BY
The Modi government may not have begun the current
slide towards chaos in the Valley, but by ignoring the many signals of growing
anger that emanate from the region, it has
opened the doorway to hell.
Twenty days have passed since Burhan Wani was killed
and every foreboding I felt when I heard of his death has been fulfilled. The
Indian state has deployed every instrument of control in its armoury. Kashmir
has been under curfew for 15 days. Newspapers were banned for four days, social
media on the internet blocked, and the SMS facility on mobile phones
remains cut off. Crowds have been dispersed with batons, pellets and bullets.
Hospital records show that as of July 23, 47 people had been killed, 125 injured
by police bullets and 595 injured by pellets – 70% with these injuries
are above the waist,
with a thousand or more injured in less grievous ways.
But far from being contained, the flames are continuing
to spread. Paharis from the border area of Gurez, who had stayed aloof from the
insurgency of the 1990s, have
voiced their anger at being
described by Zee TV as being unaffected by the rage this time. So great is
the upwelling of anger that the middle ground that has always existed in
Kashmiri politics – which revealed its strength with a 70% turnout in the
Valley in the December 2014 assembly elections – has begun to crumble away.
Kashmir’s first-ever IAS topper has voiced his anguish
and disillusionment on Facebook. The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and
both wings of the Hurriyat have condemned the crackdown after
Wani’s killing as a bloodbath. This was only to be expected, as Yasin
Malik, Shabbir Shah and a host of its other leaders are in police custody,
while Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani are under house arrest.
Discord in the PDP
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has begun to crumble
too. None other than Muzaffar Baig, the party’s senior-most leader
since Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death and its most Delhi-friendly
member, has voiced his suspicion that Wani was killed after he had
surrendered to the police. Wani’s father, Muzaffar had made the same accusation
when his elder son Khalid had been killed by the police in another ‘encounter’
while going to meet his brother in the forest last year. Whether these
allegations are true or not no longer matters. Given the foul reputation
of being executioners that virtually all the police forces of India have now
acquired, this accusation has been believed not only in Kashmir but also all
over the country, albeit to varying degrees.
Roohi Nazki, a former Tata Group executive who now runs a
tea house in Srinagar and is the wife of Haseeb Drabu, Mehboba Mufti’s
extremely able finance minister, has sharply criticised the chief minister for not resigning
and thereby allowing the BJP to make the PDP an accomplice in the reign of
terror that it has let loose on Kashmir.
But the most telling evidence is the quiet anger of
four-time CPI-M MLA Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, perhaps the most respected
politician in the Valley. Tarigami has confirmed on television what many of us
knew from anonymous sources – that the Centre approved Wani’s killing
without even informing the chief minister of J&K, in the full knowledge
that this would destroy the peoples’ trust in her and her party. In a recent interview to The
Wire, he said, “at least the previous arguments of the Kashmir
issue were addressed within a secular framework. Many in the Valley preferred
India because of its secular nature. Now, that very secular India is under
tremendous pressure… last year, the then chief minister Mufti
Mohammad Sayeed… talked about the importance of engaging with Pakistan. He
said ‘Aap humsaayon ko
badal nahin sakte (You can not change our neighbours) and
cited insaniyat as
a measure of conflict resolution, as proposed by Vajpayee. However, Modi
categorically said that he doesn’t need any advice from anybody as far as
Kashmir is concerned, On the same platform he … snubbed the elected chief
minister, his ally.. Such humiliation is one of the most
important causes of protests in Kashmir. Modi gave a message that he is
dealing with an enemy people.” (emphasis added)
These are not terrorists, let alone ‘separatists’.
Mehbooba survived three attacks on her life and home in the 1990s for
daring to raise another political party that supports Kashmir’s accession to
India. Tarigami has been shot and nearly killed for staunchly maintaining
through the insurgency years that Kashmir is better off with India. The
Mirwaiz has lost his father and uncle to ISI-directed assassins for
ignoring warnings from across the border not to enter into a dialogue with
Delhi.
Fazal Qureshi, another iconic nationalist leader of the
Maqbool Butt vintage who was responsible for the Hizbul Mujahideen’s ceasefire
offer in July 2000 and went on to become a member of the Hurriyat’s
executive committee, was shot in the head in December 2009 and nearly died, a
mere six weeks after he formally declared Hurriyat’s acceptance of the
Manmohan Singh-Musharraf formula on behalf of the council. He now survives
deeply mentally impaired.
These leaders are the Kashmiri nationalist mainstream
itself. Not one of them has ever wanted Kashmir to become part of Pakistan. So
it is not surprising that Delhi’s intelligentsia has suddenly thrown off its
torpor and begun to thrash about looking for solutions.
