Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir

Kashmir was the largest of the approximately five hundred princely states under British sovereignty as of 1947. Kashmir was predominantly Muslim but ruled by a Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh; the popular leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, preferred India to Pakistan and an independent Kashmir to both. When India was violently partitioned in 1947, both Singh and Sheikh Abdullah sought time before deciding Kashmir’s fate. In October 1947, however, tribesmen from the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, supported by the Pakistani army, invaded Kashmir, forcing their hand. Singh decided to join India, and Sheikh Abdullah, who was a friend of the new Indian prime minister, Nehru, supported him. In January 1949 the fighting stopped after the UN intervened. The UN endorsed a plebiscite for Kashmiris to determine which country they wanted to belong to, and created a cease-fire line. The line still divides Kashmir into Pakistan-controlled and India-controlled parts, and it is now known as the Line of Control (LoC).

The agreement of accession that Hari Singh signed with India in October 1947 gave Kashmir great autonomy. India controlled only defense, foreign affairs, and telecommunications. Kashmir had its own constitution and flag; the heads of its local government were called the president and the prime minister. Gradually, this autonomy disappeared. In 1953 India jailed Sheikh Abdullah, who was then Kashmir’s prime minister, after he implemented a radical land reform and gave a speech suggesting the possibility of an independent Kashmir. In the following decades, India installed puppet rulers, eroded the legal status of Kashmiri autonomy, and ignored the democratic rights of the Kashmiris. Sheikh Abdullah remained in jail for around seventeen years; when he was released, he signed a compromise with the Indian government in which he gave up the demand for the plebiscite that the UN had recommended. He spent the remaining years of his life in power, and the period (also of my childhood) was relatively peaceful. In 1987, five years after his death, the Indian government rigged state elections, arresting opposition candidates and terrorizing their supporters.

In the summer of 1988, a year after the troubled elections—when I was eleven—Father sent me to a government-run subsidized boarding school in Aishmuqam, a small town five miles from my village. I was bad at sports and spent long happy hours in the library reading Stevenson, Dickens, Kipling, and Defoe. I saw less and less of Father, as he had been transferred to Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital. But when we were home together, we took our usual places, and Father taught me poetry. He would recite a few verses from a poem and say, “If you explain the meaning, you will get two rupees.” It was a lot of pocket money, and I tried hard.

In December 1989 I returned home for my winter holidays, hoping to join Father for the winter vacations in Srinagar. A week later, a group of armed young Kashmiris, led by a twenty-one-year-old named Yasin Malik, kidnapped the daughter of the federal Indian home minister. Malik and his comrades demanded the release of their jailed friends. After negotiations, the Indian government gave in. People cheered for the young guerrillas.

Yasin Malik, who led the militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), had been one of the polling agents arrested and tortured after the rigged elections of 1987. The bottled-up resentment against Indian rule and the treatment of Kashmiris erupted like a volcano. The young guerrillas led by Malik and his friends, challenging India, were seen as heroes—most of them had received training in Pakistani camps between early 1988 and late 1989, and they had in turn secretly trained many more within Kashmir. In the next two months, the Indian government responded ruthlessly. Hundreds were killed and arrested after Indian troops opened fire on pro-independence Kashmiri protesters. It was January 1990. I was thirteen.

The war of my adolescence had started. Today I fail to remember the beginnings. I fail to remember who told me about aazadi, or freedom, who told me about militants, who told me it had begun. I fail to remember the date, the name, the place, the image that announced the war—a war that continues still. Time and again I look back and try to cull from memory the moment that was to change everything I had been and would be.

The night of January 20, 1990, was long and sad. Before dinner, my family gathered as usual around the radio for the evening news on BBC World Service. Two days earlier, Jagmohan, an Indian bureaucrat infamous for his hatred of Muslims, had been appointed the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. He gave orders to crush the incipient rebellion. Throughout the night of January 19, Indian paramilitary men slammed doors in Srinagar and dragged out young men. By morning hundreds had been arrested; curfew was imposed. Kashmiris poured out onto the streets in thousands and shouted slogans of freedom from India.

