The opposition between the Valley and Jammu originates in the colonial creation of ‘Jammu and Kashmir’ as a ‘princely kingdom’, sold by the British for a song to Gulab Singh and his descendants. The strategic desire for a buffer zone between the Indian plains and the Central Asian playing fields of the Great Game soon led to the need for a prime holiday retreat for the Raj. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, hunting, fishing, espionage, photography, and summer balls flourished in the Valley under the gaze of the Dogra maharajas based in Jammu, even as the rulers ruthlessly exploited the inhabitants of this prized space. Kashmiris of the Valley were denied the basis of modern subjecthood such as education, sidelined to promote the Dogra rulers’ self-fashioning as, according to historian Mridu Rai, ‘Hindu rulers of a Hindu state’. Their practice of ‘begaar’ conscripted Kashmiri Muslims as unpaid porters for the manual transportation of goods across the kingdom. Kashmiri Pandits, showcased by European Orientalists as representatives of a Hindu antiquity, were however mobilised to enhance Dogra Hindu identity. These are regional memories not easily forgotten.

Class-based exploitation spearheaded the Valley’s mass uprising against the Dogra rulers led by Sheikh Abdullah in 1931. Though his socialist manifesto for a Naya Kashmir had room for Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, the older privileges of class continued to antagonise the two groups. These divides resurfaced with the Pandit exodus in 1991, which quickly fitted into the wider communal polarisation of the 1990s. The Pandits in Jammu’s refugee camps had little else left but their claims on a pre-Sanskritic, Hindu antiquity for Kashmir and Kashmiri culture, which resonated with Jammu’s historical interest in those claims. Many of their intellectuals gravitated towards the Hindu right, which eagerly embraced their cause. Conversely, many in the Valley rejected the much-hyped syncretism of ‘kashmiriyat’ to assert an Islamic Kashmiri identity. Physically separated, with new generations growing up bereft of a composite demography, Kashmiris now spoke bitterly of one Kashmir ‘this side’ of the Pir Panjal mountains, and another on ‘that side’. The Pandits’ exile in Jammu has exacerbated and complicated the deep historical tensions between Jammu and Kashmir that underlie the present détente.

India retained the Dogra juxtaposition of Jammu and Kashmir, but had to relinquish the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Highway. This was the only feasible road linking Kashmir to the plains, but the Indo-Pak war of 1948 and the creation of the LOC severed this artery. Nehru had presciently obtained Gurdaspur district, through which the only possible alternative road to the valley would need to pass at Pathankot. But trouble arose immediately after Partition: Indian troops were airlifted to Srinagar to face the Tribal Invasion in October 1947, pointing to the urgency for a bypass surgery that would ultimately blast out of the mountains the Jawahar Tunnel. Kashmiris still remember a time when the natural route out of the Valley facilitated the movement of goods as well as people between the Valley and its markets in that part of the Valley beyond the LOC, including Muzaffarabad. The Kashmiris who marched towards Muzaffarabad to sell their rotting fruit struck at the nation’s Achilles’ heel. But they were primarily asserting a deep-rooted regional memory of their relationship to the Valley’s geography, their basis for the same Kashmiriyat that well-meaning secular discourses reduce to ‘syncretism’.

The problem lies in Indian ignorance of Kashmiri history, memories, and self-construction, their equivalent of the ‘synthesis between history, geography and politics’ through which scholar Mahmood Mamdani examined the roots of the Tutsi genocide by Hutus. Kashmiriyat for Kashmiris is about putting the Kashmiri back into the landscape and redefining that relationship on their own terms. Pandit and Muslim Kashmiris commonly identify with the endangered Hangul deer: can’t the deadlock over the forested land be broken by rearticulated its cost in environmental terms, surely of equal concern to all? But to get there, the political temperature has to be lowered first. The full re-opening of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway would be the most effective step in that direction.

The writer is a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds and the author of ‘Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir’