Unmasking National Conference's Hidden Agenda (Power Hungry)

Omar’s government is self-serving.
Kashmir deserves better

BY PREM SHANKAR JHA

Whodunnit? Fire spread from this government building across Kashmir. Mirwaiz and government blame each other

ON SUNDAY, a day after Kashmiris celebrated Eid peacefully on a day that remained unmarred by confrontations with the police, the government of Jammu and Kashmir clamped down the most draconian curfew the Valley has seen in more than two years. Had Omar Abdullah lit a match in a petrol storage depot, he could not have done a better job of setting Kashmir on fire. As of the morning of 14 September, 17 Kashmiri youth died in police firing, another half-dozen were in critical condition and more than 40 were seriously injured. More ominous still, for the first time in the entire intifada, two policemen had also died, a sure sign that the self-imposed restraint was breaking down.

Did the state government set Kashmir alight by accident or design? Omar Abdullah and Kuldip Khoda, the Director-General of Police, accused the followers of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq of not adhering to his promise to control his followers and allowing them to burn down the offices of the Power Development department and the Crime Branch of the Kashmir police. He, therefore, slapped FIRs on him, placed him under house arrest and announced a curfew within hours of the incident.

Kashmiris are convinced, however, that the buildings were set on fire by ikhwanis in the pay of the state police to create the pretext for the crackdown that followed. They point out that the Mirwaiz’s procession had been absolutely peaceful and his speech had been moderate and constructive. He had, in short, honoured the commitment given personally to Omar Abdullah. The Crime Branch building was 500 metres away from Lal Chowk, across the Jhelum river and well off the procession route. Eyewitnesses are unanimous that they saw smoke billowing out from the building while the Mirwaiz was still speaking.

What makes Khoda’s account less than credible is the disproportionate nature of the state government’s response. If the Mirwaiz had been unable (or had not tried) to prevent miscreants from using his procession as a cover for their misdeeds, the most they needed to do was to place him under house arrest. How did his failure justify inflicting such draconian punishment on the population of Srinagar and the entire Valley. For Eid had passed peacefully. Not a single stone had been thrown and not a single policeman hurt. Would it not have been better to take advantage of the respite to start building bridges with the people once again?

But the way in which Omar Abdullah and the state police had used the slimmest of pretexts to launch a premeditated crackdown plan makes it exceedingly likely that the burning of the Crime Branch building was indeed Kashmir’s equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 4 August 1964 (a fictitious attack by north Vietnamese navy on an American destroyer) that gave the Johnson administration an excuse for declaring war on North Vietnam.

THE ABDULLAHS, father and son, had motive enough to manufacture such an incident. Omar’s 6 August crackdown had turned into a fiasco. His police officers had started to take leave rather than fire on their own people. As many as 1,800 constables had failed to turn up for duty. In desperation, Omar had to ask Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani to request the ‘boys’ to heed the curfew and abjure violence. This had gravely undermined the authority of his government in Kashmir.

In Delhi, confidence in his capacity to restore order and govern the state was dwindling and the demand for Governor’s rule was gaining strength. In a sudden volte face, the BJP, which had earlier been demanding the replacement of Omar with Farooq Abdullah, had also begun to demand Governor’s Rule on the grounds that only the Centre could launch the massive crackdown that was now needed to keep ‘those renegade Kashmiris’ under Indian rule. The J&K government was also raring to have another go for the Centre had allowed it to induct a number of battalions of the Rapid Action Force from India and boost the number of CRPF companies deployed in the state.

By failing to recognise the moral force of the Kashmiri intifada and allowing his police to use bullets against stone-throwing youth, Omar has unwittingly made his government the most hated in Kashmir’s history

The Abdullahs also had personal reasons for wanting to regain control of the Valley. By failing to recognise the moral force of the Kashmiri intifada (locally called the Ragda) and allowing his police to use bullets against stone-throwing youth, Omar had unwittingly made his government the most hated in Kashmir’s history. Farooq Abdullah therefore knew that if governor’s rule was imposed on the state, the election that would soon follow would spell the end of the National Conference (NC). Keeping it in power at almost any cost, therefore, became Farooq Abdullah’s all-consuming goal.

Today, everything hinges upon crushing the uprising in Kashmir. If the NC succeeds, it will not only be able to prevent the imposition of Governor’s rule but also persuade New Delhi that it is the only Kashmiri party that has the commitment to India and the political will to ensure that the state remains firmly within the Indian union. The longer New Delhi dithers and the higher the post-11 June death count (now 91) rises, the more will it become a prisoner of the NC in Kashmir.

