Kashmir’s handcuffed children

                            

Inside the court room, when the judge asked the prosecution what their age was. The prosecution replied he had ‘no information’.(Pictures: Shahid Tantray)

The five children looked distraught. Handcuffed, burly policemen hushed them inside the court premises Tuesday afternoon. They looked pale and had visible torture marks. People, many of them lawyers, inside the premises just gazed in distress as the children moved.

Mohsin Majeed Shah was one among the detained minor boys. He had a torture mark on his forehead, right between the eyebrows. His tiny hands cuffed as a policeman pushed him between the groups of men who stood gazing in bewilderment.

Mohsin’s mother had waited all day inside the court premises to see her 13-year-old son- a seventh grader at a local school. She says he was arrested last Sunday.

It was an emotional tryst between a mother and her son. Both wept and cried. His brother, two years elder to him, also wept. “Look what they have done to Mohsin,” he kept saying.

His mother had brought him fruits and snacks. She cried. Her dirge was unstoppable when she held him in embrace. She kept kissing his forehead, on the torture mark. 

His family says Mohsin was arrested last week when he left his home at New Colony, Paplpora Noor Bagh, located on the fringes of Old City, to meet his maternal uncle at Rajouri Kadal.

An hour later, his brother called their mother to inform Mohsin was picked up by police and detained at a local police station.

Another boy was Burhaan Nazir of  Nalahbundpora, Nowshera. A 6th grader, he was arrested last week from the streets of Srinagar’s Old City.

“We were severely beaten in the police station and all we heard from policemen were just abuses,” Burhaan remarked, while policemen almost dragged him back from the court and bundled him into a waiting armored vehicle.

“They abuse my sisters, tore our clothes. I am afraid they will beat us again in the police station,” he cried. “They even abuse my mother, who is dead.” When he shouted everyone around froze for a moment. 

He was lodged for the past week at Mahraja Gunj police station and will now be shifted to a juvenile home on directions of the court.

The other boys seemed minors, too. One wore a torn cloak. He looked frightened, when he was brought inside and out of the court house.

There was no time to know their name as police rushed them out in hurry and dumped them into a waiting police van.

The lawyers, who had assembled in the court premises, expressed shock as the detained children were whisked away.

“It was shocking for all of us to see this. We have for the first time seen boys so young being detained,” advocate Nasir Qadri says.

“They said we have been tortured and clothes have been torn. They have been severely beaten and there were visible torture marks on their bodies,” he remarks.

The police is yet to mention the ages of the boys detained on charges of rioting and arson.

Inside the court room, when the Judge asked the prosecution what their age was. The prosecution replied that he had ‘no information’.

“This is a brute use of force by state and this is beyond any comprehension of any jurisprudence or human rights and I think police stations have turned into tyranny centres,” another lawyer, Babar Qadri says.

The state government has been under pressure from human rights groups over the detention of minors in the Kashmir valley.

Under attack from human rights groups, it has already made amendments to the Public Safety Act under which minors were booked during the civil unrest last year.

Owing to the pressure from both within and outside the state, the government set up a juvenile home in Kashmir recently.

 (C) The Kashmir Dispatch

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Mallika Kaur: Grave Lessons from Kashmir

For the anniversary of the International Day of the Disappeared, our writer reports on Kashmir’s “half widows” and their unaddressed needs, which threaten to fuel further insecurity in the volatile region and globally.


By Mallika Kaur

On the International Day of the Disappeared, which was observed on August 30, the International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that “[t]he tremendous impact that disappearances have on the daily lives and long-term prospects of the families, and indeed of entire communities, is still largely overlooked.” Overlooked also is how such apathy towards the “disappeared” in fact fuels the type of insecurity that continues to threaten sustainable peace. Kashmir’s “half widows” are a case in point.

Bilquees Begum* repeatedly asks whether my tea is too sweet. She smiles and adds how her husband Ahmed told her that city people liked their tea tasteless. But her smile disappears as she opens a brown suitcase, which the family keeps under lock and key. Inside are all the legal papers that Bilquees cannot read, but knows by heart.

