Buddhist-Muslim Relations in Ladakh – Part 3

By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,

In his early 30s, Namgyal is a lama at the Thiksey gonpa, a sprawling centuries-old monastery some 15 kilometres from Leh. Like most other Ladakhi lamas, he has spent most of his life in the monastery, having entered it when he was just seven. Life in the monastery follows a strict routine. Namgyal spends most of the day reading Buddhist texts, teaching these to junior lamas, and officiating at prayer ceremonies in the monastery as well as in people’s homes.

Namgyal’s family lives in a village which has a sizeable Muslim minority. Most of the Muslims in his village are Baltis, with only a few Argon families. He tells me that relations between the different communities were fairly cordial till the boycott of 1989. Inter-marriage was quite common. In fact, an aunt of his is from a Balti family, while his father’s cousin sister is married to an Argon. While such marriages were not approved of, they still happened. ‘For a few days there would be opposition from both sides’, he says, ‘but soon the families would reconcile themselves to the situation’. Inevitably, such marriages ended up in the wife converting to the husband’s religion. Namgyal claims, and he is probably right, that more Buddhist women than Muslim women married outside their community.

Everyone I have met in Ladakh points to 1989 as the turning point in Buddhist-Muslim relations. Namgyal was not very clear as to what exactly triggered off the conflict that year. ‘I hardly step out of the monastery, so I really am not aware of what’s happening in the world outside’, he explains. He tells me that he has heard that it was a scuffle between by a group of Sunni Muslims and Buddhist youth in Leh that set of a chain counter-attacks that finally culminated in the declaration of a economic and social boycott of the Muslims by the Buddhists. ‘I am not sure if we should have instituted the boycott’, Namgyal says. Boycotting an entire community is not in accordance with the Buddhist dhamma, he tells me, although he admits that several lamas were also involved in instituting the boycott at several places. ‘These were younger lamas who do not have a proper knowledge of Buddhism’, he claims. On the other hand, he says that some other lamas tried to oppose the boycott but were forced to keep silent by Buddhist youth who had, as he puts it, ‘simply gone out of control’.

Namgyal confesses to know little about Islam, but simply says, ‘All religions are good. They all teach love and compassion. Who knows, Ram, Krishna, Christ and Muhammad may all have been forms of the Buddha’. He, therefore, sees no reason why one should convert to another religion or seek for others to do so. ‘Let everyone serve his own religion and in that way we can all live together in peace’, he stresses. Right action, rather than religious beliefs, he goes on to tell me, are of central importance. One can learn and adopt the good things in other religions without abandoning one’s own religion. It is pointless proclaiming the superiority of one religion over the other if one does not actually practice true religion, which, as Namgyal defines it, is a form of inspiration that gives one peace as well as leads one to help those in need. The main aim of the Buddha’s mission was to end suffering, and this means that one should be concerned about the sufferings of all creatures, not simply of one’s co-religionists. Different religions, Namgyal believes, are different ways for proper living, and are devised to appeal to people with different mentalities. ‘The three poisons of ignorance, desire and hatred, are found inside you. Kill them by following the noble eight-fold path of the Buddha and all your enmities will be destroyed’, he says. All religions, so Namgyal claims, teach the same thing.

At the same time, however, Namgyal opines that many Muslims he knows are ‘overly aggressive about their religion’, but he makes a distinction between the Baltis and the Argons. He sees the Baltis as being closer to the Buddhists than the Argons are. After all, he reminds me, their ancestors were Buddhists at one time, and they speak the same language (with some minor variations in Kargil), look the same and share many cultural practices in common with the Buddhists. ‘They are simple, hardworking and honest people, not quarrelsome like the Argons’, he says. He contrasts them with the Argons, whom he describes as ‘crafty and untrustworthy’. ‘Before the boycott the Argon youth were very aggressive. They would tease our girls in the streets and leave no opportunity to pick a fight with anyone’, he claims.

Namgyal echoes a view that many Ladakhis, Muslims and Buddhists express, that relations between the Buddhists and Muslims have drastically been transformed as a result of the boycott. ‘We are not as close as we were before’, he says. Inter-marriages, fairly common in the past, are now rare. Many Muslim women, he says, somewhat in complaint, now wear head-scarves, something hitherto unknown in Ladakh. Traditional Muslim wedding ceremonies, accompanied by music and dance, are being replaced by simple functions as the former are increasingly being viewed as un-Islamic and not being sanctioned in theshariah.. Fewer Muslims now attend the festivals at the monasteries. In the past, he says, several Muslims, mainly Baltis, would come to him to ask him for prayers to cure a range of illnesses, but now few do. He sees this as a result of ‘the propaganda of the mullahs’, but, when I point out that it may, in part, be a reaction to the sufferings they underwent during the boycott he hesitatingly agrees.

X works for the Ladakh Buddhist Association, an organisation of mainly lay Buddhists that spearheaded the boycott of the Muslims. I met him at the LBA office, which is situated in the premises of the Jokhang monastery, near the Sunni mosque in the heart of Leh’s main bazaar.

