JKLF – Page 3 – The Wire

Disagreement Over Commemorating Gaw Kadal Massacre Exposes Hurriyat Divisions

The traditional strike day was added back to the Hurriyat’s protest calendar after party member Hilal Ahmad War publicly protested its omission.

File photo of Handwara, Kashmir. Credit: PTI

Srinagar: On January 15, the separatists, in accordance with their protest calendar, issued another programme specifying the days on which the city will be shut down as well as those when the restrictions will be relaxed. This is a plan that the Hurriyat trio – Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik – have been following for the past seven months.

As per the calendar, people were asked to observe a complete shutdown on Friday, January 20, and observe it as Youme-e-Muzahamat (Resistance Day) while January 26 will be marked as a ‘black day’ as the curfew continues. The calendar has also called for a shutdown the following day.

For the remaining days, however, the separatists have relaxed their restrictions. The programme includes January 21 in this list of relaxed days – the day when more than 50 unarmed protestors were shot dead by CRPF troopers in the Gaw Kadal locality of Srinagar in 1990. Every year since then, the separatists have issued a call to strike on January 21 to commemorate the killings, the bloodiest massacre in Kashmir’s turbulent history.

While the “January 21 miss” only elicited muted reactions from a handful of people on social media,Hilal Ahmad War, Hurriyat leader and chairman of the People’s Political Party (PPP), took on the trio two days later. War accused the leaders of hatching a “sinister plot” by omitting to call for a strike to remember the “martyrs” who were shot down that day.

War’s PPP is a constituent group of the Farooq-led moderate faction of Hurriyat. But that didn’t stop him from publicly criticising Hurriyat’s top leaders. He addressed a press conference at his residence in Maisuma, an area which is considered to be a stronghold of the Malik-led Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and in fact houses the organisation’s office.

“I am surprised to see the latest protest calendar of joint resistance leadership wherein they have mentioned full relaxation on January 21 which is the day of first massacre in Kashmir. It seems they (separatists) are following a sinister plot,” War told the media, referring to the Hurriyat’s latest protest programme. He added, “But if it is a mistake, then it shows their incompetence.”

Calling for a complete shutdown on the day, War demanded that Hurriyat reconsider the protest calendar. He even went on to say Geelani and his cohort should “apologise in public for forgetting the sacrifices” of the civilians who were gunned down 27 years ago in Gaw Kadal.

“This (Gaw Kadal killings) is the Jallianwala Bagh of Kashmir which gave a new direction and impetus to Kashmir’s freedom movement. But if they (Hurriyat trio) believe that there is no need for calling a strike on January 21, then there should be no strike call on February 9 when Muhammad Afzal Guru was hanged and February 11 when JKLF founder Muhammad Maqbool Bhat was hanged. Also then there should be no strike call on May 21 when Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq was killed,” said War.

Fissures in the camp

When a reporter asked War about whether there have been differences in the party over the last seven months, the separatist leader responded with a one-liner.

“Yes, there are fissures (within the ranks),” he said. Though he didn’t elaborate, his response once again highlighted the separatist faction’s discontent over the continued use of the calendar strategy even as the protests have ceased.

War’s views were shared by another senior Hurriyat leader. “None of the constituent parties were taken on board regarding any decision during these months. The leaders have been taking decisions at an individual level and their programmes didn’t represent constituent parties,” said the leader, who wished to remain anonymous.

Kashmir remained under clamp down for five months after Hizbul commander Burhan Wani was shot dead by security forces on July 8 last year, triggering a massive uprising in which at least 96 civilians were killed by government forces. The continued lockdown, however, started a debate over the implications of the seperatists’ hartal (strike) policy with several civil society members, some columnists and even members from the Hurriyat camp arguing that there was a need to rethink the strategy as it impacts the Valley’s economy.

The economic survey report – which was tabled by the state government in the ongoing assembly session last week – revealed that Jammu and Kashmir suffered a loss of Rs 16,000 crores during the five months of unrest due to complete shutdown of economic activity. In fact, the survey has a complete chapter titled, ‘Economies of Uncertainty and Conflict’ that exclusively deals with the economic losses suffered by various sectors during the unrest last summer.

Red-faced Hurriyat withdraws relaxation

Following War’s press conference, the “joint resistance leadership” withdrew the relaxations and asked the people of Gaw Kadal and adjoining areas to observe a complete shutdown on January 21. They have also altered the programme for January 25 and January 27.

Since the Gaw Kadal killings, January 25 and January 27 have also come to mark tense days in Kashmir’s history.

On January 25 in 1990, 21 people were killed by Border Security Force (BSF) troopers in Handwara, a frontier town in northern Kashmir, as they marched to the town’s main chowk to protest the Gaw Kadal massacre.

While an FIR (No- 10/1990) was registered at the police station in Handwara, years later the police claim that the accused BSF men are untraceable.

Two days later, on January 27, at least 27 civilians were killed by an army patrol in nearby Kupwara town for allegedly observing a shutdown on Republic Day.

How Rajnath Singh Shot India in the Heart

The Modi government may have not begun the current slide towards chaos in the Valley, but by ignoring the many signals of growing anger that emanated from the region, it has opened the doorway to hell.

The Modi government may not have begun the current slide towards chaos in the Valley, but by ignoring the many signals of growing anger that emanate from the region, it has opened the doorway to hell.

Srinagar: Masked Kashmiri shout slogans during a torch light protest in Srinagar on Thursday. PTI Photo (PTI7_21_2016_000351B)

Srinagar: Masked Kashmiri shout slogans during a torch light protest in Srinagar. Credit: PTI

Twenty days have passed since Burhan Wani was killed and every foreboding I felt when I heard of his death has been fulfilled. The Indian state has deployed every instrument of control in its armoury. Kashmir has been under curfew for 15 days. Newspapers were banned for four days, social media on the internet blocked, and the SMS facility on mobile phones remains cut off. Crowds have been dispersed with batons, pellets and bullets. Hospital records show that as of July 23, 47 people had been killed, 125 injured by police bullets and 595 injured by pellets – 70% with these injuries are above the waist, with a thousand or more injured in less grievous ways.

But far from being contained, the flames are continuing to spread. Paharis from the border area of Gurez, who had stayed aloof from the insurgency of the 1990s, have voiced their anger at being described by Zee TV as being unaffected by the rage this time. So great is the upwelling of anger that the middle ground that has always existed in Kashmiri politics – which revealed its strength with a 70% turnout in the Valley in the December 2014 assembly elections – has begun to crumble away.

