Pride and prejudice in paradise: And now another 73,000 dead

We need another holiday like a hole in the head: but La Presidenta added another one for today. She declared Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic equivalent of our Easter Sunday, signalling the end of the fasting month of Ramadan a national holiday. In short, walang pasok – hence, not enough people to mobilize for another anti-GMA demonstration or "prayer rally." Today, all prayers presumably must be directed to Makkah (Mecca).

Aside from sucking up to the Muslims – La Gloria never commemorates Yom Kippur, the Passover, or Buddha’s Birthday – another non-working day makes no sense. Our country has been in gridlock and paralysis for the last ten days, with one long-weekend and one holiday chasing after another. What "work ethic"? There’s not even any kind of ethics anymore. Everything is geared on one side to the overthrow of GMA, the other to her desperate defense and survival. Who’s looking after the welfare of Juan de la Cruz, who’s caught in the middle?

Maybe those columnists who nastily persist in calling La Presidenta "Ate Glue" have a point. Unwittingly they pay her a compliment: she’s sticking to her high office like glue. Must be using Mighty Bond, among every other kind of tactic like the pretense of Joe de V. and Prospering Pichay fighting each other perhaps so Pichay can look like the Minority leader.

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Pakistan has just released the figure that the death toll from the horrible October 8 earthquake in Kashmir (7.6 on the Richter Scale) has now climbed to 73,000 – far bigger than the original body count of 59,000. How many more corpses will be recovered from the debris? There are more than 33,000 grievously injured and wounded.

With scores of thousands homeless, their dwellings destroyed, many face the bleak prospect of chilling to death as December’s snows descend on them in that frozen hemisphere.

What a tragedy for Kashmir! While most of the fatalities and casualties were on the Pakistani side, thousands were also affected on the "Indian side."

The war between the two countries over Kashmir for all the non-ending "peace talks" remains unabated, and now, Nature too, has taken a cruel hand.

The last time – by coincidence – my wife and I saw Kashmir was to celebrate the same feast as today, the Eid al-Fitr, in Srinagar, Indian Kashmir’s capital.

We had enjoyed a vacation there of more than a week when the Eid arrived to send the predominantly Muslim population there (80 percent) into happy celebration. For a whole month of Ramadan (Ramazan they spell it in translation from Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan and India) the devout Muslims had fasted from food and drink from dawn each day to the firing of the sunset gun. The Eid, therefore, was the signal for all of them to let go.

The holiday in Kashmir began with morning prayers in the Eid-Gha, a special place of prayer, an open place on the outskirts of town. We joined 50,000 of the faithful, bottoms up, with the Mullah leading the group in facing the Holy City of Makkah.

After the ceremony, friends and family began greeting and embracing each other, exclaiming "Eid mubar" (Happiness), and the reply would be "Salama’at" (which is like "the same to you"!).

Next came the feast. Our host was Bakshi Abdul Rashid, General Secretary of the National Conference of Jammu and Kashmir, and, like all politicians, his large modern home was filled with his "leaders" and friends. We sat on the floor as we ate with our fingers "campaign-style", the Arab way. In one corner, a Saaz, the typical Kashmiri combo, played chakris (folk music) and love songs. One syrupy ballad was rendered and I jotted down the translation: "Oh my love, I would lay down my life for you – won’t you come to me?"

Which just goes to show that love is both corny and beautiful in any language and clime.

Looking back at those pleasant days, a hiatus in the long-lasting uncivil war in that vale of Paradise in the center of the soaring, snow-capped Himalayas mountains, it is difficult to imagine that those gentle people, so full of life and mischief, should soon afterwards be caught up in the vortex of an international storm, with guerrilla raids, ambushes, murders, assassinations – and heavy artillery and rocket exchanges along a "line of control" between Pakistan and India.