This Faustian pact is anything but new. On the contrary, its origins can be traced back to the very different conditions that prevailed in 1947, when Sheikh Abdullah firmly sided with India in the run-up to Independence and Partition. It was an asset to India when the NC was the indubitable champion of Kashmiriyat in the Valley. But this mantle fell from its shoulders when Farooq Abdullah agreed to fight the 1987 election in coalition with the Congress. Since then he has been fighting a protracted no-holds-barred fight to prevent that mantle from shifting to any other Kashmiri party.

By siding assiduously with him since then, Delhi has gradually become an opponent of Kashmiri nationalism. It allowed Farooq first to rig enough seats in the 1987 elections not only to make sure that its rival, the Muslim United Front, would come a distant second (that was never in doubt) but that it would fail. One of those who lost his seat by a mere 35 votes after a prolonged recount was Syed Salahuddin, who went on to found the Hizbul- Mujahideen. What followed is now history.

WHEN ABDULLAH came back to power in 1996, one of his main preoccupations was to prevent the Hurriyat and the JKLF from returning to the mainstream of Kashmiri politics. In this, he had ruthless, albeit unsolicited, help of the ISI. In 2000, when Abdul Majid Dar, the leader of the Hizbul- Mujahideen in Kashmir Valley, offered a ceasefire and agreed to secret talks with the Indian Home Secretary, the J&K government sabotaged the talks by getting its principal information officer and its director-general of police to inform the media of the conference. The time they gave them, however, was 90 minutes before the secret meeting was to have started. As a result, when Dar and his companions arrived at Chashma-shahi guest house, they found 150 press and television journalists waiting for them (Dar later broke with Salahuddin and was duly assassinated).

When, a few months later, the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s unilateral announcement of a ceasefire was enthusiastically endorsed by the Hurriyat, Abdullah made no secret of his scepticism and warned that the ceasefire would only undo the gains made by the security forces in the previous years. When P Chidambaram initiated his quiet diplomacy in 2009 and invited Yasin Malik and the Mirwaiz for talks, one of Kashmir’s most senior police officers leaked the information deliberately to the press.

In recent weeks, as the search for an alternative to the endless, mindless killing of Kashmiri youth gathered momentum, the NC devoted all its energies to discrediting its main political rival, the PDP. Thus, for weeks, everyone in power firmly believed that it was the PDP that was behind the stone-pelting. When Abdul Ahad Jan threw a shoe at Omar Abdullah on 15 August, by the evening nearly all the television newsrooms in Delhi had received ‘credible information’ that he had been incited into doing so by Nizamuddin Bhat, the secretary-general of the PDP. And when the state government summarily dismissed the extraordinarily able, and incorruptible, chairman of the J&K Bank, Haseeb Drabu, the story quickly spread that he had been dismissed because he had been financing the stone-pelters. Drabu had been appointed by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.

It is against this background that Delhi needs to consider the wisdom of continuing to back the Omar Abdullah government through thick and thin. There is very substantial, if not legally conclusive, evidence that India is becoming the victim of one political party’s determination to stay in power, no matter what the cost. The cost is a steadily hardening animosity in Kashmir as the belief gains ground that Delhi is behind the state government’s killing spree. Whether this perception is true or false is no longer relevant. The only thing that matters is what the Kashmiris believe.

It is still within Delhi’s power to change this perception. Four steps will do so more completely than the government can imagine today. These are, one, to suspend the assembly and create an interim government for a few months under the venerable Congress leader Saifuddin Soz; if for some reason this proves impossible, then declare Governor’s rule straightaway.

Two, announce that curfew and Section 144 will no longer be applied. But ask all processionists and demonstrators to keep the peace and cooperate with the police in ensuring that there are no mishaps. Both the Hurriyat and the police are already familiar with these procedures as they had been successfully used to avoid conflict during the vast post-Amarnath demonstrations from 14 to 21 August 2008, before New Delhi inexplicably reversed its policy of restraint and opted for a state-wide crackdown.

Three, Delhi should, through clear and unambiguous announcements, make it clear that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Disturbed Areas Act will be lifted from the entire Valley but only after cooperation between the public and the police has been re-established and demonstrations have become orderly and peaceful.

Four, a fresh general election will be held as soon as life returns to normal in the Valley. Delhi will then lose no time in resuming a dialogue with the elected government on ways to move towards lasting empowerment of the Kashmiri people within the framework of the Indian Union and, when conditions are once more propitious, with Pakistan.

Read More

Why silence over Kashmir speaks volumes

By Pankaj Mishra (Indian author and writer of literary and political essays)

Bloody protests against military rule get little coverage, while India maintains its reputation 

Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley's 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.

Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn't be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmir's cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one. Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.

