HOW GOODNESS ERUPTED

Significant news this week from different parts of a world shaken by recent events includes the Liberal Party’s victory in Canada, which will be seen as an unanticipated consequence of President Trump’s desire to acquire the US’s huge northern neighbor. However, I focus again on India and South Asia, not because I see other parts of our planet as less important or more stable, but for two simple reasons. One, with over two billion current inhabitants, making up a quarter of the world’s total, South Asia is our earth’s most populous, as also the most densely populated, region. 

Secondly, today’s scene in South Asia is truly serious. After the terror attack of April 22 that killed 26 men in Pahalgam, seen as Kashmir’s tourist paradise – “Pakistan organized the attack,” New Delhi declared --, rhetoric between India and its neighbor Pakistan, both possessing nuclear weapons, has reached alarming heights. Controlling the higher terrain, India has formally “put in abeyance” a 65-year-old treaty to share with Pakistan the waters of the great Indus River, which originates in Tibet, which China controls. 

“Not a drop of water” will go to Pakistan, C. R. Paatil, minister for “waterpower” in Modi’s cabinet, has thundered. Indians link the Pahalgam attack to a speech that Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, gave in Islamabad on April 15, in which he declared that South Asia’s Muslims and Hindus had absolutely nothing in common and in fact were two separate nations, adding that Kashmir unquestionably was Pakistan’s “jugular vein”. 

Indian voices now demand a forcible absorption of the Kashmir portion which, despite three wars, Pakistan has held from 1947, comprising, in area, roughly one-third of what before decolonization was the princely state, under British suzerainty, of “Jammu & Kashmir”. 

COMBUSTIBLE RHETORIC 

Given the large and widening gap, in India’s favor, between the neighboring economies, and the even bigger contrast between India’s current global standing and Pakistan’s apparent helplessness before its serious internal divides, some of India’s hawks, their lungpower amplified following the Pathankot attack, imagine that Pakistan can be quickly and painlessly crushed. However, China remains a staunch Pakistan ally, although, if a new India-Pakistan war does start, Beijing might prefer to watch (and enjoy) an endless drain of Indian resources in attempting to subjugate a neighbor that holds 250 million people, rather than involve itself directly in the possible war. 

Moreover, today’s China faces large challenges domestically as well as globally. As for the US, which in 1999 successfully pressured India and Pakistan to cut short a war they were fighting in Kargil in Kashmir, its stakes in South Asia have shrunk following the American withdrawal in 2021 from Afghanistan. 

For the very first time, and in order, one supposes, to reach the ears of the wider world, Modi uttered sentences in English to promise retaliation for Pahalgam. His speeches are always in Hindi, except in his native Gujarat, where he switches to Gujarati. Has Modi bound himself to initiate an act of force?

We must hope that any India-Pakistan war remains mostly verbal. Even if it does, the hardening of the drive in India to make the lives of its Muslims (between 14 and 15 percent of the population) even more difficult than it already is, should agitate every Indian with a conscience. 

BOYCOTT “THEM” 

Because it seemed that the killers in Pahalgam first made sure, callously, that the human target they had found and intended to kill was a Hindu and not a Muslim, India’s Hindu nationalists, hardly negligible in numbers or influence, have mounted a wide campaign to boycott Muslim shopowners. On April 25, the BJP’s Nitesh Rane, a cabinet minister in Maharashtra, told a gathering in his state’s Dapoli town: 

“They asked our religion before killing us. So, you should also ask about their religion before shopping or buying anything. Chances are, some shopkeepers will just lie about their faith. Ask them to recite the Hanuman Chalisa (a Hindu religious poem).” 

BOMBED OUT HOMES

Within Jammu & Kashmir, which was demoted in 2019 from a state of the Indian Union to a “union territory”, at least seven homes of locals suspected of involvement in the Pahalgam attack were bombed out of existence on or around Sunday April 27. According to Siddharth Varadarajan, writing in the online portal, The Wire, only two of the seven whose homes were exploded had been named by the police in connection with the Pahalgam attack. No trial, no indictment, no entry in any police book of alleged crime. Just bombing. 

Much of India appears to cheer this revenge as overdue justice. The applause and the “justice” run parallel with the demolition in other parts of India – without court orders – of Muslim tombs or other Muslim properties. A claim that a Hindu shrine once existed on or under a Muslim-owned edifice seems to justify demolition. A local judge here or there, or even a Supreme Court justice, may on occasion object on legal or constitutional grounds, but “revenge” marches forward. Revenge for what? For what any Pakistanis may have done at any time since 1947, and for what any Muslims may have done anytime in the last 1,200 years. Bizarre as it sounds, this is the psychology at work. 

IS GUILT THE SOURCE? 