Bilquees describes how her 35-year-old Ahmed “disappeared,” in front of his entire family, on July 20, 2003. “There was a wedding function in the family… And then, there was a raid. I responded to a knock on the door. When I got out, the Army was everywhere. They separated the male members of the family and started a parade… they asked, ‘Who is the eldest son?’ It was the 22 Rashtriya Rifles counterinsurgency division of the army. They took him in front of us all.” Bilquees and the family were told that Ahmed would be returned the next day, after some questioning. Eight years later, Ahmed has still not returned. “We recognize the men who came that night, we even know their names. We went and asked them and they refused knowing anything about my husband. We looked everywhere, we even rented a shikara [a Kashmiri raft, often seen in glossy tourist photographs of Srinagar’s Dal Lake], in case he was killed and his body thrown in the water.”

Bilquees is one of Kashmir’s “half widows”: a woman whose husband has been “disappeared” and never heard from again, leaving her shrouded in uncertainty as to her marital status. Enforced disappearances have been recorded in Kashmir since the early 1990s and local civil society groups, such as the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, estimate about 8,000 enforced disappearances and about 1,500 “half widows” in Kashmir.

Now, in August of this year, a State Government agency, the State Human Rights Commission, has announced the existence of “mass graves” in the Indian-administered Kashmir Valley: it has recorded multiple graves containing 2730 bodies. The report acknowledges that many of the graves contain civilians who had “disappeared”—574 of the 2730 have been identified as locals—rather than only “unidentified cross-border terrorists” as per the Indian government’s prior claims (even this official position is contrary to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture and mutilation and call for proper burial of fallen combatants). While the skeletons in mass graves evidence suffering of the past, they are also stark reminders of continued suffering of women like Bilquees, who do not know whether their husbands are in the mass graves, or alive somewhere in captivity.

Bilquees shares her story in the family common room at much prompting by Haseena, Bilquees’s neighbor, also a “half widow.” Haseena explains that Bilquees’s in-laws are very wary of Bilquees talking about Ahmed with any “outsiders.” “They think if someone is going to give some money or help for Ahmed’s family, it should go to them. This happens with a lot of us, we aren’t seen as a part of the family anymore and the parents prioritize their own pain over ours.” Bilquees adds, “This is a poor family. There isn’t much, and we spent lots of money bribing army and police “messengers” to get us some information about my husband. Now, we have a legal case pending for some ex gratia relief… and though I have four kids, my father-in-law believes he is the rightful claimant to that relief… for his old age support. If they had more, perhaps they would take better care of me.”

The first road-block to concrete measures for improving the situation in Kashmir is the misidentification of the nature of the prevailing conflict.

Though Kashmir makes international headlines in the context of the Af-Pak tensions and the “war against terror,”civilians like Bilquees and Haseena exhibit the grave and growing insecurity in the region that continues to be unacknowledged and thus unaddressed. Symbolic gestures to the Muslim world; troop deployment in regions of increasing anti-Western sentiment; and diplomatic overtures toward countries made important by the geopolitical situation, all fail to address insecurity in Kashmir, the contested region between nuclear India and Pakistan and a symbol of anti-Muslim oppression for much of the Muslim world.

The first road-block to concrete measures for improving the situation in Kashmir is the misidentification of the nature of the prevailing conflict.

When asked about the “terrorism” in Kashmir, Haseena responds without hesitation, “Oh, there is no terrorism here… it’s not what you read in the Indian newspapers. It’s sons like mine, who have only seen broken promises since they were born, who are taking to the streets… Look, my younger son had walked out of our home here, just out of the house, and the CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force] beat him. The same thing happened with my elder one. He wasn’t throwing stones… why did they beat him? Because they [CRPF] are scared. They are scared the boys will come out hurling abuses and worse, stones. So they go from house to house picking up boys. And with the women, well, they misbehave.”

