There are several versions of when and why my family converted to Sikhism. One tells the tale of two brothers, Madan and Gopal, from Rishikesh who travelled north and settled in Poonch in the late 18th century. This chimes with accounts of Max Macauliffe (1841-1913), who traced the arrival of Sikhs in Kashmir as accompanying Raja Sukhjawan, a Hindu who was made governor of Kashmir by Timur Shah in the mid-1750s. Some historians believe Sikhism came to Kashmir during Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule in the early 19th century, while others believe it was Banda Bahadur (1670-1716), the Sikh general who created the Khalsa (the pure ones) in Kashmir. Bahadur was born in Rajouri, a region adjacent to Poonch to which he retreated, following a lost battle, in order to raise a fresh army. Regardless of the historical veracity of competing accounts, Kashmiri Sikhs have been a culturally, linguistically and ethnically distinct group for at least 200 years.

I come from a clan of Kashmiri Sikhs from Poonch, a beautiful district in Kashmir with the line of control (LOC) that divides India and Pakistan running right through it. Kashmiri Sikhs are ethnically distinct from Punjabi Sikhs, and were originally Kashmiri Brahmins (or Pandits, as Kashmiri Brahmin Hindus are commonly known).

The immediate and long-term consequences of this Indian move will be far-reaching, and may be very damaging. No one can foresee the outcome and many will rightly be trepidatious. But at this critical juncture, it is important to realise the complexity of the Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, and its varied victims. Much of the media portrayal of the conflict is one between a Hindu nationalist India and the Muslim population of Kashmir. This is only partly true.

I thought of Iftikhar as India and Pakistan are again on the brink. On 5 August 2019, Amit Shah, India’s home affairs minister, announced in the upper house of the Indian parliament (Rajya Sabha) that a presidential order had been issued revoking Article 370, depriving the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status that conferred on it a certain level of autonomy, and fundamentally changing the relationship between India and Kashmir.

Iftikhar was my favourite taxi driver while I lived in London. An elderly Muslim from Lahore, he spoke in lilting, lyrical Punjabi typical of that part of the world. In June 1999, as India and Pakistan fought the Kargil war, he was driving me to Heathrow when the conversation turned to the conflict. I asked what he thought. ‘Doctor sahib‘, he said, ‘when my mother had me, she was suffering from tuberculosis. She was weak and her milk had dried up. Her nextdoor neighbour was a Sikh woman who had also given birth. My mother asked her to breastfeed me. When you ask me about the war, what can I say? I was born of one mother’s womb; another mother suckled me. How can I choose?’

No more, though. Kashmir has been ethnically cleansed of its Sikh and Pandit populations, in a systematic and purposeful manner. Over half-a-million non-Muslim Kashmiris have been driven out of their homeland since 1990. Beginning in 1989 with the assassination of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo in Srinagar, a meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed campaign of terror was unleashed against non-Muslims. My paternal uncles owned two iconic bookstores in Srinagar ̫ Hind Book Store and Kashmir Book Store, famous with hippies, backpackers and the assortment of Western travellers who flocked to Kashmir and its idyllic beauty, and celebrated it, as Led Zeppelin did, in their majestic song ‘Kashmir’. But my uncles, fearful of the posters that appeared on walls claiming Islamist rule, the masked men with Kalashnikovs forcing locals to change the time on watches to Pakistan Standard Time, and threatening messages broadcast from mosques, left everything they knew and owned behind, to live as refugees in neighbouring Jammu. They were lucky to escape unharmed. Girija Tickoo, a young Pandit woman, was abducted in June 1990. Her mutilated body was found on 25 June 1990. She had been raped and then her sawed in half, possibly with a carpenter’s saw, while still alive. Sarla Bhat, a 24-year-old nurse, was tortured and gang-raped over five days in April 1990 before being shot and killed. The list of atrocities against Pandits is long and horrific. And the indifference of the world startling.

Perhaps it was ever thus. In 2010 my mother, terminally ill with cancer, agreed for me to video-record her narrating her life story, so my young children would know her, even if only through that movie. She was of the generation that spoke little, and whose waking hours were consumed by a thousand chores, big and small, and who had to look after a large family with very little money and none of the accoutrements of modernity. Over two hours she told me things that I neither knew nor could have imagined.

Several people in my extended family had been killed by Muslims in the 1947 partition madness. In revenge my great grand uncles had gone on reprisal killings. In the massacre of one family, they abducted 10-year-old Muslim girl. When my great grandfather found out, he was extremely angry and distressed. He insisted that the child be taken back to her family, but there was no family she could return to. He adopted the girl, and when she turned 13 he married her to his 13-year-old son. I knew her as an aunt with piercing blue eyes and a perpetual hint of mischief on her face. I spent a lot of my childhood playing in her house with her son. My dying mother told me that her real name was Fatima, that she never spoke about her past, and died taking all her secrets and untold griefs with her.

That very year my brother-in-law Gurdev was contacted by a family from Lahore claiming to be his cousins. Gurdev was born in Lahore. His parents fled at the start of the killings in 1947. His paternal aunt refused to leave the family home, insisting that the ‘madness would pass’. The family was attacked and everyone killed but for two young boys, who had to choose between being killed or converting to Islam. They converted, and 60 years later, thanks to the internet and social media, traced Gurdev. The families agreed to meet as the Pakistani side was planning a trip to India. A date was set and my sister, Gurdev’s wife, started planning a meal.

The choice of dishes was problematic. The Muslim part of the family wanted only halaal; my sister refused to cook anything but jhatka meat (the Sikh way of killing an animal, with a single stroke severing the head to minimise suffering). The only option was to cook a vegetarian buffet.

Gurdev’s cousins arrived, attired in the Pathan garb of Kamaeez Shalwar, and with Muslim skull caps. Gurdev greeted them in all his turbaned glory. The cousins read the Namaaz in my sister’s Sikh household before eating. There were tears of joy and sorrow, much reminiscing of what little each could remember from their turbulent past, a long list of all the uncles, aunts and peers who had passed away, and proud displays of the achievements of the younger generation. No one mentioned partition, politics was studiously avoided, and religious differences, simultaneously visible and completely ignored, were not allowed to get in the way of the palpable intimacy of the occasion. Like Iftikhar’s two mothers, here were those of the same flesh and blood, brought up by two different mother cultures. They would not eat the same meat, but could love each other nonetheless.