Author: Scott Baldauf
Publication: The Christian Science
Monitor
Date: October 22, 2002
URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1022/p01s02-wosc.htm
Javed's parents always talk about
what Kashmir used to be - a land where Hindus and Muslims were friends,
celebrated holidays and weddings together, ate each other's food.
But Javed, a high school student
here, says his parents might as well be describing life on the moon. He
was 3 when a violent insurgency against Indian control tore apart the state,
causing Hindus to flee by the hundreds of thousands. He has never had a
Hindu teacher or friend, never tasted Hindu food.
"The terrorist activities have destroyed
our culture," says Javed, who prefers not to give his last name. "When
the Hindu Pandits left the valley, we lost a part of ourselves."
Yesterday, India announced that
it will begin pulling back troops from the Pakistan border in eight to
10 days. But while politicians and diplomats search for ways to end the
13-year insurgency - considering everything from state autonomy to joint
control by India and Pakistan - Kashmiris themselves are in the midst of
a profound social change. The migration of most of the state's Hindus has
turned a once- cosmopolitan society of Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists,
into an Islamic monoculture.
Now, experts worry that an entire
generation will grow up never having experienced Kashmiriyat - the thousands-
year-old concept of cultural unity through diversity - and in a fundamental
way, India will have already lost Kashmir.
"Kashmiriyat as a collective presence
is either dead or dying, and to revive this sense of togetherness is the
biggest challenge, a bigger challenge than fighting terrorism," says Amitabh
Mattoo, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Altered classrooms
The Hindu vacuum is felt most profoundly
in the state's public and private schools, where children of Kashmir's
many cultures once mingled. Before 1989, Kashmir's small but influential
community of Pandits - a caste of Hindus whose name means teacher - occupied
20 percent of white-collar jobs. They had an especially large presence
in education - 60 percent of all the region's teachers were Hindus.
But when the insurgency broke out
in 1989, sparked by a rigged election that kept Muslim separatists out
of office, posters appeared in Pandit neighborhoods accusing Hindus of
collaboration with the Indian government and threatening their lives if
they didn't leave the state. Pandits fled by the hundreds of thousands,
some to the southern Jammu region and others to Delhi and beyond.
Today, qualified Muslim teachers
have replaced Pandits in public schools. But a few hundred private religious
schools, some of them owned by promilitant groups such as Jamaat-e Islami,
have also sprung up. Out of 900,000 students statewide, perhaps 200,000
students attend Islamic private schools full time.
Even some separatist leaders say
they have noticed a dramatic change in the mind-set of Kashmir's young
people - not necessarily because of the influence of religious schools,
but because of the absence of diversity both in the classroom and outside
it.
"Kashmiris are religious, but they
are not communal [communally exclusive], and every Muslim believes that
we want the Pandits to return," says Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chief cleric
of Kashmir's largest mosque and a separatist leader. "But all that is changing,"
he adds. "A certain sector of Kashmiri youth has gone to religion in a
hard-line way."
Preserving tolerance
Some Kashmiris believe that tolerance
starts at home, where parents can reinforce values rooted in the three
liberal religions that dominate the valley, Sufi Islam, Shivaite Hinduism,
and Mahayana Buddhism.
"Honest to God, I feel very unfortunate
that my children don't know what it is to have a Hindu teacher or a Hindu
friend," says Mukhtar Ahmed, a father who spent 16 years as a photographer
for the royal family in Saudi Arabia before returning to Kashmir last year.
"It reminds me of Saudi Arabia. Children grow up never knowing what a Hindu
is, what a Christian is, what a Sikh is. But in Kashmir, we don't believe
those values as in Saudi Arabia, and the home is the first cradle of values,
so we teach humanitarian values."
In fact, on the streets of Srinagar
and even in the villages, it's clear that Kashmir is still one of the more
modern, liberal Islamic societies in Central and South Asia. Short skirts
have been replaced by the loose traditional outfit called the salwar kameez,
but it is still rare to see women wearing a full face-covering veil. Social
mores are more liberal too. Couples cuddle up for a shikara boat ride across
the expansive Dal Lake, or take long walks in the lush public gardens.
Even the hundreds of religious private
schools that have sprung up across the state over the past decade have
relatively liberal curricula. Islamic schools in Kashmir teach the Koran
in Kashmiri and English, and require students to study math, science, literature,
history, and economics.
Mohammad Shafi-Uri, a former state
education minister recently ousted in this month's state elections, says
he is hopeful that schools will be able to cultivate tolerance, even as
the population grows less diverse. "Education has a tremendous liberating
power. It makes you humanistic. If you talk to students at college, they
may talk against the government of India, but they are secular in their
outlook."
At the Government Boys Higher Secondary
Institute in Srinagar, Muslim students are asked to explain ideas from
the Koran. Hindu students (there are still six left, out of hundreds of
Muslims) discuss lessons from sacred Hindu texts. And Sikh boys talk about
their holy book. Principal Syeeda Shafi says her teachers do what they
can to mold tolerant, globally minded students - even in a cultural vacuum.
Nevertheless, the straight-talking
Ms. Shafi stops short of nostalgia in talking about Kashmir's multiethnic
tradition.
"It was a lovely mixture of cultures,"
she says. "But there was a problem: The Pandits used to overestimate their
own talents, and underestimated ours. Our Muslim children were neglected.
"If the Muslim youth had been given
chances to work in the central government offices, if they were allowed
to see the outside world, maybe these problems [the insurgency] wouldn't
have come up."