Haseena is referring to the violent unrest in 2010, when Kashmiri civilians, a majority of them young men, took to the streets in protests, demanding azaadi, freedom from India. These sustained protests lasted for months, and occurred much before the famed Arab Spring. Kashmiris, given their many summers and springs of civil disobedience, look quizzically at those commentators who wonder why the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere did not prompt a greater response in Kashmir: “The Indian government is not the Egyptian government," said one young student at Kashmir University, under the condition of anonymity—her Facebook account is already strictly monitored, she went on to explain.

Haseena remembers, “When they were beating my sons, I threw myself on the boys, and then they hurled abuses at me. And do you want to see the time they hit me with a baton…? I have the mark. My sons know, our kids know, that we don’t just throw stones like that. But when we watch TV, or radio, or when all that has been shut by the government, and we just talk to people, it’s all about bloodshed. And my kids say, ‘This is all the same bloodshed that took our father… now, we want to fight this.’ So are these kids the terrorists India is scared of?”

The conflict in Kashmir, which has its roots in the 1947 decolonization and partition between the current states of India and Pakistan, entered its bloodiest phase in 1989. Popular disenchantment with the Indian electoral system spurred a groundswell movement for Kashmiri secession from India. Simultaneously, armed militants, some backed by Pakistan, became the violent face of the self-determination movement. Indian government passed security legislation giving armed forces sweeping powers to suppress insurgency and significantly fortified military presence in the region. The exceptional legal and militaristic treatment of Kashmir continues even today, though by the government’s own estimates, the number of active militants in the Valley does not surpass 500. The past 22 years of conflict have seen more than an estimated 70,000 dead.

In her assessment of the situation, Haseena does not comment on the armed militancy, which continues even today, at a comparatively miniscule scale. But her omission is not out of fear or even strategy, but rather honesty. In Srinagar, and now most of Indian-administered Kashmir, the conflict is not between armed militants and government forces. It is in a large part between Kashmiri civilians, disgruntled men, women, and children, and the government's deployed forces.

“Disappearances” fuel disgruntlement. They are most often explained by the Indian government as cases of men having slipped across the Himalayas to Pakistan-administered Kashmir, for arms training. However, Kashmiris and human rights activists explain these “disappearances” as scare and punishment tactics of the armed forces—not unlike those employed by forces in Punjab or Argentina or Sri Lanka or the Philippines. “Now they say we didn’t disappear anyone. That is also a lie, clearly, because see all the dead bodies that have been found in mass graves? Who are those people… so many of them?” asks Haseena.

When I walk into Haseena’s home, she rushes to apologize for the mess of withered orange peels on a rickety plastic chair. Her one-bedroom home is otherwise spotless. Everything has a place, and every bit of space made the best use of. Haseena does several odd jobs to meet her family’s expenses. She makes paper bags from old newspapers for a neighborhood shopkeeper; does darning for a local tailor; and provides “beautification” at her home for local women who cannot afford beauty parlors but can afford her home-made orange peel “beauty scrub.” Haseena, or “beautiful,” thus seemed an apt pseudonym for this vibrant woman who lives with her two sons, 19 and 12, while her 15-year-old middle child is away at “hostel.” A hostel for children without fathers, she explains.

Haseena’s husband “disappeared” one morning nine years ago: “It was 2002. Militancy had decreased so much. And my husband was busy with his own work… he was a mason. That day, he left to find work in the Delhi. He said he would call from there. But I heard nothing. In those days there were no cell phones”—Haseena’s cell phone is obviously a prized possession; it rings frequently and she enjoys animated conversations—“and I didn’t know what happened to him. So I went looking at my in-laws. At other places. But found out nothing. The last person who saw him was a little girl on the first bus he had taken during his trip… he had given her some chewing gum. After he got off at Srinagar to change buses, no one saw him again.”

