May 2011 
Year 17    No.157
Special Report


Zone of unfreedom

An inquiry into the Kashmir uprising of 2010: Excerpts from the report of an independent fact-finding team constituted by The Other Media, New Delhi

Introduction

The mass uprising of mid-2010 in Kashmir sent shock waves across all of India. It caught most experts on Kashmir thoroughly unawares after they had managed to persuade themselves that the situation in the valley – routinely referred to as “troubled” – had rapidly changed for the better.

Warning signals had emerged from the valley through the two years before but these were evidently not heeded. There are, as a consequence, different opinions about when the 2010 civil disturbances in Kashmir, locally called the uprising or intifada, began. The killing of Zahid Farooq in the Brane Nishat neighbourhood of Srinagar in February has been identified in some narratives as the point at which public rage erupted. Others have focused on the cold-blooded murder of three who fell victim to the perverse system of military rewards and incentives for killing supposed “terrorists”. Shahzad Ahmad, Riyaz Ahmad and Mohammad Shafi were shot down in Machil village near Kupwara in a supposed “armed encounter” on April 30, 2010. It took the furious reaction of the local people for an official admission of error and a commitment to fix accountability for the atrocity.

As the official response took shape, people in Kashmir kept up the protests against a seemingly unaccountable deployment of security forces in their area. But maybe these dispersed and uncoordinated popular protests would not have gathered the dimensions of a full-fledged rebellion had it not been for the killing of 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Matoo in Srinagar on June 11.

Different interpretations are possible but few among those with a basic familiarity with Kashmir would dispute that the clumsy and disingenuous official response to each of these incidents has fuelled public fury. Further, the unquestioning attitude in what is called “mainland India” towards any official claims on Kashmir has contributed little of value.

Civil society groupings in Kashmir affirm that the demonstrations the valley saw for three uninterrupted months since June 2010 were very much a reflection of the public mood, continuous in every sense with the eruption in 1989 of what they call the azadi movement. The spirit and the scale of the 2010 uprising, though, have been of a magnitude not seen since 1989.

On the part of Indian state authorities, the protests were described as a Pakistan conspiracy or, alternately, a shallow and short-lived commotion orchestrated by designated terror groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The Indian union government, after sending out signals of support to the state administration under Omar Abdullah, later seemed to turn its back on the beleaguered chief minister, characterising the disturbances as the outcome of a “trust and governance deficit”.

These arguments have taken up much public attention in recent times. But what has caused the most alarm in mainstream political commentary is the discovery of a new weapon by the azadi movement in Kashmir and a new mode of delivery. Stones thrown even with the most power have little efficacy when facing firearms with lethal capacity. But stones have a moral capacity to shock and disturb, especially when they become the weapon of choice for a people that seem simply unwilling to accept defeat even in the face of all the coercive might deployed against them.

The state has thought up various means of dealing with the situation but politics has largely been absent from the mix. A parliamentary delegation that visited Srinagar in September and made the significant gesture of meeting with representatives of the so-called “separatist” political stream succeeded to some degree, and temporarily, in cooling violent passions on the streets. The subsequent announcement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that a team of “interlocutors” would be empowered to engage with all sections of opinion in Kashmir and discuss ways out of the trap of antagonistic politics also briefly held some promise.

The team of “interlocutors” as finally constituted seemed an active effort at denying the political element. In Kashmir itself, the three-member team was dismissed as yet another dilatory tactic which would do little to address the real issues.

The simultaneous announcement by the prime minister that he would ask his Economic Advisory Council to explore ways of bringing about greater participation by the youth of Kashmir in the economic mainstream was also viewed with considerable scepticism. Every announcement of a special economic “package” for Kashmir – as a magic bullet to appease its political grievances – is well remembered in the valley as yet another futile effort to change the subject and evade the fundamental issue.

The director general of police (DGP) for Jammu and Kashmir has drawn several lessons from the unrest but public attention most likely would be attached to his proposals on changing “standard operating procedure” (SOP) as used by police forces in dealing with mass demonstrations.

More than 120 people lost their lives and many more were severely injured in the highly unequal street contest that went on in Kashmir last year. Contrary to the alibi advanced on their behalf, the security forces were by no means acting always in self-defence. Indeed the people of Kashmir believe that the men in khaki were actively involved in the coercive effort to deter and discourage demonstrations. They showed little hesitation to pre-empt what they thought would be violence directed against them, by inflicting serious violence on all those who they thought capable of such actions.