Kashmir’s first-ever IAS topper has voiced his anguish and disillusionment on Facebook. The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and both wings of the Hurriyat have condemned the crackdown after Wani’s killing as a bloodbath. This was only to be expected, as Yasin Malik, Shabbir Shah and a host of its other leaders are in police custody, while Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani are under house arrest.

Discord in the PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has begun to crumble too. None other than Muzaffar Baig, the party’s senior-most leader since Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death and its most Delhi-friendly member, has voiced his suspicion that Wani was killed after he had surrendered to the police. Wani’s father, Muzaffar had made the same accusation when his elder son Khalid had been killed by the police in another ‘encounter’ while going to meet his brother in the forest last year. Whether these allegations are true or not no longer matters. Given the foul reputation of being executioners that virtually all the police forces of India have now acquired, this accusation has been believed not only in Kashmir but also all over the country, albeit to varying degrees.

Roohi Nazki, a former Tata Group executive who now runs a tea house in Srinagar and is the wife of Haseeb Drabu, Mehboba Mufti’s extremely able finance minister, has sharply criticised the chief minister for not resigning and thereby allowing the BJP to make the PDP an accomplice in the reign of terror that it has let loose on Kashmir.

Burhan Wani. Credit: PTI

But the most telling evidence is the quiet anger of four-time CPI-M MLA Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, perhaps the most respected politician in the Valley. Tarigami has confirmed on television what many of us knew from anonymous sources – that the Centre approved Wani’s killing without even informing the chief minister of J&K, in the full knowledge that this would destroy the peoples’ trust in her and her party. In a recent interview to The Wire, he said, “at least the previous arguments of the Kashmir issue were addressed within a secular framework. Many in the Valley preferred India because of its secular nature. Now, that very secular India is under tremendous pressure… last year, the then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed… talked about the importance of engaging with Pakistan. He said ‘Aap humsaayon ko badal nahin sakte (You can not change our neighbours) and cited insaniyat as a measure of conflict resolution, as proposed by Vajpayee. However, Modi categorically said that he doesn’t need any advice from anybody as far as Kashmir is concerned, On the same platform he … snubbed the elected chief minister, his ally.. Such humiliation is one of the most important causes of protests in Kashmir. Modi gave a message that he is dealing with an enemy people.” (emphasis added)

These are not terrorists, let alone ‘separatists’. Mehbooba survived three attacks on her life and home in the 1990s for daring to raise another political party that supports Kashmir’s accession to India. Tarigami has been shot and nearly killed for staunchly maintaining through the insurgency years that Kashmir is better off with India. The Mirwaiz has lost his father and uncle to ISI-directed assassins for ignoring warnings from across the border not to enter into a dialogue with Delhi.

Fazal Qureshi, another iconic nationalist leader of the Maqbool Butt vintage who was responsible for the Hizbul Mujahideen’s ceasefire offer in July 2000 and went on to become a member of the Hurriyat’s executive committee, was shot in the head in December 2009 and nearly died, a mere six weeks after he formally declared Hurriyat’s acceptance of the Manmohan Singh-Musharraf formula on behalf of the council. He now survives deeply mentally impaired.

These leaders are the Kashmiri nationalist mainstream itself. Not one of them has ever wanted Kashmir to become part of Pakistan. So it is not surprising that Delhi’s intelligentsia has suddenly thrown off its torpor and begun to thrash about looking for solutions.

The air in the capital is suddenly full of instant diagnoses and coffee-table remedies.

There is, of course, the great mindless majority that says, ‘Let the army take care of the Kashmiris. That is what armies are for’. The Modi government has not endorsed this explicitly, but neither has it said or done anything to show it has anything else in mind.

Advantage Pakistan?

As expected, it is laying the blame on Pakistan for instigation. Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has warned Islamabad that its dream of acquiring Kashmir will not be realised “even till the end of eternity”.

But her boast is hollow and her draftsperson’s less-than-perfect command of English must have the Pakistan foreign office chortling with glee. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and specifically his home minister Rajnath Singh and invisible security establishment – India’s increasingly lawless Deep State – have done everything they can to help Pakistan achieve in a matter months what it could not do in 27 years: convince a large section of the Kashmiri middle ground that life under the heel of Pakistan could not possibly be worse than it is under India. Pakistan has to do absolutely nothing but sit back and enjoy India’s discomfiture.

The most inane response to the crisis has come from Rajnath Singh, who visited Kashmir over the weekend “to consult with different groups on how the violence can be checked”. All he received was a well deserved slap in the face, for not a single Kashmiri organisation agreed to meet him, and the few individuals who did, covered their faces in order not to be identified. The fact that no one in the home ministry advised him not to visit Kashmir at this time because all he would do was fan the anger roiling the Valley, shows that no one in the entire ministry has the faintest clue about what has been happening in the state in recent years. Few governments anywhere in the world have experienced such a monumental failure of intelligence, or shown so little capacity to analyse the information they have.

Others have been more circumspect and constructive. Former home minister P. Chidambaram has candidly, and correctly, put the blame for the alienation of Kashmiris on India’s failure to live up to the promises it made to the people in 1947. The road to peace even today, he believes, lies in doing so to the greatest extent possible. This, in effect means going back to the full Article 370 and scraping off the parasitical encroachments upon the autonomy it had given to the state that have taken place since then.

Mehbooba has urged Delhi to pick up the threads of the five round-table conferences that Singh organised on Kashmir during the first UPA administration and also suggested reopening the dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir.

But the time when these panaceas might have worked is long gone, for all such solutions have to be negotiated. Negotiations succeed only when the negotiators enjoy the trust of their people. Today there is no leader in Delhi or Kashmir who enjoys the trust of the Kashmiris.

Over the past 27 years, Pakistan and India have tacitly collaborated to prevent any leader from emerging who can spearhead an authentic Kashmiri nationalism. Pakistan has done this by systematically assassinating anyone in the Hurriyat who has been prepared to accept autonomy within the Indian union; India has done it by engaging Hurriyat leaders in fruitless rounds of dialogue, giving them nothing and thereby discrediting them, and finally exposing them as puppets who take money from the “agencies”.

Protests against the killing of Burhan Wani in Srinagar. Credit: Reuters/Danish Ismail

Kashmiri youth: leaderless but enraged

Today all that is left for the leaderless youth of Kashmir is rage. This rage will not die out; nine out of ten persons hurling rocks at police vans and trying to break through its cordons are in their teens. Many are too young even to have sprouted beards.