Attention to “disappearances” is a humanitarian as well as political imperative. The struggles of “half widows” may not make headlines, but their plight is urgent and present.

Haseena’s experience subsequent to her husband’s “disappearance” is not much different from the norm, she explains. “After I searched everywhere, I tried to file a FIR [First Information Report, a crime report the police are required to file]. The police kept sending me away saying this kind of thing was common… I should just wait for him to return. Two years later, a lawyer filed a writ for me for free, just for this FIR. That is still pending. And then, whenever I went to search in jails, the police men would give their advice, ‘get married again… you need a man to take care of you,’ and such nonsense. I began wearing a burqua to such places, to government offices. Who can take this constant lechery and disrespect?”

Bilquees also recounted her burqa-wearing days. “At one point I had to turn to begging on the streets to feed the kids. I wore a burqua for that…” Haseena interjected, “You must have read how ‘radicalism’ is on the rise among us Muslims here… but what about these women you see in burqas who are covering out of such necessities… to protect against the army men, or against social shaming by their neighbors?”

Bilquees’s daughter silently slips through the front door and sits beside her mother. Unlike the older woman, Sameena wears a hijab, a headscarf. When she hears Haseena Aunty’s burqa comment she chimes, “Well, do I look radicalized? Or oppressed by someone? I wear this because I am a proud Kashmiri Muslim. I am proud to be on the right side.” Haseena prompts Sameena to tell me about her “Brigadier Uncle.” “That man… no Uncle of mine! See, when I was about thirteen, and my father had just been taken, our entire family went to an Army camp to see a Brigadier, the highest officer we could dream of getting access to. He asked me to come forward. He asked me about school. My mother interjected, with folded hands, reminding him that it was my father that we were there about. He kept talking to me, told me to study hard, and that I would go far. Then he gave me a pen, as a present. I threw it at his head… really, it hit his nose!” Haseena chuckles as Bilquees looks at her daughter worriedly. “My mother scooped me up, but the Brigadier smiled and told my mother not to be scared. He gave me his mobile number and said he would look for my Papa… Actually, look, he probably felt bad for this little girl. These guys are humans. But what can I do for his pang of guilt? Forgive the Indian Army? Of course there are some good guys, but they’ve been sent here to do bad things, like take my father… petrify my entire neighborhood. People like him, in high places, need to tell India to stop sending them here to do such things!” Bilquees sent her daughter to the kitchen to make me a cup of namkeen (salty Kashmiri) chai. She worries Sameena’s temper and outspokenness will land her in much trouble in an environment where those who voice dissent are persecuted.

Haseena and Bilquees both believe that their society has been somewhat unfair toward them following the “disappearances.” “When people wanted to hurt me they say things like ‘your face was like this, which is why your husband disappeared.’ And my children have faced taunts growing up as well. They envy other children, who see their fathers, get things from their fathers, have security in their lives,” explains Haseena. “People are too afraid to voice anger against the actual perpetrators, so they turn against us… it’s easy, we are easy targets, aren’t we?” Bilquees adds quietly.

“Half widows” and their children are also an easily identifiable population for those seeking true engagement and change in Kashmir. In response to the mass graves report, Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has proposed a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that will, among other things, “probe the disappearances [and] the issue of half widows.” However, urgent responses to the socio-economic situation of half widows are also needed: whether in the form of self-help groups that provide some financial independence through cottage industry, or scholarships for their school-age children (often removed from even government schools due to inability to pay for stationery or uniforms), or vocational training for them and their children. Similarly, the psychological trauma faced by “half widows” calls for immediate attention, both in the form of accessible medical treatment as well as remedies that provide truth as well as justice for the underlying reason of the trauma—the unresolved “disappearance.”

Attention to “disappearances” is a humanitarian as well as political imperative. The struggles of “half widows” may not make headlines, but their plight is urgent and present. Further, “half widows” represent various forms of insecurity, signify rights violations, and stand as a constant reminder of alienation, thus impeding resolution in Kashmir. The current cycles of violence in this strategically vital region will inevitably continue as long as closure remains elusive. “I dreamt of him just last week, walking into the kitchen, hungry for some food,” confesses Bilquees, still holding hope for Ahmed’s return, eight years later.