The air in the capital is suddenly full of instant
diagnoses and coffee-table remedies.
There is, of course, the great mindless majority
that says, ‘Let the army take care of the Kashmiris. That is what armies
are for’. The Modi government has not endorsed this explicitly, but neither has
it said or done anything to show it has anything else in mind.
Advantage Pakistan?
As expected, it is laying the blame on Pakistan for
instigation. Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has warned Islamabad that its dream of acquiring Kashmir
will not be realised “even till the end of eternity”.
But her boast is hollow and her draftsperson’s
less-than-perfect command of English must have the Pakistan foreign office
chortling with glee. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and specifically his home
minister Rajnath Singh and invisible security establishment – India’s
increasingly lawless Deep State – have done everything they can to help
Pakistan achieve in a matter months what it could not do in 27 years: convince
a large section of the Kashmiri middle ground that life under the heel of
Pakistan could not possibly be worse than it is under India. Pakistan has
to do absolutely nothing but sit back and enjoy India’s discomfiture.
The most inane response to the crisis has come from
Rajnath Singh, who visited Kashmir over the weekend “to consult with different
groups on how the violence can be checked”. All he received was a well deserved
slap in the face, for not a single Kashmiri organisation agreed to meet him,
and the few individuals who did, covered their faces in order not to be
identified. The fact that no one in the home ministry advised him not to visit
Kashmir at this time because all he would do was fan the anger roiling the
Valley, shows that no one in the entire ministry has the faintest clue about
what has been happening in the state in recent years. Few governments
anywhere in the world have experienced such a monumental failure of
intelligence, or shown so little capacity to analyse the information they
have.
Others have been more circumspect and constructive.
Former home minister P. Chidambaram has candidly, and correctly, put the blame
for the alienation of Kashmiris on India’s failure to live up to the
promises it made to the people in 1947. The road to peace even today, he
believes, lies in doing so to the greatest extent possible. This, in effect
means going back to the full Article 370 and scraping off the parasitical
encroachments upon the autonomy it had given to the state that have taken place
since then.
Mehbooba has urged Delhi to pick up the threads of the five round-table conferences
that Singh organised on Kashmir during the first UPA administration and also
suggested reopening the dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir.
But the time when these panaceas might have worked is
long gone, for all such solutions have to be negotiated. Negotiations
succeed only when the negotiators enjoy the trust of their people. Today
there is no leader in Delhi or Kashmir who enjoys the trust of the
Kashmiris.
Over the past 27 years, Pakistan and India have
tacitly collaborated to prevent any leader from emerging who can spearhead an
authentic Kashmiri nationalism. Pakistan has done this by systematically
assassinating anyone in the Hurriyat who has been prepared to accept autonomy
within the Indian union; India has done it by engaging Hurriyat leaders in
fruitless rounds of dialogue, giving them nothing and thereby discrediting
them, and finally exposing them as puppets who take money from
the “agencies”.
Kashmiri youth: leaderless but enraged
Today all that is left for the leaderless youth of
Kashmir is rage. This rage will not die out; nine out of ten persons hurling
rocks at police vans and trying to break through its cordons are in their
teens. Many are too young even to have sprouted beards.
These young people, who make up more than half of its
population, have known India only as an oppressor. They have lived their entire
lives in a world of curfews and crackdowns, surrounded by police informers, in
which the faintest murmur of political dissent invites a visit from the police.
Theirs is a political disempowerment that the poorest adivasi in Bastar would find hard to imagine.
The only sanctuaries in which they feel free to voice their dissent, their
protest or their anger are the mosques and madrassas. But these are not the
old, decrepit, poorly maintained mosques of the Sufi-Hanafi-Reshi Islam of
the Valley, but the spanking new, well built, glitteringly clean mosques of the
Ahl-e Hadis built with Saudi money, stocked with contemporary books on religion
and world politics, and staffed by young preachers who are fully up to date
with world politics and can discuss endlessly the Islamic resurgence and its
challenge to the west.
This generation of the youth holds its elders in contempt
for having knuckled down to “Indian rule”. It feels betrayed by the 1990s
generation of militants who were naïve enough to have trusted New Delhi, laid
down their arms, and tried to negotiate with a government that has only abused
their trust in order to destroy them.
Since 2008, when the peace process initiated by Atal
Bihari Vajpayee at Islamabad failed, this new generation of youth has been
without a leader whom they can trust, lionise and emulate. Afzal Guru could
have filled this role if the president had granted his appeal for clemency
instead of hanging him, because his long incarceration and numerous appearances
on TV programmes had bestowed some of the stature that Butt had acquired in the
years before the Indira Gandhi government hanged him in February 1984.