These young people, who make up more than half of its population, have known India only as an oppressor. They have lived their entire lives in a world of curfews and crackdowns, surrounded by police informers, in which the faintest murmur of political dissent invites a visit from the police.

Theirs is a political disempowerment that the poorest adivasi in Bastar would find hard to imagine. The only sanctuaries in which they feel free to voice their dissent, their protest or their anger are the mosques and madrassas. But these are not the old, decrepit, poorly maintained mosques of the Sufi-Hanafi-Reshi Islam of the Valley, but the spanking new, well built, glitteringly clean mosques of the Ahl-e Hadis built with Saudi money, stocked with contemporary books on religion and world politics, and staffed by young preachers who are fully up to date with world politics and can discuss endlessly the Islamic resurgence and its challenge to the west.

This generation of the youth holds its elders in contempt for having knuckled down to “Indian rule”. It feels betrayed by the 1990s generation of militants who were naïve enough to have trusted New Delhi, laid down their arms, and tried to negotiate with a government that has only abused their trust in order to destroy them.

Since 2008, when the peace process initiated by Atal Bihari Vajpayee at Islamabad failed, this new generation of youth has been without a leader whom they can trust, lionise and emulate. Afzal Guru could have filled this role if the president had granted his appeal for clemency instead of hanging him, because his long incarceration and numerous appearances on TV programmes had bestowed some of the stature that Butt had acquired in the years before the Indira Gandhi government hanged him in February 1984.

Masarat Alam aspired to this position and Mufti released him in the hope that he would do so soon after he was sworn in in February 2015. But Alam broke his promises to Mufti within days of being released and unfurled the Pakistani flag at the welcome ceremony for Geelani after his treatment in a Delhi hospital. In any case, as a ‘Jamaati’ committed to making Kashmir a part of Pakistan, his appeal was limited.

Over the past two years, Burhan Wani had begun to fill the void. He was as young as JKLF leaders Yasin Malik and Javed Mir when they were captured in the 1990s, and allowed to leave jail to turn the JKLF into a nonviolent movement for azadi, with whom the government could negotiate. Wani had the added advantage of not having killed anyone, making him an ideal person to negotiate with, when the occasion arose.

Access to him was also far easier than it had been to the leaders of the 1990s insurgency, as his father was the respected headmaster of a school and his brother a Ph.D student. The Wani family was educated, influential and, best of all, capable of understanding, and therefore cooperating in, an endeavour that would not only save his life but bring peace to the Valley.

Delhi’s goal from the outset should have been to capture Burhan and his associates, not kill them. But from the very beginning the hunt for Wani had only one goal – to eliminate him. This difference in the administration’s strategy in the 1990s and today highlights how rapidly the capacity for strategic thinking has disappeared within the Indian government.

By killing Burhan, Delhi has not only closed the door to negotiations in the immediate future, it has also left itself with no alternative but to continue with the ruthless suppression that it is engaged in today. There is every likelihood that the only remaining alternatives – to make concessions like a Vajpayee-type ceasefire, a publicised order to the police not to open fire under any circumstances, or a promise to limit, if not repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, as soon as peace returns – will be seen as a sign of weakening and fan the fires of insurgency instead of dowsing them. This likelihood will become a certainty if Delhi extends an olive branch after human rights organisations and western governments have publicly criticised the government’s actions in Kashmir.

Time to stop the chaos

The tragic, inescapable truth is that by dubbing the tiny and, in political terms, insignificant remnants of insurgency in Kashmir after 2008 as ‘terrorism’, and using only force, George Bush-style, to eradicate it, Delhi has turned the use of force into its own vindication.

Can killing militants and opening fire repeatedly upon protestors restore calm if not peace? If the government is ruthless enough, it can. The Kashmir Valley is only 0.13% of the land area of India and its entire population amounts for less than half a percent of India’s population. Kashmiris cannot keep fighting and protesting forever. Ultimately they will have to choose between the loss of work, the loss of education for their children, the loss of sales, mounting debt and interest burdens, and increasing shortages of fuel, medicines, and other things in life that make peace so precious.

But that will only bottle up the rage that is consuming the youth of the Valley. If the government does not open an valve for it to escape through, an increasing number of youth will take Burhan’s way out – snatch a rifle or kill a government functionary and become a militant.

If the government still does not give ground and continues to hunt them down, sooner or later some of them will resort to the only form of protest that the government cannot prevent – committing suicide. They will not exercise this right quietly in the solitude of their homes or forests. They will do so in crowded market places, bus stops, malls, cinema houses, buses and aircrafts. They will not do it in Kashmir alone, but anywhere and at any time, across the length and breadth of India. And they will not remain alone for long, for ISIS will soon come to their aid.

One has only to consider the wave of Islamophobia that half-a-dozen terrorist attacks have released in Europe since the Paris attack in November to appreciate what a sustained ISIS-backed campaign can do to the social harmony in India. Muslims number less than 21 million in the EU and account for less than 5% of its population. But one in seven Indians is a Muslim. Should a similar wave seize India’s mainly Hindu population, it will tear the country apart.

I do not wish to speculate on the many ways in which continuing to rely solely on force to “solve” the Kashmir problem can trigger a chain reaction that could culminate in civil war within Kashmir, war with Pakistan and the arrival of ISIS in the Valley. Suffice it to say that all scenarios have the same end: suicide bombings spreading through the country, a flight of capital from India, the end of economic growth and a blight on the future of our youth.

The Modi government did not begin this slide towards chaos. But by ignoring the many signals of growing anger that were emanating from South Kashmir for the last two years, doing next to nothing to help Kashmiris after the Srinagar floods, casually dismissing all the commitments it made to Mufti while forming the government, and finally bypassing the Kashmir government and ordering the killing of Burhan Wani, the Modi sarkar has opened the doorway to hell.

There may still be ways to close it, but none can be implemented without first restoring order with the absolute minimum resort to lethal force in the Valley.

The End of Burhan Wani: ‘Capture’ Rather Than ‘Kill’ is Better for National Security

Protestors throw stones on police amid tear gas smoke during a clash in Srinagar on Sunday. The authorities imposed restrictions in most parts of Valley following the killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Muzaffar Wani, along with his two associates. Credit: PTI/S.Irfan

Srinagar: Now that the killing of Burhan Wani – described by the national media as “the poster boy” of Kashmir’s new wave of militancy – has unleashed a massive wave of protests across the Valley and led to the death of at least 18 people, we must question whether there was a better way to have dealt with him. In fact, some observers suspect that he was caught and then killed. If they are right, that tactic was a terrible blow to the national good; the events that are now playing out will prove extremely costly.