*Names changed for protection______________________________________________________________________________________________

Mallika Kaur (JD/MPP, Berkeley/Harvard) is a lawyer who focuses on gender and minority issues in the United States and South Asia. She traveled in Kashmir as the 2010-11 Harvard Sheldon Traveling Fellow, speaking to women and girls caught in the conflict.

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Why are mass graves in Kashmir so passé?

By SA Aiyar 

The Jammu & Kashmir State Human Rights Commission says 2,730 bodies have been found in unmarked graves in Kashmir. This officially confirms earlier accusations by human rights groups. Security forces once claimed any such graves were those of unidentified militants killed in military encounters. But the commission says 574 bodies have already been identified as those of local villagers, and DNA tests will expose many more. This was mass murder. 

Most countries would have treated this as major news, but our media barely noticed. Bored with unending tales of human rights violations in Kashmir, our media saw Anna Hazare’s fast and even Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s pregnancy as more newsworthy. 

Two decades of insurrection in Kashmir have eroded our ability to feel horror, to be nauseated by mass murder. Yes it’s terrible, most people say with a shrug, but it’s all Pakistan’s fault and we can’t surrender to jihadis.

As a libertarian, i dislike ruling people by force, and am dismayed by the parallels between India’s independence struggle and the Kashmiri azaadi struggle. Basharat Peer’s “Curfewed Nights” and a new collection of writings from Kashmir “Until My Freedom Has Come”, highlight Kashmiri humiliation and anger against what they call Indian colonial oppression.Actually, India has not colonized Kashmir. Rather, it has tried to integrate Kashmir with itself. Nation building is a difficult task that, across the world, has required a mixture of persuasion and firmness. Using this mixture, India succeeded in integrating some regions with secessionist movements — Tamil Nadu, Mizoram, Punjab. But 64 years of this approach have manifestly failed in Kashmir. Using ever more force begins to look like colonial oppression more than attempted integration.Kashmiri alienation flows from Muslim revolts against the erstwhile Dogra ruler, rigged elections after 1947, and security forces guilty of torture, killing and rape in the name of national security. The Kashmiri insurrection has taken 70,000 lives of civilians, armed forces and militants. Some are due to terrorism, some to genuine defence against jihadis and armed infiltrators. But the mass graves bear testimony to horrors against innocent Kashmiris too.Secular Indians feel outraged by 900 Muslim deaths in Gujarat’s 2002 riots. They are outraged by the killing of 3,000 people by Chilean dictator Pinochet. But they are mostly bored by 2,730 Kashmiri bodies in unmarked graves. It’s all the fault of Pakistan and jihadi terrorists, say some. True, Pakistan trained many jihadis. But many of these were Kashmiri youngsters angered by Indian outrages. They were killed in droves by Indian security forces, and their flow to Pakistan greatly diminished. There was no Pakistani training or inspiration behind the thousands of youngsters who took to the streets during the Srinagar intifada last year. They did not seek union with Pakistan. They simply wanted Indian “killers” off their soil.Many analysts emphasize the legalisms of Kashmiri accession to India. But hundreds of Indian princes had legal treaties with the British Raj, which our independence movement declared irrelevant after the rise of Indian nationalism. Liberal values cannot be based on legalisms alone.Let us forget legalisms and hold a plebiscite, which we promised anyway in 1947. Probably the valley will vote for azaadi, with Jammu and Ladakh opting for India. We should see this not as a loss of territory but a gain of moral stature, and return to the liberal values that drove our independence movement. Most Indians say a plebiscite will wreck Indian secularism and let loose another round of partition killings. Really? If India was so wedded to secularism, it should never have accepted partition along communal lines in 1947. Having agreed to communal partition, it was hypocritical to violate this norm in Kashmir.In Junagadh in 1947, a Muslim Nawab ruling over a Hindu majority, acceded to Pakistan. India refused to accept this, ousted the Nawab forcibly, and justified this by holding a plebiscite that went overwhelmingly in India’s way. If this was a secular tactic, why call a similar plebiscite in Kashmir a danger to secularism? Critics of a plebiscite claim that a vote for azaadi will trigger fresh partition riots, targeting Muslims throughout India. Really? Is supposedly secular India actually so communal that Hindus will slaughter Muslim innocents galore, with the state a helpless bystander? I have a better opinion of India than that. Forget what Kashmiris demand. Let us allow self-determination in Kashmir to cleanse our own hands and hearts. This will not mean surrender to militants or Pakistan. It will mean returning to the liberal values of our independence movement, which are getting tainted beyond recognition by the mass graves in Kashmir. We need to regain our capacity to feel horror. 

