Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak
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of the post-9/11 world, young Kashmiris, children of the conflict, made stones and rocks a weapon of choice against government armed forces, side-stepping the tag of a terrorist movement linked with Pakistan. The unrest represents a conscious transition to an unarmed mass movement, one that poses a moral challenge to New Delhi’s military domination over the region.
Almost every day since mid-June, protesters and bystanders have been killed in firing by government forces on irate groups of stone-throwing people during massive demonstrations for the region’s separation from India. The large-scale protests were widespread across the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley. By the end of October, 111 residents, mostly youths, were killed in the intifada-like uprising in which angry protesters fearlessly pitched themselves against armed police and federal paramilitary soldiers. The moral equation changed perceptibly in favour of the agitating people, before the overbearing security establishment cracked down with a stringent shoot-on-sight curfew, and laid siege around populated areas.
This summer’s cycle of protests and killings was seen to be triggered by a staged gun battle by Indian Army soldiers in the mountainous Machil area near the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. In May this year a rare police probe found that the army had gunned down three civilians, claiming they were armed militants who had ‘crossed over’ from Pakistan. This enraged the Kashmiri people, but the reasons behind the civil unrest had been accumulating since much earlier.
Since the Partition of India in 1947, Kashmir has been a site of simmering tensions, alternating with outbreaks of violence. But for the last two decades now India has maintained the presence of an estimated 7,00,000 troops in Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region with a population of about ten million bordering India, Pakistan and China. Hundreds of armed forces’ camps dot the region, keeping a close watch on its residents. Most of these troops were brought in to fight a Pakistan-backed armed rebellion by Kashmiri Muslims in 1990. Citizens deeply resent the overwhelming presence of soldiers amongst them, and their camps in the neighbourhoods. They feel violated by the impunity soldiers enjoy under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). This law allows the soldiers to search houses without warrants, to detain residents at will, and to destroy buildings, including houses suspected of harbouring rebels. Under the AFSPA, soldiers accused of crimes like rape and the killing of civilians in their custody cannot be prosecuted in civil courts unless the federal government in New Delhi specifically permits it.
Militarization of the region was politically cemented in 1994 with a unanimous resolution by the Indian parliament declaring Kashmir an ‘integral part’ of the country. Kashmir’s special status within the union, which had been guaranteed in the Indian Constitution, had been slowly eroding for decades. Kashmir enjoyed a significant degree of self-rule until the early 1950s, when only foreign affairs, defence and communications were subject to Indian domain control. The Indian military campaign against a few thousand insurgents has since left about 70,000 people, mostly civilians, dead.
By the year 2002 the popular armed rebellion was largely crushed, but public support for Kashmir’s independence from India appears to have deepened over the years. The government claims 500 to 700 armed rebels remain in the fighting, confined to the forested areas of the region, but the concentration of the troops across the region remains unchanged for the most part. However, it is not these armed militants who are leading the most recent protests against the Indian government.
The largely defeated armed insurgency and the sustained crackdown by the Indian counter-insurgency campaign have gradually produced a transition to a less violent mode of mass rebellion in the last few years. It fed on the two-decade-long local memory of arbitrary detention of residents by troops, and widespread torture and harassment. Hundreds of graveyards for the victims of conflict across the territory became shrines to the loss and the ‘Kashmir cause’. The pent-up bitterness and a sense of being completely dominated were waiting to explode.
In mid-2008, protests erupted over a government decision to grant 100 acres of land to the Hindu shrine of Shri Amarnath in the Kashmir Himalayas. Many Muslim Kashmiris perceived the land deal as an attempt to effect a demographic change in the Muslim-majority region. Thousands of people took to the streets of the provincial capital Srinagar as well as other towns, in protests spearheaded by separatist leaders, demanding that New Delhi negotiate a settlement of the six-decade-old dispute with Pakistan and them on board.
Defying a curfew, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched towards the heavily militarized frontier west of Srinagar in an attempt to cross over to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Government forces eventually fired at the procession before it could reach the border, killing several people, including senior resistance leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a former militant commander and a key leader of the hardline All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), the main separatist alliance in the disputed state. By the time that summer uprising was defused, and a siege laid around Srinagar and other towns of Kashmir, a total of around sixty protesters had been killed. Significantly, the armed rebels remained tactically silent during the period.
New Delhi’s earlier claims of ‘normalcy’ returning to Kashmir went up in thin air in the face of the massive demonstrations for Azadi. The situation called for a non-military response. The Indian government’s response to the unrest was a plan to stage a fresh round of elections. Many senior activist leaders, including the hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, moderate Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and former armed rebel commander Yasin Malik of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), were arrested as the polls for the region’s new government were announced in October 2008.
Buoyed by renewed mass support for their campaign against Indian rule, the resistance camp had appealed for a total boycott of the elections, called by New Delhi against the advice of pro-India Kashmiri political parties, which feared very low participation. To facilitate campaigning for votes and ensure security during polling, several thousand more paramilitary troops were brought in. During their lacklustre election campaign, the politicians sought votes for day-to-day governance. They repeatedly told people in small gatherings, and through the media, that the election had nothing to do with the dispute over Kashmir or the territory’s future that has been at the centre of animosity between nuclear arch-rivals India and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, hundreds of resistance activists and prominent protesters were meticulously identified by field intelligence operatives from video footage and photographs of demonstrations. They were arrested under the Public Safety Act (PSA) that allows the authorities to detain anyone presumed to be acting against the interests of the state for up to two years without legal recourse. The field was cleared for the pro-India politicians and groups.
The vast and robust Indian intelligence apparatus in Kashmir worked overtime to ensure a good voter turnout where little was expected. Besides nominees from the pro-India Kashmiri political parties, more than a thousand candidates suddenly jumped into the fray for eighty-seven seats. They were fielded by regional parties from mainland India who had no cadres to talk of in Kashmir. Many were also independents, some of whom later revealed that they were backed by government agencies and promised money for bringing out friends and relatives to vote.
In winter, and under highly militarized conditions, polling was held in seven phases over six weeks for what turned out to be a ‘watershed election’ that registered a turnout of 60 per cent. A huge number were first-time voters, educated young men and women who, while acutely aware of post-9/11 realities and clearly uneasy with the violence around them, had perhaps hoped that a new emerging India would deliver justice this time round. But politicians in New Delhi and the Indian mainstream media described the turnout as a ‘victory for Indian democracy’ in Kashmir and a ‘defeat of separatism’.
The resistance leaders were ‘humbled’ while people in general felt angered and foxed at their vote being interpreted—once again—as a referendum endorsing Indian rule. Many Kashmiri voters sulked under the media euphoria, and many first-time voters tasted their first ‘betrayal’. In January 2009, the elections brought the UK-born Omar Abdullah to centre stage, at thirty-nine the region’s youngest-ever chief minister. Lauded by the Indian media, he promised an era of reconciliation, gradual demilitarization and repeal of the contentious AFSPA, as well as restrictions on the use of the widely resented PSA.
Although the results