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.)