Hovey Lecture 2008

BBC’s Whitehead ’04 discusses the flashpoint called Kashmir. Photo by Philip Datillo

Of all the world’s enduring trouble spots, Kashmir, tucked away in the foothills of the Himalayas, is perhaps the least understood. Yet this major territorial dispute goes back more than 60 years. It has triggered three wars between India and Pakistan, both now nuclear powers, and has been the setting of a long-running separatist insurgency. It remains a rallying point for radical Islam. You can see why Bill Clinton once described Kashmir as “the most dangerous place in the world.”

Over the past decade, the level of violence in Kashmir has fallen sharply. Pakistan has dramatically reduced its practical support for separatist insurgents. India has pumped in money, embarked on dialogue, and allowed relatively free state elections. In 2007, I took my children for a brief holiday there, something I would never have contemplated amid the tension and violence of the 1990s.

But the strikes and mass protests that shook Kashmir during the summer of 2008—a wave of unrest that took everyone by surprise—has demonstrated the insufficiency of the Indian government’s policy of encouraging what might pass for normality in the hope that the issue of the region’s status will fade away. It is a stinging reminder that conflicts require resolution. They rarely just evaporate.

The Indian-controlled Kashmir valley, the area at the heart of the dispute, has a population of five million or so. Over the past 20 years, some 40,000 to 50,000 people, most of them Kashmiris, have been killed. A few more facts: the Kashmir valley is 98 percent Muslim, and is part of Hindu-majority, broadly secular India rather than the Islamic Republic of Pakistan which it borders. Pakistan says that defeats the logic of the settlement by which India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947, and ignores the wishes of the people of Kashmir. India says Kashmir’s decision to accede was made, entirely constitutionally, by the area’s last maharaja, a Hindu, and endorsed by the commanding Kashmiri nationalist of that era, a Muslim.

The dispute stretches back beyond the memory of just about anyone now in public life. During the 2008 Hovey lecture, I spoke about how I have used the journalism of those foreign correspondents who covered the first shots in the Kashmir crisis, and the memories of those who lived through those events, to look again at a deeply contested issue: how the Kashmir conflict started.

But first let me say how privileged I was to deliver the lecture named after Graham Hovey. I owe a great debt to Charles Eisendrath, the wise steward of the journalism fellows, and to all at Wallace House. Among my Wallace House peer group, most aspired either to write a book or a screenplay. The book that took firm root when I was a fellow five years ago, “A Mission in Kashmir,” was published at the end of 2007. I don’t know whether the world is better for it, but I am—and I’m grateful.

The seeds of that book were sown years earlier, when as a Delhi-based news correspondent I managed to persuade the BBC to let me make a series of radio documentaries about Partition fifty years on. Not about the high politics, but the unvarnished voices of those who were caught up in that whirlwind. The venture took me once again to the Kashmir valley to record memories of 1947. The status of Kashmir was unresolved as India and Pakistan celebrated independence. But in October there was an invasion by thousands of Pathan tribesmen, fighters from just the localities which are now the stronghold of Pakistan’s Taliban. It was a jihad, a holy war— and an attempt to claim Kashmir for Pakistan—and a quest for loot.

The small town of Baramulla, the western gateway to the valley, bore the brunt of the attack. The raiders ransacked a Catholic mission hospital, St Joseph’s. Half a century later, I arrived there unannounced and asked the Sister Superior whether anyone had memories of that tragic incident.

Andrew Whitehead ’04 receives the Hovey Bowl. Photo by Philip Datillo

“Yes, there is one nun who lived through the attack,” she told me. That’s how I met Sister Emilia from Italy, who had lived in the convent since 1933—and is now buried there. Red faced and perpetually smiling, she told me that she had seen the raiders kill or fatally wound six people—including a young Spanish nun. “There were rumors they were coming,” Sister Emilia told me. “We were thinking they won’t do nothing to us. The Monday after the feast of Christ the King they reach here. Then they started to shoot. They came inside. We were working still. They were on the veranda of the hospital, going from one ward to another. They say: shoot, kill, maro.”

