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ОглавлениеWhat Are Kashmir’s Stone-pelters Saying to Us?
Like an obstinate nightmare, Kashmir has returned to haunt India’s political discourse in this third consecutive summer of massive protests. For almost two months now we are witnessing the brazen courage of Kashmiri youth, armed with stones in their hands, in groups of no more than a few hundred at a time, taking on Kashmir’s much vaunted ‘security grid’. This carefully welded network deploys at least 6,00,000 soldiers in uniform, and another 1,00,000 ‘civilian’ intelligence and surveillance operatives. But pinned down by this summer’s showers of carefully aimed rocks, the grid has begun to appear clumsy and vulnerable.
As the sang-bazan, the stone-pelters, insolently stormed into prime time, they brought with them an intensity that made the newspaper pundits, and the usual chorus of television-studio experts, briefly wilt. Images of boys as young as nine and ten being dragged off into police vehicles, or shot dead by the paramilitary forces, have begun to dent conventional truisms about what is happening in Kashmir. Startling photographs of middle-aged (and middle-class) women in the ranks of the stone-pelting protesters have also destabilized those who have allowed a morbid panic of the ‘Islamists’, or the fear of Pakistan’s venality, to obscure their understanding of events in the Valley. Although reluctant to grant this uprising the same political pedigree, at least some Indians seem to be curling their tongues around the word intifada. On the whole, the David and Goliath disproportion of the protests, and its sheer effrontery, has begun to capture the imagination of a growing number of people in India.
So beyond their furious defiance, what are Kashmir’s stone-pelters saying to us?
As a Kashmiri who has mostly lived outside the Valley, my engagement with its troubles began quite recently, in 2003, when I returned to Srinagar after a gap of fourteen years. These intervening years were witness to the tumultuous history of the present movement—the tehreek—and were accompanied by massive militarization. It had ended in a virtual deadlock: a restive population, locked down by a gargantuan military presence, in what Kashmiris call the ‘occupation’ of the Valley.
The year 2003 turned out to be significant, partly because it gave the first indications that armed militancy might be on its way out. From a peak figure of almost 30,000 militants in the early 1990s, security forces had dropped their estimates to less than 2,000 active fighters. Typically, and well before anyone could understand what lay behind the ratcheting down of the armed struggle, the government claimed credit for ‘breaking the back’ of the armed struggle, and trumpeted the return of ‘normalcy’. Unorthodox parameters were used to buttress the claim to normalcy: tourism department estimates of tourist arrivals, and the headcount of pilgrims headed for the annual yatra to the Amarnath shrine. There was no acknowledgement that tourists and pilgrims were moving along sheltered corridors, tightly controlled by the security forces, and that these had little connection with the everyday lives of Kashmiris. The understandable enthusiasm of pony-men on the pilgrimage route, and shikara-walas and houseboat owners on the Dal Lake, were presented as the turning of the tide against the tehreek. And for? Well, if not for India, then it was seen as turning towards something called Peace. This was a ‘normalcy’ confected for visitors, not for the vast majority of people in Kashmir.
As the state government quixotically launched road shows to bring Bollywood producers back to the sylvan slopes of Gulmarg, Kashmiris seemed preoccupied with picking up on other parts of their lives. For the first time in over fifteen years, they too were coming up with a set of numbers, not so much to plumb the peace, but to help configure their abnormal past, and consign their losses to a respectful memory. A dogged survey by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society was providing early indicators: 60,000 people killed, and almost 7,000 ‘missing’ in fifteen years. No one had gotten down to counting the men and women injured and maimed in the thousands of incidents of firing; nor had reliable estimates been made of those molested or raped. Interrogation and torture—words used interchangeably in Kashmir—had run their brutal, bloodied hands over several hundred thousand people it was said, but these were only whispered estimates.
They make a desolation, and call it peace, Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet, has written.
