The Indian government has 600,000 army and security forces in Kashmir and their ubiquitous presence has coarsened the city and compromised whatever beauty it might have had. Apart from bunkers and armoured patrol cars, there are barbwired and sandbagged surveillance posts, sports pitches that have been turned into army camps, and I’m told there’s not a single cinema operating in Kashmir’s capital now. All have been requisitioned for military accommodation.
On the corner of the busy main street, Lal Chowk, and opposite the heavily fortified Telegraph Office stands the Greenway Hotel. Two weeks ago two suspected Islamic militants holed up here and withstood a siege for 20 hours before police blew the building apart with mortar fire. Ten people were killed and 40 wounded and the Greenway now consists of little more than half a roof, scorched black walls and a crumpled framework of charred and blistered timbers. Around the time this happened six more people were killed when a car blew up in the vegetable market.
On the edge of the old town is a patch of green grass and a stagnant rubbish-filled pond. Horses graze and dogs chase, snarl, fight and mate amongst the filth. Next door to this soiled little field is a small cemetery, neatly walled and fenced. Inside, gravestones fringed in green and topped with sturdy metal pennants mark the resting place of those who have died in the struggle. An arch over the entrance announces it as the Kashmir Martyrs’ Graveyard. Most of the graves are inscribed in Urdu, but beneath a cypress a neglected metal sign in English reads:
‘Master Shaheed Yawar Says
Do Not Shun The Gun
My Dear Younger Ones
The War For Freedom
Is Yet To Be Won.’
It’s rusty and fading and must have been there for some time, unlike two freshly dug mounds, crudely decorated with a border of pebbles, containing a mother and a three-month-old baby killed in crossfire outside the Greenway Hotel. There are some 400 graves here and many more lie in similar plots throughout Kashmir. Flowers have been planted around the place, perhaps to represent on earth the gardens the martyrs are promised in heaven. Though governments may see the Kashmir struggle as the troubles, most of those who lie here saw it as a war.
This is brought forcibly and uncomfortably home to me by the bizarre conflation of our own patriotic rhetoric that is inscribed above the arched gateway of the Kashmir Martyrs’ Graveyard: ‘Lest You Forget We Have Given Our Today for Tomorrow of Yours’.
The only place where the violence seems not to have made a mark is on the water, and along one arm of the lake 60 or 70 houseboats, with jolly names like ‘King of Kashmir’, ‘Himalayan Fantasies’ and ‘Buckingham Palace’, still court the tourists. They’re moored up cheek by jowl, end on to the bank, cabins tweely curtained, fenced sundecks ringed with pot plants, waiting for the next boom. Their design is cosy and old-fashioned and can’t have changed much since the houseboat era began in the 1880s, when the British got around laws preventing outsiders from buying lakeside property by building their mansions on the water instead.
A white-crested kingfisher studies the limpid surface of the lake. Our presence on the bank has already attracted a flotilla of water taxis and eager salesmen flaunting jewellery, papier-mache and various ethnic trinkets.
‘Where are you from?’ shouts one man.
When we tell him he shouts manically back.
‘England! Fish and Chips! Bangers and Mash! Marmite Sandwiches! Good Heavens!’
August, they say, had been a good month for Indian tourists. Then came the September violence and 30 per cent of the bookings were cancelled immediately.
I go out again on the lake at dusk. The rain has cleared the air and the water is a mirror, reflecting a huge golden sunset. It’s ironic that of all the places I’ve been on my journey so far, this should be the closest I’ve come to perfect peace.
Day Forty Two : Ladakh
The looming presence of the mountains around two sides of Dal Lake reminded me that, after almost two weeks, we were once again getting close to the high Himalaya. This morning, as we land at Leh after a complicated flight from Srinagar via Delhi, the change from foothills to mountains is complete. Nature is not generous up here. The air is powder dry and the rocky slopes all round us are bare and deeply gullied. For the first time in a long while I feel my lungs working, pumping a little harder to pull in the oxygen, for we are at 11,650 feet (3550 m), nearly two and a quarter miles above sea level.
Sonia Gandhi, daughter-in-law of one premier and wife of another, is visiting this remote province and her convoy of chunky white Ambassador cars, honest but unglamorous, winds its way through the security chicane and out of the airport, while we are still waiting for our bags.
Nothing is quite as I expected. The porters and baggage handlers are stocky thick-set women wrapped in red cardigans, headscarves and baggy blue pantaloons and they jostle with each other for the heaviest bags. Their features are more Mongolian than Indo-Aryan, with darker, berry-brown complexions and broad cheeks.
The only similarity with where we’ve come from is the heavy military presence: jet fighters in revetments at the airport, a sprawling barracks on the way into Leh. Once again there is a sensitive border nearby, only this time it’s not Pakistan they’re worried about, but China.
Ladakh, meaning ‘many passes’, is a part of Jammu and Kashmir but has little in common with the rest of India, nor indeed with the rest of the state. Over half the population is Buddhist and its strategic position on the old Silk Road means it shares more with Tibet and Central Asia.
The architecture, too, is different from anything I’ve seen so far: stone walls and rugged houses with flat roofs that seem to have bushy undergrowth piled on top of them. (I never worked out if these rooftop toupees were fuel stores or a form of insulation.) The run-down palace that dominates the centre of Leh is on a grand scale and has the same upwardly tapering walls that I’ve seen in pictures of the Potala Palace in Lhasa.
The streets of Leh are busy, in a low-tech way. A row of men, some holding prayer wheels, sit cross-legged on the pavements behind sacks rolled back to show off various nuts and spices and fruits. I buy rather a lot of apricot kernels, because someone said they make you live longer, and am tempted by the piles of shawls, scarves and rugs made from pashm, the fine underfleece of goat’s wool that is the speciality of this part of India. The pashmina salesmen look particularly doleful, as their trade, like everyone else’s in Kashmir, is heavily affected by the troubles. They seem to face the situation with remarkable stoicism. I’m back among mountain people - patient, taciturn and politely wary of outsiders. Masters of survival.
There is evidence that their independence is being compromised by various life-improvement campaigns, from tidiness to road safety. At a busy road junction a prominent and colourful display board advises the locals to ‘Learn and Repeat, Signs and Traffic Signals’.
As I’m reading it a black cow, followed by her calf, emerges from behind the board and, without signals of any kind, saunters off into the rush-hour traffic.
I think we should use cows for traffic calming at home. They’re much more effective than sleeping policemen. And they give milk.
The road safety campaign extends beyond Leh. As we drive across the desert, following the slim green band of cultivation along the River Indus, we’re treated to an assortment of useful warnings: ‘Peep Peep, Don’t Sleep’, ‘Drive Like Hell - You’ll Be There’ and ‘Be Mr Late Rather Than the Late Mr’, which is marginally our favourite. The road surface is good, better than you’d expect in such a remote place. The reason, of course, is that the highway is built and maintained by the army, or ‘The Mountain Tamers’, as they like to call themselves.