Kashmir Diary: The wisdom of the old fails to seep into the young

During the course of my research in Kashmir, I have met two amazing older men.

Both were about a hundred years old when I met them and both died within months thereafter.
The first was Ghulam Qadir "Ganderbali," who had been a National Conference leader in the pre-independence years.

He was appointed Administrator of all of Ladakh in the Emergency Government that Maharaja Hari Singh appointed, with Sheikh Abdullah at its head, in October, 1947.

Abdullah had appointed party activists as virtual governors of various parts of the Maharaja's state to oversee the administration in those chaotic, war-torn days.

Our meeting took place soon after the Kargil invasion and the old man spoke of having inspected the ranges around Kargil with army officers all those years ago and pointing out then that some of the very ridges that Pakistan invaded in 1999 were vulnerable.

He was a diehard Indian and wouldn't hear a negative word about Jawaharlal Nehru. I asked him about the reports I had heard of excesses, even atrocities, by the army.

I expected him to be bitter because his teenaged grandson had been killed some years earlier by army bullets. The boy happened to be in the market when the army opened fire in response to a grenade attack. Instead of bitterness, I was treated to contemptuous anger about allegations of atrocities.

He had worked with the Indian army, the old man said, and they were the most disciplined and valorous anywhere. It was impossible that they could commit excesses.

He clearly revered Sheikh Abdullah and spoke of Farooq Abdullah as of a little boy, insisting that, whatever flaws his governance might have, he was good at heart.

His mind would sometimes wander as we sat in bright sunlight in his home in Nunar village near Ganderbal. He would retreat into silence as he puffed deeply on a cigarette.

My friend and I, who had gone to interview him together, would wait silently. At one point, he returned to the conversation with recollections of a meeting at which he had gone with a party delegation and met Nehru. It was at Udaipur, he said, as far as he could remember. Yes, it was Udaipur. Nehru had told them about secularism, he said, and they had been inspired.

It was only later, when my friend and I had returned to my friend's home that it dawned on us that he had been talking of the State People's Conference in 1938. No wonder he was so committed to India, fired as he had been in the crucible of the freedom struggle.

The other centenarian was no politician but a leading light of his community nonetheless. He lived in a village beyond Anantnag and we got there after walking through picturesque forests and fording a stream. Even at that advanced age, he had his wits entirely about him and, lying bolstered in his bed, received streams of visitors.

He was a respected Sufi pir (seer) and aalim (scholar) and many neighbours would come daily seeking advice or predictions. There was a beatific serenity about him and he welcomed and blessed me warmly.

In a lyrical, sometimes cryptic, style, he criticised the Kashmiri people as being eternally dissatisfied, and he criticised the gun. Violence would achieve nothing, he predicted.

Although he had never been a political associate, he too had words of praise for Sheikh Abdullah and observed that it was he who first wanted independence for his people rather than accession to either India or Pakistan.

The views of neither aging man, both unfortunately now gone, is representative of common Kashmiri thinking but both had a certain centred wisdom. Both spoke with consistency, unswayed by popular currents.

By contrast, most Kashmiris tend to be emotional, voluble and easily swept along by the dominant slogan of the time.

I had gone to visit the pir in connection with my research about the life of his nephew, who became a militant commander with the nom de guerre Shahidul Islam. He once observed that "Kashmiri bhed khata hai aur bhed chaal chalta hai, that is, Kashmiris eat sheep and tend to herd like sheep."

That is probably an apt observation and is, sadly, one reason for their current predicament. If only the wisdom of age could seep into the young.