Kashmir, the Imperiled Paradise
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses," "The Moor's Last
Sigh" and, most recently, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."
LONDON -- For more than 50 years, India and Pakistan have been arguing and
periodically coming to blows over one of the most beautiful places in the
world, Kashmir, which the Mughal emperors thought of as Paradise on earth.
As a result of this unending quarrel, Paradise has been partitioned,
impoverished and made violent. Murder and terrorism now stalk the valleys
and mountains of a land once so famous for its peacefulness that outsiders
made jokes about the Kashmiris' supposed lack of fighting spirit.
I have a particular interest in the Kashmir issue because I am more than
half Kashmiri myself, because I have loved the place all my life and
because I have spent much of that life listening to successive Indian and
Pakistani governments, all of them more or less venal and corrupt,
mouthing the self-serving hypocrisies of power while ordinary Kashmiris
suffered the consequences of their posturings.
Pity those ordinary, peaceable people, caught between the rock of India
and the hard place that Pakistan has always been!
And, as the world's newest nuclear powers square off yet again, their new
weapons making their dialogue of the deaf more dangerous than ever before,
I say, A plague on both their houses. "Kashmir for the Kashmiris" is an
old slogan, but the only one that expresses how the subjects of this
dispute have always felt; how, I believe, the majority of them would still
say they feel, if they were free to speak their minds without fear.
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