In 2003, I was in the Valley with twin identities, Kashmiri and Indian. As a Kashmiri, in place of the promised ‘normalcy’ I could only sense a deeply traumatized society, and one fearful of its own recent past. Not defeated perhaps, but in some inchoate way, overwhelmed. As an Indian, I was acutely disturbed by what I saw, and could see something with far-reaching consequences for India brewing in those troubles. Even today, the sharpest memories of that visit are those that bridge my two disparate identities.
The strongest is always the militarization. However prepared you are for the presence of uniforms and guns; actually facing them, and living with them, is much harder, even for the casual visitor. From the aircraft window, you see soldiers with automatic weapons on the tarmac; outside, dozens of vehicle-mounted machine guns wait to ‘escort’ the convoys of dignitaries. The streets are endlessly lined with heavily armed soldiers, and roundabouts throw up the unsettling sight of traffic policemen who carry AK-47s. And then the bunkers: everywhere, but most galling when they turn up at both ends of the lane in which you live. Even without a secessionist bone in your body, so many guns can never stand for anything but intimidation.
The second is a compelling sense of the breakdown of the institutions of democratic governance. For a people bruised and battered by fifteen years of an armed struggle, every single mechanism by which they could find representation, or hope to be heard, or access minimal justice, had been dismantled and put away. Elections, the judicial process, the rule of law: all had been hollowed out. In their place we had the draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and the Public Safety Act (PSA). Despite the fact that an elected legislature was in place, real power was widely regarded as lodged in three specific sites: Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s cantonment, where the corps headquarters of the Indian Army are located; Gupkar Road, where a slew of Indian intelligence agencies are based; and Raj Bhawan, formerly the maharaja’s palace, now the governor’s home. (Kashmiris don’t fail to make the obvious connection that all three sites are implicated in a century of highly oppressive rule by the Dogra maharajas.) Outside of Srinagar, for those living in the qasba and the small town, the real face of power was clearer, and usually signposted in the middle of the main street. ‘Town Commander’, the modest tin boards said. Lettered in just below, the name and phone number of a major of the Indian Army.
The third revelation centred on the national media. What was reported seemed so far removed from the reality unfolding on the ground here that it was not long before an acute sense of disorientation began to settle in, a feeling of being lied to, and manipulated. Unlike the ongoing conflict in Manipur, or earlier, in Nagaland, which are shrouded in silence, Kashmir was regularly covered by the mainstream Indian press. There was a large contingent of reporters covering Kashmir for the Indian media, and there were a surprising number of local newspapers and magazines. But this media mirror was hugely distorting, sending out twisted images every day, right on to the front pages of newspapers, and on prime time television. The very abundance of such coverage seemed designed to obscure, a dense smokescreen on which many prominent Indian journalists could project a self-image of caring souls whose hearts bled for Kashmir.
The easy comfort with a military solution, and the near abandonment of the rule of law: many will recognize in Kashmir a set of tactics that the Indian state has since begun to deploy with avidity in other troubled parts of the country.
What has changed in the Valley since 2003?
In 2010, despite occasional lip service to the idea of troop reduction, the military presence remains unaltered, and the civilian population continues to suffer the full weight of the security apparatus. Despite the talk of normalcy, there has been only the rare instance when there was ‘troop reduction’. (One particular, well-publicized pullout of a battalion of the Indian Army translated into no more than a 1,000 soldiers on the ground. Out of an estimated 6,00,000.) In Srinagar the cosmetic changes have included replacing the Border Security Force (BSF) with an equal, perhaps greater, strength of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). There has been a visible reduction in the ubiquitous squalor of the brick and barbed-wire bunkers that puncture the daily life of its citizens. But in its place the CRPF have shifted to a more centralized ‘quick reaction’ deployment, with even more lethal consequences. The recent cycle of protests, for instance, saw patients pour into Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital with severe bullet injuries inflicted by security forces, sixty in the first fortnight of August alone. Surgeons at the hospital told the BBC ‘most of the bullet injuries are in the abdominal area, chest, eyes and neck. They are single and multiple bullet wounds. They are all young men, in their late teens or early twenties’. This week a new threat was unleashed in the streets of Srinagar: a ‘pressure pump’ gun. It fires highly damaging pellets which enter the body and destroy vital organs, but leave hardly any external marks. (The summer of 2010 left thirty-five people blinded in firing, and more than 110 have been killed. The security forces have reported no casualties.)