Deterrence often slipped over into active repression, particularly in situations when it seemed likely that the “protest calendar” announced on a regular basis by Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani was likely to attract public support and loyalty.

A generation has grown to maturity in the turbulence of the valley’s two-decade-long insurgency. And anger lurks just beneath the placid surface, waiting for an opportunity to express itself. Only the naďve could have believed that the relatively high turnout in the 2008 elections to the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly constituted evidence that Kashmir was rapidly becoming reconciled to life under Indian rule.

Several Kashmir-watchers within Indian civil society were completely puzzled by the events beginning June. This bewilderment also arose from the nature, scale and persistence of protests. Although the protests following the Shopian murders in 2009 and the transfer of land to a religious trust administering the annual Amarnath yatra in 2008 were no less widespread, a new vigour was manifest in the 2010 visitation. There was also something new in the way each killing led to protests – typically associated with the burial ritual – that themselves became so threatening to the state agencies that they responded more often than not with disproportionate force. This in turn set the stage for a further escalation in the cycle of killings and protests.

The idea of a fact-finding team to Kashmir was mooted in August 2010. Apart from the most evident objectives such a team would set for itself in a situation of widespread human rights violations, the aim also was to talk to people and assess different shades of opinion on the origins of the problem, its present status and possible routes towards resolution. While the Kashmiri media has documented deaths and injuries through the valley’s long summer of unrest, there were still gaps in documentation, since numerous eyewitnesses to the lethal force applied by the security forces still believe that they have something to add – by way of both narrations of personal loss and considered opinions on the modus operandi of the Indian state.

What role did stone-throwing play in the protest strategies of Kashmir’s youth? How equipped were the security forces to cope with the situation without further aggravating matters? It was important – in the context of the growing understanding that the security forces, far from being the solution to the Kashmir dispute, could actually contribute to its aggravation – to understand chains of command and discover how civilian casualties are seen within the apparatus of the Indian state. Equally important was an assessment of the status of the promises made by the Omar Abdullah government to bring human rights violators to book, to punish those who recklessly took life and to compensate – to the extent possible – those who suffered from the excessive use of force.

This fact-finding team was in Kashmir at the end of October and met several families of those killed and injured during the period of maximum violence. Each member of the team spent varying lengths of time in the valley but in total, roughly about 25 person-days were put into the fact-finding exercise. In groups or individually, the team met the families of almost 40 persons who had been killed since the beginning of the civil unrest. Several individuals who had suffered serious injuries were also met. The team worked out of the state capital of Srinagar and visited villages and towns in five of Kashmir’s 10 districts: Baramulla in the north (Sopore and Baramulla tehsils), Anantnag (Bijbehara and Anantnag tehsils) and Pulwama (Pulwama tehsil) in the south, Budgam in the west (Chadura and Budgam tehsils) and Srinagar itself. Separate sessions were held with journalists and media practitioners, university teachers and students, doctors, lawyers and activists besides officials in the police headquarters and the civil administration.

Agencies of repression

For a population of five million in the Kashmir valley – formally known as the Kashmir division of Jammu and Kashmir state – India has military and paramilitary troops deployed in numbers that remain a closely guarded secret. Kuldeep Khoda, DGP for Jammu and Kashmir, was kind enough to reveal to this team that the number of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel deployed numbers 58 battalions in the Kashmir valley. A recent media report by a journalist known to be intimately connected to the security and intelligence agencies puts the army deployment in counter-insurgency operations – under various formations of the Rashtriya Rifles – at 32 battalions.

Taking an average battalion to be about 1,000, this amounts to 90,000 armed persons – already near what the British Raj needed in terms of European administrators and military officers in order to maintain itself in a land of 300 million.

The figure of 90,000 is, of course, a serious underestimate, since it only covers the army deployments that are designated to be on active counter-insurgency operations. There are more deployed in patrolling and static guard duty, not to mention the many at the border with Pakistan, including those manning artillery and air defence units. People in Kashmir believe that there is probably one armed person of the Indian army and paramilitary for every 12 of their number.

Irrespective of the precise figure, which the government releases – if at all – only with extreme reluctance, the indubitable reality is that the people of Kashmir see the presence of the military and the occupation of parts of their land – including orchard and farmland – as abiding proof that they live in a state of unfreedom. The substantive content of azadi cannot be very easily described but the absence of freedom is a very visible reality in Kashmir.