Tragically, the security establishment appears to have less than full regard for the legal-judicial system to deal with militant rebels. This is not good for the current situation, or for the future of India.

To be sure, the ways in which the legal-judicial system has functioned, particularly in the context of insurgency and terror, has raised questions in many minds. In this context, the strong position Chief Justice T.S. Thakur has taken for impartial and politically neutral functioning deserves high praise.

One thing is clear: the timing of this landmark killing was almost too good to be true. Ramzan, when large numbers gather in mosques five times a day and every night, was over, Eid-ul-Fitr too was over, but a festive atmosphere lingered. Schools, colleges, universities and offices were to remain closed, in most cases until Tuesday or beyond.

Burhan’s death was announced on a Friday evening. So, there was another week to go for the next Friday’s prayers, when large numbers gather. In some areas, young people have taken to regularly protesting with stones after Friday afternoon prayers.

Official tacticians might have further calculated that it was easy enough to shut off the Internet over the weekend; social media has become the most important vehicle for mobilising protests and spreading images and narratives of excesses by the security forces. Whatever the security establishment figured, their calculations were obviously faulty. Violent protests erupted across the valley and show, at the time this report was filed, no signs of abating quickly.

For at least the past year, strategists in the military and political establishment have had to consider the advantages and disadvantages of eliminating Burhan – given the fact that they generally don’t seriously consider the option of capturing such high-profile targets alive.

They could not ignore the fact that glowing stories of Burhan’s fight against the state had motivated large numbers of youths, including many teenagers, to take up arms. His continuation in the field was a symbol of failure for the state. On the other hand, the evidence of the last autumn indicated that his funeral would be a highly emotional mass event, which could inspire more young people to join the militant ranks.

The overwhelming question they had to face was this: Would Burhan become an even bigger icon in death than he had been in life? The obvious answer was: Surely.

Certainly, Maqbool Butt and Afzal Guru became huge symbols of Kashmiri aspirations after they were hanged; relatively few Kashmiris had been conscious of – or been motivated by – Butt or Guru when either still lived. This conundrum is partly explained by the nature of Burhan. He was a pleasant-faced, relatively soft-spoken, handsome young man in his early 20’s. Some hold that no militant in Kashmir has ever been as popular. Perhaps only Ishfaq Majid, the JKLF chief commander in 1989-90,and Shabbir Shah in the years before that had this level of iconic popularity.

Horrendous torture

To be sure, Burhan was relatively unknown until he shot like a meteor to iconic fame after his elder brother Khalid was brutally killed by the security forces in April 13, 2015. The grotesque evidence of torture and mutilation on his body that his family cited immensely boosted public sympathy for Burhan. For, Khalid was not a militant: He was caught while returning from a meeting with his younger brother in a forest. Burhan had taken to militancy in 2010, when he was still in his mid-teens.

At root, we are paying the price for the horrendous and utterly indefensible way in which the security forces killed Khalid. It is tragic that some of the men who actually combat militancy on behalf of the Indian state often have little sense of the negative impact on national security that their cruelty has. Too often, they surge with nasty doses of macho violence.

In that light, it was a good thing that the counter-insurgency machinery held back from going all-out to capture Burhan last autumn or winter. At that stage, Burhan’s death would probably have boosted militancy and public unrest even more than it will now.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that several sections of young Kashmiris have introspected over the past few months. There is more talk of the futility of militancy now than there was a few months ago.

This may not necessarily be the mainstream view, but there is some change. Perhaps not enough to stave off a spurt in militancy, but at least one can say that it would have been worse some months earlier.

Another factor must have forced the hand of even those strategists who might have preferred caution. They could not ignore the change in Burhan’s discourse. In a video that had gone viral exactly a month before he was killed, he had threatened Kashmiri policemen, media-persons and other sections of society that did not overtly support militancy. Coming soon after dramatic attacks in which policemen had been killed on the streets of Kashmir’s biggest cities, this crossed a red line that the state could not afford to ignore.

It’s tough to say for sure whether strategists did weigh the pros and cons of killing Burhan adequately. The way things have played out on the ground, though, the basic tactic of eliminating him was obviously a bad idea. Assuming the official account of the encounter is correct, surely the forces could have surrounded the house where Burhan and his associates were holed up, and closed and held the cordon until the trio ran out of ammunition. He should have been captured and tried impartially. It’s a pity that in his case the establishment appears to have discounted the value of a proper prosecution.

David Devadas is a Srinagar-based journalist

Freedom Under Fire: Class XI Student Dies as Protests Spread in Kashmir; Pistol, Threat Letter to Kanhaiya, Umar Recovered from Bus

A round-up of news, both bad and good, on the rights front from India.

Protests in Srinagar on Friday against the killing of four persons over the Handwara incident. Credit: PTI

Class XI student fifth to die as protests spread in Kashmir

A 19-year-old Class XI student, who was among the four injured Friday when security forces opened fire on protesters hurling stones at an army camp in the Natnusa area of Kupwara, died of injuries in a Srinagar hospital, The Indian Express reported.

Arif Hussain was the fifth person to die in protests that started in Handwara on Tuesday (April 12) over the alleged molestation of a minor girl, who is now said to be “under police protection” along with her father, by a soldier.

The protests have spilled to other parts of Kashmir, with clashes reported from Baramulla, Kangan and Tral. The Hurriyat faction headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front have called for a shutdown on Saturday.

Pistol, threat letter to Kanhaiya, Umar recovered from bus

According to a NDTV report, a loaded pistol and a letter threatening to behead JNU students Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid were recovered from a bag in a DTC bus.

The police have tightened security measures after this.

Murthal gang rape complainant gets threat call

Bobby Joshi, the complainant in the Murthal gang rape case, has alleged that he received a call threatening him with dire consequences for “speaking too much” on the matter, a report in The Hindu says.

Joshi’s complaint lead the police to file an FIR alleging gang rapes in Murthal during the Jat agitation in February.

Anti-Maoist outfit that ‘hounded’ activists, journalists disbanded

According to a report in The Indian Express, the Samajik Ekta Manch, a group working out of Bastar’s Jagdalpur area, that has come under fire for its alleged role in hounding out activists, journalists and lawyers, announced its own “disbanding” with immediate effect on Friday.

The Manch’s self-proclaimed agenda was to rally against Maoists. The group drew flak for its close relationship with the district police and for branding journalist Malini Subramaniam, lawyers Isha Khandelwal and Shalini Gera of Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, activist Bela Bhati and economist Jean Dreze as Maoist sympathisers. These activists have called the Manch a “front for the police” and an attempt to intimidate “any voice critical of police excesses”.

