54 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2017YAWAR NAZIR/GETTY IMAGESFORBES ASIA
BOOK EXCERPTT
he causes of the enduring brutality in Kashmir began with the region’s terrain.
The Himalayas illustrate the curse of mountain buffer zones—frontiers too
sparsely inhabited to be priorities for the plains elite. The needs and unique ways
of these communities—they are generally minorities, and often indigenous—are
usually overlooked or repressed by the capitals, which in turn fuels frustration.
Of course, not every range that serves as a border is a site of conflict. Switzerland in its entirety
is one big peaceful buffer zone for the five nations surrounding it. The Pyrenees separate Spain
and France without any grumbling from either country, and in fact the two governments
collaborated on cross-border crackdowns on Basque separatists going back and forth. Spain
and France also share military protection of Andorra, the mountain principality that straddles
their borders. This prevents either from overrunning it.
But buffer zones don’t work so smoothly in the Himalayas. China and India use tiny Nepal,
Sikkim, and Bhutan as bulwarks against each other. As in Nepal, the behemoths on either side
of Kashmir bully the minority mountain people, ignoring their interests for strategic gain.
Kashmir was historically British India’s defense against China; India now uses the territory
as a shield against Pakistan. And like Nepal, Kashmir has significant rivers originating in the
mountains that its bigger neighbors want to exploit for their own benefit and not the locals’.
I also saw many parallels between Kashmir and Chechnya. In both, the mountain people
are Sufis repressed by the dominant religious group. Radicalization has been the result, and has
followed the same pattern: the hijacking of what was originally an ethnic separatist move-
ment by international jihadists, aided by the fact that in the mountains, guerrilla fighters can
more easily smuggle arms and train recruits. In Chechnya the foreign jihadists came from
the Middle East. In Kashmir they were hardened Al Qaeda fighters trained in Afghanistan or
Pakistan. In both cases, what was once a garden-variety secessionist movement spread from
the mountains to the plains.
Unlike in the Caucasus, however, the conflict in Kashmir is not purely a case of frustrated
sovereignty or collision of faiths. The many dimensions of Kashmir’s imbroglio had an ad-
ditional factor—two nations coveted it. Such has been the fate of Kashmir over history. Its
attractive location and fertile charms have drawn a mosaic of invaders, occupiers, colonizers,
and Silk Road adventurers—Mughals, Afghans, and Sikhs among them—who left traces in
what became a potpourri of cultures. At different times the main faith was animist, Buddhist,
Hindu, or Muslim. Modern Kashmir still includes most of these groups. The central and heav-
ily populated Valley, the locus of today’s struggle, is mainly Sunni Muslim. It was once home
to many other groups, including a sizeable population of Hindu Brahmins, called Pandits,Shipwrecked
Kashmir
BY JUDITH MATLOFFThe long standoff between India and Pakistan has
traumatized the sturdy people of a stunning land.