[Reader-list] Shaking the mountains

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Kashmir's Troubles: Shaking the mountains

India’s response to an uprising in Kashmir has been, by turns,
repressive and complacent. It is storing up trouble for the future
Kashmir's troubles

Dec 29th 2010 | SRINAGAR

A GROUP of special Indian police barged into a white-painted,
single-storey house on the crisp morning of October 27th. They let
their lathis do the talking. The wooden batons were first rammed
through all the windows, furniture and a television. When the
grey-haired owners protested, the rods were turned on them. The police
broke the husband’s leg and beat his wife’s flesh a sickly purple.
Before leaving, the officers added an insult, hurling religious books,
including a Koran, to the floor.

Such intrusions are common in Palhallan, a hillside settlement in the
north of Indian-run Kashmir. It looks like an idyllic rural spot,
where bushels of red chilies hang from the eves of steep-roofed wooden
houses and hay wains jostle with shepherds in narrow streets. But the
village has been caught up in months of violent protests that have
roiled Kashmir. In 2010 an uprising led by youthful Kashmiri
separatists left over 110 people dead and thousands injured.
Youngsters daub anti-India slogans on walls, yell at Indian police and
soldiers to “go home”, and hurl stones.

In turn its residents have taken a beating. A young man lifts his hand
to his head, showing a zip-like scar running from the crown of his
skull to his neck. It is the result, he says, of a police battering.
His lament is typical: “I am an unpolitical person, but they treat me
like a terrorist.” Locals say they suffer collective punishment.
Enraged officers usually fail to catch stone-lobbers, so lash out
instead at families and residents nearby, accusing them, usually
unfairly, of collusion.

As a military helicopter buzzes overhead, a resident counts eight
people killed and many more hurt in the area in the previous three
months. Bitterness deepens with each injury and funeral. “The police,”
he says, “they want to start a war.” A return to war, or widespread
armed insurgency, is unlikely for the moment. But fury has spread,
spurring some young Kashmiris to demand a more violent, more bloody
response than mere strikes and stones.

On November 10th three men in Pattan, a small town a few minutes’
drive down the hill from Palhallan, took matters into their own hands.
Hidden in the crowd of a bustling market they marched up to a pair of
police constables, shot them at close range, snatched their rifles and
fled. Both the policemen died. The Kashmiris have aped Palestinian
methods, mobbing India’s ill-trained, sometimes panicky, police, by
raining stones and broken bricks on them.

The police—more in the habit of using sticks and bamboo shields—have
struggled, fighting back with huge quantities of tear-gas (tens of
thousands of canisters were fired in 2010) and then bullets. They have
reckoned that any protesters who die have themselves to blame.
Officials in Delhi bristle at any comparison between the year’s events
and Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the unrest in neighbouring
Tibet. Kashmiris, they insist, have their own land and state, enjoy
religious freedom, are by no means the poorest in India and take part
in elections, most notably in 2008.

But there are severe limits to their democracy. Peaceful protests are
prevented, jails are crammed with political detainees, detention
without charge is common, phones are partially blocked, the press
censored and reporters beaten, broadcasters muffled and curfews
imposed. Those who complain too fiercely online are locked away. The
authorities in Kashmir and Delhi say these measures are temporary.
They say that to prevent abuses, the police are now being trained and
re-equipped. (Soldiers, for the most part, have been kept away from
street clashes.) Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, says
that police officers may even be prosecuted for misdeeds. But the
repression persists, and risks causing ever greater resentment and
instability.

Seen from Delhi the uprising appears manageable. Kashmiris have
dropped their guns and shooed away Islamic insurgents who a decade or
so ago skulked in the postcard-perfect mountains. The presence of a
350,000-strong Indian security force (some say the number is much
higher), amid a population of just 11m, has also kept the armed
militants at bay.

It helps India that Pakistan, the eternal trouble-stirrer in Kashmir,
is in disarray. And India takes heart from the weakness and
fractiousness of local leaders in Srinagar. Many have been bought off
with well-paid posts, or jailed, or both. Moderates who attempt to
reunite the parts have been locked up or worse (one was shot and
paralysed by a mystery assailant). Some of the highest-profile ones,
such as the stone-pelters’ elderly icon, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, are
kept under house-arrest.

Sticks and stones

Some Kashmiris darkly hint of picking up guns again, but the local
leaders have no appetite for large-scale violence, fearful of a return
to the carnage of the 1990s when thousands died each year. Instead
they encourage low-casualty options such as throwing stones and
prolonged stay-at-homes (hartals).

If such gestures have a goal, it is to gain attention. Young Kashmiris
expose themselves to Indian bullets, hoping to draw compassionate
outsiders—Barack Obama perhaps—to put pressure on India. Yet the
strategy has so far achieved little. Outsiders, especially Western
democracies once so cocksure and outspoken on human rights, now fret
that their power is ebbing eastward. The Kashmiri separatists who
suggest that “you people” or “Britain and America” could somehow chide
India into a less repressive stance in Kashmir do not appreciate how
eager Westerners are to court India as an ally.