In parched Latur, 10,000 litres water for a helipad for Maharashtra minister

Maharashtra Agriculture Minister Eknath Khadse landed in a controversy on Friday after it emerged that 10,000 litres of water was allegedly used for a makeshift helipad in a village in Latur district where he was going for a review of the drought situation in Marathwada, a report in The Indian Express says.

Dismissing the protests, Khadse said that untreated water released from a filtration plant located in Belkund village was used for the helipad. “The allegations that drinking water was used for the helipad are baseless and false. The untreated water was released from the filtration plant that had been lying idle for the past six years. This water was used for the helipad,” he said.

On Ambedkar’s birth anniversary, Dalit scholar ‘evicted’ from Hyderabad varsity

According to a Hindustan Times report, a Dalit research scholar was allegedly evicted from a university in Hyderabad on Thursday, sparking anger among students attending a function to mark the 125th birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar.

Koonal Duggal said he may have been targeted by the English and Foreign Languages University for participating in the agitation seeking justice for Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, whose suicide in January sparked a debate over caste bias on campuses.

“The moment I finished my speech and song, three security guards pushed me and tried to forcibly take me to (the) chief security officer,” Koonal said. “They did not give any reason for this. They, in fact, disrupted the event.”

Do you know of any other incident we should highlight in this column? Write to me at jahnavi@cms.thewire.in.

If you want to receive regular email updates from this column, subscribe to the Freedom Under Fire newsletter.

Negotiation, Not Repression, Key to Ending Insurgency in Kashmir

Government initiatives will help shrink the public support for armed militancy, and pressurise the militants to lay down their arms and return to normal life.

Youths throw stones and water bottles on police at the venue as violent clashes erupted during the first ever International Kashmir half-Marathon at Kashmir University Campus in Srinagar on Sunday. Credit: PTI Photo

Illustrative image. Credit: PTI

In the past three months Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made two overtures to Pakistan, leaving little room for doubt that he wants to reverse the deterioration in bilateral relations. First he “dropped by” Lahore to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his way back from Kabul, Afghanistan, in December. The second was his telephone call to Sharif wishing the Pakistan team good luck in the World Cup match at Calcutta.

Pakistan has responded by providing intelligence on the Pathankot terrorist attack and warning India of a possible terrorist attack on the Somnath temple in Gujarat, which the government was able to foil. But how will the countries build upon these initiatives if the situation in Kashmir continues to worsen at the rate it is doing today?

Kashmir appears to be moving in a different direction at present. With the continued reluctance of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti to form a government and the BJP’s inability to do so, Jammu and Kashmir has been left without a representative government. Meanwhile, the slow burning anger that has been growing in south Kashmir is approaching a boiling point.

South Kashmir on the boil

In the past two months every killing of a militant in south Kashmir has been followed by shutdowns of business and funeral processions that have grown ever larger, followed by ugly confrontations with the police and paramilitary forces. The first two months of the year saw 20 days of shutdowns in the the Pulwama, Kulgam and Anantnag districts. Besides, the intervention of civilians to foil the armed forces in their fight against the militants has led to the injury and deaths of several civilians, and a further rise in public anger.

The security agencies in Delhi and Srinagar are, as usual, blaming Pakistan: unable to send terrorists across the Line of Control (LOC), they claim Pakistan is training local youth to carry out violent acts within Kashmir itself. This explanation is self-serving, to say the least, as it is entirely possible that Pakistan is not sending infiltrators into India simply because it no longer needs to. But such an explanation also evades the real questions: why are the youth in south Kashmir, a PDP stronghold for 15 years, taking to armed insurgency again? And why is popular support for insurgency growing in an area where there was virtually none before?

The answers lie in Delhi’s failure to understand the causes of the Kashmiri insurgency and thus its inability to end the conflict despite many opportunities. The failure has risen out of a belief embedded in the psyche of most Indians – as Muslims, Kashmiris find it hard to resist the blandishments of Pakistan. This was and continues to be very far from the truth.

Denial of political space

The insurgency in the 1990s was born not out of religious separatism, but a complete denial of room for democratic dissent in the valley after the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah in 1953. From 1957 till 1972, every election in the valley was rigged to ensure a sweeping National Conference victory.

As Pakistan found out in 1965 when its infiltrators found no support in the valley, the National Conference’s victories were not altogether unpopular as the party’s main purpose was to ensure the domination of the valley over the politics of the entire state. But as a consequence, two successive generations of Kashmiri youth were denied the political space in which to express their growing frustration and anger with an increasingly corrupt and predatory state government that was being backed uncritically by Delhi.

In 1987, when the National Conference entered into an electoral alliance with the Congress, the Muslim United Front (MUF) emerged as a political voice for the youth. But when the MUF was denied a reasonable presence in the state assembly through vote manipulation, a large section of the youth became convinced that they would never be allowed to secure the right to dissent, let alone govern, through the Indian democratic system. This led them into the arms of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and thus, Pakistan.

Although initially sheltered and armed by Pakistan, the JKLF’s goal was Kashmiri independence and not a merger with Pakistan. Its leaders knew that neither Ladakh nor Jammu would go along with secession. Had religion been their main driving force, JKLF leaders could have espoused the Dixon Plan, proposed by the British in 1947, to hand over the Kashmir valley to Pakistan. But not once in the 39 years of its existence has the JKLF advocated this “solution”.

On the contrary the JKLF has consistently demanded azadi (freedom) for Kashmir as it had existed before 1947, in the full knowledge that this would increase its heterogeneity and drag it further away from a purely religious identity. Over the years the Hurriyat conference, with the sole exception of Ali Shah Geelani, has also come around to a similar position.

In hindsight it is clear that no matter what they professed in public, what the militants wanted in the 1990s was to be the architects of a peace settlement along the lines of the Framework Agreement signed by General Musharraf and Manmohan Singh in 2005.

It is not surprising then that between the Islamabad declaration of 2004 and the attempted Amarnath land scam in 2008, domestic militancy all but died out in Kashmir. The Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad repeatedly sent terrorists across the LOC, but lacking local support they were soon rounded up or killed. For this four-year period, Kashmiris lived in the expectation that a lasting peace was around the corner.

State crackdown

That hope has since died. The UPA’s ill-advised crackdown in the valley in August 2008, the deaths of more than a hundred stone pelters in 2010 and the hanging of Afzal Guru in 2013 convinced Kashmiris that a harder, more merciless Indian State had emerged over the years.

