By EDWARD A, GARGAN Special to the New York Times

SRINAGAR, Kashmir: This day, on his way to work, Khwaja Sana Ullah Bhat picks his way past a tangle of blackened beams, heaps of charred and cracked bricks, and a Sandbag bunker where a soldier cradles an assault rifle, all before he can reach the unmarked heavy steel door that leads to his office.

Then he worms his way through amaze of hallways, weaving by empty desks that jut into passages, pasta heat-coil burner and, finally, into a chamber where he sinks into the creaky high-backed editor’s chair of The Daily Aftab, or The Daily Sun.

We’re in trouble here,” Mr.Bhat Said, slowly shaking the gray mane brushing his shoulders.

The rubble outside his office is the remains of Lal Chowk, Srinagar’s central square, which was burned down early in April by Indian security forces, who are Waging & War against secessionist guerrillas here.

For three years, a violent rebellion has racked the Kashmir Valley, a gentle swath of paddy fields, groves of mulberry and apple trees, and villages of wood frame and mud houses where the overwhelmingly Muslim population seeks to withdraw from union with India. No Hope for Peace.

Through these three years, and during the decades that gave birth to the civil war, Mr.Bhat has chronicled the descent from paradise, as Kashmir was widely depicted, to the cataclysm of brutality that has engulfed the valiey. Whatever hope he once retained for peace has long since been extinguished.

“I sees disaster,” he said his shoulders shifting in resignation “and continuing disaster. Some limes it will be big things, sometimes small things. But it will continue.”

Yet he remains one of the rare independent voices here, a man whose views anger both the Government and separatist guerrillas and whose pen has scorched both Pakistan and India.

“After 1947, independence, f was across the border,” he said, “I Started a weekly paper in 1952 on the other side, called it Kashmir. There were differences between me and the authorities. Finally, ultimately, they arrested me in 1957 and interrogated me for 22 days, then they handed me to the Pakistan Army and they threw me across the border. They said, “You go across.” At that time, I was not supporting accession to Pakistan or India. I was for independence.” Pakistan then, and now, claims Kashmir as its own territory.

“So they shoved me over. I was lucky the Indians didn’t shoot me. As soon as I came over | was arrested by the Indian Army. They interrogated me for three days, they handed me over to the police, who interrogated me for 16 days. After that | went home.”

The Sun Is Born

Home, such as it was, was a shared room at a relative’s home here in the Kashmiri capital. He was not, however, about to forsake newspapers, or his tangy pen. One month later, with a little help from friends, “The Daily Aftab” hit the Streets of Srinagar.

Inevitably, he said, he quickly irritated the country that had no choice but to adopt him. “The authorities were unhappy with us. The authorities are unhappy with us.”

 

In April 1990, after a series of massacres by Government troops, described in compelling detail by “The Daily Aftab”, Kashmir’s Governor ordered the paper closed, But 10 days later, a judge in the Srinagar High Court reversed the Governor and Mr. Bhat was back in business.

But he acknowledges that no newspaper, note yen his, is really free in acclimate of fear, of threats from both the Government and the secessionist guerrillas. “We serve the militants because the public is with them,” he said. “We publish their statements, their actions.”

For this, his office is regularly raided by the security forces. “They search this office,” he said, in the darkness brought on by one of Srinagar’s regular power cuts, “They are looking for militants, for bulletins. They’ve searched us so many times, 20, 25 times. Only once did they beat me up. With rifle butts on the back.”

At the same time despite publishing what the guerrillas demand, he is no favorite of theirs either.

“T myself have tried in the last 34 years to say that people should reconcile to India, because there is no way out,” he said. “But when I say this they don‘t support me. Even today they are not happy with me.”

And because another well-known Kashmiri editor was killed for failing to embrace the separatist struggle Mr. Bhat works behind his steel doors. “No one can easily approach this room,” he said, as a generator coughed and the rooms: three fluorescent best flickered to life. “You have seen the zigzags.”

‘Peace-loving People’

If there are those who share his views, few give voice to them, Rather Mr; Bhat recognizes he represents the smallest of minority views here.

“We are not a revolutionary people,” he said. “We are a peace loving people. At present, I can’t say people are happy with India. They don’t want to remain in India. If, after two years, three years, five years, there is a compromise and Kashmir will remain in India, people will never be happy.

These are the basic things; I don’t say the people of Kashmir want to go to Pakistan. I don’t say they want independence but one thing I can say is they don’t want to remain in India.

An old wire service machine clattered to life down the hall. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, “With the militancy our deadlines are earlier now. Everyone wants 10 get homes before dark.”

Article extracted from this publication >>  May 28, 1993