The Kashmiris who have died in recent months have at least embarrassed
India, which may yet respond by moderating the repression. But the
radical separatists, who define azadi, the Kashmiri word for freedom,
as outright independence from India—or even, for a shrinking number,
incorporation with Pakistan—will not be placated. And nor will India
consider letting Kashmir go.

Time appears to be on India’s side. With each passing year it will
have more resources to throw north. The local economy, at least until
recently, had been chugging along quite well, thanks to horticulture,
tourism, funds from central India and heavy spending by the armed
forces. A few Kashmiri expats had started returning and investing
before the uprising in 2010. Development in itself will not fix
Kashmir. But faster economic growth could at least prove a useful
balm.

The government has made some political gestures. In September, an
all-party delegation of Indian politicians—including even the
Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party—visited Kashmir. India’s
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made reassuring comments about
addressing grievances there. The government in Delhi also pledged to
send a high-ranking team of interlocutors to prepare a series of
reports on Kashmir after consulting all sides in the conflict. A
three-person team was eventually named in October.

These initiatives have started to persuade some in Kashmir of
progress. But the team is made up merely of two academics and a
journalist, people who carry no political weight. Nor does it help
that they have already fallen into public squabbling. Kashmiris have
watched their saga wearily. Some leaders have refused to meet the
delegates, dismissing them as a joke.

Conspiracy theorists in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled
Kashmir, accuse India’s generals of sabotaging politicians’ peace
efforts because the armed forces reap big rewards in the territory.
More likely the central government in Delhi, run by the Congress
party, is shy of Indian nationalists, who complain whenever
concessions are considered for Kashmir. In October, a writer,
Arundhati Roy, suggested Kashmiris might have legitimate complaints,
and that Pakistan might have a justifiable interest in Kashmir. Hindu
nationalists demanded she be tried for sedition.

So Kashmir is left to smoulder, with dire consequences for its
citizens. A visit to Srinagar’s psychiatric hospital shows throngs of
patients, crowding around its overworked chief consultant. They relate
a dismal roll-call of anxiety, stress, depression, alcohol and opiate
addictions, child abuse and suicides. As Dr Mushtaq Margoob takes a
break to munch a chapati and sip milky tea, he talks of Kashmir as a
broken society. Some patients become destructive, he says, describing
a mother who watched her son shot dead on the street and who then went
on to burn down her own home and that of her neighbours.

The most damaged, he concludes, are the youngest. “We see a collective
anger, an aggressive, traumatised generation”, he says. The head of a
think-tank talks of 600,000 young, educated, Kashmiri adults who are
now jobless, waiting for some sort of guidance. Religious and
political leaders fret that their youngest followers, teenagers,
excited by the stone-pelters, are increasingly attracted by more
radical ideas.

Militancy stirs

Worryingly, the youngsters talk openly of religious antagonism. Some
ask why Kashmir’s Muslims do not turn on Hindus (many Hindu pilgrims
visit a sacred spot in the state, but have so far been left
unmolested) to seek communal revenge for repression. The head of a
student movement, a man who has spent most of his adult life in prison
and who is now on the run and hiding from police in the backstreets of
Srinagar, warns of infuriated youngsters turning to a “battle of
extinction” in which “others, not only Kashmiris, will be killed”.

As long as political leaders exist to channel, and moderate, the rage
of the stone-pelters and innocent victims, such excited talk might be
discounted. Mr Geelani, a frail octogenarian, is one such. He condemns
India as “an occupying imperialist power”, but he is largely a
moderating influence. He opposes any return to arms. He supports the
pelters’ goals, but not their methods. His practical demands, for the
repeal of draconian laws, the end of police abuse and talks with the
central government, are hardly off the wall.
Geelani awaits the call from Delhi

But Mr Geelani’s influence is waning, along with his health. It is
doubtful that anyone among a handful of potential successors could
command as much local respect. The alternative could be more
troubling. Some observers fear that as India succeeds in neutering
Kashmir’s nationalist politicians, religious groups will flourish.

A Wahhabi welfare organisation, al Hadith, which almost certainly
benefits from generous Saudi funds, is quietly emerging as a powerful
welfare, religious and cultural force. As others bicker, it has gone
about building community centres, mosques, primary and secondary
schools and clinics. It is seeking permission to set up a university.
Its genial leaders deny being extremists, pointing to their love of
education and computers; they say that in the planned university,
women and non-Muslims will be enrolled too.

As for claims that the group, which says it has 1.5m members, is
spreading conservative values in a territory long known for its
Muslims’ religious tolerance, one leader concedes only a “little,
little component of cultural shifting”. A few more women are wearing
burqas, or staying at home, than did in the past. More Arab-style
mosques are springing up.

The non-Muslim minority in Kashmir is much less sanguine, seeing al
Hadith as a proxy for Saudi interests and a powerful example of the
spreading “pan-Islamisation” of Kashmir. They fret that ties may exist
to Wahhabis elsewhere, including terrorists, and warn that a powerful
new force is rising in the territory, filling a vacuum created by
India. Just now their concerns seem overblown. But the government in
Delhi would be wrong to think of Kashmir as yesterday’s problem.

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