[Reader-list] A cruel joke called elections in Kashmir

[Shivam V]

The Indian media has been expressing surprise about the high voter
turnouts in the Kashmir elections. The expression of surprise sounds
genuine. I am not sure how genuine it is. Nationalism must be coming
in the way of truth. How can we not see what a Wall Street Journal
reporter can?

EXCERPT: In the village of Samboora, residents said that Indian Army
troops went from house to house on Saturday morning, rounding up
families and taking them to a polling station. As a reporter drove
into the village Saturday afternoon, an army vehicle with several
soldiers stopped by the walled compound of Ghulam Mohammad, pulling
the 59-year-old retiree onto the road. Seeing a foreign reporter, the
soldiers jumped into their vehicle and quickly drove off. "They asked
me why I'm not voting, and I said that's because I don't like any of
the candidates," Mr. Mohammad said moments later. "They said, if I
don't vote, I'll be sorry later." [Must Read]
And wasn't this predicted anyway? Didn't we tell you about Gentle
Persuasion? Oh, and they already know who the CM is going to be.

Wasn't this predicted anyway?
[1] http://kafila.org/2008/10/05/gentle-persuasion-in-kashmir/
[2] http://www.dawn.com/2008/11/15/op.htm#1

shivam

o o o



A New Tack in Kashmir
Peaceful Protest Gains in Separatist Fight

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV


DECEMBER 15, 2008
SRINAGAR, India --
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122930169820005503.html

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the presumed perpetrator of last month's Mumbai
attacks, sprang up from the bloody insurgency against Indian rule in
predominantly Muslim Kashmir. While the plight of Kashmir has
galvanized Islamic radicalism across South Asia, the decades-long
armed struggle is waning in the disputed region itself.

India now largely faces a different, and potentially more challenging
foe here: peaceful campaigners for self-determination, who borrow from
Mahatma Gandhi's rule book of non-violent resistance.

"India is not scared of the guns here in Kashmir -- it has a thousand
times more guns. What it is scared of is people coming out in the
streets, people seeing the power of nonviolent struggle," says the
Muslim Kashmiris' spiritual leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key
organizer of the civil disobedience campaign that began earlier this
year. The number of armed attacks in the valley, meanwhile, has
dropped to its lowest since the insurgency began in 1989, Indian
officials say.

The former princely state known as Jammu and Kashmir was divided
between India and Pakistan since 1947, and has been claimed in its
entirety by both ever since. It has long been the main axis of discord
between the two neighbors, now both nuclear-armed.

Since the early 1990s, Pakistan's intelligence services trained and
financed Kashmiri militant groups such as Lashkar, helping fuel a
conflict that has cost 60,000 lives. Mr. Farooq's father was gunned
down by suspected jihadi militants in 1990 for seeming too
accommodating to India.

Mr. Farooq, who heads the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella
group of Kashmiri parties that want independence or merger with
Pakistan, has been kept under house arrest. Kashmir's Grand Mosque in
Srinagar, where Mr. Farooq usually delivers the weekly sermon, has
stood empty for several Fridays, its gates ringed by barbed wire and
its perimeter patrolled by troops.

The rest of Srinagar, Kashmir's tense capital city, has been under
curfew for days. Fearful of mass demonstrations against Indian rule
and controversial elections, troops blocked the roads. Every few
hours, small clashes broke out with stone-hurling teenagers.

Fading Attacks

Earlier this year, unarmed protests organized by Mr. Farooq and other
separatist campaigners rocked Kashmir, causing the downfall of the
state government as demonstrators thronged the roads waving green
banners of Islam and chanting "Azadi" -- "Freedom."

Militant attacks, once a daily occurrence that drove out 300,000
Kashmiri Hindus, have become much less frequent. Indian officials say
as few as 600 armed insurgents remain in Jammu and Kashmir.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a key organizer of a Kashmiri civil-disobedience
campaign that began earlier this year, is now kept under house arrest
by Indian troops. Here he leads a 2007 protest in front of his
ancestral home.