‘The boycott began because some Argons teased a group of Buddhist girls in Leh’, X claims, offering a slightly different version of the events from what Namgyal provides. Some Buddhist youth protested, and this then led to clashes in the town. In some villages, he admits, Muslim houses were burnt down and families were forced to flee to Leh. Three lives were lost in police firing in Leh and in the nearby village of Shey. Many Kashmiri traders in Leh were forced to close their shops and go back to Kashmir. The boycott lasted for some three years, kept alive, X proudly says, by the LBA, and supported by numerous lamas. ‘We forbade Buddhists from buying things from Muslim shops or travelling in Muslim vehicles’, he gloats. The boycott finally gave over after the Muslims and Buddhists promised to stop inter-religious marriages. However, he warns, ‘These things are still happening, and many more Muslims are marrying Buddhist girls than the other way round. If they continue like this the situation might become volatile again’. He repeats the claim that I have heard many Buddhists make that the Muslims offer monetary inducements to Buddhist girls to convert and marry Muslim men, an allegation that many Muslims rebut.

I ask X if he believes that the boycott and the ensuing violence were in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha. He hesitates and thinks for a while. ‘It is true’, he replies, ‘that the Buddha taught non-violence and compassion for all creatures’. ‘At the same time’, he says in his defence, ‘the Buddha taught that we must protect our religion, which is what the boycott intended to do’. He goes on to tell me the story (apocryphal or not, I do not know) of a Buddhist monk who killed a man because the otherwise the man would kill 999 other people. In this way, he says, the monk saved so many lives by taking just one. ‘If we simply preach compassion’, he tells me, ‘Buddhists will become extinct in Ladakh and the Muslims will take over’. He refers to Afghanistan and the Kashmir Valley, which were Buddhist at one time. The Buddhists there, he says, ‘stuck to compassion’, and that was why Islam was able to ‘drive Buddhism out’ from these regions. He compares that with the situation in Ladakh today, where, he says, if the Buddhists do not get organised to protect their religion Islamist militants will take over.

I can empathise with his predicament, although I cannot agree with his justification for a boycott of an entire community. I refer to the stance of the Dalai Lama during the boycott crisis, reminding him that the Dalai Lama had condemned the boycott and had urged Buddhists and Muslims to solve their differences peacefully. At this, X suddenly does an about-turn and stutters: ‘Yes, maybe the boycott was wrong, maybe it was un-Buddhist’. He, however, continues to maintain that it was a ‘natural reaction’ to Kashmiri and Argon ‘wrong-doings’.

After the lifting of the boycott Buddhist-Muslim relations in Leh are now ‘almost normal’, X tells me, although irritations remain, such as the continued intermarriages. He tells me of how visiting each other’s houses, a common occurrence in the past, has now declined, a result of the boycott. The boycott has also affected the local economy. In the past most of the shops and vehicles in Leh were owned by the Argons and Kashmiris, but during the boycott the Buddhists set up their own shops and bought their own vehicles. Now, he tells me, the Buddhists dominate Leh’s economy, a fact that many Argons resent.

X, clearly, has a low opinion of the Muslims. ‘They do not have any respect for us and our religion’, he complains. ‘From childhood they learn that k stands for kafir, so how can you expect them to love us?’ He talks about how many Muslims now consciously seek to distance themselves from the Buddhists, abandoning many local customs and practices and becoming more self-consciously ‘Islamic’. He claims that the Muslims are ‘inherently militant’, so much so that ‘they cannot resist fighting among themselves’. He talks about Sunnis in Kargil who took out a pro-Saddam demonstration during the Gulf War and were beaten up by Shi‘a youth to back his claim. ‘The Shi‘as and Sunnis actually detest each other but put up a united front against the Buddhists’, he claims. He also tells me of what he and many Buddhists see as the looming threat of Islamist militancy spreading to Ladakh, although he admits that the militants enjoy little support among the local Muslims, particularly the Baltis. He refers to the killing of three lamas of the Rangdum monastery in Zanskar by militants some years ago, and says, ‘If the militants have their way they will destroy all our monasteries’.

The LBA, X tells me, is ‘passionately pro-India’. He makes the obvious point that joining Pakistan is simply not an option for the Buddhists. ‘We’ll be wiped out there if we do’, he says. Ideally, he explains, Ladakh should be separated from Jammu and Kashmir and made a Union Territory. ‘We have nothing in common with the Kashmiris and so there’s no reason why we should stay on with them’.

Dr. Tashi Paljor is the Principal of the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (CIBS) at Choglamsar, near Leh, one of the leading Buddhist research and teaching institutions in India. Originally from Lahaul in Himachal Pradesh but having lived in Ladakh for many years, he is a well-known authority on Ladakhi Buddhism.