The New York Times this week described the protests as a comprehensive"intifada-like popular revolt". They indeed have a broader mass base than the Green Movement does in Iran. But no colour-coded revolution is heralded in Kashmir by western commentators. The BBC and CNN don't endlessly loop clips of little children being shot in the head by Indian soldiers. Bloggers and tweeters in the west fail to keep a virtual vigil by the side of the dead and the wounded. No sooner than his office issued it last week, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, hastened to retract a feeble statement expressing concern over the situation in Kashmir.

Kashmiri Muslims are understandably bitter. As Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist, said early this week the stones flung randomly by protestors have become "the voice of a neglected people" convinced that the world deliberately ignores their plight. The veteran Kashmiri journalist Masood Hussain confessed to the near-total futility of his painstaking auditing of atrocity over two decades. For Kashmir has turned out to be a "great suppression story".

The cautiousness – or timidity – of western politicians is easy to understand. Apart from appearing as a lifeline to flailing western economies, India is a counterweight, at least in the fantasies of western strategists, to China. A month before his election, Barack Obama declared that resolving the "Kashmir crisis" was among his "critical tasks". Since then, the US president hasn't uttered a word about this ur-crisis that has seeded all major conflicts in south Asia. David Cameron was advised a similar strategic public silence on his visit to India last fortnight.

Those western pundits who are always ready to assault illiberal regimes worldwide on behalf of democracy ought not to be so tongue-tied. Here is a well-educated Muslim population, heterodox and pluralist by tradition and temperament, and desperate for genuine democracy. However, intellectuals preoccupied by transcendent, nearly mystical, battles between civilization and barbarism tend to assume that "democratic" India, a natural ally of the "liberal" west, must be doing the right thing in Kashmir, ie fighting "Islamofascism". Thus Christopher Hitchens could call upon the Bush administration to establish a military alliance with "the other great multi-ethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism" even as an elected Hindu nationalist government stood accused of organising a pogrom that killed more than 2,000 Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Electoral democracy in multi-ethnic, multi-religious India is one of the modern era's most utopian political experiments, increasingly vulnerable to malfunction and failure, and, consequently, to militant disaffection and state terror. But then the west's new masters of humanitarian war, busy painting grand ideological struggles on broad, rolling canvases, are prone to miss the human position of suffering and injustice.

Indian writers and intellectuals, who witnessed the corrosion of India's secular democracy by Hindu supremacists, seem better acquainted with the messy realities concealed by stirring abstractions. But on Kashmir they often appear as evasive as their Chinese peers are on Tibet. They may have justifiably recoiled from the fundamentalist and brutish aspect of the revolt in the valley. But the massive non-violent protests in Kashmir since 2008 haven't released a flood of pent-up sympathy from them.

Few people are as well positioned as the much-revered Amartya Sen to provoke national introspection on Kashmir. Indeed, no one can fault Sen's commitment to justice for the poor and defenceless in India. Yet Sen relegates Kashmir to footnotes in both of his recent books: The Argumentative Indian and Identity and Violence.

Certainly, as Arundhati Roy's recent writings prove, anyone initiating a frank discussion on Kashmir risks a storm of vituperation from the Indian understudies of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. The choleric TV anchors, partisan journalists and opinion-mongers of India's corporate media routinely amplify the falsehoods and deceptions of Indian intelligence agencies in Kashmir. Blaming Pakistan or Islamic fundamentalists, as the Economist pointed out last week, has "got much harder" for the Indian government, which, has "long denied the great extent to which Kashmiris want rid of India". Nevertheless, it tries; and, as the political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the few fair-minded commentators on this subject, points out, the Indian media now acts in concert with the government "to deny any legitimacy to protests in Kashmir".

This effective censorship reassures those Indians anxious not to let mutinous Kashmiris sully the currently garish notions of India as an "economic powerhouse" and "vibrant democracy" – the calling cards with which Indian elites apply for membership to the exclusive clubs of the west. In Kashmir, however, the net effect is deeper anger and alienation. As Bukhari puts it, Kashmiris hold India's journalists as responsible as its politicians for "muzzling and misinterpreting" them.

"The promise," Mehta writes, "of a liberal India is slowly dying". For Kashmiris this promise has proved as hollow as that of the fundamentalist Islam exported by Pakistan. Liberated from political deceptions, the young men on the streets of Kashmir today seem simply to want to express their hatred of the state's impersonal brutality, and to commemorate lives freshly ruined by it. As the Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer wrote this week in a moving Letter to an Unknown Indian, Indian journalists might edit out the "faces of the murdered boys", and "their grieving fathers"; they may not show "the video of a woman in Anantnag, washing the blood of the boys who were killed outside her house". But "Kashmir sees the unedited Kashmir."