The changing nature of the separatist struggle makes it increasingly
difficult for India to portray the conflict over Kashmir as a
clear-cut fight between the world's largest democracy and murderous
terrorists. Unlike Lashkar's jihadis, unarmed protesters in Kashmir
can muster sympathy from sections of Western, and Indian, public
opinion.

"It's justified when you kill a militant, but it's not justified when
you kill a demonstrator," says Kashmir's leading pro-Indian politician
Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, India's home minister at the peak of the
Kashmiri insurgency and Kashmir's chief minister in 2002-2005.

Many among the new generation of Kashmiri protesters say they are
happy that the insurgents no longer prowl the streets, demanding
shelter and food from civilians, enforcing rigid Islamic observance --
and attracting army reprisals. "It's good that the militants are gone.
What we need is to fight for our freedom in a peaceful environment,"
says 22-year-old farmer Tanha Gul from the town of Pulwama south of
Srinagar, who says he has participated in every demonstration in his
area.

Indian officials acknowledge the change in popular attitudes. "People
want peace. Nobody wants to be disturbed in the evening - not by the
militants, and not by the forces," says Kashmir's chief of police, B.
Srinivas.

Still, responding to recent demonstrations, Indian troops often
resorted to lethal force, killing more than 50 Kashmiri civilians.
Scores of protesters and separatist politicians have been thrown
behind bars or placed under house arrest. Indian officials say these
detentions are necessary to preserve public peace, and that the troops
have to use force to maintain law and order.

Some half a million Indian soldiers and policemen remain deployed in
the Indian-administered part of Jammu and Kashmir, home to 10 million
people. (About 5 million people live in Pakistani-held Kashmir.)
Indian laws grant troops in Kashmir almost total immunity from
prosecution, including in cases of civilian deaths. Srinagar, once
India's prime tourist destination, is dotted by checkpoints, its
indoor stadium, cinemas and hotels surrounded by sandbags and
converted into military camps. Broadcast media are censored.

New restrictions have been added in recent months, such as an order to
disable mobile-phone text messaging -- a key method of mobilizing
protesters -- on cellphone networks that operate in Kashmir.

The event that sparked these protests, bringing Kashmiri civilians
into the streets, was a decision last May by the state government to
transfer land near the Amarnath to a Hindu religious organization.
This land near the shrine -- a cave in which an ice stalagmite forms
every winter -- has been used for years to shelter pilgrims. But large
tracts of the region already are requisitioned for army and police
use, and the formal transfer stoked fears of a widespread land grab.

Snowballing Protests

In June, snowballing Kashmiri protests over the issue prompted Mr.
Mufti Muhammad's People's Democratic Party to withdraw from the state
government. The following month the collapsing state government
revoked the land transfer decision. As federal rule was imposed, fresh
riots broke out in Jammu, the predominantly Hindu part of the state.

While the plight of Kashmir has galvanized Islamic radicalism across
South Asia, the armed struggle is waning in the disputed region.
At the peak of Kashmir's peach and pear season, Hindu protesters in
Jammu blocked the only highway linking the valley with the rest of
India. With the fruit harvest -- the valley's key export -- rotting
away, Kashmir's fruit growers' union called for opening an alternative
trade route -- through Pakistani-held Kashmir. Defying curfew orders,
on Aug. 10 thousands of fruit growers and separatist activists marched
towards the cease-fire line. The protest column was met with gunfire
from Indian forces. Fifteen marchers were shot dead, including a
prominent separatist.

As Kashmir descended into chaos after these killings, India responded
with increasingly severe curfews and lockdowns that continue. Often
they come without prior warning or formal announcement, as in Srinagar
over the past weekend.

"Common people like me are made to suffer continually," says Ghulam
Rasool Sailani, a milk merchant who has been sitting at home in
Srinagar, unable to trade, over the past three days. "It's hard. Our
losses are huge because our incomes are so low."

One of Mr. Sailani's regular clients was Mohammad Yacoub Jaan, a
35-year-old father of three. On Aug. 24, as he carried home a metallic
milk container, Mr. Jaan encountered three policemen a few yards from
his doorstep. As they beat Mr. Jaan with bamboo sticks for violating
the curfew, the milk spilled from the container and soiled the
officers' uniforms, according to Mr. Jaan and neighbors who say they
witnessed the incident. They say an enraged officer opened fire with
his assault rifle, shooting Mr. Jaan through the throat and the side.

