ABSTRACT
In October 1947, Abdul Rashid Butt took the last bus from Baramulla to Muzaffarabad: the very last commercial transport which would traverse that route for almost six decades. To understand the cultural climate in Jammu and Kashmir as Butt boarded the
bus from Baramulla, we may turn to literature: no historian has described it with anything like the evocative precision as Salman Rushdie did in his epic novel, Midnight’s Children.2 Jammu and Kashmir sat on the edge of a cataclysmic change, change that had been brewing through the century of Dogra and British Imperial rule and that would reach its climax in the murderous Partition of India. While parts of the province of Jammu were to witness horrific communal violence, most of Jammu and Kashmir was spared this carnage. All of the state, however, was to feel the impact of the storm that had ripped apart South Asia. Represented in Rushdie’s novel through the characters of Aadam Aziz and Naseem, the competing influences of an anxiety-suffused modernity and reactionary traditionalism; of local identities and new nationhoods; of syncretic cultures and communal solidarities: all these were to underpin the transfiguration of the small mountain state into a battlefield on which India and Pakistan would assert the legitimacy of the ideological project each represented. Butt was just 16 when he took the last bus to Muzaffarabad: he, with two
cousins and two servants, left never having considered the possibility that he would not be able to return home. His family had dispatched him to enquire about the fate of a cargo of fruits and spices they had sent to Kohala, the small town that marked Jammu and Kashmir’s border with the new country that had come into being two months earlier, Pakistan. Normal public transport had come to a standstill, since Pakistan had blocked fuel supplies to Jammu and Kashmir,
claiming it had none to spare. Butt and his cousins succeeded in using their contacts to board a bus chartered by a Lahore-based leader of the Muslim League to evacuate his British wife and three children who were on vacation in Srinagar. By Butt’s account, he spent the night at a hotel in Muzaffarabad, and then took a horse-drawn cart to Kohala the next morning. There, he learned the goods that his family had sent had disappeared – and that Pakistani irregulars had entered Jammu and Kashmir Without cash or hope of returning home, Butt stayed on in Muzaffarabad, and
eventually made a life for himself in the city. He obtained a degree, set up a business and married. Across the Line of Control (LoC) in Srinagar, his parents and four siblings went about their own lives, and passed away. In 2005, when Butt’s son, Saqib Butt, told him that India and Pakistan bus service was about to be started linking with Muzaffarabad, the journalist Tariq Naqash recorded that he “started crying like a child”.3 This chapter tells the tale of the first phase of the long jihad which ensured Abdul Rashid Butt missed his bus home.