In the countryside, which has always been ‘held’ by the army, even less ground has been yielded. If anything, the army has visibly dug its heels in, with the defence minister firmly rejecting the possibility of a troop reduction. Earlier this year the army commander, northern command, waded into the debate around the removal of the draconian AFSPA, with a comment that displayed a dreadful lack of cultural sensitivity, describing the Act as a ‘holy book’ for soldiers deployed in Kashmir. Debate on the possible removal of the notorious Act has always been upstaged by considerations of the ‘morale’ of the Indian Army. What this word ‘morale’ effectively silences is the impact that half a million soldiers have on a civilian population. It starts with the colonization of scarce water resources in villages and the catastrophic effect of their presence on the forests. It is reflected in the high incidence of forced labour, begaar, around the army camps. And in the largely unspoken incidence of the sexual exploitation of women.
And yet, in discussions on this summer’s protests, all attention has been focused on the incompetence of the Omar Abdullah government, encouraging the impression that it lay within his powers to alter any of the key elements in the crisis. The reality is that within this present structure, were the prime minister of India arrange to have Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the separatist patriarch, recast as chief minister of the state, even he would be hard put to prevent further strife. Incidents like the fake ‘encounter’ in Machil, Kupwara, came and went, but were never allowed to disturb the tone of the official Indian position. But Kashmiris could not have forgotten that the protests this summer were sparked off by the cold-blooded killing of three innocent civilians in a faraway valley by Indian Army soldiers. That the soldiers were under orders from their officers, who tried to pass off the bodies as those of ‘militants’ killed in an encounter. Eventually when the story broke, and massive protests erupted, a colonel and a major were charged with murder. (Their motivation was not much more than a few hundred thousand rupees of ‘reward’ money.) The Machil incident was a timely reminder that India’s military presence in the Valley is not seen as some well intentioned—if occasionally clumsy—beast sent to protect Kashmiris. It is seen as an occupying force.
To dismiss such incidents as aberrations would be dangerous. The past two years have seen the unearthing of a series of mass graves in Kashmir, which could hold evidence of hundreds of Machil-style executions. There has been no considered official reaction to these revelations. Meanwhile, the government remains doggedly centred on the role played by Pakistan, the involvement of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, and for the good news, the 2008 elections and its voter turnout.
Over two decades of conflict, Kashmiris have lost the right to speech, assembly and travel; they have lost all guarantees of their freedom from violence, harassment and unlawful detention. They have seen every single substantive attribute of democracy give way under the pressure of militarization and the attitudes of those who administer Kashmir. The rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the civic responsibilities of elected politicians: as each of these protective pillars has been hollowed out, all that remains of democracy is the thin patina of elections.
And this record is itself such a shabby one, right from the first election of 1951, where the National Conference (NC) under Sheikh Abdullah won every single seat in the seventy-two-member assembly. (Only two seats were actually contested. No one else was allowed to file nominations, most of which were rejected at the outset.) But as long as he could deliver the Kashmiri ‘mandate’ to New Delhi, Sheikh Abdullah was left undisturbed. His successors, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, and G.M. Sadiq, were allowed to do the same, a tradition that has survived all the way into the present. Not surprisingly, elections are seen locally not as a measure of popular support, but the mechanism by which the writ of the Indian government can be stamped on the dispensation of its choice.
(Ironically, the only election that Kashmir will remember as ‘free’ was in 1977, in the aftermath of the declaration of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when the fractious coalition of the Janata Party was in power, and the ‘centre’ at it’s weakest. For a people who had not experienced a fair election in twenty-five years of voting, this brief tryst with democracy electrified Kashmir. But that moment of fairness passed too quickly, and as soon as the Janata Party coalition collapsed, and Indira Gandhi returned to power, things reverted to normal. This brief experience of free and fair elections, it has been suggested, could well have given a spurt to the secessionist movement in the early 1980s.)