Hearing the shooting, Mr. Jaan's relatives rushed outdoors. As Mr.
Jaan's 65-year-old father Ghulam Qadir tried to plead with policemen
to stop beating his son, they shot at him too, the witnesses said. He
was instantly killed. "After that, everyone just scattered away, their
caps falling into the drains," recalls Mr. Jaan's wife, Asmat. Mr.
Jaan, who remains paralyzed, says no representative of the authorities
has contacted him since the shootings.

Mr. Srinivas, the Kashmir chief of police, says that curfews and other
restrictions are needed to prevent greater violence. "I don't want the
peace-loving people of Srinagar to be disturbed by rogue elements," he
says in an interview. As for allegations of abuse, he adds,
investigations are under way.

Anger Over Disparity

Some pro-Indian Kashmiri politicians have been angered by the
disparity they say security forces have shown when dealing with Hindu
protests in Jammu and the Muslim demonstrations in Kashmir. "Lives are
cheap in Kashmir," says Omar Abdullah, president of the National
Conference party and India's former federal minister of state for
external affairs. "I'm still struggling to understand how the same
chain of command had two completely different approaches to crowd
control."

Kashmir's information secretary, K.B. Jandial, says there was no
disparity, and that every individual incident has to be considered
separately.

Mr. Abdullah's party, the biggest in the previous legislature, is
currently battling for the right to form the next state government in
elections that began last month and end on Dec. 24. Even though
separatist parties have called for a boycott, the turnout so far is
among the highest on record. Indian officials view such high
participation as a rebuke to Pakistan and Pakistani-backed
separatists.

But many voters who lined up at the polls Saturday in south Kashmir,
for example, also turned out at anti-Indian protest marches weeks
earlier. In the town of Tral, 20-year-old student Manzur Ahmad said
that he was voting for an incumbent candidate because, in recent
years, the lawmaker had managed to curb the harassment of local youths
by government forces. "We vote because this makes our lives easier -
but this doesn't mean we don't want freedom," he said.

In the village of Samboora, residents said that Indian Army troops
went from house to house on Saturday morning, rounding up families and
taking them to a polling station. As a reporter drove into the village
Saturday afternoon, an army vehicle with several soldiers stopped by
the walled compound of Ghulam Mohammad, pulling the 59-year-old
retiree onto the road. Seeing a foreign reporter, the soldiers jumped
into their vehicle and quickly drove off. "They asked me why I'm not
voting, and I said that's because I don't like any of the candidates,"
Mr. Mohammad said moments later. "They said, if I don't vote, I'll be
sorry later."

In another south Kashmiri village, Koeil, a similar police effort to
round up voters degenerated into clashes with stone-throwing youths.
As a reporter arrived on the scene, dozens of police officers charged
along the main street, firing tear-gas volleys. Many policemen also
picked up rocks and hurled them into villagers' homes, breaking
windows.

"My boys are irritated. They just want to let them know we're here, to
scare them," the district senior superintendent of police who oversaw
the operation, Ali Mohammad Bhatt, said when asked about the
window-breaking. "Ultimately, if you restrain your force and don't
kill anybody, your job is done," Mr. Bhatt added.

Half an hour later, Indian forces in the village opened fire at the
protesters, killing a 20-year-old student and seriously injuring three
others, including a 14-year-old boy whose arm and intestines were
pierced by high-velocity Kalashnikov bullets. "Once you take the law
into your hands, the forces or police have to take action," the Jammu
and Kashmir information secretary, Mr. Jandial, said when asked about
the shootings.

As for allegations of voter coercion, he said he wasn't aware of any:
"If ever there is a coercion, it's on the part of people pressing for
a boycott."

Continuing bloodshed may end up reversing Kashmir's recent shift
towards unarmed campaigning. Sitting on the porch of a shuttered store
near Srinagar's Grand Mosque, two former insurgents bristled with
anger this weekend. Then, one of them, Iqbal Sheikh, spat on the
ground and said: "When the small kids who throw stones are met with
bullets, many people want to take up guns again."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov at wsj.com