THE intractability of India’s and Pakistan’s competing policies on Kashmir was evident last autumn, as the respective foreign ministers parroted inflexible national positions at the United Nations General Assembly session. After several years of quietude, Pakistan renewed its call for a UN-mandated plebiscite, which would give Kashmiris the option of choosing between India and Pakistan as their home nation.

‘The Jammu and Kashmir dispute is about the exercise of the right to self-determination by the Kashmiri people through a free, fair and impartial plebiscite under UN auspices. Pakistan views the prevailing situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir with grave concern,’ Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in his recent address.

India responded by calling off any potential meeting between Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart, with Krishna retorting: ‘Jammu and Kashmir, which is an integral part of India, is the target of Pakistan sponsored militancy and terrorism. Pakistan must fulfil its solemn commitment of not allowing territory under its control to be used for terrorism directed against India… Pakistan cannot impart lessons to us on democracy and human rights.’

Far away from the rhetoric in New York, Kashmir was dying last summer and autumn as more and more people took to the streets, fighting against New Delhi’s heavy hand. The authorities, in turn, trounced the uprisings with violence.

Gangbugh is a small village on the outskirts of Srinagar, the summer capital city of Indian-controlled Kashmir; a few hundred freshly built houses amid an expanse of golden paddy fields. On July 6, several hundred residents of the neighbourhood came out in a protest against Indian rule – part of a wave of demonstrations triggered by the death of Tufail Mattoo, a seventeen-year-old student killed by a tear gas shell fired by the troops in Srinagar. They were attempting to disperse a crowd protesting the murder of three Kashmiri villagers by the Indian Army near the disputed border with Pakistan. Paramilitary forces and police posted in the area charged at the crowd and broke the windowpanes of scores of houses with stones. A villager complained to a minister in the Kashmir government about the paramilitary troops’ activities. The politician then visited the village; some angry boys threw rocks at his cavalcade. The police and paramilitaries returned for a crackdown. Another protest followed, and after the confrontation was over, one more seventeen-year-old high school student, Muzaffar Bhat, was dead.

 

The circumstances of his disappearance remain unclear. His family alleged that villagers saw the police take Muzaffar away in a jeep. The police argued that he had jumped into a river to escape arrest when the troops charged at the protesters. The next morning, his body was recovered from the river. As the news of the teen’s death spread, several thousand people came out on the roads raising slogans against the Indian troops and demanding Kashmir’s independence.

As the protest began, Fayaz Wani, a thirty-year-old neighbour of the dead boy, and the father of two young daughters, prepared to leave for work. He was as an office assistant in the Kashmir government’s Department of Floriculture. ‘He dressed for the office and stepped out as the protest started,’ Mushtaq Wani, his older brother, told me. Fayaz, a tall, athletic man with sunken cheeks, walked with his fellow villagers in the protest. While there, he also made a phone call to a colleague saying, ‘I shall be shortly in the office.’ A few minutes later, the protest intensified, angry mourners threw a few stones at the troops, who fired back. Four bullets hit Fayaz, two entering his back, and two shattering the right side of his face. Wani died right there.

The furious, grieving village set off on another procession, a few hours later, carrying its two dead men to one of the most prominent landmarks of war: the sprawling Martyrs Graveyard in northwestern Srinagar, where several hundred Kashmiris killed in the conflict are buried. As they reached an area called Batamaloo, Indian paramilitary troops and police stopped them. The city had been tense, under curfew. A police officer ordered the mourners to return home; the mourners insisted on the right to bury the dead where they wanted. The troops ended the argument by firing tear gas shells at the crowd and assaulting them with bamboo sticks.

 

The bodies fell to the street as the police charged at the mourners. ‘Muzaffar’s father threw himself on his son’s corpse to protect his body from being defiled,’ Bilal Bahadur, a photojournalist who along with a few others captured the moment on camera, recounted. ‘The police grabbed him by his leg and dragged him away.’ Bahadur continued clicking until the uniforms noticed the photojournalists. In a few moments, they were attacking the photographers. Several were hurt; Bahadur’s right arm was in a cast for weeks.

