Heavily forested hills covered in juniper and cypress rise sharply behind the whitewashed palace, while a lawn the size of four football fields slopes gently down toward the houseboats and lotus gardens of Dal Lake. Now known as the Grand Palace Intercontinental, a luxurious five-star hotel with 125 suites and cottages, the villa in ordinary times would be a booming resort filled with well-heeled vacationers. But these are not ordinary times.
The first indication that something’s not right is the large sign posted on the circular driveway: NO WEAPON BEYOND THIS POINT. Just past the uniformed Sikh doorman poised at rigid attention, the vast columned lobby is as silent as a mausoleum. After a 10-minute wait the receptionist arrives, mumbling apologetically. “We are not used to guests,” he says. How many of the Grand Palace’s 125 rooms are presently occupied? I inquire. The clerk pauses, clears his throat. “You are the only ones,” he says.
That’s hardly surprising. After 12 years in which nearly a dozen militant groups have fought without respite against India’s rule of this disputed Muslim-majority area, few locals can even remember the days when the fabled Vale of Kashmir was a tourist paradise. Today the mood here is grim and desperate, the result of repeated terrorist attacks, the ubiquitous presence of the hated Indian Army, and a creeping fundamentalist Islamic influence for which the average Kashmiri citizen has little sympathy. Suicide attacks on military convoys and bases in the remote countryside–and sometimes the capital–by separatist militants known as fedayeen are near-daily occurrences, as are reprisals carried out by the Indian Army against civilians. Officials say more than 30,000 people have been killed in political violence since the revolt against Indian rule began in 1989; India’s government has stationed half a million troops in Kashmir, and Srinagar, the chaotic capital on Dal Lake, has become an armed camp.
Now, the shikaras–canopied longboats–that once paddled honeymooners across the lake are filled with armed troops from the Border Security Force, on the lookout for Kashmiri guerrillas. And the hundreds of houseboats that line the shore stand empty, in varying states of disrepair, like indigent dowagers who’ve lost both the resources and the will for self-upkeep. Two weeks ago the militants struck again, this time with an act of unprecedented audacity in the heart of the capital. Just before 2 p.m. on Oct. 1, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden Tata Sumo–a Land Cruiser-like vehicle popular in India–into the heavily guarded front gate of Kashmir’s State Legislature. As the huge explosion sent body parts flying and ripped a hole in the gate, three more militants disguised in police uniforms entered the compound, Kalashnikov assault rifles blazing. They killed several people in the courtyard and then swept through one of the buildings, shooting ministerial aides dead as they cowered behind their desks. The final death toll was 38, including the bomber and three attackers, who were killed by police.
The Pakistani-based Islamic fundamentalist group Jaish-e Mohammed, which has close ties to Afghanistan’s Taliban, claimed credit for the suicide attack, then later denied responsibility. Five days later, when I arrived in Srinagar from New Delhi, most damage had been repaired, and a semblance of calm had returned to the city. But the hundreds of police and paramilitary forces who lined the streets were on high alert, and our car–a Tata Sumo, just like the one driven by the suicide attacker–was pulled over repeatedly whenever we drove around town.
For those who remember Kashmir’s glory days, the transformation has been gut-wrenching. At Butt’s Clermont Houseboats, opened by the Butt family during the last days of the British Raj in 1940, Gulam Butt wages a lonely battle to keep things afloat. During its heyday a generation ago, Butt’s played host to American ambassadors, political eminences such as Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller and–most famously–to George Harrison, who holed up here for several weeks in 1966 during the Beatles’ spiritual pilgrimage to India. Now Butt’s elegant wooden boats, hand-crafted beauties floating in the shallows at the pristine northern end of the lake, provide refuge only to foreign correspondents passing through for a glimpse of the war. Rare visitors are greeted with a warmth usually reserved for family members returning home after a long exile. “Welcome, my dear,” Butt cried as I stepped out of my taxi, hugging me and leading me into his office, where he pointed out fading black-and-white photos on the walls of illustrious guests from decades past. “Those were better days,” Butt said. “Inshallah [God willing], they’ll return.” He’d been forced to scuttle five of his nine houseboats and had laid off most of the staff; the four employees who remained spent weeks at a time, they conceded, with nothing to do. (The previous guest on my houseboat had checked out 44 days ago.) Lassa, who paddles Butt’s visitors around Dal Lake in a shikara, told me that “Months go by and we see nobody. It’s very lonely. And very hard for a poor man like me to survive.”