War is particularly vicious when waged in paradise. Adam and Eve, we’re taught in the Bible, committed the sin of pride in believing that if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (as the serpent whispered), they would become equal to God. It is pride, too, that has brought tragedy, almost open-ended, into the Vale of Kashmir – Indian pride which refuses to compromise (and, by the way, I don’t blame them), against Pakistani pride, which demands (in 1963, the population was only five million) that a Kashmiri nation predominantly Muslim ought to belong, both in geography as in spirit, to Pakistan – "The Land of the Pure."

If you delve into history, this enmity between Muslim and Hindu in India-Pakistan is not new. We had sojourned for over a week in comfort and ease aboard a houseboat on the placid and lovely waters of Dal Lake, with the breath-taking Himalayas forming the towering backdrop, and on the shore the lovely gardens of the Shalimar. (The same garden of eden which had inspired the English poet to keen: "Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar…")

The glistening lake Dal, most of its admirers never learn, conceals a grim secret in its depths. In the 18th century, under the reign of the "barbaric" Afghans, Muslim zealots forced stubborn Hindus who refused conversion to Islam into sacks and threw them into the lake. Kashmir has, for generations, been the battleground and footstool of contending despots and invaders. Its chronicle of human woe dates back to such pre-Muslim tyrants as Mihirakula, the White Hun, and the merciless Shankavarman. In the 14th and 15th centuries, a succession of Muslim warlords ruled the valley, laying waste the surrounding countryside.

The founder of the Mogul Empire in India was, of course, Babur from Afghanistan. The Moguls made Kashmir their summer capital. After their empire collapsed, the Afghans returned to dominate the Vale – but even their ferocity was unable to withstand the onslaught of the Sikhs coming up from the Punjab, whose warriors put Ranjit Shah on the throne there.

Even the late Maharajah Sir Hari Singh, who signed Kashmir’s accession to India in October 1947 and thus planted the seeds of the "everlasting" quarrel with Pakistan, was the last of a dynasty which had seized control of the area under dubious circumstances. The Maharajah’s grandfather had been a sly Rajput chieftain who had fought on the side of the British in the Sikh Wars and had thus been rewarded for his "loyalty" by being allowed by the Brits to buy Kashmir for the equivalent of less than two million dollars. No real estate bargain in history could have been profitable, since Kashmir (comprising the present state of Jammu and Kashmir) is no less than 84,471 square miles in area – six times the size of Ireland, or larger than Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Austria put together! Didn’t think Kashmir was that big, did you?

It was the British Raj, therefore, who laid the groundwork for the current, continually bitter Indo-Pakistani confrontation. For that fateful "purchase" of 1846 placed a Hindu dynasty in control of a predominantly Muslim province.

As somebody once remarked, there are no "ifs" in history. But what might have happened, we cannot help wondering, if the Maharajah of Kashmir had been a Muslim instead of a Hindu? Would he have, when Britain’s Lord Louis Montbatten "agreed" to partition India, giving away the "Muslim" part to Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his militants, would the Maharajah then have chosen Pakistan instead of the new India? Would that have averted the bloodshed and heartbreak of the past half century?

In any event, once Kashmir went to India, the great Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister and founder of the dynasty which virtually still controls India (through grand-daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi) vowed never to relinquish Kashmir. Aside from declaring that his ancestors had been Brahmins from Kashmir, Nehru thoroughly detested Ali Jinnah. The two men positively hated each other.

There will, I fear, for all the tons of words about reconciliation and "peace," be no happy arrangement over Kashmir. Too much blood is on the ground, too many tears have been shed, too many insults exchanged both domestically and internationally. There’s too much pride and prejudice poisoning that paradise.

Only the grief over the terrible earthquake and the massive relief effort have managed, temporarily, to open the borders between the two "Kashmirs," one in Pakistan, the bigger portion in India. But I can dolefully predict they will slam shut again.

