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’.

... contd.