[Kashmir is in tumult again. The simmering embers of people's anger at the decades of betrayal of promises and mockery of democracy by New Delhi needed only the spark of brutal CRPF firing on teenagers and children in street protests to ignite it into a raging fire.

The response from the UPA Government has once again been delay and duplicity. PM Manmohan Singh broke his silence on Kashmir after two months of bloodletting on the streets. But he made the same tired announcements of various economic packages – while making any discussion of political autonomy contingent on a 'consensus.'

Meanwhile the street protests continue. Why are the Valley's youth picking up stones? What is bringing the women pouring out on to the streets? The articles below are attempts to make sense of what is going on in Kashmir today. – Ed/.]

The Politics of Protest in Kashmir

Najeeb Mubarki

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said that the Palestine-Israel conflict was also important in what it revealed about Israeli society, about what Zionism had done to the Jewish psyche. It is, without doubt, in times of extreme stress and conflict that a people, a nation, or just even a political system, both manifests its deepest urges, its driving forces, and its core aspirations.

Taking that piece of historical wisdom, the current strife in Kashmir is, at heart, also about the battle over the content and essence of Indian polity and democracy. Without much hyperbole, India is facing an uprising in Kashmir. Or, at least, the latest outburst in Kashmir’s contemporary narrative of rage and resistance.

And, like before, like always, the state has so far responded with brute force. The sole departure from the past being that both the sheer intensity of the protests and the exceptional brutality of the response — given that it is mostly children and teenagers who have been gunned down — seems to have taken even certain sections within Indian society by surprise.

The big question, however, is whether New Delhi realises that something new, a potent political challenge, has arisen in Kashmir, and whether the response now will be political or, in continuing mutilation of Indian democratic principles, purely based on disciplining and punishing Kashmiris.

For that, in effect, is what the situation is on the ground. If one were to take the eruption of the militancy in 1989 as the starting point, through the years of the armed forces re-establishing and asserting their supremacy, and the gradual shifting of Kashmiri resistance on to a political terrain, New Delhi’s overall response could well be termed one of the longest pacification campaigns of the century.

But that has certainly not lessened the political reality, the political problem, which lies at the heart of the Kashmir issue and is one of the main reasons for the emergence of the phenomenon of an intifada-like situation in the Valley. Indeed, recent events have highlighted the limitations and sheer myopia of total and utter reliance on force to deal with protests in Kashmir.

Despite the presence of overwhelming force and coercion, Kashmiri protestors persevered. This not only threw the state government into crisis, but also forced a virtual closing of ranks among the separatist leadership, while firmly bringing back the sentiment for azadi centrestage.

Now that that slogan is once again the main rallying cry in the Valley, New Delhi must ponder just what two decades of a massive counter-insurgency effort has yielded.

Of course, the protests have an immediate catalyst. The unabated killing of civilians has been fuelling the rage in the streets on a day-to-day basis. And it’s not even as if bullets and teargas canisters aimed at the upper part of the body are the sole methods of causing fatalities.

A few days ago, a seven-year-old boy was bludgeoned to death by the police and paramilitary forces in Srinagar — literally pulped to death by lathis and rifle butts. Faced with that sort of savagery, with not much by way of condemnation or concern expressed by Indian civil society at large — leave alone a state government seen as the instrument of a wider policy to curb protests and dissent at all costs — vast sections of Kashmiris seem to have relapsed into a firm belief that only by continuing such protests, despite the enormously high costs entailed, can they force some sort of political breakthrough.

That desperate thinking and situation is also a manifestation of a wider failure to actually try and comprehend contemporary Kashmir. The security paradigm in the state operates on the principle of force and fear, the belief that a Kashmiri can neither understand any other language nor be controlled by any other means.

This wholly negates or prevents the state from realising that the years of strife and violence have bred a generation of Kashmiris that is politically aware, conscious of the rupture between the state’s discourse of rights and citizenship and the daily violence and denial of those rights in their own lives.

This generation, weaned on a constant state of violence, also seems to have internalised it, and somewhat transcended the elementary fear it normally generates. Their desperate fight, as it were, isn’t merely against that violence. The stone-pelting isn’t just a reaction to the structural violence that permeates their lives.

The protests aren’t only about staking claim to the rights that a professedly democratic entity offers its citizens. Rather, they are also about the deep-rooted desire of the Kashmiris for a resolution, a political resolution, for their long-festering problems.

The protests are also about resisting the obfuscations, the dissembling that accompanies the denial of that political reality in Kashmir. The new generation of Kashmiris is perfectly aware of how official narratives, ably assisted by an overtly nationalistic media, twist and distort their realities, of how there is a constant delegitimisation of the causes, means and forms of expression of their political reality.

