NEW DELHI, 12 September 2004 — The chief attraction at the Gupta Shudh Vaishnav Bhojanalaya, one of the honorable pit stops for heavy traffic on the highway between Pathankot and Jammu, was a large kiosk selling Lay’s potato chips. I asked Guptaji Jr., who was minding the shop, how multinationals were faring in the struggle against domestic, cottage-industry pakoras, bhujia and samosas. How many packets of Lay’s did he sell in a day? “About ten ... sometimes as many as 20. The truck drivers now want Lay’s and water.”

And the price? Twenty rupees. If you break up the price in one way, it comes to 50 paise for a fried, salted flake of potato: I imagine there can’t be more than 40 of them in a large packet. Dissect the price in another way and it adds up to ten samosas. Guptaji Jr. had a third take. He made only two rupees from every packet sold: 18 rupees went to the company. All it needed was for one friend, or, worse, relative, to drop in and pick up a packet. The earnings out of ten packets disappeared. What could one do? You can’t be rude to a relative.

Life was much better in the pre-Lay’s era, when all a relative wanted was a cooked savory. The per-unit cost of hospitality had jumped sharply with the arrival of Lay’s. And then there were the rats, who were even worse than relatives. Once they nibbled off all the packets on display. But Guptaji Jr. ended on an optimistic note. “From October the samosa will be king. In winter no one will buy these packets. Everyone wants a hot samosa in winter.”

• The most popular contemporary demand in Srinagar is azaadi from BSNL, or Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. The arrival of mobile phones last year was advertised as the return of normalcy. The catch was that only the government-owned BSNL was permitted operations. When young Kashmiri kids want to have fun they sit in restaurants and phone each other on their mobiles. There are chortles of glee when they hear that the line is busy, or the phone is busy, or whatever. BSNL has become the code word for anything that doesn’t work. But this week should bring good news. Private networks have finally been granted permission.

The reason why Jammu and Kashmir was kept out of the mobile loop was security. As a policy this must rank among the higher grades of stupidity. The last thing any terrorist wants is to talk on a mobile phone, where records are maintained of every call made and to which number, and then locked into a computer until the policeman comes along. On the other hand, anyone who does want a conversation across the border can simply use a pre-paid chip on a satellite phone.

Apparently, on one occasion when the supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahedeen and chairman of the United Jihad Council, Syed Salahuddin, was holding a clandestine press conference on this side of the LoC, he generously offered his phone to anyone who wanted to make a call anywhere in the world.

• An advertisement in Greater Kashmir of Wednesday, Sept. 8 offered “Congrats to Maroof Sayeed Shah, s/o Dr. M. Sayeed Shah of Gulbarg Colony Haiderpora on being the first Kashmir boy selected for an international canvas ball cricket tournament to be held in Pakistan next month”. “Nears and Dears and well-wishers” paid for the advertisement. Canvas cricket is the sort of cricket I now dream of. I would be able to look the ball in the eye once again. But I had no idea that canvas cricket was a feature on Pakistan’s sporting calendar. On the other hand, the age of surprises is upon us. This week I saw an American cricket team on television, playing against New Zealand. The shock became slightly more explicable when one noted that it was a black-brown American XI. Clearly there is no tariff on the import of cricketers from West Indies. No wonder Brian Lara has to make do with a scratch side. All the potential Sobers’, Kanhais, Huntes, Worrells, Weekes’, Lloyds’, Richards’ and Chanderpauls are now queuing up for American visas.

I presume young Maroof will have no problem getting a visa to Pakistan. I hope that Indian immigration will not be too intrusive about his performance when he returns.

• Billboards still proclaim: “Muzaffarabad 170 kilometers”. But last year’s possibilities have retreated into the distance. Srinagar greeted the Indo-Pak talks in Delhi with a shrug. The sense of faint excitement through much of last year has dissipated with the hard lines drawn by Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who believes there is nothing to discuss with anyone in the valley, and Foreign Minister Natwar Singh, for whom time froze in 1972 in the mountains of Shimla. No one was particularly disappointed because no one expected anything much. Shabbir Shah and Yasin Malik left an unusual marker in Delhi when they publicly suggested that some movement forward between India and Pakistan might be possible if Atal Behari Vajpayee were asked to head a Kashmir committee, but since that is not going to happen, they can keep waiting.

I was in the city for the launch of the fourth volume of the collected speeches and writings of S.A. Shamim, organized by his ebullient sister Qurratulain. Shamim was a brilliant lawyer who burst upon a stagnant political environment in 1971 and set it alight. One of the great tragedies was that he died 24 years ago, in 1980. He stood as an independent in 1971 and, to everyone’s surprise but his own, he won. He asserted himself in Parliament with unique aplomb, exemplary courage and great wit. I will quote from a speech Shamim made in February 1973 when the Telangana movement had set Andhra Pradesh alight. (Thirty years later, it still could!)

Mrs. Indira Gandhi was prime minister after a historic mandate but already a sense of complacency had set in (too many governments believe that they are going to be in power for the next 20 years). Shamim told the government to recognize the dangers:

“Violence does not erupt for nothing. It is not that people are seized of a mad instinct to destroy property. What happened in Andhra? Andhra was peaceful. Six months ago an objective situation existed there. The prime minister and her colleagues with their pride and prejudices did not want to recognize the realities... That is what has given rise to such vast destruction of life and property in Andhra.” Then came his sharp message about Kashmir, leavened with wit:

“There is a conspiracy of silence in every corner as far as the state of Kashmir is concerned ... the reason being in Kashmir there is no violence... There is no response because there is no violence in Kashmir. If tomorrow there were violence, the way we have in Andhra, Mrs. Gandhi and her colleagues would sit up... Unfortunately for us who are in Kashmir, there is no railway property to destroy... I do not think the situation will remain as it is...”

And then there was a memorable comment on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who had unilaterally accepted the reality of Kashmir’s accession to India but was still kept out in the cold: “You can today ignore Sheikh Abdullah but once he is no more on the scene, the new generation will not understand the language of secularism and the language of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi...”

Is there need to say more?

Once again the ostrich has descended on Delhi...