Their faces, and those of the little ones, who cry not because they know who has been lost but because their mothers and aunts are distraught, are the new face of Kashmir. They weep as one for their gun-toting insurgent son, who climbed the high mountains in pursuit of a dangerous dream, or their carpenter-brother, who left the house for supplies and never returned home. There are pictures of buildings aflame, the end result of a skirmish between violent men, or the more spectacular one of the precise moment when the military blows up two homes from which militants fire at them. The tone of the photograph is uncannily like the tone of the stories: the roar of the blast is muted into the visual whoosh of debris flying high, with the quiet, understated certainty of death. Pictures and poetry, stories and songs—who could have known that two decades of violence could have made these the weapons of the weak? And then there are other pictures that are almost as inspiring: masses of men, and of women, mobilized into processions, surging forward, arms in the air and mouths open with slogans, storming into a future that holds few promises except for the certainty of more pain.
T
here is another set of stories though, that is told less and less often as the years go by, but whose power to haunt and to vex does not fade. They too feature people who were killed, but they are mostly about exile, about leaving homes and hearths in fear. These are Hindu stories, or at least stories of Hindus, and of their horror at hearing, in their neighbourhoods, the strident voices of hate. There is no compensation for their loss, which is also the loss of a set of stories that complemented and completed Kashmir’s web of enchantments. They will never be replaced, but, slowly but surely, their telling will fade in the face of the other more urgent, more recently painful, stories Muslims have to tell.
And finally, when all the policy planners, the politicians, and the military men have done their work, it is these stories that will defy their logic. We—I now write as an Indian and a democrat—have no convincing stories to offer Kashmiris, no narratives of inclusion and oneness. We have watched, and listened—but not really done either—as large sections of "our" Kashmiri population are brutalized and reduced to the status of supplicants. We think our promises of development, and of belonging to an India burgeoning into a superpower, will wean them away from the stories they now imbibe. We should know that we have in fact, no stories to offer, or at least none that are not hollow, corrupt and coercive. And they now have a sea of stories, stories which move and mobilize, with which to irrigate their suffering and their struggle.
I will be keenly affected by the outcome of this struggle, I know, but I know also, even more forcefully, that we have lost the moral right not to let Kashmiris compose their own stories. We do not know what form those stories will take, nor what conclusions they will offer. They might tell of the coming of an Islamic state, or of union with a Muslim neighbour, or they might imagine a future of continuing toleration and exchange, a reassertion of the Islam and Hinduism of the sufis and the rishis. Or they might yearn (and I hope this will be the case) for a secular polity in which Kashmiris of all religions and of none can participate fully. We cannot know in advance what those stories might be, but they need to be conceived, shared, and debated. If we value democracy, we can encourage no less.