At least some of the heat in the Indian establishment’s post-Pahalgam rhetoric comes from guilt over the surprising absence of any security force on April 22, when the tourists in Pahalgam were attacked. Surprising because almost every piece of Kashmir, whether in town or country, has in recent years been guarded by an army or police unit. While it seems that a “lapse” is being quietly acknowledged behind closed doors, guilt has found escape in vocalized anger at Pakistanis and at India’s Muslims, who are presented as two sides of a single coin. Ability to conflate the two was aided by the emphatic, erroneous, and combustible declaration of Pakistan’s army chief, in the unprotesting presence of his country’s prime minister, that Muslims and Hindus are two different, and presumably irreconcilable, “nations”. 

That “two-nation theory” was frontally rejected by India’s founding fathers and by the constitution they bequeathed, which remains in force. And if one positive outcome has joined Pahalgam’s pain, that outcome is the unrestrained appreciation for local Muslim helpers publicly expressed by Pahalgam’s Hindu survivors. 

ADIL HUSSAIN SHAH 

Across India, Syed Adil Hussain Shah is now a well-known name and face. Adil used to give rides on his pony, or maybe this young guide had more than one pony, to tourists and their children in Pahalgam. A widely published story sent out by PTI, India’s premier news agency, put it this way: 

“A pony-wallah who laid down his life trying to save visitors to his homeland, a guide who rescued a family of 11, and countless locals are among those who added another dimension to Kashmir’s hospitality when terror struck Pahalgam on a calm Tuesday afternoon. 

“As the families of Kaustubh Ganbote and Santosh Jagdale, two of the victims (they had traveled from Maharashtra), stood face to face with the armed terrorists, the... pony-wallah confronted them, asking why they were killing innocent people. In a courageous attempt to protect the tourists, the young man tried to snatch away the weapon. Shah succumbed to three bullets to the chest.”

Bengaluru’s Deccan Herald wrote: “Syed Adil Hussain Shah, a 28-year-old Muslim pony ride operator, became a symbol of brotherhood and bravery on Tuesday when he laid down his life to protect a group of non-Muslim tourists during a brutal terror attack... Adil, who had spent his day ferrying tourists on horseback... was guiding a family when the gunmen opened fire. Eyewitnesses recount that instead of fleeing, Adil rushed toward one of the terrorists and tried to wrestle the weapon away, creating a split-second distraction that gave the tourists a chance to escape.” 

SHAWLSELLER & GUIDE 

The Indian Express carried a story from Naveed Iqbal, its reporter in Srinagar, about another guide: “Over the sound of gunshots ringing, Chhattisgarh resident Lucky Parashar, his face on the ground, cried out to tour guide Nazakat Ahmad Shah for help...  The firing in the Pahalgam meadow started just short of 2 pm on April 22. In barely 10 minutes, three terrorists in dark clothes shot dead 26 people, including a local pony ride operator, and injured several others. As cries of pain, shock and grief broke out, the terrorists melted into the forest nearby. 

“Earlier that day, four couples and three children, including Lucky’s family, had travelled with 31-year-old Nazakat to sightsee around Pahalgam, a one-day stop in their Kashmir itinerary. At the ticket counter, the guide greeted his cousin — 30-year-old Syed Adil Hussain Shah, the ill-fated pony operator — before entering the park. 

“Nazakat, who has been working as a tour guide since 2010, has known Parashar’s family for years. For four months each year, his family sells shawls and other Kashmiri goods in Chhattisgarh (more than 1,000 miles away) ... Amid the gunshots, Nazakat called up the driver he had hired to ferry the family, instructing him to take a different route and meet him ‘near the spring that flows close to the park’. A split second later, he grabbed the three children, and, with Lucky, made a beeline for the gap in the fence.” 

“The taxi driver had heard the gunshots too... Running along the spring, Nazakat, the children and Lucky reached the car 10 minutes later. Once the children were inside, Nazakat turned around — back towards the meadow and the gunshots — to track down the remainder of his group. 

“The gate near the ticket counter was open, he recalls, allowing those on the park’s periphery to get away. At the fence, he saw pony wallahs rushing panicked tourists down the slope on ponies even as shots continued to ring. “It had rained two days ago. The path was still extremely slippery,” he says. “Despite the chaos, Nazakat managed to locate all seven remaining members of his group. He says he took the stunned tourists back to their hotel in Pahalgam. 

“The next day, April 23, he accompanied them to Srinagar airport, nearly 80 km from Pahalgam. It was on his way to Srinagar on April 23 that Nazakat found out about his cousin succumbing to the bullet injuries he had sustained during the attack... ‘[I]n my rush to get the guests out, I had forgotten to check on Adil,’ he says.” 

Another helper, Sajjad Ahmed Bhatt, was named by NDTV. “When bullets rang in the scenic meadows of Pahalgam and terror dawned on tourists on April 22, a group of locals rushed to their rescue without caring for their own lives. These men, many of whom earn their livelihoods ferrying tourists on horseback, were the first responders... Among them is Sajjad Ahmed Bhatt, whose video of carrying a tourist away to safety during the terror attack ha[s] gone viral. Keeping fear aside, he carried an injured boy on his back for several kilometres downhill over the rocky terrain.”