(C) The Times Of India

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The courage of a stolen childhood

By Showkat Nanda

Showkat Nanda took this picture of a young Kashmiri boy throwing stones at an armoured vehicle in the summer of 2009 just moments after another young boy, shot by Indian security forces, had died in his arms [Showkat Nanda]

When I shot this picture in the summer of 2009, I remembered the image of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy, Faris Odeh, standing in front of an Israeli tank, alone, with just a stone in his hand.

Ten days after Odeh's picture was taken, he was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in another stone throwing incident. He became a hero and his iconic image a symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation. Then, I had not imagined that a Faris Odeh was being raised in every second home in Kashmir.My job as a news photographer has taken me to different places and diverse situations - safe, peaceful, violent and dangerous. But after the 2008 uprising, now known as Kashmir's second Intifada, my job led me to a place where death comes easily - the frontlines of a new form of resistance in Kashmir, the 'war of stones'.

This appallingly disproportionate war entered its bloodiest phase during the summer of 2010, when it consumed more than 100 young lives. Kashmir's streets had become the battleground for this war in which young men and children carrying stones in their hands stood in front of armoured vehicles and heavily armed soldiers; eyeball to eyeball. A single hit in the head or chest could leave you on the ground, dead.

Last summer's images of Kashmir often take me back a year to when, in the wake of the Shopian twin rape and murder, the valley was plunged into yet another period of unrest.

The bridge of battleCement Bridge in northern Kashmir's Baramulla town has become one of the symbols of resistance against Indian rule. The local people call it 'the bridge of battle' and some say the angel of death lives there for it has consumed so many young lives - mostly during violent clashes between protesters and paramilitary soldiers.

One day I witnessed this for myself as a child of barely 12 years old lay in my arms, his life slipping away, breath by breath.

It was a rainy afternoon and mild clashes were taking place between protesters and paramilitary forces. I was sat some 100 metres away from the bridge looking through photographs on my camera's LCD. Suddenly I heard a rumble of gunfire followed by loud shouts. I saw three or four youth coming towards me carrying an injured boy, his blood leaving a trail on the ground behind them. I ran towards them and took the blood-drenched, half dead child in my lap, pleading with the people around us to call an ambulance.

Nearly a dozen desperate young boys formed a ring around us, each suggesting ways of saving his life. But I knew he was not going to make it. The bullet that had pierced the left side of his chest had left a gaping wound.

He lay in my arms, blood oozing from his mouth. I felt choked but tried to smile as I told him he was going to be alright. He smiled back, perhaps in disappointment, for he knew I was lying. Tears welled up in my eyes but I looked up at the sky as I tried to stop them from falling. I did not want my eyes to convey that his death was near, very near.

The second time I looked up at the sky to hold back my tears, I felt a freezing numbness in his body. His smile had turned into a ghastly stare. He was dead. Hundreds had already gathered, shouting 'Shaheed ki jo mout hai, Woh qaum ki hayat hai' - meaning 'the death of a martyr is life for a nation'.

