-shaasanam, built the city of Srinagari.

So the discourses on Kashmir not being a part of India can rest for ever. Like any other part of India, it has been, and should remain an integral part of India. Now let’s look back and try to analyze why there has been so much fuss about Kashmir’s special status since 1947.

When India was partitioned, most of her peoples were never asked which part they wanted to be in – India or Pakistan. Bengal and the Punjab were attempted to be partitioned allocating the Muslim majority areas to Pakistan and retaining the rest in India. But that left out numerous regions on either sides with contrasting demographics – Hindu majority areas in Pakistan and Muslims majority in India. People of these regions were never asked whether they were fine with their fates – especially the hapless minorities who decided to stay back in Pakistan.

Moreover, there were some major anomalies, all of which favored Pakistan. The whole of Khulna district of Bengal with 50.7% Hindu population was awarded to (East) Pakistan. To decide which country they wanted to join, Sylhet, a part of Assam, was offered a referendum, which was thoroughly rigged in favor of Pakistan. When plebiscite was offered to the princely states of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir, Jinnah insisted that the decisions should be left to the rulers and not to the peoples, because he was more interested in Hyderabad, a Hindu majority princely state ruled by a Muslim, than J&K, exactly its opposite. Given this, Pakistan shouldn’t have had any problem when the Hindu king of J&K wanted to join India. Period.

So, from the very beginning Pakistan’s actions in matters of Kashmir were uncalled for. Their attacking Kashmir in 1947 in a bid to free it from India could be similar to India trying to free Khulna, Sylhet (in East Pakistan) and the North West Frontier Province (under Frontier Gandhi, they wanted to join India) from Pakistan, which very logically India never did. And for the millions of people who became victims of the partitions and who were not consulted before their fates had been decided by someone else, they learned to accept the eventuality and move on, building their lives from scratch. Extending the same logic to Kashmir, it would be ludicrous to even accept the argument that their accession to India was unjust. The accession, like any other part of India, should have been unconditional from the day one, just to maintain the parity with the rest.

The reality is, even the Kashmiris eventually learned to move on. Till the eighties there hasn’t been any disturbance. Not a single incident could be pointed out to vindicate that the Muslims in the valley were being subjugated by a Hindu majority India. On the contrary, the Kashmiri Pandits can’t remember since when they stopped celebrating any festival outdoor, fearing reactions from their Muslim “neighbors”. There was of course this dream of the two sides of Kashmir (J&K and POK) uniting someday, like many, who had to leave their homes in East Bengal and settle in India, still living with the utopia of a reunited Bengal. But that didn’t lead to any violence or terrorism, till Pakistan, in the eighties, started indoctrinating the youths in the valley, first with communism and revolution, with inspiration from Guevara, Castro, Nietzsche, Chomsky et al, and then slowly with radical Islamization.

Two elections in the eighties were rigged in Kashmir, but all elections in Bengal and Bihar have been rigged till the nineties. So, that was no justification for resorting to violence and terrorism, but it was very smartly exploited to begin with the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus and Sikhs in the valley.

Over six months, starting with the winter of 1989, the entire Pandit population was terrified with rampant killings and rapes, threatened with dire consequences and finally forced to leave, with the masjids announcing openly: Yetiy banega Pakistan, batav rosti batanivy saan, This will be Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women; Raliv, Galiv, ya Tschaliv, Merge, Die or Flee. All the while, during this short period of six months, the Indian government kept silent, when chits were being pasted on the doors of the houses of the Kashmiri Pandits daily, announcing who should leave next. 

The present militarization of the valley was only after this.

The truth is that the issue has never been a fight for Kashmiriyat. It was always, like Pakistan, to do away with everything else than Islam, totally obliterate all the non-Islamic identities that have thrived for millennia and try to create, futilely though, an Islamic identity. It’s nothing but the popular slogan Iqbal had coined: Pakistan ka matlab kya la illaha illalah, which translates word by word to “Pakistan’s meaning is there is no god but Allah”. This obsession with carving out an Islamic identity, disowning the millennia old unalienable Indian history, heritage and connections is the root cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis, which explains why they are a failed state. Totally contrast to this is how the few other non-Arab Islamic countries like Bangladesh, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia have so well preserved their non-Islamic rich cultural heritages.

The people who are spearheading all the “struggle” in the valley are least interested in Kashmiriyat. Most of them don’t even speak the language – they prefer Urdu, I’m told. During the Swadeshi movement, when the Indians wanted to boycott everything British, they didn’t slyly send their kids to Britain for education – they created their own institutions like Jadavpur University in Calcutta and Banaras Hindu University. On the contrary none of the separatists’ kids study in the valley. It’s also not about their hatred for India. Otherwise so many Kashmiris wouldn’t have had business interests across India, pointed out a Kashmiri Pandit friend of mine. A Chechen separatist, she added, would rarely enter into any business with Russia. A little fact check will reveal that nothing of Kashmiriyat has been preserved in POK, but still no Kashmiri separatist or activist ever talks about that.

Moreover, I myself figured out during my trip to the valley in 2017 that the minority Shias are not at all antagonized to India. Nor are the Hanzis, the boatpeople who are not part of the mainstream Islamic communities. Both these communities have been marginalized. Pehle Kafir (Hindus and Sikhs), phir Shia, phir Hanzi, that has been the agenda and the clarion call. The fact that the Shia majority Gilgit-Balistan in POK today has a totally different demographics should say it all.

It could be argued that India should have honored the special status given to Kashmir (in the form of Article 370) and promised as a part of the accession pact. But then, India did honor the commitment in spirit as the demographics in the valley didn’t change at all over the years (apart from the 100% exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, for which of course the Indian government was not responsible) whereas that in POK did drastically. And as to honoring the commitment in letter, it’s up to the Supreme Court to judge if the abrogation of Article 370 really violated anything.

So practically, the entire issue about Kashmir is a Sunni Wahabi narrative perpetuated forcefully by a few with vested interests and supported by Pakistan. That’s the root cause of everything. It’s also perhaps, as pointed out to me by a Kashmiri friend of mine, a hidden agenda fueled by the racial supremacy of the ruling class of Pakistan, who didn’t want to share the power with the dark skinned and Bengali-speaking Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (he would soon become the first Prime Minister of Bangladesh) even though he had got a massive majority in the 1970 general elections in Pakistan, just because they felt he was racially inferior.

India has to put an end to all these. India needs to be united, not because she has been such all along, but because, that’s how she can survive longer, as a strong economy and a prosperous and free place.

The need of the hour is to gain the confidence of the indoctrinated Kashmiris and convince them that it’s for mutual benefit that we all stay together.