The Wail of Kashmir

A lot of what Peer says about the acts and excesses of the army and paramilitary forces is chilling beyond words. For instance, he writes of the night when the security forces fired on a wedding procession and the “bride was raped” by “rampaging BSF men”. In another horrifying incident, the army is accused of picking up two young boys, and after “strapping landmines on their bodies” sent them to confront “a group of armed militants holed up in a house”. There are also references to various “massacres”. But, to his credit, Peer is never one-sided in his account.

For example, he writes: “In the winter of 1990 Srinagar was the city of protests, the city of massacres. Militants joined the Indian forces in a display of brutality. Mushir-ul-Hasan, the vice-chancellor of the Kashmir University, was kidnapped and killed…. Prominent Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims seen as siding with India were the next targets. On May 21, 1990 militants from Hizbul Mujadeen, the pro-Pakistan militant group, assassinated the head priest of Srinagar, Maulvi Farooq…. Paramilitary forces fired at the slain priest’s funeral procession. Bullets pierced the coffin; pallbearers and mourners fell. A hundred were slain. Their blood-soaked shoes lay on the road after their bodies were carried away. People forgot the head priest’s assassination; anger rose against India.… The firing on the mourners and the image of their blood-soaked shoes found their way into poetry and paintings.”

Peer was a schoolboy when Kashmiri Pandits were hounded out of the Valley to rot till today in refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. Seeing the empty benches where his Pandit classmates used to sit, he discovered that along with killing hundreds of pro-India Muslims, ranging from activists to suspected informants of Indian Intelligence, the militants had killed hundreds of Pandits “on similar grounds, or without a reason”.

At the time of Maulvi Farooq’s assassination, Peer was 13. On returning to the Valley several years later, he recorded: “I heard and remembered stories of brutality, courage, love, faith, loss or even hope. Both Kashmir and I had changed. The heady, rebellious Kashmir I left as a teenager was now a land of brutalized, exhausted and uncertain people.… The conflict might leave the streets, but it might not leave the soul.”

Army leaders, serving and retired, who, in their interaction with me, have often complained that their officers and men are being maligned even on charges that have been proved to be false would be well-advised to read Peer’s book. For Khushwant Singh is entirely right in describing it as “beautifully written, brutally honest and deeply hurtful”.