By Karan Thapar

“Just because you’ve been there doesn’t mean you know the place” Charlie Douglas-Home once said as he heard me pontificating about Nigeria. No doubt he was laughing but there was a point to his jest. “And don’t even think you understand. After all, it was only a few months.”

We were lunching at his club in London. I was on a break from Lagos and he was foreign editor at The Times. The meal was his way of congratulating me for surviving the first three months of my first job. The warning was provoked by my air of authority. I daresay it was deserved.

Perhaps those words will haunt me as I embark on another reckless discourse. This time my subject is the Kashmiri people and a weekend visit to Srinagar. I won’t claim I know, leave aside understand, but I feel I sensed something I should share with you.

“Aap humme samajhne ki koshish kare”. It was a mere sentence spoken at a chance encounter in Shalimar Gardens. The speaker was complaining about television coverage of Kashmir. The image portrayed to the rest of the country, he felt, was not just unbalanced but unfair.

“Yahan atankvad zaroor hei” he explained. “Magar aur bhi hei. Hussi hei, gana hei, phool hein aur aman hei. Aap terrorism ke bare bahut bolte hein lekin Kashmir ke bare bahut kum.”

Paradoxically, that morning a blast at the city’s fruit market killed nine and injured over forty. But Jahangir – that was his name – knew nothing of this. Nor did the hundreds of others enjoying a saturday afternoon in Shalimar and Nishat Gardens. They had taught themselves to lead normal lives and were happy with their partial success. The screaming television headlines rekindled a reality they preferred to forget.

Mufti Mohammad Saeed repeated the point at lunch on sunday. He was our host at an al fresco buffet on the grounds of Farooq Abdullah’s enchanting golf course. The Chief Minister insisted we drive around in golf carts. He wanted us, guests at a World Tourism Council retreat, to return with memories of Kashmir’s beauty and its emerging if troubled calm. And what better way than to drive to hole No.5 and look back on the sloping course as it dips to the shores of Dal Lake.

But it was a taxi driver – the fount of all journalistic wisdom – who put it most beautifully. Driving through Lal Chowk, the city centre, I found the shutters down. For all intents and purposes it appeared as if terrorists had closed the city. But last weekend this would have been an erroneous conclusion. What I saw wasn’t proof of militancy but a manifestation of returning democracy. The city’s shopkeepers were protesting against an increase in the power tariff!

The taxi driver sensed this when I asked what the matter was. He threw his head back and laughed. He saw the joke but also realised how easily outsiders would be fooled.

“Nahiji, ab zamana badal gaya. Yeh vaisa bandh nahin.” I could have sworn I detected a note of pride. Or was it relief?

As we drove through Srinagar even the soldiers – and they’re everywhere – seemed relaxed. But was I imagining? Was I starting to believe what I wanted to hear?

“Ek time aisa tha ki Allah humse bigar gaye” the taxi driver said reading my thoughts. “Haalat kharab ho gaye aur phir hum bhi kharab ho gaye.”

We drove in silence but he was smiling. When I caught his eye in the rear-view mirror he started speaking again.

“But now all well” he said switching to English. “Insahallah aisa hi rahe.”

Am I wrong to sense a message in this? Am I mistaken in attracting your attention to it?

Terrorism in Kashmir is not over. Far from it. But the people of Kashmir want to move on and they want us to recognise that. They want to be seen in broader terms.

But there’s more than that. If terrorism in Kashmir is to be defeated then we, in the rest of India, have to believe in the Kashmiri ability to do this. One way is to reflect their lives more fully. To see Kashmir through stories that go beyond

death and destruction; hear their laughter, see their fun, and, of course, share in their everyday pain and sorrow.

Only if we show the normal side of their lives can we strengthen it. Of course, we must not exaggerate but at the moment we are, in fact, ignoring this. That’s not just unhelpful, it’s also cruel and wrong.

Bombs in Ahmedabad and Bombay have never stopped us visiting these great cities. Today I realise how wrong I was to allow bombs in Srinagar to keep me away. And this time Charlie Douglas-Home, I think, would agree!