I did not know him or his name. But before he was taken away, he was able to rest in peace in my arms for a moment. This must be the peace India keeps talking about, I thought.

Death of innocence, birth of defianceI wanted to scream. I wanted to throw stones. Not one, not two, but millions of them. But, apart from clenching my teeth, I could do nothing. With the burden of journalism hanging around my neck, I felt powerless. It was dangerous for a journalist to take sides, I had been told.

By now the battleground had been deserted; no one dared face the soldiers in case they should open fire again. But just a few minutes later a small child appeared as if from nowhere. He ran towards the paramilitaries throwing stones at their armoured vehicle, seemingly without worry about being chased, beaten, arrested or shot. I overheard somebody say that the stone-throwing boy had been a schoolmate of the one who had just died in my arms.

In those few moments I had simultaneously witnessed the death of innocence and the birth of defiance. Here was a child challenging a mighty state with just a stone in his hand. That is when I shot this image and left the spot with the dead boy's blood on my clothes.

Every night I would dream of the boy who died in my arms and think of revenge. I felt restless whenever the image of his lifeless face appeared before my eyes. And I would stare at the picture of his stone-throwing schoolmate for hours; the boy's defiance seemed to represent my emotions. The more I looked at it, the more it seemed to convey.

In his act, I could feel a blatant rejection of the lies imposed upon these children. Through every pebble he tossed at the bulletproof vehicle, he seemed to be saying: "Look, I am in front of your gun barrel for a purpose, and by choice. I am not an accidental revolutionary getting paid for every stone I throw, neither am I a misguided puppet as the world is made to believe. I am not a suicidal maniac either, obsessed with coming out of this dreadful game of death as a martyr. I am here demanding a different life - a life where the land I belong to exists as a nation on the map of the world; where I do not live and die with an uncertain identity. A life where there are no bunkers, no checkpoints and no barriers of coiled razor wire; where I am not greeted by gun-wielding soldiers on my way to school; where my parents are not humiliated every day; where my tiffin box and school bag are not searched for weapons; where I am not killed in a playground with a cricket ball still in my hand; and where I am not thrown into the shadows of despair and frustration."

Ultimately, thus, he became my hero, my Faris Odeh.

A bullet for a stone For youngsters like him, throwing stones expresses the anger they have long been harbouring against those they see as usurpers of their land. It is their way of knowing and identifying with the problems of their homeland. It becomes an antidote to the horrors they have suffered ever since they were born; horrors which nurture an early political awareness, making them more rebellious than my own generation born during the 1980s.

I remember how, during the early 1990s when I was I child, my parents never allowed me to take part in anti-India demonstrations for fear that would mean not returning home alive. In those days, government forces would often fire indiscriminately upon demonstrators. 

After the deaths of my brother and teenage cousin, my parents would warn me that the family could not afford another martyr. But I would ignore their warnings, wearing slippers on my hands to escape quietly via back windows, to go and join the demonstrations. But I never pelted stones. In the presence of the gun it seemed such a futile and dangerous pastime.

Two decades on, what I have found is an immense transformation or rather an intensification of almost everything - of the anger felt and the methods of resistance employed. Back then it was a bullet for a bullet; now it is a bullet for a stone. Then parents would prevent their children from joining the protests, now they encourage them. They have no other choice; they cannot see their children cocooned into a political breathlessness. This political suffocation has turned everyone into a rebel. And I am no exception.

In August 2010, I was covering a demonstration in Baramulla organised to protest against recent killings. The procession, which included hundreds of elderly men and children, was so large that its head and tail were almost half a kilometre apart. The boys were advised by their elders to be peaceful and disciplined and they obeyed.

When the procession reached the Cement Bridge, the protesters found that a bevy of policemen and paramilitary soldiers sitting strategically in packed rows, shoulder to shoulder, had blocked their way.