What a pity. The Kashmir we briefly knew was so beguiling. One could chose to "live" on a houseboat which had a bedroom, a living-cum-dining room, a kitchen, and flush toilets. A boatman tended to your every need – cooking, poling the boat from place to place, doing the groceries, etc. In fact the "groceries" came to you – shikaras or dug-outs laden with vegetables, fruit, or flowers would come from shore to houseboat. Many Kashmiris, such as the Hanji or Manji, who spuriously "traced" their ancestry, they claimed, to Noah’s Ark, loved on houseboats themselves in floating villages. In more peaceful times, they recounted to us, over 100,000 tourists would come up yearly to seek a cool respite from the heat of the Indo-Gangetic plains. If there were only peace and tranquility there, I can envision almost a million tourists would flock to Kashmir these days.

When we appeared there in 1963, tourism had gone zilch. The Chinese had just "invaded" neighboring Ladakh (remember?) scaring everybody away. Thus we found hordes of guides, tonga (calesa) drivers, agents and houseboat operators descending on us, proclaiming their houseboats the "finest" and virtually begging for our business.

"Mine has double-action flush W.C.s (water closets)," one would shout. "Come to mine!" Another would bid: "It has a shower and tub with hot and cold running water!"

The names of the houseboats were fascinating in themselves: "Hiawatha", "Jacqueline Kennedy," "White House," "Hollywood," "New York," "Prince of Jaipur," "Shah Parie," "Mah Jong," "Miss England," "Alexandra Palace," "Sunbeam," "Lone Star," "Bonanza," "Lone Star," "Sunflower," "Alps," "Flower Garden," "Mona Lisa." Betcha today, they would have had one named "Da Vinci Code," or "Batman Begins."

In any event, we selected the houseboat "H.B. Royal Palace," a 100-footer. The proprietor, an elegantly bearded gentleman, his gray Astrakhan cap perched rakishly on his brow, flashed a smile of triumph at his disgruntled competitors and ushered us aboard. In those halcyon days, you could get one of the 50 deluxe (not the lesser "doongas") houseboats for sixty rupees a day or only $4 to $6 daily – there was no VAT. You got a bedroom, a dining room, a living or sitting room, with upholstered chairs and a sofa, a flush toilet, the services of a cook, a houseboy, and a boatman. If you didn’t like the view, the boatman could pole you to the River Jhelum.

An endless stream of vendors came by dug-out to supply your needs – a boatman-baker, delivering the morning bread; the floating market I already mentioned above. Another shikara (rowboat) brought a traveling salesman to spread his wares on your houseboat deck: knives and embroidered leather handbags, puff cushions, Gooz rugs, Namada (pure wool) cloth, Pashmina wool shawls and even a "ring shawl" (so named because it is so fine you could pass it through a woman’s ring.) This ring shawl is now prohibited, because it is woven from the hairs of an endangered species of mountain sheep.

I deeply regret not buying it for Precious – but it had cost US$50 and in those days this was a hefty sum.

There were walnut wood carvings, cigar and jewel boxes of hand-lacquered papier-mache, red vases, table lamps, silver teapots. The original "cashmere," naturally, comes from Kashmir, as well as Persian lamb coats called Karakul, fashioned expensively from the fleece of the unborn lamb.

A parting word about the ring shawl – woven of such delicate wool that it provided the warmth of a thick scarf while remaining so light and airy you could pass it without friction through your wedding ring. Of this type, the "White Shahtush" is the finest since the wool can only come from one place, the white star on the forehead of the Shahtush sheep. The local merchants informed us that it took 15 years to collect enough white shahtush hairs to make a shawl. Then they mentioned the price of $100 for this "special." That was enough for me to exclaim that if I were daft enough to shell out that kind of money, journalists would become an endangered species.

What a cornucopia of delights the old Kashmir had to offer. Now, it’s Paradise Lost.

No wars are more unforgiving, as we’ve found in Mindanao and every battlefront of terrorism than wars waged in the name of God – or religious "conviction."