One protest began from a southern Srinagar area where my parents now live, passed the city center, Lal Chowk, and marched through the nearby Maisuma district toward the shrine of a revered Sufi saint a few miles ahead. Protesters were crossing the dilapidated wooden Gawkadal Bridge in Maisuma when the Indian paramilitary, the Central Reserve Police Force, opened fire. More than fifty people were killed. It was the first massacre in the Kashmir valley. As the news sank in, we all wept. The massacre had occurred a few hundred meters from my father’s office. Mother was certain he would be safe. “He wouldn’t have gone to work on a tense day like that. He will be fine,” she said. “And he would never go near a procession,” Grandfather added. But there was no way to get the same assurance from Father by hearing his voice for a few minutes: There were no phones in our village. Grandfather walked out of the room onto the lawn; we followed him. Our neighbors had come out as well. We looked at one another. Nobody said much. Later that night I lay in my bed imagining the massacre in Srinagar.

Kashmiri mornings are full of activity. I would wake up to the banging of utensils in the kitchen; the sounds of chickens running around in the courtyard after Grandmother let them out of their coop; one or another of our neighbors herding their cattle out to graze on the mountainside; the brisk footfalls and chatter of village women passing by on their way back from the forest, carrying bundles of fir and pine branches they’d gathered for timber; the repeated honking of the first bus leaving the village calling passengers; the newsreader’s words in a flat monotone floating from our black Phillips radio on a windowsill in the kitchen.

The village was unusually silent that morning. Hasan, the neighborhood baker who always made wisecracks as we waited for him to bake fresh lawasa, looked sullen as he slapped round loaves of dough with ferocity. He stared at the flames leaping out of the oven, turned toward me, and said, “Those murderers will burn in a fire far brighter than this. I cried when I heard it on the radio last night.”

The shops did not open, and the buses did not leave the village. There was no way to reach Father. Like most people in Kashmir, we relied on the public phone at the district post office in the nearby town of Anantnag. But the post office would be closed because of the protests. Father had called a friend in Anantnag, who visited us the next day with the news of his safety. Villagers stood around repeating how they’d heard the news on the radio. I felt anger spread in me. A young man raised a slogan: HUM KYA CHAHTE? AAZADI! (We want? Freedom!) He repeated, and we repeated after him: We want? Freedom!

The protest gathered momentum. Voices that were reluctant and low in the beginning became firm and loud. The crowd began a slow but spirited march along the main street of the village. Old and young women appeared at the windows of the houses. New chants were created and improvised. A young man raised an arm toward a group of women watching the procession from a communal tap and shouted, “Our mothers demand!” The crowd responded: Aazadi! He repeated: “Our sisters demand!” The crowd: Aazadi! A rush of adrenaline shot through me, and I marched ahead of my friends and joined the leaders of the procession. Somebody who was carrying his young son on his shoulders shouted: “Our children demand!” Aazadi!

By February 1990 Kashmir was in the midst of a full-blown rebellion against India. Every evening we heard the news of more protests and deaths on the BBC World Service radio. Protests followed killings, and killings followed protests. News came from Srinagar that hundreds of thousands of people had marched to pray for independence at the shrine of the patron saint of Kashmir, Nooruddin Rishi, in a town an hour away from Srinagar. All over Kashmir, similar marches to the shrines of Sufi saints were launched. Another day I joined a procession to the shrine of a much-revered Sufi saint, Zain Shah Sahib, at Aishmuqam, near my school. A few young men led us wearing white cotton shrouds. They seemed to be in a trance, whirling like dervishes, singing pro-independence songs. I walked behind them, repeating their words in complete wonder. Men, women, and children stood on the sidewalks, offering food and beverages and showering flower petals and shireen—round white balls of boiled sugar and rice—on us, a practice held in shrines and at wedding ceremonies.