In Gangbugh, Wani’s three-year-old daughter would take her mother’s phone and persist in calling her slain father’s number. ‘How does one explain a father’s death to his three-year-old girl?’ Mushtaq said, as he showed me a picture of his brother with his wife and two daughters in happier times. ‘Everyone loved Fayaz here,’ Mushtaq stared into the middle distance. ‘In his spare time, he installed television satellite dishes for the entire village.’

Death has been a frequent visitor in Kashmir, especially for the past two decades. In the winter of 1989, Kashmiris launched an armed uprising against Indian rule with support from Pakistan. A violent campaign of insurgency and counter-insurgency continued throughout the nineties. Around seventy thousand people have been killed in the last twenty years; another ten thousand have gone missing after being taken into custody by Indian troops; most of the Kashmiri Pandits have left Kashmir after militants killed several prominent members of the community. One-sixth of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kashmiris wanted independence. Instead they became pawns in the India-Pakistan great power game. They remain victims of this battle today. While Pakistan stoked the terrorist incursion, India continued a remorseless counter-insurgency campaign. A military success, it was accompanied by widespread killings of civilians, torture, arbitrary arrest and abuse of power. And this too came with costs. Torn between the two powers, Kashmiris continued to die. Their dislike for both India and Pakistan grew. Hopes for independence – or at least greater autonomy within India – continued unrequited.

 

Peace is ever out of reach in this war-torn land. Violence partially declined after 2003 as then President Pervez Musharraf cut support to the Pakistani militants that dominated the fighting in the disputed region. And since 2004, India and Pakistan have engaged in both official and ‘back-channel’ talks about the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. The two countries even came close to forming a framework for a resolution by 2007, but Musharraf lost power in Pakistan, and the agreement foundered. The negotiations were completely derailed by the terrorist attacks – attributed unsurprisingly to Lashkar-e-Taiba – on Mumbai a year later.

Now Kashmir is a story of people waving banners and protesting in the streets. Pakistan, plagued by its own internal fractures, by a battle for control of the state, by an increasingly powerful Taliban and by a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, has turned its attention elsewhere. The militants are silent – for the time being. And the war for Kashmir’s future is now being waged in the political halls of power. Whether India can seize the momentum and forge a peaceful resolution is the question.

For Kashmir, it seems, has made an overwhelming transition from insurgent violence to nonviolent protest. Still, Indian soldiers and police crushed the demonstrations against New Delhi by opening fire, killing as many as fifty protesters and injuring around seven hundred – all of which brought Kashmiris to the polls.

 

A rather successful local election, with the highest turnout since 1990, followed in 2008, the people hoping to change the fraught status quo. The National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party vied for power. The National Conference campaigned for an autonomous Kashmir, while the People’s Democratic Party championed autonomy and a soft border with areas under Pakistan’s control. In the end, a new Kashmir government, headed by the National Conference president, Omar Abdullah, a youthful grandson of Sheikh Abdullah, was formed with support from the Congress Party. Analysts were euphoric about the young Abdullah; triumphalist proclamations of the end of separatism followed for months. But it was a doomed agenda. Abdullah blundered his way through the job, and a sharp rise in human rights violations followed. Abdullah responded to dissent with force. Inevitably, the Kashmiris rose up in violent protest again. A vicious circle ensued. Tear gas and bullets rained down upon them.

Between early June and late September of last year, forces killed 109 Kashmiri protesters and bystanders, some as young as eight years old. The number of seriously injured is believed to be more than one thousand five hundred. ‘Here alone we treated around seven hundred patients, mostly with firearm injuries,’ Dr. Amin Tabish, the medical superintendent of a premier Srinagar hospital, told me. Twenty-five died inside his hospital.