For them, the insanity of the police or the CRPF repeatedly, day after day, shooting to kill — even as the most basic of security doctrines and methodologies would aver that the sort of protests seen in Kashmir do not warrant firing bullets — isn’t some temporary, aberrant reaction.

Rather, it is seen as the official, sanctioned, and thought-out reaction by a state out to wholly suppress them. That awareness or line of thinking has also peculiarly, though not un-understandably, led to a stiffening and hardening of their will to resist.

Given all that, it is a moot point whether the strife and violence in Kashmir will end. It certainly may happen, given the overwhelming nature of the security apparatus, that the protests are quelled for now. But that will again prove a temporary measure, an enforced peace waiting for the next event to rupture it again.

Any incipient moves to break this cycle also cannot realistically emerge from Kashmir. That responsibility lies primarily with the state. With the elements within the political class which, aware of the depth of the problem, might genuinely seek a political resolution, some form of a dialogue.

Elements who realise the mutilation of democracy of the very fabric of Indian society that is entailed in using such force upon a population. The results of a genuine effort on that front might be surprising.

For, one of the best-kept secrets is that were such a process to emerge, with real intent, the average Kashmiri would probably prove to be far more flexible in seeking political solutions than what the images of an enraged mob suggest.

(Najeeb Mubarki is a journalist with The Economic Times in Delhi. This piece appeared in ET, August 6, 2010)

End of the Road for Military Occupation?

Parvaiz Bukhari

Before the latest wave of intense mass protests and killings was triggered across Kashmir, a youth narrating his horrifying story of being a witness to state brutality said “Kashmir mein izzat se zinda rehna hai to India se ladtay rehna hai (Living honourably in Kashmir means keep resisting India)”. Echoing the most common sentiment in Kashmir today, he said it was not possible to imagine a life of dignity as a part of India.

Imagine this sentiment continuously confronted with the presence of five lakh soldiers and a large police force that knows nothing except fighting armed militants. (Of whom there are only a few left in Kashmir.) So, pent up anger is a constant backdrop to any act of resistance in the valley. The temperature of this anger began rising early this year when BSF soldiers killed a school boy. It was followed by the killing near the LoC of three young men from Nadihal village of Baramula who were passed off by the army as terrorists engaged while crossing over from Pakistan.

Such memories are common lore in Kashmir where an estimated 70,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed in the last twenty years. On June 11, this summer, residents of Chota Bazzar locality in old town Srinagar planned a protest demonstration against the massacre of 28 civilians seventeen years earlier in CRPF firing. As usual, authorities locked down the area. As happens in such pressure situations, protests broke out in the neighbouring areas. In their attempts to contain the situation, police killed a school boy with a teargas shell fired at his head from close and later claimed that some ‘miscreants’ murdered him to create disturbance.

This familiar mix of brutality and deception stood in contrast to government claims of normalcy and democracy taking root in Kashmir. This time government denial of the reality and the attempted deception crossed the threshold of patience in Kashmir sending the valley into a vortex of anger and death.

The situation has since gone almost out of control leaving 57 people, mostly protesting youth, killed in police and CRPF action. Hundreds are still nursing their bullet wounds in hospitals. On August 11, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finally broke his silence over the situation he appeared as unwilling to change anything on the ground as New Delhi has always been. Apart from his usual approach of economic empowerment as a panacea for all problems, the PM again advocated dialogue but only for removing the perception (Ehsaas) of the status quo that has become unbearable for an average Kashmiri.

“Jammu Kashmir ke masloon ke liye ek aisa hal zarrori hai jo logun ke alahdigi ke ahsaas ko door kar sakey (Issues related to Jammu and Kashmir need such a solution that removes the feeling of separatism)”. The PM spoke in Urdu, a language widely understood in Kashmir. Military commanders in charge of Kashmir call it ‘perception management’.

The PM’s acknowledgement of the fact that people of Kashmir are making a bid for a future separate from that of the Indian Union, coupled with his inability to advance a political initiative, exposes the reality. To the people of Kashmir it meant that they will be kept under the jackboot till the ‘ehsaas’ of “alahdigi” (read Azadi) is given up or it fizzles out.

Understandably, the PM’s televised address to the nation had no effect in Kashmir. The next day the valley remained under curfew and restrictions. Protests continued in Srinagar and other places leaving many injured. Six more people have since been killed when government forces fired to quell protests.

