SRINAGAR, 3 August 2003 — If you want to see Pakistan, sit on your left; if you want to see the mountains sit on your right, said the pilot of Indian Airlines Flight-825 from Delhi to Srinagar. It wasn’t a difficult choice. The Himalayas are preferable to politics any day. For the pilot, the 752 km journey of an hour and six minutes, with half an hour added for the Indian concept of chalta hai, is mundane. For a journalist, flying into the heart of a problem always raises a frisson, no matter how respectable the mission. There is neither crisis nor crisis management on the agenda of this visit. I am heading toward the University of Kashmir to participate, at the request of Ajit Bhattacharjea, now director of the Press Institute, in a seminar on “Media and Human Development.”
Trust the earnest heart of Ajit to link the two. Media and Inhuman Development might have been a more truthful subject to ponder. But Ajit, one of the veterans of Indian journalism, still believes sufficiently in idealism to call the monthly journal of the institute, Grassroots. The roots of successful modern media are no longer in grass, but in the celebration of celebrities. The only grass that would-be celeb-journos are familiar with these days is the kind that is smoked in the undressing rooms of fashion shows. The only animal that roams through the pastures of modern media is big bucks. Since I don’t get the big bucks yet, I place my hat in the idealism corner. When, or if, the big bucks arrive I shall change sides. Here I am waiting to sell my soul, and there’s no one around to buy it. Or, more accurately, no one both sensible and independent. By gad, Sir!, I am willing to trade with Mephistopheles as much as any newspaper chockfull with ads, but the devil must keep some place in hell for the joy of freedom.
“Please book your flight early since there is a rush,” wrote Ajit Bhattacharjea in his invitation. The left eyebrow rose a cynical centimetre or two. A rush to Srinagar? Was this overdoing the PR? Or was the rush to Jammu, where the aircraft was scheduled to stop after Srinagar? We would see what we would see. I checked into my right-hand window seat, banished the evil of doubt, opened the book I had brought as travelling companion, and sank into the mind of Javed Miandad, another place where civil war has been raging since birth.
How do you write a book with a knife instead of a pen? Very easily, if you have the mind and passions of Pakistan’s second-greatest cricketer, Javed Miandad. No wonder he called his autobiography Cutting Edge. He was not referring to cricket. He was describing what he intended to do to all the teammates who had played with him over a long career. Miandad has no time to hate the opposition; the rancour against his own side is all-consuming. His knife also has all the strokes in the cricket book: cut, slice, drive forward, sweep and of course the backward glance. Show Miandad a back and he won”t miss it with his knife, particularly if he knows that he is hitting an already sore spot.
The darkest day in Pakistan’s cricket history was surely the day the team lost to India in Bangalore during the World Cup in March 1996, not because Pakistan lost to India but because it lost a match it could easily have won and marched to a successive Cup trophy on the momentum. That loss has fueled allegations of bribery that smolder till today. Miandad is sanguine about the result, clearly because he believes that his team deserved to lose since he had not been made captain. He says as much: “Aamir Sohail was made the substitute captain in Akram’s place when in fact I should have been asked.” Aamir Sohail stood in for an injured Wasim Akram. Even though Akram had told Miandad on the morning of the game that even painkillers were not helping, Miandad strews his copy with poisonous suspicion. “Even as the time for the toss approached, we still thought Akram would be captain.” Why, when he had no reason to think so. Then the knife twists a little. “Imran was at the ground and I noticed Akram chatting with him, though I have no idea what they talked about.” Of course you don’t. But before you darken the page with insinuation, Javedbhai, just pick up the phone and ask. Both the players named have been your colleagues for decades. They would have taken your call. When Miandad reaches Lahore to watch the Sri Lanka-Australia final on March 17, he is a smug wounded hero, rather than senior player of an embarrassed side: “I had nothing to hide and nothing to fear. The other members of our team apparently saw it differently. They stayed away from the public eye and slunk away to different parts of the country. A rumor started that Wasim Akram had been bribed by the bookies to miss the quarter final.” Ah. I am not sure, you see, I just heard that these guys were crooks who had sold their country. “I had no personal knowledge of this and as far as I could tell it was just a rumor.” So why lay such vicious stress on it, except to malign Wasim and implicate Imran without any evidence?
Let me tell you, Javed Miandad, something which is not a rumor: you are a marvellously talented cricketer, among the finest Pakistan has produced, but as a human being you are the pits. You inferiority complex has turned into permanent envy of those who might, through no fault of theirs, be better educated than you are. This autobiography has not exposed anyone you dislike; it has only exposed you. Normal guys have hair under their armpits; you think you have wings. They still stink.
Everything is nearby in Srinagar and everywhere takes a long time to reach. If it is any consolation, it used to take longer. Time is the best measurement of development: horsepower has progressed from being a literal fact to a metaphorical one. You reach Srinagar from Delhi at the pace of the 21st century, and then slip into the 1960s as you negotiate your way through the capital. The roads are jagged at either side. They do not travel straight, but lurch a little, as if in the first stages of drunkenness. The city has a corporation, but its problem is the traditional Indian one of corporation-corruption. Construction remains a busy fact, but control and planning are not the priorities of city planners. There is a sense of work all over, including the old road around the shrunken Dal Lake (it used to be over 41 square kilometers in area and is now just about ten) but not yet of progress. Fortunately, nature cannot be corrupted or venal human beings would have managed that as well.
But there is growing sense of normal life, with even the security forces, guarding both themselves and the city, merging into the urban landscape. Long years of presence in the veins and sinews of Srinagar have created an easy flexibility of social maneuver. They live in patched cantonments, but saviour and saved chat amiably enough in shops, the tension diminished by the fact that both are equally vulnerable.
Human rights violations continue, but the excesses have calmed. Any self-congratulation would however be premature. The culture of the gun is etched sharply on virtually every public moment of the visit. It is impossible to treat the sight of two men in T-shirts, their legs swaggering apart, standing behind the minister on the dais, the cold steel of machine guns at a 45% angle to their chests. Maybe this is what normalcy now means. The buzzword remains security. I don’t know if Press has any relationship to public morality, but it certainly seems to be the preferred camouflage if an ordinary mortal wants a sense of security. That is the label on the vehicle in which I am travelling. Shall we say that there are more vehicles marked Press‚ than are owned by pressmen in Srinagar. Bad times, as we know, can be good times for journalists.
Kashmir University used to be Asia’s largest poultry farm. Its untended grounds were as wild with unwanted hens as its classrooms were barren with boredom. The university reflected the state of the state. Complacence is the death of governance, and stagnation deludes itself when it parades minimal change as achievement. Change has only one judge: aspiration. If change does not satisfy aspiration then it is inadequate. But change has reached the air. I do not refer to any change in the secretariat or the legislature, in names that fill the headlines or faces that occupy front pages.
I saw change in the heart of a university. The library that was once a repository of dust is now clean, spacious, fully computerised, accessible to the world of knowledge beyond and pumps fresh blood into a generation that seeks achievement through learning. When we dropped in, unannounced, it was full. Every computer was occupied, and each student was allotted a maximum of an hour because of queues. The vice-chancellor, Prof. Jalees A.K. Tareen, has come here from Mysore and shown how an individual’s intervention can transform an institution. The students did not need to be told what their predecessors had found, and what they had received. The story from Srinagar is that there is no political story. What could be better news than that? The Himalayas will always be a better story than politics.