The crowd itself was a human jumble. The contractor who carried whiskey in a petrol can and the uptight lawyer who waited for passersby to greet him, the tailor who entertained the idle youth in his shop with tall stories while prodding away on his sewing machine and the chemist who would fall asleep behind the counter, the old fox who bragged of his connections with congressional politicians in Delhi and the unemployed graduate who had appointed himself the English-language commentator for the village cricket team’s matches, the Salafi revivalist who sold plastic shoes and the Communist basket weaver with Stalin mustache all marched together, their voices joining in a resounding cry for freedom. Amid the collision of bodies, the holding of hands, the interlocking of eyes in affirmation and confirmation, the merging of a thousand voices, I had ceased to be a shy, bookish boy hunched by the expectations of my family. I wasn’t scared of being scolded anymore; I felt a part of something much bigger. I let myself go fly with the crowd. Aazadi! Throughout the winter, almost every Kashmiri man was a Farhad, ready to mold the mountains for his Shirin: freedom!

WAR TILL VICTORY was graffitied everywhere in Kashmir; it was painted alongside another slogan: SELF-DETERMINATION IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT! The Indian government seemed to have deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the rebellion. Almost every day the soldiers patrolled our village in a mixture of aggression and nervousness, their fingers close to the triggers of their automatic and semiautomatic machine guns. Military and paramilitary camps sprouted up in almost every small town and village.

It became harder for Father to visit home on weekends. He stopped traveling in his official vehicle, as that made him conspicuous. The journey from his office in Srinagar to our village, once a lovely two-hour ride, had become a risky, life-threatening affair. Almost every time he came home, it took him around five hours. On a lucky day, his bus would be stopped only every fifteen minutes, and at each military check post, he and other passengers would be made to stand in a queue, holding an identity card and anything else they carried. After a body search, Father would walk half a mile from the check post and wait in another queue for the bus to arrive. On various other days, he barely escaped getting killed.

Father worked in a colonial castlelike office compound a few minutes from the city center, Lal Chowk, and the adjacent Maisuma area, the home of JKLF commander Yasin Malik. Gun battles between the JKLF guerrillas and the Indian soldiers, and hand grenades exploding near the paramilitary bunkers and patrols, were becoming a routine near Father’s office.

One afternoon he stepped out of his office compound with a few colleagues, a group of middle-aged bureaucrats in suits and neckties carrying office files. They crossed the military check post outside their office gate and began walking toward Lal Chowk to catch buses home. Suddenly, the shopkeepers by the road jumped from their counters, pulled down the shutters, and began to run. Rapid bursts of gunfire resounded in the alleys behind the office; louder explosions came from Lal Chowk. As a burning passenger bus rushed down the street, Father and his colleagues stood in a huddle close to the massive stone-and-brick pillars of the office gate, waiting for the gunfire to stop.

A stern bark from the road startled them. “Hands up!” A group of angry Indian paramilitaries stood across the narrow road, their guns raised at Father’s group. Some policemen guarding the office compound stepped forward and shouted at the soldiers, “Don’t shoot! They are government officers! They work here!”

A week later, Father and a friend of his were walking toward Lal Chowk after work when a grenade exploded across the street. They wanted to rush back to the office, but heavy gunfire seemed to come from all directions. Father and his friend ran toward a roadside tea stall. His friend slipped and fell into a manhole. Father dragged him out, and they hid in the tea shop, under wooden tables. They lay on the dusty, mud floor for a long time.

That winter began my political education. It took the form of acronyms: JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front), JKSLF (Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation Front), BSF (Border Security Force), CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force). I learned new phrases: frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest, and torture. That winter, too, busloads of Kashmiri youth went to border towns and crossed over to Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir for arms training. They returned as militants carrying Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, light machine guns, and rocket launchers issued by Pakistan.

