Kashmir is the main excuse that India and Pakistan use to justify the high cost of their militarisation. It is not merely the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir who suffer from this rivalry—peace in the Subcontinent is held hostage by this dispute. Peace in Kashmir is not an option. It is imperative for South Asia's survival.
The 1950s witnessed the revival of nationalism in India. Like most Indians of that decade, I grew up believing in the great destiny of India. We looked to the future and saw India as a prosperous, peace-loving and powerful country, a leader among the community of nations. We were proud that despite the partition of the Subcontinent on religious grounds, India remained committed to secularism.
Our teachers never tired of pointing to Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state's voluntary accession to India. It was the badge of India's secularism. The majority of our teachers and our parents were nationalists. Most of them believed that Hinduism was compatible with secularism, as it was a tolerant and open system. They believed Islam was rigid and intolerant. They blamed the Muslims primarily for the Partition riots and killings. Not a single Muslim family lived on our Calcutta street. There were no Muslim students in our school.
The continued persecution of Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan roused passions and there were occasional outbursts of anger on the streets when innocent Muslims of Calcutta became targets of violence. Yet it did not seem to sully our secularist image or shake our belief that Hinduism was more tolerant than Islam. These incidents were explained away as mere aberrations. It escaped everybody's notice that perhaps we were tolerant of the Muslims because they did not live among us. The fact that the Muslims were the butt of jokes also did not seem to bother most of our elders who professed to be secularists.