Of course none of this sordid reality ever inflects the debate on Kashmir in India. This summer, while there was some grudging space for a ‘human-rights’ discourse, attempts to read events politically were viewed with distaste. ‘You are bringing politics into it!’ our TV anchors said in what could only have been feigned outrage. While on the streets of Kashmir, protesters are unambiguous, chanting ‘Go India! Go back!’ and ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ Like an article of faith common to the entire political spectrum, references to the voter turnout of the 2008 election recur all too frequently, from left-liberal to right-Hindutva. (With metronomic regularity, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Ravishankar Prasad offered us the non sequitur, ‘Why don’t the separatists stand for elections?’ He clearly chooses to be oblivious of the fact that during the last elections most separatists were in detention. Before, during, and after the polls.)
The quicksilver memory of our media allows us to forget that the 2008 elections were called at a moment spectacularly unpropitious for the government of India. It was a time not unlike the present. Through the summer, Kashmir had been rocked by protests against the state government’s acquisition of land for the pilgrimage to Amarnath. Massive unarmed marches, often with 20,000 people, had snowballed into the most outspoken expression of public sentiment since the troubles began. After years of looking frayed at the edges, the numbers on the street suggested that the sentiment for Azadi was back. The palpable air of defeat one had sensed only a few years ago seemed to be a thing of the past.
Not surprisingly, the two principal ‘pro-India’ regional parties, the National Conference (NC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), were both visibly reluctant to wade into this flood of separatist sentiment and canvass for votes. In the face of a poll boycott called by the separatists, a lacklustre and largely invisible campaign followed. Omar Abdullah and the NC in particular pointedly sheltered under the caveat that the election was narrowly about ‘development’ and not about the larger issue of Azadi. Informally, police and intelligence officials made the gloomy admission that a turnout of 35 per cent would leave them very satisfied.
Yet, when the results started to come in, and the turnout began to creep past these modest expectations, and eventually rise to 60 per cent, no one admitted to being surprised. (In 2002 the figure was just under 32 per cent) Such was the din of celebration, deftly orchestrated by the mass media, that an election fought on the mundane platform of bijli, sadak, pani was suddenly being served up as a referendum. Kashmiris had embraced Indian democracy, they said. Kashmiris had rejected separatism.
There was no mention that to stall anti-election protests, most districts had been under curfew for weeks before polling. Or that almost 700 key activists of the summer’s protests spent the months in the run-up to the election in jail, locked up under the PSA. There was silence about the sudden and ominous reappearance of the dreaded ikhwani counter-insurgents, their murderous operations now dressed up in the constitutional uniform of Special Police Officers, as part of the Special Operations Group, and even the Territorial Army. (Word of their renewed presence alone was enough to terrorize people in the villages.) No one drew attention to the fact that in addition to the soldiers already in place, nearly 450 additional companies (50,000 paramilitary troopers) had arrived to ‘assist’ in the elections, allowing the government to flood each constituency with khaki and olive green before the polling, which was held in an unprecedented seven stages.
Of course there were the more familiar reports of straightforward rigging, of bogus voting and booth capturing. But on the whole the strategy seemed designed not to favour one party or the other, but to simply ensure a turnout. The more subtle strategies included the sudden nomination of thousands of candidates, most of them independents, but others from parties that had little or no presence in Kashmir. In the midst of a fierce poll boycott, and a tense campaign, candidates suddenly showed up from the BJP, the Samajwadi Party (SP), Janata Dal (JD [Secular]), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Janata Party (JP), Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), All India Forward Bloc (AIFB), Forward Bloc (Socialist), Republican Party of India (Athvale), Samata Party, Socialist Democratic Party, National Lok Hind Party . . . An endless list of Indian political formations had lined up at the hustings. They clearly hadn’t hoped to win, and almost 1,100 such candidates lost their deposits. But whatever the inducement to stand, these candidates were probably expected to poll only a few hundred votes each, often just from family and neighbours.