Paradoxically, this new State was a product of the unexpectedly high turnout in the valley in the assembly elections in December 2008; it enabled the architects of the crackdown to trumpet that the Kashmiri militancy had ended, that the Hurriyat and other separatists had never enjoyed significant support, and that what the Kashmiris really wanted was jobs and a better future.

The corollary of this was that there was no more need for a political dialogue with the ‘separatists’. As a result, the dialogue between government and the Hurriyat, which had been an important part of the peace process till then, came to an end. On the ground in Kashmir this erased the distinction between crime and political violence. All subsequent militant attacks became criminal acts to be dealt with by the police with the help, where necessary, of the paramilitary forces.

Police methods invariably include the interrogation of all those whom they consider likely to have information that will lead to the arrest of the “criminals.” Treating the nationalist movement in the Kashmir valley as a law and order problem thus made the nearly 31,000 militants who remained on the police’s history sheets and the thousands of stone pelters who were added to their number after 2010, the prime targets for interrogation.

For them, and their families, life became an uncertain, nerve-wracking hell. Add to this the never-ending trickle of deaths of local Kashmiri youth in encounters and crossfires, and one begins to understand the mixture of anger, despair and desire for revenge out of which the new militancy in south Kashmir has been born and is gathering support.

Reviving hope

Unlike the militants of the 1990s, the current crop of militants in south Kashmir have no political agenda, because they have no hope. They know from the experience of their predecessors that Pakistan will help, perhaps even provide shelter, but will ultimately enslave them. And the pointless, brutal hanging of Guru has shown them that there is no mercy in the Indian State. Their only desire now is to hit the Indian State repeatedly and invite retaliation that will rekindle a general uprising again as it did in the 1990s.

So far their tactics have met with unqualified success. The disaffection in south Kashmir today is not far short of what it was in Srinagar and north Kashmir in the 1990s. If Delhi continues to deal with it through repressive police measures alone, the tension and anger that is building up will inevitably boil over into a more general uprising. The only way to reverse this spiral is to rekindle the militants’ desire for peace, their desire to live. But so great is the accumulation of anger and mistrust that weaning them, and the tens of thousands who are openly supporting them, away from violence will not be easy.

The starting point should be for Delhi to recognise and concede publicly that the struggle in Kashmir needs to be dealt with through negotiation and accommodation, not through repression. To do this the Modi government could take a page from Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s book and declare a unilateral cessation of anti-terrorist action by security forces, coupling this with the offer of a general amnesty to all those who forsake armed struggle, and restart a political dialogue with the Hurriyat and back-channel talks with Pakistan on Kashmir.

Such initiatives will gain credibility if it is accompanied by a promise to repeal the Public Safety Act that gives the Kashmir police its extraordinary powers, and limit the scope of AFSPA as peace is restored. These initiatives may not lead to an immediate cessation of violence in south Kashmir as Pakistan may continue to stir the pot to strengthen its hands in negotiations with India. But if the government persists with these initiatives, it will shrink the base of public support for armed militancy that is building up in south Kashmir, and pressurise the new militants to lay down their arms and return to normal life once again.

Prem Shankar Jha is the Managing Editor of Financial World and a senior journalist.

Mufti Mohammad Sayeed: A Life Lived Well in Kashmir’s Turbulent Politics

Mufti Mohammad Sayeed hugging Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Srinagar: From an obscure lawyer in Kashmir to India’s Home Minister – incidentally the only Muslim to occupy that position so far – Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who died in New Delhi on Thursday morning, carved a niche for himself in national and Jammu and Kashmir politics with the craftiness and unwavering focus of an avid bridge player.

In a political career spanning nearly six decades, Sayeed emerged as a rival power centre to the mighty Abdullahs of the National Conference, always playing his cards close to the chest, while making friends with parties following conflicting ideologies in pursuit of his political agenda.

The high-points in the political journey of Sayeed, who would have turned 80 on January 12, was his being catapulted to the post of free India’s first Muslim home minister in 1989 and, years later, becoming the chief minister of the restive state. He became chief minister for a second time in 2015, heading a coalition with the BJP, which entered government in the state for the first time.

Sayeed’s stint in the Union home ministry, at a time when militancy had begun to rear its ugly head in his home state, would, however, be most remembered for the kidnapping of his third daughter Rubaiya by the JKLF. The militants demanded freeing five of their comrades in exchange for Rubaiya’s freedom and let her off only after their demand had been met.

The kidnapping and subsequent release of the militants, according to Sayeed’s rivals, projected India as a “soft state” for the first time.

Born in Baba Mohalla of Bijbehara in Anantnag district on January 12, 1936, Sayeed had his early education at a local school and graduated from S P College, Srinagar. He went on to obtain a law degree and Master’s degree in Arab History from Aligarh Muslim University.

Rise of a politician

Sayeed cut his political teeth early, having joined the Democratic National Conference of G M Sadiq in the late 1950s.

Sadiq, recognising the potential of the young lawyer, appointed him as the district convenor of the party.

In 1962, Sayeed was elected to the state assembly from Bijbehara, a seat which he retained five years later. He was appointed a deputy minister by Sadiq, who by then had become chief minister.

However, he fell out with the party a few years later and joined the Indian National Congress, a courageous but risky decision at that time given the unstinted support of most Kashmiris to Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who was in jail.

Considered an astute organiser and administrator, Sayeed ensured that Congress not only got a foothold in the Valley but created pockets of staunch support for the party.

In 1972, he became a cabinet minster and also the Congress party’s leader in the legislative council. He was made the state Congress president a couple of years later.

As he rapidly grew in stature, Sayeed saw himself as the next chief minister of the state. However, all hopes he might have harboured of occupying the hot seat were dashed when the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi entered into an accord with Sheikh Abdullah and facilitated his return as chief minister after a hiatus of 11 years, much against the wishes of Congress workers in general and Sayeed in particular.

Not one to give up easily, Sayeed engineered a coup of sorts ahead of the 1977 elections as Congress withdrew support to Abdullah’s government. The aim was to have a Congress chief minister – which would have been Sayeed – in place for elections to control the official machinery but Governor L K Jha brought the state under governor’s rule.

It was the first time that Jammu and Kashmir was brought under governor s rule. Sayeed would later play a role in the imposition of governor’s rule on all subsequent occasions during his epic political career.

The results of the 1977 Assembly elections all but killed Sayeed’s dream of becoming chief minister as the National Conference came to power with a thumping majority.

