Kashmir’s killing fields
What is happening in the Indian Held Kashmir today is a classic case of the failure of India’s so-called democracy
The writer served as Executive Editor of The Express Tribune from 2009 to 2014
What is happening in the Indian Held Kashmir (IHK) today is a classic case of the failure of India’s so-called democracy. No true democracy would have failed to win, in 70 long years, the hearts and minds of a handful of people seeking their fundamental right to self-determine their political, economic and social fate.
Instead of letting the IHK people self-determine how they would like to live, New Delhi in fact has kept on depriving them by degrees the level of independence India’s Constitution had granted them under Article 370. Today the IHK is being treated by New Delhi as its colony forcibly occupied by armed- to- teeth Indian troops numbering perhaps nearly 700,000.
Indian journalist Sandeep Bamzai — visiting Fellow at India’s Overseas Research Foundation — in one his recent columns (Imperiled Kashmir) has drawn a bone chilling picture of IHK’s occupation: The (Indian) Army has a grid that functions like a concentric circle right across the Valley starting from the LoC right into the innards of Srinagar city. There are over 300,000 Army soldiers both along the border and for counter insurgency operations in Kashmir Valley. While the northern army command is based in Udhampur, there are three Corps — 14 (Leh), 15 (Srinagar), 16 (Nagrota), with around 60,000 troops each. They are on the outer periphery of the concentric circle as it winds inwards. Add to this the counter terrorist force — Rashtriya Rifles, drawn from the ‘ghatak’ platoons of the Army which has 62 battalions.
What is baffling is that the Indian Army, according to Sandeep, which has redrawn Kashmir boundaries into tight concentric circles for better vigil and management, thereby exercising better control, is suddenly facing a brand new threat percept.
“Using the old tactic of Fedayeen attacks, they are now targeting vulnerable and high visibility military and Para military convoys, choosing the locations with precision and deflating morale by exacting high number of casualties. This new stratagem of real, deadly, dangerous and persistent attacks has the security grid in a twist. Dovetailed with the mass uprisings of 2008 and 2010 in the form and shape of the Intifada have altered the discourse somewhat amongst the dissatisfied youth, yearning for a better life.”
In a recent NDTV commentary (Why Kashmir needs a touch of Vajpayee’s ‘insaniyet’) Mihir Sharma, another Indian journalist, Distinguished Fellow at ORF, says that the ‘eruption’ has been coming for some time. “New Delhi largely wasted a decade of uneasy quiet, imagining that it meant that peace had returned to the Valley, and in the years since 2008, as anger has built up, it has shown itself bereft of any ideas other than those that it used to quell militancy in the 1990s. Vajpayee’s new beginning, when he promised to treat Kashmir with “insaniyat”, has been betrayed by New Delhi’s complacency.
“As the Valley’s mourning of Wani’s death shows, New Delhi has been fooling itself if it thinks Kashmir is moving towards “normalcy” — or that it is edging towards acceptance of its place within the Indian state. The wounds of the 1990s were deep; the state was angry, but it needed time to recover. Yet those wounds stayed open, and so the state stayed angry. In fact, a whole new generation arrived, even angrier, and radicalized itself on Facebook.
“Kashmir is not going to be normal while it is the most militarized part of the world, with one soldier for every 15 or so residents. It is not going to be a normal Indian state while basic Indian rights are suspended, and those omnipresent soldiers know they are above the laws that constrain them in the “mainland”. It is not going to be normal, or even slightly Indian, till the state holds itself accountable for its actions, the way it would in other parts of India.”
Manoj Joshi another Indian journalist writing ( Kashmir: Government need to do more than slogans) in Scroll In says: “Like it or not, a resolution of the Kashmir issue requires a settlement between India and Pakistan as well as the Union government and the State. On both these tracks there has been some progress in the past, but at present there seems to be a stasis. This does not make for a particularly happy situation — and things are being allowed to drift once again.”
Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2016.
Instead of letting the IHK people self-determine how they would like to live, New Delhi in fact has kept on depriving them by degrees the level of independence India’s Constitution had granted them under Article 370. Today the IHK is being treated by New Delhi as its colony forcibly occupied by armed- to- teeth Indian troops numbering perhaps nearly 700,000.
Indian journalist Sandeep Bamzai — visiting Fellow at India’s Overseas Research Foundation — in one his recent columns (Imperiled Kashmir) has drawn a bone chilling picture of IHK’s occupation: The (Indian) Army has a grid that functions like a concentric circle right across the Valley starting from the LoC right into the innards of Srinagar city. There are over 300,000 Army soldiers both along the border and for counter insurgency operations in Kashmir Valley. While the northern army command is based in Udhampur, there are three Corps — 14 (Leh), 15 (Srinagar), 16 (Nagrota), with around 60,000 troops each. They are on the outer periphery of the concentric circle as it winds inwards. Add to this the counter terrorist force — Rashtriya Rifles, drawn from the ‘ghatak’ platoons of the Army which has 62 battalions.
What is baffling is that the Indian Army, according to Sandeep, which has redrawn Kashmir boundaries into tight concentric circles for better vigil and management, thereby exercising better control, is suddenly facing a brand new threat percept.
“Using the old tactic of Fedayeen attacks, they are now targeting vulnerable and high visibility military and Para military convoys, choosing the locations with precision and deflating morale by exacting high number of casualties. This new stratagem of real, deadly, dangerous and persistent attacks has the security grid in a twist. Dovetailed with the mass uprisings of 2008 and 2010 in the form and shape of the Intifada have altered the discourse somewhat amongst the dissatisfied youth, yearning for a better life.”
In a recent NDTV commentary (Why Kashmir needs a touch of Vajpayee’s ‘insaniyet’) Mihir Sharma, another Indian journalist, Distinguished Fellow at ORF, says that the ‘eruption’ has been coming for some time. “New Delhi largely wasted a decade of uneasy quiet, imagining that it meant that peace had returned to the Valley, and in the years since 2008, as anger has built up, it has shown itself bereft of any ideas other than those that it used to quell militancy in the 1990s. Vajpayee’s new beginning, when he promised to treat Kashmir with “insaniyat”, has been betrayed by New Delhi’s complacency.
“As the Valley’s mourning of Wani’s death shows, New Delhi has been fooling itself if it thinks Kashmir is moving towards “normalcy” — or that it is edging towards acceptance of its place within the Indian state. The wounds of the 1990s were deep; the state was angry, but it needed time to recover. Yet those wounds stayed open, and so the state stayed angry. In fact, a whole new generation arrived, even angrier, and radicalized itself on Facebook.
“Kashmir is not going to be normal while it is the most militarized part of the world, with one soldier for every 15 or so residents. It is not going to be a normal Indian state while basic Indian rights are suspended, and those omnipresent soldiers know they are above the laws that constrain them in the “mainland”. It is not going to be normal, or even slightly Indian, till the state holds itself accountable for its actions, the way it would in other parts of India.”
Manoj Joshi another Indian journalist writing ( Kashmir: Government need to do more than slogans) in Scroll In says: “Like it or not, a resolution of the Kashmir issue requires a settlement between India and Pakistan as well as the Union government and the State. On both these tracks there has been some progress in the past, but at present there seems to be a stasis. This does not make for a particularly happy situation — and things are being allowed to drift once again.”
Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2016.