 

Though the lethal insurgency is almost over, with the number of deaths dropping from thousands every year to hundreds, India continues to deploy more than half a million military and paramilitary forces and policemen in Kashmir. The high troop density increases incidences of contact between the civilians and the military, which are mutually hostile, and the results are invariably ugly. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has been in operation for twenty years in Kashmir, gives the troops stationed there the power to shoot any person they suspect of being a threat, while guaranteeing them immunity from prosecution. To try a soldier in a civilian court, the Home Ministry has to remove his immunity and grant the Kashmir government permission to prosecute him. ‘This failure to ensure justice only creates a culture of violence,’ says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

A committee set up in May 2006 by India’s mild-mannered, economist prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and headed by the country’s current vice-president, Mohammad Hamid Ansari, has already recommended scrapping these highly unpopular laws. The military resists, and these draconian measures remain on the books.

Early last summer, news came that in April a unit of the Indian Army had lured three Kashmiri labourers with the promise of jobs, taken them to the disputed border with Pakistan, killed them and described them as ‘terrorists from Pakistan.’ A rare police investigation revealed them to be common villagers. After an army inquiry into the killings of the three men, a colonel heading the unit was removed from his post and a major suspended, but they could not be tried in a civilian court of law. As Ganguly describes, ‘We have seen too many false promises of punishment whenever soldiers are implicated in killing civilians. But when the dust settles, the army obstructs prosecution under the Special Powers Act, and fails to deliver justice.’

 

The absence of justice, fresh civilian murders renewing the memories of older extra-judicial killings, torture and repression at the hands of Indian forces, and the lack of any meaningful progress in the negotiations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir’s future have all contributed to the despair and rage.

Kashmir’s doctors have been very busy. Inside a surgical ward at the Institute of Medical Sciences, I met a bright young surgeon, Dr. Babar Zargar. ‘We barely got any sleep for the past few months. The flow of injured was constant and most of them needed surgeries. At times, our team would work forty-eight hours with a few hour breaks.’ I met one of his patients, Tanveer Hussain, a twenty-seven-year-old cellphone mechanic from the north Kashmir town of Baramulla, who was injured on an early September afternoon. The separatist leaders had been issuing weekly calendars, which marked what days people should protest and what days they should go about their business. Work was on the schedule, and Hussain was at his shop with a few customers, waiting for the errant electricity to return.

Earlier in the day some protesters had raised a green flag which resembled that of Pakistan at the town square where he worked. (Kashmiri separatist leaders have been divided even on what flag to fly in rallies, and several standards ranging from a Kashmiri nationalist group’s PLO-like design to a pro-Pakistan group’s green flag of Islam are used.) A few hours later, Indian soldiers came, took down the flag and trampled on it. ‘The boys in the market jeered at the soldiers and raised slogans. Somebody threw a stone, and the army fired,’ Hussain told me. Eighteen were injured, including Hussain, who had a bullet cut through his thigh and another shatter his left leg below the knee. ‘Only once the wounds heal, can we say if he will walk straight,’ said Dr. Zargar.

 

On a bed adjacent to Hussain was Mudasir Dar, a fourteen-year-old student, from the town of Charar Sharif, an hour and a half from Srinagar, who had been operated upon twice. Doctors had removed his spleen, cut a piece of his stomach out and were preparing for a third surgery to dissect a part of his lungs. He had been hit when the Indian paramilitary troops fired upon protesters in his hometown. ‘I felt a burning sensation and fell on the road. One of my friends fell beside me. He didn’t survive.’ Several other doctors I met reiterated something that Zargar told me, ‘Many more could have been saved if they had reached here on time.’ But the journeys to the hospitals are fraught; vast numbers of ambulances get delayed at check posts during curfews.

Although young Kashmiri men are ignoring the recruitment calls from Islamist militants and choosing more peaceful methods of protest, hard line separatist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a tall, frail man with a short white beard who speaks with deliberation, is now seen as a crucial player in the region. Geelani, a former member of the Kashmir legislative assembly, comes from the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islaami. After the Kashmiri uprising of 1990, he resigned from the assembly and began a new chapter as a separatist ideologue and mentor to pro-Pakistan militants affiliated with the Jamaat.