Sayeed was a key player when governor’s rule was imposed for the second time in the state in 1986.

The National Conference and Abdullahs have privately held the wily man from south Kashmir responsible for the intra-party rebellion against, and subsequent dismissal of, Farooq Abdullah by Governor Jagmohan in 1984. The power tussle between Farooq and his brother-in-law G M Shah led to a permanent estrangement and also saw the latter becoming chief minister with Congress support.

However, Shah’s tenure also did not last long as the Congress headed by Sayeed withdrew support to his government, leading to imposition of governor’s rule for the second time in 1986.

National stage

When militancy broke out in Kashmir and Sayeed became Union home minister in the short-lived V.P. Singh government, he appointed appointed Jagmohan as governor despite protests by Farooq Abdullah, who resigned and the state came under governor’s rule again in 1990.

While the state was brought under governor’s rule in 2002 and 2014 due to Sayeed taking time to thrash out coalition agreements with the Congress and BJP respectively, it was his manoeuvrings that saw a democratically elected government give way to administration by the Raj Bhawan in 2008.

Sayeed’s PDP withdrew support to the coalition government headed by Congress’s Ghulam Nabi Azad in July 2008 following widespread protests over the Amarnath land allotment row that pitted the people of the Hindu-dominated Jammu region against the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley.

Sayeed’s stay in national politics was relatively short.

As Farooq Abdullah warmed up to Rajiv Gandhi in 1986 to ensure his return as chief minister ahead of the 1987 assembly elections, Sayeed was shifted to Delhi and appointed as the Union minister for tourism and civil aviation.

He quit as tourism minister in 1987 and later co-founded the Jan Morcha with V P Singh, who had quit the Congress over the Bofors scandal. In 1989, he won the Lok Sabha election from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh as a Janata Dal candidate and became Union home minister in V P Singh’s cabinet.

Towards the end of P V Narasimha Rao’s tenure as Prime Minister, Sayeed returned to the Congress fold with daughter Mehbooba Mufti. Sayeed won the Anantnag Lok Sabha seat in the 1998 general elections, while Mehbooba became a Congress MLA in 1996.

With his dream of becoming chief minister of the state still unfulfilled, Sayeed parted ways with the Congress and floated a regional outfit, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999. The manner in which the PDP emerged and grew are considered exemplary of Sayeed’s political genius.

The green flag and pen-inkpot election symbol of the PDP were lifted straight from the Muslim United Front (MUF) – the Jamaat-e-Islami-led conglomerate of the anti-National Conference, anti-Congress parties in the 1987 assembly elections.

Though the MUF received wide public support in the Valley, it won only four seats amidst credible allegations of vote rigging. Its symbols found ready acceptance in the Valley as PDP made significant gains and won 16 seats in the 2002 assembly elections. Although way short of a majority in the 87-member house, Sayeed managed to bargain with the Congress and secure a three-year stint as chief minister on a rotational basis.

Sayeed was sworn in as the ninth chief minister of the state on November 2, 2002, fulfilling a long-standing dream.

The wily politician, who enjoyed good relations across the political spectrum at national level, saw his PDP grow to 21 seats in the 2008 Assembly elections but surprisingly decided to sit in the opposition.

The youngest party in the state continued to gain in strength as it not only won all the three Lok Sabha seats in the Valley in the 2014 general elections but also emerged as the single largest party in the state elections later in the year.

Sayeed became the unanimous choice for chief minister when the PDP and BJP reached agreement to form a coalition government, and took his oath of office on March 1, 2015.

Scripting a Biography of Kashmir through the Life Stories of its People

New books by Nandita Haksar and Meera Khanna are a valuable addition to the literature on Jammu and Kashmir

Nandita Haksar
The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism: From the Cold War to the Present Day
New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2015.

Two recent paperbacks describe Kashmir through different sets of biographies. Both are by activist Indian women who write empathetically but realistically of the Kashmiri aspiration for freedom. Each tries to focus on Muslim-Hindu fraternity.

Meera Khanna’s superb biographical sketches, woven together in In a State of Violent Peace: Voices from the Kashmir Valley are like short stories, mainly about what happened around 1947 and 1990. She narrates stories about a Kashmiri doctor’s incarceration in Lahore, the sacking of Muzaffarabad, and the siege of Gilgit with the touch of a suspense thriller. Her stories stand alone, but come together like pieces of a jigsaw. Her documentation of inspiring, brave and caring women and men is a rare and valuable addition to literature on Kashmir – not least because the communal harmony and women’s empowerment portrayed have been under siege over the past quarter-century.

Based exclusively on each protagonist’s narration, one or two of Khanna’s stories tend at times towards the hagiographic. The majority of her subjects are Kashmiri elites but she also has some intimate, insightful portraits of women, girls and men on the other side of the social spectrum, also caught in the horrors of a war they did not manufacture.

Haksar, in The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism: From the Cold War to the Present Day, narrates two life stories – of Sampat Prakash, a Communist Pandit, and Afzal Guru, a surrendered militant who was hanged in Delhi in 2013. She disappoints by focusing more on the first biography than on the second. More ambitious than Khanna, Haksar attempts to combine half-a-dozen strands in her book. The first is `Kashmiriyat,’ for which she valiantly continues to search after discovering quite early that it is a myth. Khanna, on the other hand, not only finds but brilliantly documents liberal inclusiveness.

Meera Khanna
In a State of Violent Peace: Voices from the Kashmir Valley
Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2015.

Haksar’s second strand celebrates the employees’ rights movements in Kashmir, even though she calls her protagonist “patriarchy personified” and concludes that Communism was no match for fundamentalism and xenophobia in Kashmir. Her protagonist nods when Haksar tells him that “Kashmiri Pandits espoused Kashmiriyat only when it could be used to protect their interests” but he claims confidently that communal harmony thrives in the trade union movement. She leaves it at that, even after she discovers that not everyone in Kashmir’s workers’ unions holds to secular inclusion, that the relationship between bureaucrats and their staff is like that between “feudal lords” and “serfs”, and that a high point of employees’ agitations is to march on the wrong side of the road.

Another strand is Haksar’s attempt to understand Kashmir. Her ancestors migrated from there two centuries ago but she posits herself as an empathetic Indian, not a Kashmiri. While Khanna conjures vivid pictures with the self-effacement of a gifted artist, Haksar’s voice is present throughout, as in a candid chat about her voyage of discovery.