And it remembers. "Like many other Kashmiris," Peer writes, "I have been in silence, committing to memory the deed, the date." Apart from the youth on the streets, there are also those with their noses in books, or pressed against window bars. Soon this generation will make its way into the world with its private traumas. Life under political oppression has begun to yield, in the slow bitter way it does, a rich intellectual and artistic harvest: Peer's memoir Curfewed Night will be followed early next year by a novel by Waheed Mirza. There are more works to come; Kashmiris will increasingly speak for themselves. One can only hope that their voices will finally penetrate our indifference and even occasionally prick our conscience.

Read More

Kashmir's cry for 'freedom' ( By Soutik Biswas, online correspondent for BBC News in India.)

It is yesterday once more in Kashmir. From the time I have flown into the valley on Monday, Srinagar has resembled a ghost town, bringing back memories of a visit two years ago. The only signs of life are tetchy security forces manning checkpoints or idly fiddling with their mobile phones, the odd chemist or a cigarette shop that is open, an occasional car with a flashing red beacon or an ambulance hurtling down its empty roads, a "ration truck" bringing in supplies to its besieged residents.

The interminable day and night curfews have drained all life out of Srinagar. People have retreated into their homes leaving back graffiti on the walls screaming Go Back India! In the restive old city, surly young men sit outside shuttered homes and shops and glare at the troops peering out of sandbagged bunkers and manning the razor wire checkpoints. People wake up at the crack of dawn to store up on supplies when the grocers open for a few minutes. At night, an eerie silence descends over the city as the moon plays hide and seek with the clouds.

It is another summer of unrest in what is possibly the most scenic valley in the world. Two months of cyclical violence between stone pelting protesters and heavily armed security forces have left more than 50 dead - mostly teenagers. Things are looking grimmer than ever before. It's a summer that could turn out to be another defining point in the valley's tortured history. A whole generation of children of the conflict - Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer evocatively calls it their "war of adolescence" - who grew up in the days of militancy and violence in the early 1990s are driving the protests today. (Seven out of 10 Kashmiris are below 25.)

Growing up in the shadow of the gun and what they say is "perpetual humiliation" by the security forces, they are angry, alienated and distrustful of the state. As prominent opposition leader Mehbooba Mufti tells me when I visit her at her heavily secured home overlooking the stunning Dal lake: "If these young men are not given something to look forward to, God help Kashmir." The valley, most residents say, is in the early stages of an intifada.

Mainstream politicians admit that they have lost confidence of the people. "We can only wait and watch how the situation develops," says Ms Mufti. The hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani appears to be only leader with a modicum of legitimacy, however precarious. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's "give peace a chance " appeal to Kashmiris in a televised speech on Tuesday appears to have left them cold. When politics and the state withers away, it creates a dangerous vacuum. One senses an early beginning of this in Kashmir today.

In the labyrinthine heart of the old city of cone-roofed cheek by jowl brick homes and shops, old "heritage" houses in elegant decrepitude, overflowing sewers and potholed roads, India has receded further from the collective consciousness of its residents. In their homes, mothers are stocking memories of their dead children in trunks, suitcases, cupboards and school bags. Most have died in the firing by security forces.

One mother emptied a cupboard and a suitcase full of of her 14 yr-old boy's belongings for me. Wamiq Farooq had gone to play in the neighbourhood when a tear gas shell fired by the troops exploded on his head. Doctors tried to revive him for an hour at the hospital before declaring him dead.

Now, sitting on a brown rug in a modest family home, his mother brings out Wamiq's red tie, red belt, white cap, fraying blue uniform, half a dozen school trophies, report cards, school certificates and then his pithy death certificate. "He is sure to be a face in the crowd," writes his school principal on one certificate praising Wamiq, the Tom and Jerry cartoons and science-loving teenaged son of a street vendor father. Then she slowly puts back Wamiq - his life and death - back into the suitcase and the cupboard and tells me, her eyes welling up: "I never understood why Kashmiri people demand freedom. After Wamiq's death, I do. I want freedom too. So that my children can return home unharmed and in peace."

Read More

The world wants to think the best about India. So we turn our back on Kashmir

By Dean Nelson (Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor)

Think of India and it’s all Gandhian saintliness, Ravi Shankar’s sitar, a whiff of incense and the feel-good beats of Bollywood Bhangra. These memories, sounds and smells conjure images of the world’s largest democracy, where tolerance and spirituality supposedly reign over realpolitik.

We don’t think of it as a country whose troops are jailing opposition leaders or placing them under house arrest, denying people the right to gather in prayer, beating children to death, or massacring stone-throwing protesters. The words “shoot to kill” are a grim relic from our own recent past, and certainly nothing we ever associate with India.

That’s why India is the world’s first “soft superpower”. It can barely do wrong for doing right, and if it does we don’t really want to know. As David Cameron made perfectly clear during his recent visit, we’re interested in India as the world’s second fastest-growing economy and by its contribution to the war on terrorism, but not how it treats its own people.