In the end it did all add up, they did deliver a few percentage points in the voter turnout. ‘We had several different strategies in place,’ I heard from a senior police officer, some months after the elections, ‘and all of them luckily fell into place.’ He could not stop grinning. ‘Of course we will never again have this level of force available to us, never,’ he added emphatically, ‘so it will be difficult to replicate.’
That is what the 2008 elections in Kashmir eventually was: an exercise in pushing up the turnout to a ‘respectable’ level, to once again demonstrate the validity of Indian democracy in Kashmir. It did not matter what Kashmiris thought of it. So that when the new coalition government between the Congress and the NC, and headed by the telegenic Omar Abdullah, was sworn in early in 2009, all that grey was forgotten. In the noisy triumphalism generated by the Indian media, the spin masters in Srinagar and New Delhi seemed to so enjoy the din that they appear to have begun to believe in the implausible script they had written. These elections had pulled Kashmiris back into the mainstream, they said. Something akin to a ‘post-conflict’ euphoria permeated the atmosphere, and the air was thick with talk about a ‘reconciliation’ commission.
It took only a few months for the illusion to fall apart, to understand what Kashmiris thought of all this delusionary behaviour. By May 2009, the rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, in which the security forces were widely believed to have been implicated, led to another massive round of protests. If the protests in the 2008 Amarnath land issue were marked by huge unarmed processions, now the overwhelming feature was civil disobedience. Shopian town remained shut for forty-seven days, this unprecedented hartal itself called by a non-political formation of citizens, the Majlis-e-Mashawarat, the consultative committee. It was the Majlis who made sure that daily wagers and petty shopkeepers were given rations to survive the long shutdown.
But wrapped up in its hubris, and swaddled by a pliant media—and an intelligence structure dulled by complacency—New Delhi was unable to grasp what was developing. Opaque to the terrible bottled-up anger of people, Omar Abdullah’s government responded with a series of callous statements about the death of the young women, and the Jammu and Kashmir police followed up with a series of bungled investigative procedures. These eventually threw up so many contradictions, and started to look so shabby, that the government of India had to rope in the Central Bureau of Investigation to put a lid on it. (The CBI promptly concluded that it was a case of death by drowning, in a stream with less than a foot of water). Today the case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations. In Shopian, the anger remains in place.
This week I was suddenly reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with a committed separatist, a former militant, and ex-chairman of the United Jehad Council. (He spoke about carrying an AK-47 for seven years, but was oddly proud of himself for never having fired it.) He’s now a quiet scholarly presence, retired to a spartan hut in his sister’s compound in Srinagar.
‘We didn’t want an Azadi where all our young men were dead,’ he had said, suggesting tactical withdrawal before the might of the Indian Army, not a defeat.
‘There were 30,000 armed militants once,’ I insisted, ‘what happened to their weapons?’
‘Well, guns are not like fruit, my friend, they don’t come off trees, they don’t just rot with age . . .’ he had answered thoughtfully. Then added, ‘They must be somewhere, mustn’t they? There must be many, many weapons buried in the Valley. Plenty of ammunition too . . .’
I regret not having asked him about the fighters, the survivors amongst the 30,000, those who were not killed, or jailed. (Or arrested and broken by torture.) How many of those are there? Where are they? What must they be thinking of what is going on? As the streets are taken over by younger people, the stone-pelting children of the tehreek, what counsel do they have to offer to this new generation of Kashmiris, who grew up in the tumultuous 1990s? What lessons are these veterans in turn drawing from the young?
The last three summers have seen an argument about resistance slowly taking shape in the Kashmir valley. The tenacity of the sang-bazan only caps a political debate that Kashmiris have been engaged in for the last twenty years. (And in some ways, all the way from 1947.) The difference is that this time the stone thrown on the street is being intelligently shadowed by a sharpened understanding of the oppression. It’s no more a secret understanding, open only to a few select leaders. It’s available on the Internet, on social networking sites. But it still is a debate. And the form of the resistance is fluid, and can easily swing back to the place where it has come from.
What is buried in the Valley, as my friend had hinted, can always be resurrected.
That is a debate that should engage all of us, Kashmiris and Indians.
This article first appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, 11 September 2010.