The tremendous sense of drama and tragedy, of an event which was soon to recede from view as those involved died, appealed to my instincts both as historian and journalist. Sister Emilia mentioned a British army officer whose wife had come to give birth in the mission hospital shortly before the attack. Tom and Biddy Dykes were both killed and are buried at Baramulla. She also told of their three sons—then five, two and two weeks—and how she had helped get them milk and food; they had survived the ordeal. I eventually managed to track down the oldest, Tom junior. He told me how he awoke on that Monday morning to the sound of gunfire and screaming. He became separated from his parents. A group of agitated nuns locked Tom and themselves in a hospital room, but the attackers started to break down the door. “The splinters started to fly across the room,” he recalled, “and I could see the wild faces through the cracks in the door. I noticed that at the back of the room there was another door, and I tried it. It wasn’t locked and I ran. I remember seeing some of [the nuns] later, and they were staggering around the place with their habits torn.” When the fury of the raid was spent, Tom returned to find his infant brother sitting on a pile of corpses.

I now had my own mission—to record as many testimonies as I could to the violence in Baramulla, and to the wider invasion of the valley and its repulse by Indian troops. Townspeople in Baramulla—some of whom had initially welcomed the tribal army—told me how they had recoiled from the violence and looting. Through a colleague based in northern Pakistan, I tracked down the voice that I thought would elude me. He came across a veteran of the Pathan raiding force, Khan Shah Afridi. “I was the pir’s [Muslim cleric’s] follower,” he said. “I had a small shotgun at the time. Pir sahib told us we will fight and we should not be afraid—it is a war between Muslims and infidels and we will get Kashmir freed.”

There was a remarkable confluence of dates. The day of the attack on the Baramulla mission—October 27, 1947— was also the day that the first Indian troops set foot in Kashmir—and the day that independent India accepted the maharaja of Kashmir’s accession. In so many ways, it was the day that the Kashmir crisis started.

The initial events in the conflict happened largely beyond the reach of the Indian news media. A handful of foreign correspondents had an advantage—they were already there. After a gruelling summer covering the joy of independence and the gut-wrenching violence of Partition, several had headed to Kashmir for an autumn holiday. Margaret Parton of the New York Herald Tribune and Eric Britter of The Times were having what she called an illicit vacation on a houseboat. We can only imagine their discomfort in discovering on a neighbouring boat their colleague Bill Sydney Smith of the London Daily Express and his wife.

When the invasion started, all their holidays came to an abrupt end. “Here we are,” Margaret Parton wrote home to her mother, “the only foreign correspondents in Kashmir, and 150 newsmen in Delhi panting to get here and completely frustrated!” Parton and Britter used Kashmir’s leading hotel as their base. Bill Sydney Smith—a war reporter by instinct—headed straight to the frontline. He was captured and roughed up by the tribesmen, then deposited at the mission hospital at Baramulla where he and 80 others— including Sister Emilia and the Dykes boys—were trapped for eleven days. When the survivors were eventually evacuated, Smith filed an exclusive which the Daily Express trumpeted as “the year’s most exciting story”—a captivity story about the endurance of those held hostage at the mission and the ruthlessness of their assailants.

Most of the foreign correspondents who reported from Kashmir in the early weeks of the conflict were making their first ever visit to the valley. What gives value to their reporting is the purpose that so many foreign correspondents share of being an “honest witness.” You can pick all sorts of holes in just how honest and unbiased correspondents were able to be. But this self-image of being an honest witness is what qualifies the work of foreign correspondents to be source material for that other discipline, history, which also sees itself as providing honest testimony and narrative.

When my book was published in India, I was often asked what could be learned from 1947 about how to settle the Kashmir issue. My answer was: not very much. Both India and Pakistan have been too insistent on harking back to events of 60 years ago, as if an assertion that they were in the right at that time justifies their subsequent actions. The contours of the crisis have changed. Yet the underlying issue hasn’t. What is Kashmir’s primary identity? And how is that determined? That’s what the conflict is about. To resolve any conflict, by any means other than a military knock-out, you need to understand it. And to achieve that, you need to know how it started. And I believe that if there can be progress towards a shared narrative of how the Kashmir crisis first flared up in 1947, then other forms of accord may not be far away.