The uprising in Kashmir, after the heavy-handed response that it first elicited, led to some loud thinking within official circles about the possibility of thinning the heavy security presence and allowing the normal rituals and routines of civilian life some unimpeded space. Earlier talk about withdrawing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) subsided rather rapidly and even the few verbal concessions to the need to bring down the visible and obtrusive presence of troops in Kashmir has invited some rather revealing responses… The final word on this came when defence minister AK Antony clarified that the 25 per cent target for troop reduction would apply only to the CRPF and other paramilitary forces, not to the army.

Absolute impunity the norm

The near absolute impunity enjoyed by security forces for egregious human rights violations is in many ways a function of the legal framework that they function under, which ruthlessly abridges the fundamental rights to life and liberty and imposes severe restrictions on the rights to free speech, assembly and association.

Security forces in Kashmir are equipped with extraordinary powers of detention, arrest, search and seizure and operate under a very low threshold in the use of lethal force. These extraordinary powers are granted under laws such as the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act 1978, the Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act 1992 and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act 1990. These statutes provide immunity to those exercising powers under these laws which confer on them the presumption of good faith. No prosecution can be initiated against forces in Kashmir without the prior sanction of the concerned government.

The global campaign and advocacy body, Human Rights Watch, observed in a 2006 report that: “In addition to facilitating impunity, laws in force in Jammu and Kashmir encourage the security forces to use excessive lethal force in dealing with law and order problems, to commit arbitrary arrests and to detain suspected militants in violation of the right to a fair trial. These laws on their face are contrary to international policing standards, particularly the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, and violate the due process provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

The legal framework within which security forces operate in Kashmir makes it extremely remote – or a virtual impossibility – that personnel of the armed forces could be held accountable under general criminal law for offences relating to illegal detention, torture, excessive or criminal use of force, disappearances or extrajudicial killing.

There is only one known case in which the Indian government has granted sanction for prosecution: the disappearance and murder of human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi in 1996. The army officer responsible, Major Avtar Singh of Unit 103 of the Territorial Army, was however allowed to leave the country before sanction was granted, rendering the remedy ineffective. Recent reports of Avtar Singh’s arrest on February 20, 2011 in California, in a case of domestic violence, once again placed the spotlight on the seriousness of purpose of the Indian government in addressing the issue of impunity. But after the initial flurry of activity when there seemed to be a pretence that extradition proceedings would begin, the trail seems to have gone cold.

The possibility of a political settlement in Kashmir is inextricably linked to issues of justice and accountability for human rights violations.

Compensation

After the all-party delegation visit to the valley on September 20, 2010, the government of India with the approval of the Cabinet Committee on Security announced an eight-point formula for dealing with the crisis in Kashmir. One of the clauses of this eight-point formula announced a compensation of Rs five lakh for the families of those killed since June 11, 2010.

This compensation, not surprisingly, was rubbished by the political leadership with the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani reiterating that the withdrawal of armed forces from the state would be the only form of compensation acceptable to the people of Kashmir. Some families, including the kin of young Tufail Matoo whose killing on June 11 sparked off the unrest, have refused the compensation amount, decrying it as tantamount to selling martyr’s blood. Others, under more obvious compulsion, have accepted the compensation distributed through the office of the divisional commissioner for Kashmir.

In a conversation with this team, Kuldeep Khoda, the DGP, repeatedly pointed out that even those who had not died due to the action of the police or the security forces had been awarded compensation. Khoda enumerated 13 such instances of death where the police believe that compensation was awarded undeservedly, derisively remarking in relation to each of them that “inhe bhi hamare khate mein dal diya hai (these too have been put on our account)”.

This list of 13 deaths includes young Sameer Ahmed Rah and Faizan Buhroo. Clearly, since no punitive consequences other than compensation are expected to flow from killings in the valley, it made scant difference to the DGP under what head the deaths were categorised.

Reflections on the current situation

The 117 people estimated to have died in lethal crowd control actions by the security forces in Kashmir, the scores that have been permanently incapacitated and the hundreds that have been grievously injured have all been victims of a highly unequal street contest that went on for four months in the valley. It cannot by any stretch of the imagination be said that the security forces who took on the demonstrators and inflicted such damage were acting in self-defence. Their endeavour could more accurately be described as one of actively discouraging demonstrations through a strategy of shock and awe.