My friends were talking about a novel, Pahadoon Ka Beta, the story of a young Afghan boy who fought the Russians. I wanted to read it and found a copy with a cousin toward the end of my winter vacation. It was a slim paperback, with a green cover featuring a boy with a gun. It read like a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Ali, its young protagonist, was both James Bond and Rambo. He seemed to have destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, undertaken espionage missions within Russia, and even rescued his father from a Russian prison. Its charm and fame seemed to lie in its obvious romanticizing of a guerrilla fighter at a time when almost every young person in Kashmir wanted to either be a guerrilla fighter or get to know one.

And there was a movie everybody wanted to watch: Arab-American filmmaker Mustafa Akkad’s Lion of the Desert. Father had bought a black-and-white television set, but we didn’t have a video cassette player. One of our neighbors had one, and his son promised to let me watch Lion of the Desert if I could get a copy of the film. I couldn’t find it. But one day I heard the men sitting at a shop front near my house talk about it. Rashid, a bus driver who often ferried passengers from Anantnag to Srinagar, was talking about having seen Lion of the Desert many years ago. He had watched it at the Regal Talkies in Lal Chowk. He narrated the story of Omar Mukhtar, an aging Libyan tribal chief who fought the occupying Italian army of Mussolini till he was arrested and hanged. “He was fair and tall and had a short white beard,” Rashid described Mukhtar, played by Anthony Quinn. “After the Italians arrest him, the Italian commander asks him to organize the surrender of his men. Omar Mukhtar is old and in chains but he tells the Italian general that they will never surrender, that the Italians have no right to be in Libya, that no nation has a right to occupy another nation. The Italians hang Omar Mukhtar.”

Those animated conversations at the shop fronts would come to a sudden halt every time we saw a column of soldiers or a convoy of trucks and armored cars pass by. The Indian government seemed to have deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the rebellion. Morning to evening, the soldiers patrolled the road through our village. They walked in long lines on both sides of the road in uniforms and bulletproof helmets, their fingers close to their triggers. Some of them carried big cylindrical guns that fired mortars. Every time we saw a soldier with a mortar gun, someone would talk about how the soldiers used the mortar guns to burn houses wherever they came under attack from the militants. Rashid talked about a town called Handwara, near the border, that was burned by Indian troops. “They throw gunpowder over the houses and then fire mortars, and an entire village is burned in an hour.”

Military and paramilitary camps sprouted up in almost every small town and village. A camp was set up near my village, too: Sandbags fortified its windows and doors, coils of barbed wire formed a boundary around the camp, empty liquor bottles hung from the barbed wire, and grim-looking soldiers who stood in the sandbag bunkers along the fence held on to their machine guns. Every pedestrian and automobile had to stop a hundred meters from the camp; people had to raise their hands and walk in a queue to a bunker, where a soldier frisked them and checked identity cards. No farmer, shopkeeper, or artisan had official papers except for maybe a ration card with his address and the names of family members written on it. Only the few men like my father or grandfather who worked for the local government had state identification cards.

My school was closed for the winter holidays till March. I bought an identity card from our neighborhood stationery store. The shopkeeper had bought a big bundle of identity cards from a dealer in the nearby town of Anantnag. He boasted that the identity cards he sold worked best with soldiers. They said INDIAN IDENTITY CARD and had an impression of the Indian emblem: a pillar with four lions on four sides, a wheel, and a pair of oxen on its base. I got my identity card signed and stamped by the local magistrate and promptly pulled it out whenever I was stopped by soldiers on the street or was walking past one of their numerous check posts. It became a part of me.

In our mosque, after prayers and before the recitation of darood—a song praising the Prophet Muhammad—people made spontaneous speeches and shouted slogans of aazadi. I specifically asked God to give us freedom by the next year. But there were also moments of frivolity. One day a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted in Arabic, “Kabiran kabira!” The slogan meant “Who is the greatest?” But no one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again, and again there was silence—then the adolescents in the last row, the backbenchers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that in reply to the slogan we were supposed to shout, “Allah-o-Akbar!” (God is great). He shouted again, “Kabiran kabira!” He was answered with a hesitant, awkward “Allah-o-Akbar.” For about a year after, we teased him.

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