So despite the fact that 50 mainly young men and teenagers have either been shot or beaten to death in the last eight weeks in Kashmir; the two main separatist leaders have been jailed or placed under house arrest; that the Kashmir Valley has been locked down and the streets of Srinagar occupied by swaggering Indian troops who threaten housewives with big sticks, our leaders have remained completely silent.

Had these incidents been in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan, or had the victims been Tibetans revolting against Chinese rule, we would have called it a massacre. But India’s great “soft power” is that the world wants to think the best of it.

To that end, our leaders overlooked the 53 young men and teenagers who were treated for bullet wounds in just one hospital in Kashmir’s state capital, Srinagar, last week. They had been shot either for throwing stones during protests against killings by Indian security forces in Kashmir – or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in their own city.

This present wave of protests began after Indian soldiers shot dead three young Muslim men in the hope of passing them off as Pakistani terrorists and themselves as war heroes. They had lured them with the promise of jobs. A few weeks later a 17-year-old schoolboy was killed when Indian police fired a tear gas canister at his head.

Last week I interviewed Fayaz Ahmad Rah, a Srinagar fruit seller, as he mourned the death of his nine-year-old son, Sameer. Neighbours told me they had seen members of India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force beat him to death with sticks and then dump his body in stinging nettles. The CRPF claims he was in fact a protester and that he had been trampled by other demonstrators as they fled a police advance.

Fayaz said his son had been walking through their usually safe tiny back lanes to his uncle’s house 100 metres away after stopping to buy sweets. When he washed his son’s body for burial, there was a half-chewed toffee still in his mouth, he said.

Over the last eight weeks a round of teenage civilian deaths, protests and more shootings followed by further protests has sucked Kashmir into a bleak vortex. But since it began, not a single member of India’s security forces has been shot or killed. It couldn’t be a more unequal contest.

Luckily for India, it happened in Kashmir where the words “Muslim”, “Pakistan” and “militants” shield what is either bad marksmanship or a shoot to kill policy from scrutiny and criticism.

This decision to look the other way only fuels the anger in Kashmir. From his home where he was being held under house arrest last week, separatist spiritual leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told me India had turned Kashmir into a “police state” and that British politicians and others were turning their back on it.

He had not been allowed to go to his mosque for more than six weeks, while other separatist Hurriyat leaders were also in jail or under house arrest. In many mosques throughout the state, only men over the age of 50 – regarded as beyond their stone-throwing years – have been allowed to meet to pray.

“It’s a direct interference in our religious affairs, a situation in which in a muslim state, if we’re not allowed to pray, the Muftis will say we have to call a war on the state,” he said.

Those demonstrating are part of a new generation born into violent protest which has seen leaders like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq sacrifice their credibility for talks with India, which came to nothing. “People now ask the question ‘you went for dialogue, what did you get? Did the killings or violence or disappearances stop?’ All it did was undermine the credibility of those who wanted, like me, to give dialogue a chance,” he said.

He believes India is not sincere about talks and is only interested in continual delay in the hope that protests and the desire for Kashmiri independence will peter out.

India has its own arguments, of course. It focuses on earlier killings and “ethnic cleansing” of Kashmiri pandits, and the reluctance of Buddhist Ladakh and Hindu and Sikh majority Jammu to follow the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley into Pakistan or independence. It criticises the refusal of separatist parties to take part in state assembly elections.

These are valid points, and I certainly don’t have the answers to a problem which has blighted India and Pakistan and provoked three wars between the nuclear enemies since their independence from Britain.

But I do think Britain might come to regret its silence and India its troops’ brutality. We risk alienating the remaining friends we have in the Muslim world and within our own substantial Kashmiri community in Britain. India risks losing the tremendous goodwill it had built up throughout the world over decades.

The Kashmiris, on the other hand, have little left to lose: the world has forgotten them.

Read More

Don't look away again (By Barkha Dutt)

In a nondescript, overcrowded hospital ward in Srinagar a child flinches in pain as doctors examine his bullet-ridden leg and a distraught mother cradles his head in her arms and wordlessly feeds him fruit pulp with a spoon, her stoic eyes chillingly expressionless. Amir Ashraf is 15 and he is not a 

stone-pelter. Nor has he ever taken part in a street protest. He merely happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time — returning home from the village madrassa in Bandipore, after reading the Quran, when he was suddenly caught in clashes between protesters and security forces. In fact, the first civilian death that triggered this period of strife began with the death of a teenager Tufail Mattoo who was walking back from a tuition class when a tear gas shell, apparently directed at a protesting mob, claimed his life instead.