All through the four-month-long killing spree questions were raised by various groups and opposition parties critical of the strategy of facing down street demonstrations with lethal gunfire. While the Indian state kept repeating that dialogue was the way forward, its agencies and representatives on the ground seemed to be actively suppressing all such possibilities by responding with massive force to every demonstration. So-called “non-lethal” forms of crowd control that were introduced testified not so much to humane intent but to the state’s willingness, in its eagerness to avoid the political fundamentals, to reduce Kashmir to a laboratory for testing every new apparatus of control that took its fancy.

People in Kashmir are accustomed to seeing the police go berserk in face of rising protests. What sets the events of 2010 apart from the past is the absolute “free hand” that the police and security forces assumed in dealing with the demonstrations. This is amply evident in the incidents at Pattan and Palhalan as also in the attacks on funeral processions and the numerous instances when particular individuals were picked out for acts of targeted retribution.

There is a clear case that most deaths and grievous injuries were caused by deliberate intent. Kashmiris are certainly right in questioning why similar protests across India are treated differently and they alone seem fair game for trigger-happy policemen. It is becoming an irrefutable case that this is an outcome of deliberate policy, an indubitable consequence of the culture of impunity that has flourished over the decades that special security laws such as the AFSPA have been in force. Peaceful assemblies are criminalised under the law and under the over-broad characterisation of situations when it is fair to shoot with intent to kill, any threat posed by “weapons” or of “things capable of being used as weapons” could be met with lethal force: meaning that a stone could be treated as a weapon under this law.

New directions in the Kashmir movement

Developments over 2010, coming in the wake of the turmoil of the two preceding years, have changed the landscape of the azadi movement. The voices for azadi have become stronger, indicating the preference of a majority of Kashmiris, particularly among the youth, to visualise a future where their state will maintain equidistance from both India and Pakistan. In that sense, the ideology of an Islamic state and one that will merge with Pakistan has receded. This may also have a connection to the worsening internal situation in that country.

Quite paradoxically though, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has been a staunch supporter of the merger of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan and the most recognisable face of the Islamist side to the Kashmir movement, has emerged the acknowledged leader today. It is evidently not his political doctrine that has catapulted him to this position but rather his position within Kashmir’s political landscape as the one politician who has refused to talk terms until the fundamentals are addressed.

As Khursheed Ahmad of Palhalan mentioned to this team, “We welcomed even Omar Abdullah when he said in the state legislative assembly that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded but by no means merged with India; we also welcomed Yasin Malik when he came to our village during his Safar-e-Azadi [Journey to Independence] campaign.” Stirring at the roots of this increasingly widespread public attitude is the yearning for freedom and the bitter resentment that is increasingly voiced at military domination by India.

While rejecting the demand of Omar Abdullah for revoking the AFSPA and not even acknowledging the five-point formula advanced by Geelani, New Delhi took its own counsel when the agitation became an acute international embarrassment, sending an all-party delegation to Kashmir to assess the ground situation. Despite the reservations of the principal opposition party, members of the delegation met with Geelani and other Hurriyat leaders such as Yasin Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. The brief hope that a political approach towards Kashmir would finally prevail over the militaristic course was belied when a team of “interlocutors” was announced for gauging the entire range of public opinion in Kashmir, without any seriously credible political figure in it. The interlocutors began their exertions in Kashmir in October but have failed in establishing their credibility with the larger public.

What lies in store for the Indian state in Kashmir? A distinct feature of the situation across the valley after more than four months of turmoil has been the manner in which the name and identity of each person killed or maimed is known across the community. Everywhere this team went, it was not difficult at all to locate families that had suffered loss and bereavement. Every incident has become a part of public memory. Every attack has been memorialised. At some places, banners have been put up declaring the killed person a “martyr”.

A failure of the political imagination

“Kashmir” as conceived in the Indian political imagination is an inheritance of the distant past. As an issue – and not a dispute, as the Indian official establishment never tires of underlining – “Kashmir” is about little else than cross-border mischief by a neighbouring, inimical and envious state.

Kashmir’s current generation was assumed, by implication, not to have a stake in the legacy of a partition in the Indian body politic, effected over 60 years back. Images of the last year in Kashmir speak of a generation that refused with furious insistence to accept this invitation to forget the legacy of the past and partake of a supposedly glitzy future of a “shining India”.

This is the generation that was born, or grew out of infancy, after Kashmir’s insurgency erupted in 1990. In Curfewed Nights, an acclaimed account of growing up through the years of strife in Kashmir, Basharat Peer talks about boys moved to join the militancy by impulses that they could not quite describe, of a generation that learnt the basic alphabet by rolling strange and alien words off their tongues, such as “frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture”.

