Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak

      This article first appeared as ‘Days in Srinagar’ on the website http://www.outlookindia.com, 6 August 2010.

       What Are Kashmir’s Stone-pelters Saying to Us?

       Sanjay Kak

      Like an obstinate nightmare, Kashmir has returned to haunt India’s political discourse in this third consecutive summer of massive protests. For almost two months now we are witnessing the brazen courage of Kashmiri youth, armed with stones in their hands, in groups of no more than a few hundred at a time, taking on Kashmir’s much vaunted ‘security grid’. This carefully welded network deploys at least 6,00,000 soldiers in uniform, and another 1,00,000 ‘civilian’ intelligence and surveillance operatives. But pinned down by this summer’s showers of carefully aimed rocks, the grid has begun to appear clumsy and vulnerable.

      As the sang-bazan, the stone-pelters, insolently stormed into prime time, they brought with them an intensity that made the newspaper pundits, and the usual chorus of television-studio experts, briefly wilt. Images of boys as young as nine and ten being dragged off into police vehicles, or shot dead by the paramilitary forces, have begun to dent conventional truisms about what is happening in Kashmir. Startling photographs of middle-aged (and middle-class) women in the ranks of the stone-pelting protesters have also destabilized those who have allowed a morbid panic of the ‘Islamists’, or the fear of Pakistan’s venality, to obscure their understanding of events in the Valley. Although reluctant to grant this uprising the same political pedigree, at least some Indians seem to be curling their tongues around the word intifada. On the whole, the David and Goliath disproportion of the protests, and its sheer effrontery, has begun to capture the imagination of a growing number of people in India.

      So beyond their furious defiance, what are Kashmir’s stone-pelters saying to us?

      As a Kashmiri who has mostly lived outside the Valley, my engagement with its troubles began quite recently, in 2003, when I returned to Srinagar after a gap of fourteen years. These intervening years were witness to the tumultuous history of the present movement—the tehreek—and were accompanied by massive militarization. It had ended in a virtual deadlock: a restive population, locked down by a gargantuan military presence, in what Kashmiris call the ‘occupation’ of the Valley.

      The year 2003 turned out to be significant, partly because it gave the first indications that armed militancy might be on its way out. From a peak figure of almost 30,000 militants in the early 1990s, security forces had dropped their estimates to less than 2,000 active fighters. Typically, and well before anyone could understand what lay behind the ratcheting down of the armed struggle, the government claimed credit for ‘breaking the back’ of the armed struggle, and trumpeted the return of ‘normalcy’. Unorthodox parameters were used to buttress the claim to normalcy: tourism department estimates of tourist arrivals, and the headcount of pilgrims headed for the annual yatra to the Amarnath shrine. There was no acknowledgement that tourists and pilgrims were moving along sheltered corridors, tightly controlled by the security forces, and that these had little connection with the everyday lives of Kashmiris. The understandable enthusiasm of pony-men on the pilgrimage route, and shikara-walas and houseboat owners on the Dal Lake, were presented as the turning of the tide against the tehreek. And for? Well, if not for India, then it was seen as turning towards something called Peace. This was a ‘normalcy’ confected for visitors, not for the vast majority of people in Kashmir.

      As the state government quixotically launched road shows to bring Bollywood producers back to the sylvan slopes of Gulmarg, Kashmiris seemed preoccupied with picking up on other parts of their lives. For the first time in over fifteen years, they too were coming up with a set of numbers, not so much to plumb the peace, but to help configure their abnormal past, and consign their losses to a respectful memory. A dogged survey by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society was providing early indicators: 60,000 people killed, and almost 7,000 ‘missing’ in fifteen years. No one had gotten down to counting the men and women injured and maimed in the thousands of incidents of firing; nor had reliable estimates been made of those molested or raped. Interrogation and torture—words used interchangeably in Kashmir—had run their brutal, bloodied hands over several hundred thousand people it was said, but these were only whispered estimates.

      They make a desolation, and call it peace, Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri poet, has written.

      In 2003, I was in the Valley with twin identities, Kashmiri and Indian. As a Kashmiri, in place of the promised ‘normalcy’ I could only sense a deeply traumatized society, and one fearful of its own recent past. Not defeated perhaps, but in some inchoate way, overwhelmed. As an Indian, I was acutely disturbed by what I saw, and could see something with far-reaching consequences for India brewing in those troubles. Even today, the sharpest memories of that visit are those that bridge my two disparate identities.

      The strongest is always the militarization. However prepared you are for the presence of uniforms and guns; actually facing them, and living with them, is much harder, even for the casual visitor. From the aircraft window, you see soldiers with automatic weapons on the tarmac; outside, dozens of vehicle-mounted machine guns wait to ‘escort’ the convoys of dignitaries. The streets are endlessly lined with heavily armed soldiers, and roundabouts throw up the unsettling sight of traffic policemen who carry AK-47s. And then the bunkers: everywhere, but most galling when they turn up at both ends of the lane in which you live. Even without a secessionist bone in your body, so many guns can never stand for anything but intimidation.

      The second is a compelling sense of the breakdown of the institutions of democratic governance. For a people bruised and battered by fifteen years of an armed struggle, every single mechanism by which they could find representation, or hope to be heard, or access minimal justice, had been dismantled and put away. Elections, the judicial process, the rule of law: all had been hollowed out. In their place we had the draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and the Public Safety Act (PSA). Despite the fact that an elected legislature was in place, real power was widely regarded as lodged in three specific sites: Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s cantonment, where the corps headquarters of the Indian Army are located; Gupkar Road, where a slew of Indian intelligence agencies are based; and Raj Bhawan, formerly the maharaja’s palace, now the governor’s home. (Kashmiris don’t fail to make the obvious connection that all three sites are implicated in a century of highly oppressive rule by the Dogra maharajas.) Outside of Srinagar, for those living in the qasba and the small town, the real face of power was clearer, and usually signposted in the middle of the main street. ‘Town Commander’, the modest tin boards said. Lettered in just below, the name and phone number of a major of the Indian Army.

      The third revelation centred on the national media. What was reported seemed so far removed from the reality unfolding on the ground here that it was not long before an acute sense of disorientation began to settle in, a feeling of being lied to, and manipulated. Unlike the ongoing conflict in Manipur, or earlier, in Nagaland, which are shrouded in silence, Kashmir was regularly covered by the mainstream Indian press. There was a large contingent of reporters covering Kashmir for the Indian media, and there were a surprising number of local newspapers and magazines. But this