Of course, as the stark images of raw, defiant rage on the streets of Srinagar show, children are not always out there by accident. Notwithstanding appeals from the government, it's not just women — but very often — little boys too, some of them not even 10 years old, who mingle with protesters, raise their fists in precocious anger and speak a language of accelerated adulthood. You can certainly argue about the ethics and wisdom of exposing children to possible death and you can question why the only separatist leader of significance to make an appeal for non-violent protests is the man considered to be the most hawkish of all — Syed Ali Shah Geelani. But, the fact is, that no matter what your ideological position is on the Kashmir crisis — when teenagers and children become the face of the conflagration, politics is morally obliged to reinvent its approach.

And that is the one thing — imaginative and robust politics — that we have seen abysmally little of in the last two months. Some tentative beginnings are being made at last. The chief minister finally made an attempt to reach out to the injured civilians this week amid questions of why it took 45 deaths for him to do what should have been any leader's first instinct. The home minister had an intelligent, nuanced response in Parliament — careful not to demoralise the security forces, but conceding the need to deliver on failed promises and expressing personal regret for the loss of lives. But with no real consensus within the government or indeed the national political establishment on how Kashmir should be handled, will New Delhi make the fatal mistake of believing that it should simply brazen this out?

A fortnight ago, when the Army was requisitioned by Omar Abdullah's government — for the first time in Srinagar in 15 years — some of us implored the Centre to not confuse quiet on the streets of Srinagar for calm. Stillness, we argued, was often the sound of stasis and implosion. We hoped that the prime minister would intervene himself, perhaps, even go on television to talk directly to the people in the state. I heard the home minister telling Parliament that these “were our own people". It was important to stress that it wasn't just the land, but also the people who were integral to us as a nation.

So didn't our own people merit a more direct political engagement or at the very least a more visible expression of empathy? Yes, there can be no justification for violent protests or setting police stations, railways tracks and other public property ablaze. But when Naxal violence can be officially handled by what the government likes to call a “two-pronged approach," couldn't violence in Kashmir have been tackled in a similar way? In the seeming lull that these ten days provided, where was the other prong?

There is a false debate being constructed by some ideologues that to push for a political intervention in Kashmir is to undermine the suffering of soldiers on the ground. This sort of clap-trap comes from those who don't really care about the lives of our security forces. We would do well to remember that it was the Army chief who spoke of the failure to build politically on security gains in the valley. Do we really think our paramilitary forces want to be locked into a hostile loop of never-ending confrontation? Do we have any idea how difficult it is for a local Kashmiri Muslim to be a police officer in the present environment of hate and resentment? For an intelligent understanding of the soldier's perspective, speak to former Border Security Force chief E. Rammohan- who ironically also investigated what went wrong in the Dantewada massacre — and listen what he has to say on how our soldiers need better training in non-lethal weapons and crowd control.

The truth is that this is not 1990 or 2000. In 2010, Kashmir has thrown up an entire generation of young men who have been brutalised, hardened and often, radicalised by perennial conflict and the changing nature of the separatist campaign. On television, the other night, I decided to censor out the politicians and hear directly from two articulate young Kashmiris: Junaid Mattoo and Faizan Ali. To listen to them, was to understand the extent of their generation's disengagement. The discourse within the valley may not always be rational; some of it is indeed intolerant and frighteningly aggressive at times. But it is the duty of a smart politician to find a language that speaks to those who don't want to listen.

When young parliamentarians made a direct attempt at communication with the boys of the valley, I was heartened. I thought of Rahul Gandhi's stopovers at Dalit homes in the heartland. We need something similar in Kashmir — a politician who is willing to look public anger in the eye and make a human connection. To look away this time, would be to miss the fork in the road. And, if we do that, there will be no turning back.

Read More

A silent shame (by Karan Thaper) Hindustan Times

‘If 50 people were shot dead by the police on the streets of London what would the British government do?” This sharp question was how Pertie greeted me on my return from Britain last week. I mistook his inquiry for levity but he soon cut me short. “Would Cameron keep silent, appear unconcerned and

unaffected, or would he fall over himself explaining and apologising?”

I realised Pertie had an important point to make. Whatever the cause and the necessity, how should an elected government — and, more specifically, an accountable prime minister — respond when security forces in Kashmir end up killing the very people they’re intended to protect. But before I grappled with his question I tried to deflect it. “The CRPF did not intend to kill,” I began. “They were forced to shoot to control rampaging crowds. And remember they were themselves under attack. They were being mercilessly pelted with stones.”

I think Pertie snorted. At any rate he seemed to dismiss my response with contempt. “What do you mean they didn’t intend to kill? Do you know that almost every single one of the 50 people killed were shot above the waist? Many were shot in the head. And remember the protestors were only throwing stones. Is shooting to kill the best, leave aside the only, way of tackling such protests?”