Haksar uses her two biographical narratives as entry-points to try and narrate a comprehensive story of what happened in Kashmir from the late Dogra period till now. Much of this grand narrative is told through the prism of one protagonist, and occasionally the other. But the author’s voice slips in and out, often at length, leaving the reader unsure whether errors should be attributed to a protagonists’ subjective perception or not.

For instance, we are told that the Taliban “succeeded against the USSR in Afghanistan,” although the Taliban emerged after the USSR ceased to exist. And, Haksar says, the Hizb-ul Mujahideen was “headed by Syed Salahuddin” when it “entered Kashmir in September 1989.” In fact, the Hizb was formed within Kashmir, and not by Yousuf Shah alias Salahuddin. He was only released from jail in March 1990. Syed Ali Shah Geelani sent him then to take over Hizb. Adopting the nom de guerre Syed Salahuddin at that stage, he ousted Hizb’s Ahl-e-Hadith-affiliated founder Amir Nasir-ul Islam and its founder commander Ahsan Dar by late 1991.

Another misleading bit is that, in 1987, “…both the JKLF and Jamaat-e-Islami had received authorisation for an offensive with the full support of Pakistan.” Apart from the fact that “authorisation” for what has variously been called a freedom struggle and a proxy war is a touch surrealistic, the statement is unfair to two highly respected Amirs of Jammu and Kashmir’s Jamaat-e-Islami, neither of whom is now alive to defend himself. At some personal risk, each flatly turned down requests from the ISI at different points in the 1980s that the Jamaat lead Kashmir’s uprising. J&K’s Jamaat-e-Islami never authorised militancy. The ISI bypassed Amir-e-Jamaat Hakim Ghulam Nabi to rope in his rival Ali Shah Geelani in January 1990. As late as 1989, even Geelani had called the JKLF’s militancy hooliganism.

Haksar’s book comes alive when she finally turns to the tragedy of Afzal Guru about two-thirds of the way through. It is a shocking account – from Afzal’s elder brother purchasing property with money raised to save Afzal, to radicalised Hurriyat and Kashmir bar leaders willingness to let him hang, from Rehman Geelani scuttling Afzal’s last hope by publicly lambasting lawyers who had saved him from the gallows to the social rejection that pushed an acquitted woman into a lunatic asylum, from Afzal’s vile torture and blackmail by police to the nationalist media’s reprehensible witch-hunt.

This among Haksar’s several strands ought to be fleshed out separately. For, each of the above-mentioned facts points to a murderously murky reality very far from the romanticised conceptions of freedom and workers’ rights which imperviously frame this book.

Haksar complains about not finding a woman trade unionist in Kashmir to interview. She would have done well to devote space to the secular Navjot Afsana and Afzal’s resilient wife, Tabassum. They could have yielded biographical sketches as inspiring as that of Mehmuda Ali Shah, former principal of Srinagar’s Government College for Women, and as moving as that of Asmat, the militant’s wife – both of which Khanna gives us. Haksar’s encounters with her Pandit protagonist’s wife and step-mother provide interesting ethnographic vignettes, but in passing.

A conversation with Hilal, Afzal’s clean-hearted younger brother, might have given a finer insight into Kashmiri labour’s travails than the on-again-off-again employees associations do. But Haksar’s research apparently steered clear of the entire north Kashmir region to which Afzal belonged.

‘We want freedom’ written on the walls by the pro-Kashmir independence protesters during the height of riots that resulted in numerous arrests and many deaths. But separatist sections of the population continue to participate in sporadic incidences of violence and organised protests. Credit: Shome Basu

Her book, sadly, does not focus sharply on the two strands promoted on the cover. The closest thing to fresh discourse on the geopolitical context is the assertion that global human rights organisations promote the West’s agenda. As for Kashmiri nationalism, Haksar highlights the ways in which diverse Kashmiris champion the often nebulous idea but does not probe the apparent sociological exclusion, ideological inconsistencies and territorial hegemony. Whenever she notes anomalies such as Islamist boys wanting help to migrate to the US or the JKLF’s propaganda CD blanking out her Pandit protagonist Sampat Prakash’s enthusiastic participation in its campaign, her stock response is, “I did not understand.”

If she decided on principle to overlook the shifting sands of Kashmiri nationalism, one wishes she had at least questioned the Indian state more closely. Haksar’s by-then-socialist protagonist made a startling revelation to her about a plan to install JKLF mentor Dr Ahad Guru as head of the state government in 1990; Mirwaiz Farooq was to have participated. This is an astonishing tit-bit, for neither had electoral backing and both were assassinated. A whodunit cloud still hangs over Dr Guru’s murder.

“To expose these shadowy powers” (page 262) that have insidiously gnawed the core of our secular democratic republic would be an act of patriotism. One looks with hope to an author of Haksar’s indisputable credentials, an upright woman of principle with an admirably open mind (evident throughout this book), an esteemed part of the justice system and a daughter whom even the most shameless establishment would squirm over opposing. Exposing those “shadowy powers” could lead to lethal pitfalls, but down that road lie justice, democracy and stability.

David Devadas is a Srinagar-based journalist and author of In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir, published by Penguin in 2007.

J&K CM Orders Probe Into Sopore Killings as Separatist Leaders Call For Strike

A shopkeeper was shot dead by suspected militants on June 15 in the north Kashmir town of Sopore, in the fourth civilian killing in a week and second since yesterday

Srinagar: A shopkeeper was shot dead by suspected militants on June 15 in the north Kashmir town of Sopore, in the fourth civilian killing in a week and second since yesterday, police said.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed ordered an expeditious enquiry into the killings and convened a meeting of the Unified Headquarters on Wednesday to discuss the issue.

“The Chief Minister has taken a serious view of the killings of civilians in Sopore and issued directions to the Home Department for stepping up investigations and providing secure environment to all civilians,” an official spokesman said.

He said the matter is scheduled to be discussed in the meeting of the Unified Headquarters, which has been convened on June 17, adding that the police has taken all possible steps to fast-track investigation into all the relevant aspects of the incidents and set up special monitoring mechanism to keep track of proper investigation.

Meanwhile, several separatist outfits in Jammu and Kashmir called for a state-wide strike on Wednesday to protest the string of attacks.

The decision was taken after a consultative meeting between representatives of Hurriyat Conference faction led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Tehreek-e-Hurriyat led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Yasin Malik-headed JKLF.

A spokesman of the moderate Hurriyat denounced the killing of the shopkeeper in the town, saying the separatist leadership “cannot remain a mute spectator to these daring incidents of killing”.

He said the top separatist leaders including Mirwaiz, Geelani and Malik would visit Sopore on Friday to express solidarity with people of the town.