At an event entitled "Roots of Conflict in Kashmir," Smith College anthropology professor Ravina Aggarwal argued last night that India and Pakistan must pay more attention to the Kashmiri perspective.
Aggarwal, who has spent 13 years in Kashmir working on issues of identity and conflict, said that the question of what to do with the region is being asked of everyone except those who actually live there.
Identity is a central question in South Asia, and particularly in areas experiencing conflict. After the region's partition into India and Pakistan, political agendas have emerged that are at odds with the agendas of traditional South Asian identities, Aggarwal said.
Nowhere is this conflict more dramatic than in Kashmir.
As Aggarwal described in her essentially historical talk, the partition of India was essentially made along religious lines -- Pakistan was to be a place for the Muslim minority in a predominantly Hindu India. At the time of partition, Kashmir, as a state with a Hindu ruler but Muslim majority, was indecisive as to which nation to join.
Never given the chance to choose either independence or a nation to join, Kashmir was invaded by Pakistani soldiers and cut a deal with India for protection.
Today, Pakistan controls about one-third of Kashmir while India controls the rest. The region has become a political battleground for identity articulation, Aggarwal said.
On the one hand, Pakistan claims it will not realize its meaning as a Muslim majority state without also including Muslim-majority Kashmir. On the other hand, India feels it will have lost a battle toward creating a secular, multiethnic democracy by ceding Kashmir to Pakistan.
Kashmir was once an organic and essentially borderless region where religions and languages mixed freely, Aggarwal told the audience. In villages, Muslims, Buddhists and others intermarried and traded freely.
While there was some intolerance, she said, groups were less defined and necessarily interdependent.
Kashmir has since been split ruthlessly in two and is a constant battlefield. Though the border might separate brothers by mere minutes they may as well be millions of miles apart. Even within Kashmir, suspicions run so high that those once considered family are mistrusted for differing religious or other beliefs.
Aggarwal said Kashmiris suffer as a result of living on a volatile land that two nuclear powers use to play out their rivalry. In the process of the struggle, she said, what is lost sight of are the Kashmiris.
If what India really wants to support is multiple religions and a secular state, Aggarwal said, then it should support Kashmir rather than overlook and destroy it in conflict.
The event, intended as a panel but missing its second speaker, was planned in conjunction with a College Course on South Asian identity.
It was dedicated to the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, who died only two months ago at Amherst. Ali, a Kashmiri Muslim, read at Dartmouth in 1996.