Paljor tells me about the Buddhist solution to the problem of inter-religious conflict. ‘The Buddha taught’, he says, ‘that we should treat all creatures as our own mother, for in one of our past lives they could have been our mother’. The enemy is within, rather than without. If the ‘internal enemies’, of desire, jealousy and envy, are destroyed, the enemy no longer remains. There is no need for religious conversion, he argues. One should remain in one’s own religion, discarding anything in it that might not appeal to reason, while not hesitating to take the good things from all other religions. Following the path of compassion (karuna) of the Buddha one should love all creatures, including people of different communities, equally, and work for the end of all forms of suffering. In this way, he says, all human beings, indeed all created beings, can be happy. The key lies in overcoming the ‘illusion’ of the self, the ego, the atma, which is the cause for desire and which inevitably leads to conflicts of all forms. Overcoming the ‘illusion’ of the ego, one is led to realise the ‘principle of interconnection and interdependence’ between different creatures, which, in turn, leads to a healthy respect for religious pluralism.

That, however, is fine in theory, I reply, but what about the situation in Ladakh? What about the problematic relations between Buddhists and Muslims? Paljor tells me that many Muslims regard Buddhists, like other non-Muslims, as ‘enemies of God’ or at least as followers of ‘falsehood’. ‘This is a major problem in promoting good relations’, he complains, although he does say that following the lifting of the boycott things have improved. Now that Leh has its own Autonomous Hill Council, Buddhist-Muslim relations are back to ‘almost normal’, but Paljor believes that there is no guarantee that the Kashmir government will not seek to dilute the powers of the Council. That is why, he says, many Ladakhi Buddhists, including the LBA, are now demanding Union Territory status for Leh.

Paljor introduces me to Geishe Konchok Namgyal, who teaches Buddhist philosophy at the CIBS. Namgyal describes Buddhist-Muslim relations in Ladakh as ‘a unique model’, and says that, barring the period of the boycott, there have been no incidents of conflict between the two communities in the past. It is true, he says, that Ladakhi Buddhist kings sometimes fought with Muslim kings, such as the Shi‘a rulers of Skardu and Baltistan, but these were not communal riots or religious wars. They did not involved entire communities, but only professional armies. Many of the Buddhist kings had Muslim soldiers and even Muslim wives. Likewise, numerous Shi‘a kings married Buddhist women. Even today, Namgyal informs me, in some remote areas, such as in Dah-Hanu in Kargil, there are families in which one brother is a Muslim and the other a Buddhist.

Namgyal admits that the boycott had a major impact on Buddhist-Muslim relations. It was, he says, wrong to boycott an entire community, but he argues that the Buddhists did have genuine grievances, which then led to ‘a mob mentality’ which then ‘went out of control’. With Leh having now been granted its Autonomous Hill Council, in which Muslims are also represented, he opines that a repeat of the boycott will not happen. But, he says, religious leaders must play a pro-active role in promoting better relations between Muslims and Buddhists, because that is not a task that can be left to the politicians alone. He tells me that the CIBS has invited Muslim leaders to attend functions, such as receptions for the Dalai Lama. In turn, sometimes Muslim leaders invite Buddhist lamas to Muslim gatherings. But, he admits, this is not done in any organised way as such.

The Mahabodhi International Meditation Centre occupies a sprawling campus outside the Tibetan refugee settlement of Choglamsar, not far from Leh. The Centre is engaged in a variety of activities, including promoting education, healthcare and interfaith dialogue, and represents a new form of socially engaged Buddhism. Smala Phuntsog works as a doctor in the Mahabodhi Karuna hospital that the Centre has recently opened. He is also the secretary of the Leh chapter of the Oxford-based International association for Religious Freedom (IARF).

Religions between Muslims and Buddhists in Ladakh, he tells me, have traditionally been harmonious. He explains the boycott as an ‘aberration’ and as a ‘political thing’. Yet, he stresses, organised efforts must be made to promote inter-faith dialogue, especially because the youth are increasingly ‘straying from the path of their elders’.

Phuntsog hands me a bunch of leaflets about his Centre, including some that detail its own role in promoting communal harmony in Leh. The Centre has held a number of inter-faith meetings, the latest being just a month before, which was sponsored by the IARF. At the latest meeting Sunni, Shi‘a, Buddhist and Christian religious leaders spoke on the importance of peace and harmony from the perspective of their own religions. The meeting culminated in a peace march through the streets of Leh, raising slogans in support of peace. The previous year, a similar meeting was jointly sponsored by the local Sunni and Shi‘a community organisations.

‘Live and let live’ is Phuntsog’s answer to my query as to how people of different faiths can live together. Since no humans think exactly alike, they should be free to believe in whatever they want, and must respect the freedom of others to do so. He tells me how at the Centre there are a number of Muslim employees as well as students in the Centre’s school. ‘We all live together here at the Centre, no problems at all’, he says.

The Buddhist way of dealing with religious pluralism, Phuntsog tells me, is through tolerance and dialogue. He recites an excerpt from the daily morning Buddhist prayer to illustrate this approach: ‘May all sentient beings be happy and free from misery. May this state be for all’.

Buddhist-Muslim Relations in Ladakh – Part 3

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By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,