The mood in the valley remains that of defiance. Protesters direct their anger at the symbols of the governing system generally perceived by Kashmiris as incapable of delivering justice. An assessment of the depth of this anger has already overstretched the local police as the cutting edge of the system that has controlled the rebellious population for two decades. It is now showing signs of crumbling under its own weight as the main tool of governing Kashmir. So much so that the PM in his address to the nation, realizing the moral challenge they face from a hostile population, asked the state government to take steps for protecting families of police personnel in the valley.

The PM said “There are elements that are trying to weaken the resolve of the J&K Police and trying to undermine their lawful efforts. I urge the State Government to take effective action to protect its policemen and their families.”

Caught in this grave situation, chief minister Omar Abdullah has become almost irrelevant. He has vacillated between using a language of reconciliation in his appeals for calm while in Kashmir, and sounding tough after meeting the Prime Minister in New Delhi. But he does not appear to be in a position to defend Kashmiri people from a position of moral strength as he called for more central forces to quell the unrest.

From the Chief Minister to the Prime Minister, everyone in the country is worried about the morale of security forces that remain the only instruments of control in Kashmir. Is it the end of politics in Kashmir or the irrefutability of what Kashmiri people call a ‘military occupation’?

A question Kashmir poses today to the largest democracy in the world.

(Parvaiz Bukhari is a journalist based in Srinagar.)

Age of the Stone Wars in Kashmir

Najeeb Mubarki

Insanity, Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Apply that to Kashmir, and one doesn’t need to be an Einstein to figure out that he had got the equation right, again.

Leave, for argument’s sake, the baggage of history — of events from 1947: the accession, New Delhi’s political machinations, dismissed governments and rigged elections to the eruption of insurgency in 1989 — alone for a moment.

Let us assume, for that moment, that there is utter veracity in the official narrative that but for a few elements, who are being discredited, peace and harmony would be restored in the Valley. Add the fact that armed militancy has been curbed significantly and a regime, elected via a surprisingly well-attended electoral exercise, is in charge.

Add also the statements emanating from the top echelons of both the central and state governments that there will be zero tolerance for human rights abuses. Given all that, if not perfect, things surely should have been better.

So why did the patent insanity of the last few days occur? Why does it happen repeatedly? Why did, day after day, the police and the CRPF shoot dead youngsters who were out protesting, rioting, against the deaths of the day before?

Most Kashmiris would answer that it is because they are under occupation, that the security forces behave as they do, use brute force, as they are the most acute and clear manifestation of the state people are alienated from and resisting. Or, at least, that Kashmiris live in a police state, where, literally, the law allows and supports torture, imprisonment and killings.

Official narrative, of course, invokes the Pak-sponsored terrorism theme. That, somehow, everything that doesn’t go according to plan in Kashmir has its roots across the border. The broadest answer as to why those killings took place is that there is a denial of political reality. That, leaving Pakistan out entirely, New Delhi refuses to recognise and engage with the fact that it faces a political crisis in Kashmir.

Of course, elections were held, a democratic process seemingly restarted. But the mistake is to ignore both the deep roots of separatism and the complexity of political consciousness in Kashmir that separates issues of immediate governance, after years of debilitating strife, and that of the larger tehreek or ‘movement’.

And the latter, clearly, has transformed. From a belief in armed insurgency, with the gradual realisation that it did not achieve its desired goals, to an incipient rights-and-protest based phase. And hartals, strikes and stone pelting are part of that. Indeed, Kashmir has reverted to an older form of political expression.

So, just who are these stonethrowers? Just why are youngsters again and again coming out to pelt stones, even when they know they might be thrashed, detained or plain killed (as someone said, employing some Kashmiri black humour, the ages of those killed in the last few days, 17, 16, 14…9, read like the scores of a batsman in really bad form)?

The first thing to understand is that this is a generation that has seen and knows nothing else but violence. In a place steeped in political violence and brutal force, they are also a generation perhaps more politicised than those before.

And that is why they also represent, though it may come as a surprise, both an awareness of the failure of the separatist leadership as well as the apparent lack of need to have any leaders in order to protest. Remember, it isn’t just the government that thinks them dangerous, many among the separatist leaders do too.

And some have called them everything from miscreants to drug addicts to being Indian agents. But as part of wider Kashmiri society, they are one manifestation of the rage of having suffered incredible violence, of living lives of daily humiliation.

As part of Kashmiri society, they are aware of the doublespeak, the dissembling that is part of the official version of each killing, each act of violence. And they are part, most immediately visible right now, of the dissent against, the political response to, that violence.

The stone throwers are a reminder that there is no way out except engaging with that dissent in Kashmir. That without such an engagement, by only using force again and again, Kashmir will, to borrow the words of the Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky, stay a place where destiny seems to shadow events like a madman with a razor in his hand.

