by MIRZA WAHEED
A Kashmiri demonstrator throws back a tear gas shell fired by Indian police during a protest in Srinagar April 8. The demonstrators held the protest after Friday prayers demanding what they said was freedom from Indian rule in Kashmir. PHOTO/Reuters/Danish Ismail
A generation grows restless at renewed violence
One of the world’s longest struggles for freedom is spiking, yet again. On April 12, outraged local residents gathered in a town square in north Kashmir to protest against the alleged molestation of a school girl by an army man. Within minutes, reports say two men and an old woman were shot upon by the Indian armed forces and police stationed in the garrison town of Handwara, 70 kilometers from Srinagar, the capital city of Kashmir. The men, Nayeem and Iqbal, were killed with shots to the head and abdomen, and the woman, Raja Begum, received a bullet in her head as she tended to her vegetable patch further away. She was later declared brain dead at a hospital in Srinagar.
A fourth victim, Jahangir, part of a protest against the earlier killings, was killed the following day, as a tear gas shell broke open his skull. On April 15, another youngster, 17-year-old Arif, was slain when the army fired on protestors in the border district of Kupwara.
The violence—the killing of protesters in Kashmir where India has stationed over half a million troops since the beginning of the armed and mass uprising against its rule in 1989—is nothing new. The theater, the disputed region divided into India and Pakistan-controlled parts since the decolonization of British India in 1947, is also an old war. (The two countries have fought three wars over Kashmir and it remains at the core of the 67-year rivalry between the nuclearized neighbors.) The victims are also same old, same old statistical additions to the vast catalogue of India’s war of attrition in Kashmir.
It’s as if the script for these customary assaults on Kashmiri citizens is written in indelible ink, and those who act upon it chapter and verse have it inscribed upon their bullet proof vests.
Soon after the killings, a video appeared online, in which the 16–year-old school girl is seen denying the allegation that the army man molested her. It is unclear who recorded the video and, more crucially, why the army of the world’s largest democracy chose to release the “confessional clip” of a minor. An army spokesperson said it was to counter attempts that “malign our image.” The girl’s mother has also spoken out.
In an interview with a TV channel, she said her daughter gave the statement under duress and was held in police custody. Subsequently, local police said the teenager had reiterated her statement in the presence of a state magistrate. The minor was, however, not accompanied by any lawyers at the time, in an unethical move that is quite possibly also in contravention of the law. A senior local lawyer, Zafar Shah, believed it to be “a serious offense,” and Kashmiri human rights activist, Khurram Parvez, wondered if the army was attempting to legitimize the killings by releasing the video. After more than a week’s detention, the state allowed two lawyers to speak with the teenager. She told them that “once she’s out of police detention, she would struggle for justice.” Previously, the state would not allow the girl’s family to hold a press conference. The minor remains in custody.
Nonetheless, all this cannot shift focus from the killings, despite attempts by the state and its friendly sections in the media to spin the alleged molestation into center stage—not the murder of five unarmed people. It was the armed forces that opened fire on unarmed protesters, shooting not to halt, but to kill. Not once, but five times. In 2010 when 120 Kashmiris, including many children, were shot dead; in 2009 when two women, Asiya and Nilofar, were gang-raped, then killed, and their deaths blamed on drowning in an ankle-deep stream; in 2008 when around 60 died of Indian bullets—and the years before, and the decades prior to those years. Kashmiris, deeply resentful of Indian rule, could be protesting about anything; electricity shortages, a cricket match, a potholed road. But the result is nearly always the same: a street encounter with a soldier with the intent and license to kill. A dark law that Delhi imposed in Kashmir in 1990 grants immunity to soldiers accused of war crimes, including murder and rape.
Over the years, all this has become normatif in Kashmir, a land where modern-day history is marked by annual seasons of bloodletting. Since the appalling 1990s, when thousands were killed as India came down heavily to crush the uprising, Kashmir has endured so many “bloody summers” that we must now append digits to each reference. There are protests against such killings by the army and the police that enforce India’s immoral rule over Kashmir. These demonstrations are often quelled by brute force, which almost as a rule result in further killings of the unarmed. Those in turn result in charged funeral protests and cyclical processions. In many ways, the last 27 years of the conflict in Kashmir sometimes read like a long funeral march. From year to year, death toll to death toll, and requiem to requiem.
Kashmir’s history is thus numbered: Over 70,000 dead, nearly 8,000 disappeared in Indian dungeons and torture centers or in the 6,000 unmarked burial sites and mass graves in the mountains, hundreds of half-widows, one in every six residents tortured, over 20,000 orphans, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits, nearly 650 of whom were killed by insurgents from 1990 to 2011, displaced and dispersed in the hot Indian plains. It requires both remembering and reminding.
The Kashmiri dead may not make for ratings-friendly viewing on much of Indian or international TV, or make for viral outrage in the cantankerous digital arenas of our age, but they do live on in the collective conscience of a beleaguered, besieged people.
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)