Pertie’s argument seemed difficult to counter. I sensed the need for a tactical retreat. So I quickly changed subjects. “Why do you ask how David Cameron would handle a similar situation in London? What’s that got to do with things?”

“Because our prime minister, Manmohan Singh, hasn’t said a word. Literally not a squeak. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know or care. Or as if Kashmir doesn’t count or isn’t part of India. I simply can’t fathom this silence. It’s inexplicable.”

“Well,” I said, startled by this sudden realisation. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to further inflame matters by saying anything. Perhaps in the circumstances silence is the most sensible course of action.”

“You can only say that because you’re not a parent. But if your kids were shot dead by policemen and the government had nothing to say you’d be livid. These were innocent children. Some of them were not even teenagers. And yet the government can’t bring itself to express regret!”

Once again Pertie had me stumped. Democratic governments need to respond to such tragedies no matter how difficult, tricky or sensitive. Silence is never the answer. “But what should the PM have done?” It was a genuine question.

“Express deep regret, share his anguish and even, yes even, apologise.” “Apologise?” My tone clearly conveyed my surprise. “What sort of apology do you mean?” “Even when something is essential and unavoidable you can apologise for having to do it. But in this case killing young people was neither essential nor unavoidable. It was gratuitous and uncalled for. So an apology is all the more necessary.”

I suddenly remembered that Singh apologised in Parliament for the Sikh killings of 1984. Even after 20 years he felt the need to do so. He wasn’t in anyway responsible yet this is what he said: “I bow my head in shame.”

Today, in contrast, when he is the PM, he is silent. For all intent and purposes his head is held high. I wonder how the people of Kashmir — and, in particular, the parents who’ve lost their sons — feel when they notice the difference?

Read More

Independence Day for Kashmir

Blog By Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, 

On August 15, India celebrated independence from the British Raj. But Kashmiris staged a bandh demanding independence from India. A day symbolising the end of colonialism in India became a day symbolising Indian colonialism in the Valley. 

As a liberal, i dislike ruling people against their will. True, nation-building is a difficult and complex exercise, and initial resistance can give way to the integration of regional aspirations into a larger national identity — the end of Tamil secessionism was a classical example of this. 

I was once hopeful of Kashmir's integration, but after six decades of effort, Kashmiri alienation looks greater than ever. India seeks to integrate with Kashmir, not rule it colonially. Yet, the parallels between British rule in India and Indian rule in Kashmir have become too close for my comfort. 

Many Indians say that Kashmir legally became an integral part of India when the maharaja of the state signed the instrument of accession. Alas, such legalisms become irrelevant when ground realities change. Indian kings and princes, including the Mughals, acceded to the British Raj. The documents they signed became irrelevant when Indians launched an independence movement. 

The British insisted for a long time that India was an integral part of their Empire, the jewel in its crown, and would never be given up. Imperialist Blimps remained in denial for decades. I fear we are in similar denial on Kashmir. 

The politically correct story of the maharaja's accession ignores a devastating parallel event. Just as Kashmir had a Hindu maharaja ruling over a Muslim majority, Junagadh had a Muslim nawab ruling over a Hindu majority. The Hindu maharaja acceded to India, and the Muslim nawab to Pakistan. 

But while India claimed that the Kashmiri accession to India was sacred, it did not accept Junagadh's accession to Pakistan. India sent troops into Junagadh, just as Pakistan sent troops into Kashmir. The difference was that Pakistan lacked the military means to intervene in Junagadh, while India was able to send troops into Srinagar. The Junagadh nawab fled to Pakistan, whereas the Kashmir maharaja sat tight. India's double standard on Junagadh and Kashmir was breathtaking. 

Do you think the people of Junagadh would have integrated with Pakistan after six decades of genuine Pakistani effort? No? Then can you really be confident that Kashmiris will stop demanding azaadi and integrate with India? 

The British came to India uninvited. By contrast, Sheikh Abdullah, the most popular politician in Kashmir, supported accession to India subject to ratification by a plebiscite. But his heart lay in independence for Kashmir, and he soon began manoeuvering towards that end. He was jailed by Nehru, who then declared Kashmir's accession was final and no longer required ratification by a plebiscite. The fact that Kashmir had a Muslim majority was held to be irrelevant, since India was a secular country empowering citizens through democracy. 

Alas, democracy in Kashmir has been a farce for most of six decades. The rot began with Sheikh Abdullah in 1951: he rejected the nomination papers of almost all opponents, and so won 73 of the 75 seats unopposed! Nehru was complicit in this sabotage of democracy. 