Now Butt and his colleagues have yet another destabilizing factor to worry about: the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan and the spillover effect across the Islamic world. On Monday morning, hours after the first strikes against Taliban targets in Kabul and Kandahar, I drove to the edge of Srinagar’s old city to measure reaction on the streets. It was just after 8:30 a.m., and the mood was turning ugly. Young toughs swaggered through the alleys, smashing long wooden sticks against the metal shutters of shops to intimidate their owners into closing up. They also threw rocks at several vehicles. By 9 a.m. about 50 policemen had taken up positions at a square beside the centuries-old Jamia Mosque, the chief enclave of the fundamentalists and a frequent flash point for Islamic rage. Burning tires set up as barricades by the mobs sent acrid smoke into the crisp mountain air. From the distance, the boys began taunting the police with cries of “Death to America,” “Long Live Pakistan,” and “Long Live the Taliban.” (They were evidently oblivious to the fact that Pakistan had joined the antiterror coalition against their former Afghan allies.)
The police dove for cover before a fusillade of bricks and stones, answering back with round after round of tear gas and stun grenades. The boys surged forward, screaming obscenities, advancing toward the police along three streets that converged on the square. Shopkeepers and pedestrians caught in the epicenter cowered in doorways; the cops fired more tear gas, called for reinforcements and then, screaming like banshees, charged en masse toward the mob, sending them fleeing into the warrens of the old city. “We have these incidents almost every Friday, but this one is hotter than usual,” said Lt. Mohsin Gadin, washing tear gas out of his eyes at a public water tap. “They’ve never come at us from all sides before. I’m afraid it’s going to get uglier.”
The street battles died down after two hours without any fatalities. But more violence erupted this week, when two Indian soldiers and four members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Taiba were killed in a 30-hour gun battle that began in a house south of Srinagar on Wednesday. Nor did anybody I spoke to doubt that the situation would remain highly volatile–and that frustrated young Kashmiris would continue to use the Afghan war to vent their anger. “It’s like the Palestinian intifada, a culture of boys going out, and most of them don’t even know what they’re fighting against,” said Muzamil Jaleel, the Kashmir correspondent for The Indian Express, who joined me on Monday’s expedition.
But some groups in Kashmir do have a clear focus. One of the most vocal such groups in Srinagar is the Daughters of Brotherhood, a clutch of burqa-wearing women who support the Taliban and have called for the imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious law) in the valley. Their views are highly unpopular in Srinagar–the group is widely disparaged by local women as “the Daughters of Degradation,” a pun in the Kashmiri language–yet they are finding support from violent Islamic fundamentalists. Six weeks ago, a previously unknown Islamic group calling itself Lashkar-e Jabbar ordered all women to wear the all-enveloping burqa robe and threatened to attack those who refused. Shortly afterward, three young women, including a 14-year-old girl, were splashed in the face with acid. The next day, nearly half a million burqas were sold to terrified women in Srinagar. (Some in Srinagar suspect that the Islamic group was in league with–or an invention of–local merchants, who made a quick fortune from the rush to buy the garments.)
In the last few weeks those fears have subsided, but the fundamentalists are no less vocal. “Osama bin Laden is our hero,” proclaimed Asiya Andrabi, the leader of the Daughters of Brotherhood, sitting on the floor alongside a half dozen other members of her group, all of whom were encased in black. As she condemned the American “terrorism” in Afghanistan, I asked her repeatedly whether she supported the murder of those at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. She stared back sullenly. As the press conference broke up, Jaleel, the Indian Express reporter, told me that I had pushed her too hard; these were not people to be trifled with, he warned.
Jaleel’s fears were confirmed later that evening. When I arrived back at Butt’s Houseboats in the darkness, six grim-faced police officers met me at the gate. Word had spread through Srinagar of my encounter with the “Taliban women,” the chief told me, and he was providing me with armed guards to guarantee my safety. “These are dangerous times,” the chief said. “We have to take every precaution.” Those precautions ultimately required me to leave the houseboat a half hour later, after the police decided that they couldn’t protect me from a militant attack in this isolated region of Dal Lake. With reluctance, I said goodbye to Gulam Butt and was escorted to the down-at-the-heels Broadway Hotel in a secure neighborhood of central Srinagar. To the piped-in music of Abba, I ate a depressing dinner in the empty dining room.
In spite of the violence that bedevils Srinagar, there are moments when the tension drops away. One evening, Lassa took me out for a cruise at sunset. We paddled through thick clumps of lotuses to the center of Dal Lake, where the incantatory rumble of worshipers chanting in the white-domed Sufi mosque on the lake shore drifted through the chill mountain air. Kingfishers cartwheeled overhead, then dropped like stones into the water, emerging with thrashing carp ensnared in their sharp probosci. A flock of crows took off from nearby rice fields, a dense black cloud sweeping across the cobalt-blue sky. As we paddled closer to shore, I heard female voices singing and noticed the orange light of many small fires. It was a Kashmiri wedding, Lassa told me. A dozen cooks were preparing the mutton-heavy traditional marriage feast, known as the wazwan. We drifted past the cooking fires and the gaily singing girls, as the serrated mountains that loom above the lake faded into the shadows. A quarter moon rose above the valley, a Kashmiri family paddled toward home across the glassy lake, and for a brief moment, Srinagar felt like paradise on earth.