Masarat Alam aspired to this position and Mufti released
him in the hope that he would do so soon after he was sworn in in February
2015. But Alam broke his promises to Mufti within days of being released and
unfurled the Pakistani flag at the welcome ceremony for Geelani after his
treatment in a Delhi hospital. In any case, as a ‘Jamaati’ committed to making
Kashmir a part of Pakistan, his appeal was limited.
Over the past two years, Burhan Wani had begun to
fill the void. He was as young as JKLF leaders Yasin Malik and Javed Mir when
they were captured in the 1990s, and allowed to leave jail to turn the
JKLF into a nonviolent movement forazadi, with
whom the government could negotiate. Wani had the added advantage of
not having killed anyone, making him an ideal person to negotiate
with, when the occasion arose.
Access to him was also far easier than it had been to the
leaders of the 1990s insurgency, as his father was the respected
headmaster of a school and his brother a Ph.D student. The Wani family was
educated, influential and, best of all, capable of understanding, and therefore
cooperating in, an endeavour that would not only save his life but bring peace
to the Valley.
Delhi’s goal from the outset should have been to capture
Burhan and his associates, not kill them. But from the very beginning the
hunt for Wani had only one goal – to eliminate him. This difference
in the administration’s strategy in the 1990s and today highlights
how rapidly the capacity for strategic thinking has disappeared within the
Indian government.
By killing Burhan, Delhi has not only closed the door to
negotiations in the immediate future, it has also left itself with no
alternative but to continue with the ruthless suppression that it is engaged in
today. There is every likelihood that the only remaining alternatives – to make
concessions like a Vajpayee-type ceasefire, a publicised order to the police
not to open fire under any circumstances, or a promise to limit, if not repeal
the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, as soon as peace returns – will be seen as
a sign of weakening and fan the fires of insurgency instead of dowsing them.
This likelihood will become a certainty if Delhi extends an olive branch after
human rights organisations and western governments have publicly criticised the
government’s actions in Kashmir.
Time to stop the chaos
The tragic, inescapable truth is that by dubbing the tiny
and, in political terms, insignificant remnants of insurgency in Kashmir after
2008 as ‘terrorism’, and using only force, George Bush-style, to eradicate
it, Delhi has turned the use of force into its own vindication.
Can killing militants and opening fire repeatedly upon
protestors restore calm if not peace? If the government is ruthless enough, it
can. The Kashmir Valley is only 0.13% of the land area of India and its entire
population amounts for less than half a percent of India’s population.
Kashmiris cannot keep fighting and protesting forever. Ultimately they will
have to choose between the loss of work, the loss of education for their
children, the loss of sales, mounting debt and interest burdens, and increasing
shortages of fuel, medicines, and other things in life that make peace so
precious.
But that will only bottle up the rage that is consuming
the youth of the Valley. If the government does not open an valve for it to
escape through, an increasing number of youth will take Burhan’s way
out – snatch a rifle or kill a government functionary and become a
militant.
If the government still does not give ground and
continues to hunt them down, sooner or later some of them will resort to the
only form of protest that the government cannot prevent – committing suicide.
They will not exercise this right quietly in the solitude of their homes or
forests. They will do so in crowded market places, bus stops, malls, cinema
houses, buses and aircrafts. They will not do it in Kashmir alone, but anywhere
and at any time, across the length and breadth of India. And they will not
remain alone for long, for ISIS will soon come to their aid.
One has only to consider the wave of Islamophobia that
half-a-dozen terrorist attacks have released in Europe since the Paris attack
in November to appreciate what a sustained ISIS-backed campaign can do to the
social harmony in India. Muslims number less than 21 million in the EU and
account for less than 5% of its population. But one in seven Indians is a
Muslim. Should a similar wave seize India’s mainly Hindu population, it will
tear the country apart.
I do not wish to speculate on the many ways in which
continuing to rely solely on force to “solve” the Kashmir problem can trigger a
chain reaction that could culminate in civil war within Kashmir, war with
Pakistan and the arrival of ISIS in the Valley. Suffice it to say that all
scenarios have the same end: suicide bombings spreading through the country, a
flight of capital from India, the end of economic growth and a blight on the
future of our youth.
The Modi government did not begin this slide towards
chaos. But by ignoring the many signals of growing anger that were emanating
from South Kashmir for the last two years, doing next to nothing to help
Kashmiris after the Srinagar floods, casually dismissing all the commitments it
made to Mufti while forming the government, and finally bypassing the Kashmir
government and ordering the killing of Burhan Wani, the Modi sarkar has opened the doorway to hell.
There may still be ways to close it, but none can be
implemented without first restoring order with the absolute minimum resort to
lethal force in the Valley.
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