Subsequent state elections were also rigged in favour of leaders nominated by New Delhi. Only in 1977 was the first fair election held, and was won by the Sheikh. But he died after a few years, and rigging returned in the 1988 election. That sparked the separatist uprising which continues to gather strength today. 

Many Indians point to long episodes of peace in the Valley and say the separatists are just a noisy minority. But the Raj also had long quiet periods between Gandhian agitations, which involved just a few lakhs of India's 500 million people. One lakh people joined the Quit India movement of 1942, but 25 lakh others joined the British Indian army to fight for the Empire's glory. 

Blimps cited this as evidence that most Indians simply wanted jobs and a decent life. The Raj built the biggest railway and canal networks in the world. It said most Indians were satisfied with economic development, and that independence was demanded by a noisy minority. This is uncomfortably similar to the official Indian response to the Kashmiri demand for azaadi. 

Let me not exaggerate. Indian rule in Kashmir is not classical colonialism. India has pumped vast sums into Kashmir, not extracted revenue as the Raj did. Kashmir was among the poorest states during the Raj, but now has the lowest poverty rate in India. It enjoys wide civil rights that the Raj never gave. Some elections — 1977, 1983 and 2002 — were perfectly fair. 

India has sought integration with Kashmir, not colonial rule. But Kashmiris nevertheless demand azaadi. And ruling over those who resent it so strongly for so long is quasi-colonialism, regardless of our intentions. 

We promised Kashmiris a plebiscite six decades ago. Let us hold one now, and give them three choices: independence, union with Pakistan, and union with India. Almost certainly the Valley will opt for independence. Jammu will opt to stay with India, and probably Ladakh too. Let Kashmiris decide the outcome, not the politicians and armies of India and Pakistan.

Read More

Kashmir Intifada

Kashmir has woken up to another bloody Sunday. Two more youths have died in CRPF firing. That makes the count, more than a dozen in a fortnight. More than thirty in the last month. India's paradise is burning and no one seems to have a clue on how to douse the fire.
On TV, Kashmir's young, but inept Chief Minister calls for stricter policing, as if killing people with bullets was not strict enough. Far away in Delhi, the Prime Minister, seems to second that. The Cabinet Committee on Security calls Kashmir a 'law and order problem'. And therein lies the great tragedy of valley and how India is losing it.
Make no mistake about this. If governments, both in Delhi and Srinagar, don't correct their course we could end up losing yet another generation of Kashmiri youth. One was lost to militancy in the decade after 1989. The other could be lost to stones, at the turn of this decade.
For many people outside the valley, and particularly those in the national media, it's difficult to fathom what's fuelling this violence. This is not just "Lashkar elements creating mischief", as the Home Minister of India would want you to believe. This is the pent-up anger of an entire generation who have woken up every morning to the sight of men in khakhis or olive greens. This is the ordinary Kashmiri saying enough is enough. This is urban warfare, but it has nothing to do with guns and militancy. Stones are the new weapons in this spontaneous outburst. This is Kashmir's Intifada.
But what's driving this kind of rage? After all, what does an eighteen something wearing a headband screaming "Azadi", really want from life and from his government. For the teeny boppy, Nike and Adidas sporting, stone throwers of Srinagar, this is resentment at being stopped everyday at some check point or the other and being asked for an ID proof. Day in and day out, for the last 20 years. This is resentment against the young kids who were gunned down by security forces in Machil after being promised jobs. The government still hasn't punished any of the guilty. Forget punishment, some of those officers were rewarded with lakhs of rupees in cash. This is resentment against Neelofar and Asiya Jaan who were raped and murdered in Shopian, but the entire state conspired to protect the guilty. Death and humiliation can be pretty random in Kashmir. And pretty frequent. No questions asked, no answers sought. And that's precisely what's fuelling the rage of the young Kashmiri.
The government of India sees these 'boys' as wanton lawbreakers. Ordinary Kashmiris think they're simply conveying the deep-seated anger of a community suppressed for so long. Ever since these kids were born, all they've heard in dinner-time conversations are deaths, custodial killings and rapes. In fact, there's not one Kashmiri youth who hasn't had a relative or acquaintance killed, branded a 'terrorist' or raped.
And no matter what the government of India thinks, simply palming off all the blame to Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar will not help. To regain its lost paradise, India needs to start listening.

Zakka Jacob

Read More

Kashmir Burns: My Kashmir Burns

Kashmir Burns: My Kashmir Burns: "Kashmir is burning and the world is silent. My children are being butchered, houses reduce to ashes, world remains silent. My sisters rape..."

Read More

My Kashmir Burns

Kashmir is burning and the world is silent.
My children are being butchered, houses reduce to ashes, world remains silent.
My sisters raped, mothers molested, world remains silent.
Shame on you india shame on your people who justify killings Kashmirs  

Read More