How Not To Fight A War

Both before and during the visit of President Clinton, the Indian government went out of its way to reassure the world that South Asia was not on the brink of war, let alone a nuclear war. Atal Behari Vajpayee made what amounted to a public commitment to this effect at the brief joint press conference he held with President Clinton on March 21; and President Narayanan pooh-poohed the idea of war in his welcome speech at the Rashtrapati Bhavan banquet the same night. The message that the government thus strove to convey to the US government was that India would fight cross-border terrorism the way it had fought the Kargil war, that is, entirely within Indian territory.

Unfortunately Vajpayee forgot one crucial difference between Kargil and the Valley: the Kargil heights are uninhabited but Kashmir valley is not. Since last August, when there was a quantum jump in the level of cross-border terrorism and related violence in Kashmir, the people have been brutalised in a way that even they had never known before. The police firing at Anantnag on Monday last week vividly highlights the price they have been paying.

If one looks back at the 10 years of militancy in Kashmir, one can identify key moments when the people swung away from India and others when they swung back. Among these were the Gowkadal massacre of January 20, 1990; the murder of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq by two members of the Hizbul Mujahideen in May; the Pakistan police firing on JKLF processionists trying to cross the Line of Control into Indian Kashmir at Chinari in February 1992; the murder of Qazi Nissar in Anantnag in 1993; and the kidnapping and murder of five foreign tourists by the self-styled Al Faran in July 1995. The killing of five persons who the army and police claim were among the foreign militants who killed 36 Sikhs at Chitsinghpura, and the subsequent police firing on a protest rally at Anantnag that has so far claimed eight lives, could easily become another such turning point.

The way that the tragedy unfolded highlights how trying to fight terrorism on one’s home ground plays into the enemy’s hands. When the Chitsinghpura massacre took place, the inhabitants of a number of villages around Anantnag were already extremely disturbed by the fact that local boys had gone missing-a euphemism for having joined the militants. Thus, in the combing operations that followed the massacre, when the army and the Special Operations Group killed five persons and burned three beyond recognition, the cry went up that these were not the killers of the Sikhs but some of the missing local boys, whom they had caught and executed.

What followed was tragically familiar: people from the surrounding villages took out processions to Anantnag, demanding the bodies be exhumed and a post mortem, including a dna test, be carried out to determine who had been killed. The police and army dismissed the villagers’ demands, claiming that the ‘boys’ had been wearing army fatigues and had fired back at them before being overwhelmed and killed. This provoked a series of demonstrations and a call from Kashmiri leaders for a protest strike. The government responded to the demonstrations by imposing a curfew and, when this was broken, by firing on the demonstrators. In the end, eight more people lay dead while another nine were, at the time of writing, fighting for their lives.

Only a last-minute dash to Anantnag by the chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, who ordered that the bodies be exhumed and examined and instituted a judicial enquiry into the police firing, has kept the situation from going totally out of control. But the Valley-wide anger that Anantnag has provoked shows how close the Kashmiris are to breaking point.

All this could not be further removed from the way things were only two years ago, in 1998. In that beautiful summer, a parliamentary election lay behind the Kashmiris, in which approximately 54 per cent of the population had turned out to vote and no one was talking of a rigged vote. Two-thirds of the bunkers in Srinagar had been removed; shops were open till 10 pm; the gardens and the lakefront were crowded; women had discarded their veils and were moving about freely and the jawans on duty no longer excited fear in the populace.

Kashmiri journalists are unanimous that Anantnag is only the focal point of an anger that has been building ever since last summer. Under the spur of heightened cross-border terrorism and especially the fidayeen attacks against ‘hard’ targets, the bunkers that had been removed in 1998 are all back. Fear has re-infected the jawans of the security forces and this has changed their behaviour towards all Kashmiris. Punitive actions against Kashmiris aimed at discouraging them from harbouring terrorists have become more frequent and the number of occasions when human rights are abused and innocent lives lost has mounted. As the alienation has deepened, young boys have once again begun to join the militants. Most of them are in their teens, and although many are products of Wahabi fundamentalism being preached in madrasas and so-called orphanages, a large number have joined the militants simply because they cannot bear to see their parents roughed up or insulted in frequent searches and ‘crackdowns’.

Kashmiris are becoming more convinced by the day that India is not capable either of settling with Pakistan or crushing the terrorists it is unleashing upon them. If the government doesn’t at least ensure that the bereaved of Anantnag and the surrounding villages receive verifiable justice from the State, it will not be long before they start looking for other saviours, or strike out desperately on their own.