Feasts in the Time of War

Fabled Kashmir, dominated by the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, is the more than half a century-old contentious issue between India and Pakistan.

Kashmir, with Srinagar as its capital, is a favored vacation sojourn of South Asian rulers of centuries past.  It has a population of around 12 million, more than the population of the provinces of Central Visayas put together, in a land area of around 220,000 square kilometers that’s almost as big as the Philippines. It lies northwest of India and shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and China.

For religious reasons, India was split in 1947 into two separate countries, Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.  The split left Kashmir an undecided issue.  It was ruled by a maharajah, one of those Indian princes of old, and was like other remote areas in India that had little link to the national government.  Thus its status during the partition wasn’t established.

Kashmir’s Maharajah Hari Singh, for military security reasons, made an arrangement with India that in effect relinquished control of Kashmir, on the condition that a referendum on its independence will follow.  The referendum never came to be, and Pakistan soon after went to war with India over Kashmir.

A UN-brokered ceasefire in 1949 had Pakistan gain one-third of the territory while two-thirds went to India, presumably with an independent status.  But India annexed their part of Kashmir as a state.  So Kashmiri Muslims who were the majority in the area rioted.  Wars between India and Pakistan were fought again in 1965 and 1971.

Complicating the territorial dispute further these days is not only that the two countries are not parties to the nuclear non-proliferation agreement; they also have nuclear arsenals.  More, Kashmir is astride the border of Afghanistan, and those who are stirring for Kashmiri independence are said to be Muslim fundamentalists within Kashmir and Pakistan.

As in most international disputes, chances are there are imprints of imperialists and world powers that can’t seem to mind their own business.  Britain of course was the hand that divided India and Pakistan more than half a century ago.

Decades later, Pakistan was armed by the US when it helped fight the latter’s proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which shares its border.  When the Soviets dropped Afghanistan, the US also dropped Pakistan.  But it left Pakistan with an arsenal of weapons.

And that’s more or less the history of why Indian and Pakistani soldiers continue to face each other now through a border that’s a no-man’s land within Kashmir, called the Line of Control (LOC), as brokered by the UN that has in turn kept a Peacekeeping Mission in the area since 1949.

The Indian side of the LOC is being cultivated while the Pakistani side has been left in its forested state.  The forest is said to be punctuated with bunkers in preparation for an Indian military attack.

Forested thus, it is populated by wild boars, which are left alone because Muslims find them dirty.  The Indian side meanwhile has wild bulls that tend to destroy their cultivated crops.  But these are also left alone because the wild bulls, like the domestic cows, are deemed sacred by Hindus.  These wild bulls and boars are the cross-border invaders.

During periods of relative peace, it has been said that Indians on their side call the Pakistanis on the other side to drive the wild boars across for them to make a feast of.  The Pakistanis meanwhile are said to wait for the wild bullsthat are driven by the Indians across, for the Pakistanis to make a feast of.

Nowhere else can there be such an exchange of gifts of feasts between foot soldiers and rangers of two conflicting sides, when they’re not shooting at each other.

It looks like it may be right after all that war is too dangerous to be left to generals, and heads of state, if I may add.  They who aren’t at the frontlines, being conference room warriors, would never have the chance to exchange feasts with their enemies.

(21 Jan 2007)