(Excerpted from the article in The Economic Times dated July 2, 2010)

The Last Option: A Stone in Her Hand

Sanjay Kak

On a summer morning this July in Srinagar, teargas from the troubled streets of Batmaloo began to roll into the first-floor home of Fancy Jan. The 24-year-old went to draw the curtains to screen the room from the acrid smoke, her mother told a reporter later, then turned away from the window, and said: "Mummy, maey aaw heartas fire (my heart's taken fire, mummy)". Then she dropped dead, a bullet in her chest, the casual target of an anonymous soldier's rifle. Fancy Jan was not a 'stone-pelter'. She was a bystander, like many of the 50 people killed in last two months. She is not the first woman to be shot by the security forces in 20 years of the troubles. But her random death, almost incomprehensible in the presumed safety of her family's modest home, coincides with a vigorous unsettling of the way women have been represented in this conflict.

Until the other day, Kashmiri women were little more than a convenient set of clichés, shown as perpetual bystanders in houses that overlook the streets of protest. When seen outside of that protected zone, they were cast as victims, wailing mourners, keening at the endless funeral processions. For an occasional frisson there is the daunting image of the severely veiled Asiya Andarabi, chief of the Dukhtaran-e-millat, a women's group whose high media visibility seems inversely proportional to the modest numbers who adhere to their militant Islamic sisterhood. In black from head to toe, Andarabi always makes for good television, her arms and hands concealed in immaculate gloves, only her eyes showing through a slit. For the Indian media her persona insinuates the dark penumbra of Kashmiri protest, signalling the threat of 'hardline' Islam, a ready metaphor for 'what-awaits-Kashmir-if...'

But now an unfamiliar new photograph of the Kashmiri woman has begun to take its place on newspaper front pages. She's dressed in ordinary salwar-kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow. Her head is casually covered with a dupatta and she seems unconcerned about being recognized. She is often middle aged, and could even be middle-class. And she is carrying a stone. A weapon directed at the security forces. Last week, in a vastly under-reported story, a massive crowd stopped two Indian Air Force vehicles on the highway near Srinagar. At the forefront were hundreds of women. The airmen and their families were asked to dismount, and move to the safety of a nearby building. Then the buses were torched. This is not a rare incident: women are everywhere in these troubled times in Kashmir, and not in the places traditionally assigned to them. They are collecting stones and throwing them, and assisting the young men in the front ranks of the protestors to disguise themselves, even helping them escape when the situation gets tough.

The government's narrative of 'miscreants', of anomie and drug-fuelled teenagers working as Rs 200 mercenaries for the Lashkar-e-Toiba, has, meanwhile, started to appear faintly ridiculous. A more reasonable explanation is being proffered to us now: it's anger, we are told, the people of Kashmir are angry at the recent killings, and that's why the women are being drawn in. That is true, but only partially. For this is no ordinary anger, but an old, bottled-up rage, gathered over so many years that it has settled, and turned rock hard. That accumulated fury is the stone in her hand. To not understand this, to fail to reach its source — or fathom its depth — is to be doomed to not understand the character of Kashmir's troubles.

Two events will provide useful bookends for this exercise. In February 1991, there was an assault on Kunan Poshpura village in north Kashmir, where a unit of the Indian Army were accused of raping somewhere between 23 and a hundred women. And then, a troubled 18 years later, the June 2009 rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, south Kashmir. In the case of Kunan Poshpura, bypassing a judicial enquiry, the government called in the Press Council of India to whitewash the incident, allowing its inadequate and ill equipped two-member team to summarily conclude that the charges against the Army were "a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathizers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad". The travesty of the investigations into last year's Shopian incident involved innumerable bungled procedures, and threw up many glaring contradictions, till the government of India roped in the CBI to put a lid on it. They promptly concluded that it was a case of death by drowning. (In a stream with less than a foot of water) The case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations.

In the absence of justice, the space between Kunan Poshpora and Shopian can only be filled with the stories of nearly 7,000 people gone missing, of the 60,000 killed, and the several-hundred-thousand injured and maimed and tortured and psychologically damaged. The men of this society took the brunt of this brutalization. What of the price paid by the women? It's when we begin to come to terms with their decades-long accretion of grief and sorrow, of fear and shame, that we will begin to understand the anger of that woman with the stone in her hand.

The current round of protests will probably die down soon. The mandarins of New Delhi will heave a sigh of relief, tell us that everything is normal, and turn their attentions to something else. But only their hubris could blind them from noticing what we have all seen this summer in Kashmir. This is not ordinary anger. It's an incandescent fury that effaces fear. That should worry those who seek to control Kashmir.