In 1994, after several Kashmiri groups came together in a separatist coalition – the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference – to champion the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict through tripartite negotiations between Kashmiris, Indians and Pakistanis, Geelani became one of its several leaders. While moderates like Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, a religious leader and the chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, engaged with the Indian and Pakistani governments in a series of failed peace talks, Geelani consistently stayed away from negotiations, insisting that the old UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir be implemented.

In and out of prison, Geelani remained the harshest critic of the Indian troops’ mistreatment of the Kashmiri population which, along with the failure of moderates to deliver anything concrete, increased his stock. Although he personally remains pro-Pakistan and an Islamist, the eighty one-year-old has been forced by pro-independence popular sentiment to drop his demand for Pakistan’s control of the region, announcing that he stands for whatever the people of Kashmir want.

 

It took three months for the Indian prime minister to call a few high-profile meetings of politicians from all major political parties in India as well as his Cabinet Committee on Security. Singh’s government went on to reject even moderate demands, such as revoking or repealing the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Scaling back troops from residential areas wasn’t even discussed. Singh’s government, however, sent a delegation of parliamentarians to Kashmir to ‘assess the situation on the ground.’

 

On the morning of 20 September 2010, when the MPs were about to fly to Kashmir, while the army and police guarded the road from Srinagar airport to the city, government workers painted over the separatist graffiti on the walls and houses along the way. The visit turned out to be of little consequence, as Kashmir remained under lockdown, and the MPs met a carefully chosen few at a heavily guarded conference centre on the outskirts of Srinagar. Later in the afternoon, five Indian parliamentarians led by senior Communist leader Sitaram Yechury showed up at Geelani’s Srinagar home. Two other groups met with two other moderate separatist leaders. Geelani had set five preconditions for peace talks with India: New Delhi should accept Kashmir as a disputed territory; set political prisoners free; demilitarize the region; punish the troops guilty of civilian killings; and, withdraw controversial laws like the AFSPA.

After considering the recommendations of the parliamentarians, the Indian government advised the Kashmir government to release all student protesters who had been arrested for fighting the forces with stones and announced the formation of a ‘group of interlocutors’ to begin the process of sustained dialogue in Kashmir. In the past three months, the interlocutors – former Times of India editor, Dilip Padgaonkar, academic Radha Kumar, and bureaucrat M.M. Ansari have made a few visits to Kashmir and met several members of civil society, political prisoners, MLAs, but the separatists have stayed away from those meetings. Over time, the protests have calmed and the separatists eventually withdrew the protest calendars they were issuing; no wave of protests could go on at a stretch for half a year. Along with the politics, winter was also playing its role in calming things down as it always does in Kashmir.

Politically nothing much seemed to move, although intense debates continued inside and outside Kashmir, especially after the Delhi police moved to file a case of sedition against Arundhati Roy, Syed Ali Shah Geelani and fellow speakers, who at a Delhi seminar questioned the idea of Kashmir being an integral part of India.

Kashmir is waiting for the spring and the big question remains: What will the new year bring? The only significant official response has been the Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s recent proclamation that the contours of a political solution to the Kashmir conflict are likely to emerge in the coming months. While that raises some hopes, Kashmir remains a police state.

The fragility of the situation was best captured early December in the arrest of an English teacher for ‘unlawful activities and suspicion of intent to provoke the masses by causing riots’, after he had set up a question paper that described the police as fuelling separatist sentiment. Noor Mohammed Bhat, the arrested college teacher, had asked students to translate into English an Urdu passage that talked about the killings of youngsters, including girls, by the police and paramilitary forces during the recent protests in the valley.

Bhat who taught at a Srinagar college set a question that asked: ‘Are the stone-pelters the real heroes of the unrest this year?’

 

* Basharat Peer is the author of Curfewed Night, 2009.