Basharat’s book has gained prominence after a US edition was published in 2010. India has had access to Basharat’s work at least two years before the US edition was published. Yet the truths that it documents – of torture, human shields and families traumatised by their children’s political impulses to join the insurgency – have remained a message that the “establishment” has simply failed to grasp.

For most of India, it has seemed beyond strange to hear slogans of azadi resonating through the long weeks of street protests in the valley last year. It has been emotionally troubling – for some, deeply offensive – to view wall graffiti in all parts of Kashmir, ordering India out with all the baggage that it has brought along. What could possibly be the meaning of these battle cries which for those weeks of turbulence were on every Kashmiri’s lips?

Beyond the sheer implausibility of an azadi demand, it is in the perception of most Indian citizens beyond permissible political sloganeering to seek a break-up of what they consider the sacred topography of the nation. This is a land that was retrieved from colonial oppression, secured from planned Balkanisation and built up as a homeland where all could live under a constitutional order. To permit the people of Kashmir to pursue their dream of azadi would be to begin the rapid unravelling of the nation state, with constitutional governance collapsing and life reduced to a state of anarchy.

Late in October last year a daylong conference was held in the national capital under a banner proclaiming azadi as the only way forward in Kashmir. Lost in the din that ensued, and repeated demands that the more prominent participants in the conference be booked for sedition, was any effort to engage with the issues raised in daylong discussions that were for the most part conducted in a tone of rational civility. Aside from the perception that a pathway towards azadi had to be found to bring peace to Kashmir, which they shared and endorsed by their presence on the same platform, there was seemingly little else in common between the participants in the conference. And even azadi would have meant different things for each of the participants.

Azadi as an ideal is impossible to argue with, since individual liberty and the protection of group rights are essential guarantees of the Indian Constitution. If the people of Kashmir have for all the years of the Indian republic – and with rising insistence over the last 20 years – argued that they do not enjoy the freedom they were promised, the knee-jerk reaction would be to brand them all as unworthy citizens who need to be disciplined with an iron hand. The more considered reaction would be to reflect on how true India has been to its sworn republican values. How has Kashmir become an exception within a constitutional arrangement that guarantees the basic rights for all? How is it that Kashmir has become a zone of unfreedom where the liberties promised by the Constitution are no more than a chimera? And how do all Kashmiris continue to be stigmatised as disloyal and worthy of no more benign mode of governance than the jackboot?

Since Kashmir erupted two decades ago, the Indian state and the wider public have had ample time and opportunity to debate these issues and seek rational ways out. That they have failed to take that path is testimony to the tyranny of unreason in discussions about group rights, particularly when they involve persons of the minority faith. Increasingly, the debate is drowned out in shrill recriminations by ultra-nationalist forces which have caused sufficient damage to the body politic in “mainland India” with their medievalist programme of righting imagined historical wrongs.

Kashmir’s wounds run deep but could still be staunched. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah recently spoke in terms of instituting a “truth and reconciliation” commission to address past abuses and chart a course forward for Kashmir. The proposal fell flat for obvious reasons. Standards of truth-telling in the Indian political establishment and its agencies – particularly those that operate in Kashmir – are yet to achieve any level of public credibility. And a people cannot be asked to reconcile themselves to a recent history of repression when they are unconvinced that the political leadership at all levels has the will to establish full accountability and institute safeguards against the recurrence of these abuses. Tired gestures like doling out packages – variously labelled “economic” and “political” – will no longer work. The people of Kashmir have spoken out clearly and unequivocally in favour of a political dialogue that will involve all parties with a stake in the future of their state. And the Indian state needs, as it sets about this dialogue, to establish its serious intent.

This would require, minimally, a substantial reduction of the military presence in Kashmir, the withdrawal of all special security laws that establish a climate of impunity for the security agencies, the release of all persons detained under these laws and credible investigations into the recent killings. Rhetoric about the need for justice in Kashmir has long since outlived its utility. The current situation calls for concrete, observable and irreversible actions.

(Set up on the initiative of The Other Media, New Delhi, the fact-finding team to Kashmir comprised Bela Bhatia, Ravi Hemadri, Sukumar Muralidharan and Vrinda Grover. The team’s report, ‘Four Months the Kashmir Valley Will Never Forget: An Enquiry into the Mass Uprising of 2010’, published by The Other Media, New Delhi, and Other Media Communications, Bangalore, was released in New Delhi on March 26, 2011. The full text of the report can be accessed at: www.sabrang.com.)


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