Behind them stood a couple of armoured vehicles with menacing multi-barrel teargas launchers on top. The protesters stopped nearly 30 feet away from the airtight barrier of uniformed men and sat down peacefully for they knew they would not be allowed to proceed further. On the other side, the soldiers looked intently through their translucent shields at the slogan-raising protesters.

Suddenly, I heard a deafening bang, then two, then three until there was complete confusion. I could see a barrage of stun grenades and teargas canisters flying over my head. Then I heard the sound of gunfire.

Everyone ran, coughing. I also ran with my eyes closed and my hands covering the back of my head to prevent it from being hit by a teargas shell. Crying children, shouting people and thousands of pounding feet created chaos. With my throat stinging from the smoke and my eyes still closed, I thought of a news anchor who, on an Indian news channel the night before, had said: "The security forces only fire in self-defence. If they don't, they could be lynched by the frenzied mob." 

I felt a rage building up inside me against not only the soldiers but the TV news anchor as well. With my eyes half shut, I could faintly see a dense fog of teargas smoke and anger. Some of the elderly protesters and a few children had collapsed on the ground and the whole situation had developed into a confrontation with hundreds of protesters, young and old, throwing stones at the paramilitaries.Haunted by the hellish images of Kashmir

The moment I opened my eyes fully, I found myself at the exact spot where, a year before, the wounded boy had died in my arms. I felt breathless as I thought of him. I remembered his smile and his frail, blood-drenched body.

I remembered all the pictures, thousands of them, I had taken of dead children, wailing mothers, humiliated fathers and destroyed homes - the pictures which had been haunting me for years. Kashmir's hellish images seemed to follow me - like the macabre image of a father being showered with kicks and blows as he tried to protect his dead son's body from being desecrated.

I also remembered the last kiss my brother gave me just days before he was killed and my teenage cousin who was shot dead at the same place during a protest 20 years earlier. I remembered the pain and bloodshed of my people. Each image flashed before my eyes and I felt angry, really angry. I did not want to live with this anger forever.

The journalist in me tried to calm my emotions down. Words like unbiased, neutrality and objectivity passed through my mind. But the rage I felt overwhelmed them. By being merely a witness to the events around me, I felt I was being the most subjective person on earth. It seemed the worst degree of partiality, almost a crime. The most valuable lesson of being neutral that I had been taught as a journalism student seemed so ridiculous here. I remembered the journalist in the Oscar-winning Bosnian film No Man's Land, saying: "Neutrality does not exist in the face of murder. Doing nothing to stop it is, in fact, choosing, [it] is not being neutral."

I looked around and took the most edgy stone I could find in my hand. It felt firm and satisfying. I held it in my hand - a piece of solid joy, not a dream. Proceeding to throw it at what Kashmiris see as the symbols of occupation, I stood at the same spot where the boy is seen in my picture. I confess I felt completely transformed - from an emasculated snap-shooter into a man of stone.

I deliberately aimed my stone at a bulletproof armoured vehicle. I did not want to harm a soldier. I just wanted to give an expression to my rage and to keep alive in me, what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, called the "disease of hope".

Then I picked up more stones and threw them. It was not a futile pastime anymore. Here I was amidst my own people and emotions; away from the platitude of false rhetoric, the impotence of political handshakes and the sterility of dialogue tables, which I had once believed could lead us out of the shackles of 60 years of political uncertainty.

That day I felt like a hero. Then I thought of the real heroes - hundreds of little Kashmiri children just like the boy in my picture.

Whenever I look at this picture, one thing always comes to my mind - the courage of a stolen childhood and, of course, the pain of a stolen land.

What became of this faceless boy is still a mystery to me. A few hours after I took this picture, someone told me that two more young boys were shot dead later that day, not far from the place where this boy was standing. Since then I have tried hard to trace him but without success. Whether I would be able to find him again or if he too met the fate of Faris Odeh, I do not know.

Showkat Nanda is an award-winning Kashmiri freelance photojournalist.

(C)Kashmir: The forgotten conflict (Aljazeera)

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