‘I can hear birds,’ a friend called in to say that morning in September. Unusual, because you don’t often hear birds in Srinagar. Not for the roar of its chaotic traffic, and for the past several months of the summer of 2010, not for the tumult of the streets.

      ‘But nothing else,’ he added in a brittle voice, ‘I hear nothing else.’

      It was the day after Eid, usually a day of continuing celebration, for it marked the end of the month of Ramzan. In the past two years it was the physical rigours of just this month of fasting that had finally leached the flagging energy from those immense agitations. This year was different though: after nearly four months of protests, and with 112 people killed, the onset of autumn gave no indication of a slowdown in the tempo. The visible faces of the ‘separatist’ sentiment were all in custody. But from somewhere far underground other anonymous organizers were still able to issue the ‘timetable’, as the relentless calendar of the hartal protests were locally known. By supporting these, despite the enormous dislocation and deprivation that the shutdowns caused, people were continuing to signal their fierce support to the revolt.

      Retribution for such insolence was inevitable, and when it came, it was as fierce. The government began to impose its own calendar of harshly enforced shutdowns. These were usually timed for the days of relief in the carefully calibrated ‘timetable’. Curfew was rarely declared though, but enforced through its extra-legal local variant, the ‘undeclared’ curfew. Put together—people’s curfew and police curfew, end-to-end—it meant that people in the cities and towns of Kashmir were often unable to step out of their homes for most of a week. No milk, no bread, no vegetables; no infant food, no doctors, no medicines—nothing.

      When the friend called the day after Eid, there was no food in the house, and little to celebrate with. The paramilitary forces were smarting from events of the previous day, when a relaxation in the curfew had seen massive protests erupt in the very heart of Srinagar, in Lal Chowk. When he tried stepping out of his home, the soldiers in the sandbagged bunker outside had threatened to shoot him. ‘You can stuff that pass up your arse,’ they had said firmly when he walked up, holding his journalist’s curfew pass like a white flag. He called their superior, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Public Relations Officer, to describe what was going on, conspicuously holding his cellphone up, speakers on. The men were even more emphatic now. ‘Call him too,’ they said of their officer, confidently. ‘Call him here, now. We’ll stuff it up his arse too . . .’

      This quick tightening of the tourniquet was carefully timed. In the nerve centres of the uprising—in Sopore in the north, and Shopian in the south—late September was also the time to bring in the abundant apple crop. To turn their backs on it, or do it badly, would spell ruin. This is what makes autumn critical in the predominantly agricultural economy of rural Kashmir, with its anxious prospect of being unprepared for the difficult winter ahead. An unspoken tactical withdrawal was materializing.

      The silence surrounding the birdsong presaged the most severe repression that Kashmiris have experienced in a decade. And once again it was in the countryside, away from even the minimal scrutiny of the media, that the brunt of the renewed aggression would be borne. Only thirty kilometres north of Srinagar, the rebellious village of Palhalan had its phone lines snapped, its mobile phone services disabled, and physical access to it made nearly impossible for outsiders. At a highway checkpoint, if your identity card carried the name Palhalan on it, you were likely to be pulled out of a public bus, and made to walk. Students from the village were summarily ejected from examination halls, and taken straight to detention. Before the year was out, Palhalan had endured almost two-and-a-half months of curfew, including one straight stretch of thirty-nine days.

      No defiance was too small to be ignored. In the remote fastness of Kulgam, paramilitary soldiers surrounded Kujar village, and asked everyone to step out of their homes. They then stood guard as the police moved in, first smashing all the precious windowpane glass, and after that, with pointed cruelty, systematically destroying the kitchen. There was no media on hand to report any of this at the time, but even if they were, what would they be saying? ‘Police smash windowpanes’? ‘Paramilitary destroy kitchen’? No one had been killed, or even seriously injured. Who would care to understand the significance of this brutalization? Meanwhile in Srinagar and other towns, Facebook groups had begun to be infiltrated, and outspoken members tracked down through their IP addresses. The mostly teenaged net warriors were systematically called in to the local police station for questioning, and the threat of worse to come.

As chila-e-kalan, traditionally the coldest part of Kashmir’s winter, placed its freezing hands on life in the Valley, the police seemed to be slowly coming into their own. Increasingly triumphant stories were being released to the press: Irfan Ahmed Bhat, a seventeen-year-old from Nagin, Srinagar, had been detained for questioning, they said, suspected of being the dreaded Kale Kharab of Facebook². Records were being created, a police spokesman said, depending on the ‘level’ of involvement. ‘In Group A habitual protesters and stone-pelters would be inducted,’ we were informed. ‘In Group B only those people who have fervently participated in protests and initiated stone pelting will be listed; and Group C includes those persons who have been once lodged in the jail for any unlawful activity.’³ Stone-pelters were being hunted down with the dogged tenacity that not long ago had been reserved for armed militants. The politics of the summer upsurge were being drowned under an endless series of stories that tried to represent the protesters as delinquents, even criminals.

      As the smug triumphalism of government propaganda readied to fill the media space, and claim yet another spectacular success against the separatists, a warning wafted off the streets, like a sullen fog.

      Khoon ka badla June mein lenge, it said.

      Blood will be avenged, in June.