(Sanjay Kak is a documentary filmmaker, director of the 2007 film on Kashmir, 'Jashn-e-Azadi'. The article above appeared in the TOI dated August 8, 2010.)

National Day of Solidarity with Kashmiri People

On 20 August 2010, in keeping with a resolution adopted at its founding Convention, the All India Left Coordination (AILC) comprising the CPI(ML) Liberation, the CPM Punjab, the Lal Nishan Party (Leninist) Maharashtra and the Left Coordination Committee Kerala, observed the National Day of Solidarity with Kashmiri People in various important centers of the country. Through protest marches, dharnas and demonstrations left activists across the country declared a strong message of solidarity to the struggling people of Kashmir and determination to sensitise and mobilize struggling people in India on the question of the repeated betrayals and daily brutalities perpetrated by the Indian state against the people of Kashmir.

In the national capital, a solidarity dharna was organised at Jantar Mantar which was attended by a large number of students, workers, activists and democratic individuals. Addressing the dharna, Dipankar Bhattacharya, General Secretary of CPI(ML), condemned the stubborn continuation of a policy of repression of mass demonstrations and the attempt to deny the authenticity of the Kashmiris’ outrage and protests. He asserted that nowhere can unity be achieved at gun point or under the army jackboot and added, “In Kashmir the much-touted economic packages cannot assuage the sense of alienation, and are no substitute for addressing the political demands and aspirations for justice and dignity of the people of Kashmir.” The Solidarity Dharna was also attended and addressed by CPI(ML) Central committee members Kavita Krishnan, Prabhat Kumar, Delhi State Secretary Sanjay Sharma, AICCTU leader Rajiv Dimri, JNU Student leader Sucheta De, AICCTU leaders Satvir Shramik and NM Thomas, film maker Sanjay Kak and others.

The National Day of Solidarity with Kashmiri People was observed in 12 different districts of Punjab including Mansa, Sangroor, Bathinda, Chandigarh, Raikot (Ludhiana),Nangal (Ropar), Rahon, Mukandpur (Navan Shehar), Tarntarn, Gurdaspur, Ajnala, Raiya (Amritsar), Mahetpur (Jalandhar), and Mukerian (Hoshiarpur). Main speakers at different places were Rajwinder Rana, Sukhdarshan Natt, Kanwaljeet, Harbhagwan Bhikhi, Iqbal Kaur Udasi, Harmeet Smagh (of CPIML-Liberation) and Mangat Ram Pasla, Harkanwal Singh, Raghveer Singh, Gurnam Dawood, and Rattan Singh Randhawa (of CPM-Punjab) and others. In Assam, the effigy of Chidambaram was burnt in several parts of the state.

In Pune, a public meeting was organized by Lal Nishan Party (Leninist) which saw enthusiastic participation of workers, students and intellectuals. Among others Com. B.J. Kerkar of Lal Nishan Party( Leninist) spoke at the meeting. In Mumbai, CPI(ML) and Lal Nishan Party held a public meeting at Dadar and have planned to hold a dharna for Kashmir at Churchgate on 25 August.

In Bihar, solidarity marches were organized in 20 districts including Ara, Patna, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Purnea, Sasaram, and Kaimur. In Jharkhand, seminars were held at Bagodar and Deoghar, and protest marches and mass meetings were held in Giridih town, Ranchi, Gumla, Dumka and Hazaribagh.

In UP, CPI(ML) organized solidarity marches and mass meetings across the state at Lucknow, Varanasi, Kanpur, Gajipur, Mughalsarai, Chandauli, Jalon, Allahabad and Ballia.

In Uttarakhand CPI(ML) along with AISA held protest demonstrations and effigy burning of the UPA Government at Pithoragarh, Dehradun and Haldwani.

At Gangavati in Karnataka, CPIML protestors burnt the effigy of the central and the Kashmir state governments. Basavaraj Soolebavi of Karnataka Souharada Vedike, Virupaksha of AICCTU and Peer Pasha, a noted left intellectual addressed the gathering. A memorandum was submitted to the Tahsildar at HDKote taluk in Mysore district.

In Andhra Pradesh, a dharna was held at the Kakinada collectorate in which 200 people participated; at Vijayawada a padayatra from Gandhinagar to the sub-collector's office culminated in a dharna; at Narsipatnam of Visakha district, a dharna was held at the Revenue divisional office.

In Tamil Nadu, solidarity programmes were held at Tirunelveli, Thanjavur, Pudukottai, and Chennai along with poster campaigns and distribution of 10,000 leaflets in many districts. In Puducherry, RSP, Forward Bloc state leaders too participated in CPI(ML)’s solidarity programme.