The writer, co-chief of The New TM Times New Delhi Bureau, tries to make sense of the killing of 35 Sikh men in the Kashmir village of Chittisinghpora. This detailed account of what happened and what did not, including reportage from both India and Pakistan, was written for the New York Times Magazine and carried by the South Asian Journalist Association (SAJAJ) website.
When Bill Clinton visited India in March, it was the first visit by an American president in 2.2 years. Among the careful preparations for the historic occasion were a painstaking cleanup around the Taj Mahal, a reconnoitring for wild tigers he might glimpse on a VIP safari and the murder of 35 Sikh villagers in a place called Chittisinghpora.
This massacre, occurring on the evening of 20 March, preceded Clinton's arrival by only a few hours. It was a monstrous way to transmit a message, whatever that message was, and the scale of the killing was large even amid the exceptional sorrows of the Kashmir Valley. The slaughter was also remarkable in that the victims were Sikhs, a religious minority never before targeted during a bloody decade infused with grief. In the aftermath, the valley's 60,000 Sikhs faced the possibility that they were now someone's strategic quarry and that a mass migration might be a sensible reaction to the danger.
The killers came to the village at about 7:20 pm. They shunned the openness of the steep and twisting mountain road and hiked instead through the nearby apple orchards and rice fields. There were perhaps a dozen of them, perhaps twice that. They were dressed in what appeared to be the regulation issue of the Indian Army. Darkness had fallen across the hamlet, where 200 families, almost all Sikhs, eked out a living in a spot of rugged Himalayan beauty. Their ancestors had been rooted in this same windswept place—often in the very same dwellings—for generations. Chittisinghpora is a palette of greens and browns and yellows. A creek runs through it like a lifeline across the palm of a hand. Walnut and pine trees provide canopies of shade above deeply sloping footpaths. The houses are mostly made of mud bricks and weathered timber, many of them with A-frame roofs and open lofts stuffed with hay.