Kashmir: The Bayonet Runs Amok

At precisely the moment when the world seems to have come to the conclusion that making the Line of Control the international boundary is the only feasible settlement of the Kashmir dispute, developments within the Valley are taking Kashmir slowly but surely out of India's hands. On Wednesday last week, Indian papers reported a spontaneous hartal in Srinagar over the killing of a shopkeeper, Rafiq Ahmad Baqal, by the BSF in the early hours of Sunday morning (June 11). The BSF claimed that its men in a picket tried to stop a car for a routine check. The car did not stop but slowed down and the six occupants jumped out and tried to run away. The others escaped but Baqal, who was driving, was killed in the ensuing shooting. The BSF "recovered" RDX, improvised explosives, detonators and a hand grenade from the abandoned car. However, the story told by Baqal's family and the other occupants of the car is very different. They were returning from a marriage party when they were stopped at the BSF picket and asked to get out of the car. The BSF jawans were very drunk, beat them up and threatened to throw them into the Jhelum river. They then asked all but Baqal to go away. The next thing they knew, Baqal had been shot.

To anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Srinagar, the BSF's story sounds utterly false. Baqal was not in his twenties or even early thirties, but 38. This is not the typical age of Kashmiri militants. He was also a man of substantial means - with a shop, a car, a family and a house in a prosperous locality of the city. Jawahar Nagar, where the marriage he was attending took place, is even more of an elite area, it was once inhabited largely by prosperous Kashmiri pandits, most of whom have now sold their homes to friends and acquaintances for whatever they could get. In short, Baqal was a man of substantial standing in the community and had a great deal to lose. Even had he decided to ferry explosives he would not have chosen to do so in the middle of the night, when the streets of Srinagar are deserted and cars are bound to be stopped and searched.

On the other hand, it is only too plausible that the BSF jawans were drunk at that time of the night, for alcohol is a time-honoured antidote to boredom and fear. It is also plausible that they made the occupants get out of the car, since that is routine procedure during such a search. It is more than likely that one or more of them abused the occupants of the car, that an altercation followed and they beat the Kashmiris up. And alas, it is only too possible that having sent the others away they did something that made Baqal panic and try to run away, and shot him. The BSF's claim to have found explosives would have been more credible had we not had the damning proof of Pathribal near Anantnag, where the Special Operations Group of the J&K police and the security forces pulled out five people almost at random and killed them in order to claim the credit for "solving" the Chitsinghpora Sikh massacre. The bodies were also mutilated and burnt in an amateurish attempt to prevent recognition.

The latest grim episode raises several questions. First, why is it that the complaint is being investigated by the Kashmir police? Why is the BSF, whose jawans were directly involved, silent over the matter? Does this mean that the BSF has already dismissed what the Kashmiris have to say? Or are they afraid of demoralising their jawans if they start investigating this and other complaints too rigorously? Second, does L.K. Advani's ministry not realise that as at Pathribal, if the Kashmir police concludes that Baqal was in fact an innocent killed in cold blood, it may result in boosting Farooq Abdullah's image temporarily, but will also confirm the Kashmiri's belief that they'll be better off if they break away completely from India. If that is to be prevented, the Kashmiris must see that New Delhi is holding its security forces accountable for their misdeeds in Kashmir.

Enforcing stricter accountability is the first essential requirement in Kashmir, but unfortunately that'll no longer suffice to check the drift out of India. What our strategic planners in New Delhi (if there are any), should be asking themselves is, why have the number of blatant human rights violations by the Indian security forces increased so much in the past six months? In December, in mid-winter, they burnt 87 houses in the Pattan area and claimed it had happened after an exchange of fire with militants, and that the fire spread because the houses are made of wood! Then came the Pathribal atrocity, for which not a single Indian politician has shed a tear of shame or remorse. Now we have the killing of a respectable middle-aged shopkeeper. These incidents are only the tip of an iceberg that's looking increasingly ominous.

The reason can be summed up in a single word - fear! What we are witnessing is the reaction of the security forces to the sharp escalation of terrorist attacks on the army, BSF, CRPF and Kashmir police since August last year. This reaction has two faces. The first is a desire to dig in and protect oneself. How many people in Delhi know that following the repeated attacks by jehadis on batallion and corps headquarters, the army is in the process of mining all the approaches to its camps? But such heavily-defended camps play into the hands of the master planners behind the jehadi's attacks. For they rapidly become prisons for the security forces. The more they stay inside, the less control they have over the countryside. The security forces know this and are increasingly venturing out in convoys. But then convoys too are sitting ducks. They permit the now relatively-free militants to set mines on the roads to blow up their vehicles. That too has been happening with increasing frequency for some time.

Just a day before the Srinagar killing, virtually unnoticed by the national press, the offensive by the jehadis entered a new phase. A convoy of four CRPF vehicles had an ied exploded under one of them. This time the militants who did it did not melt away after setting off the bomb. Instead, they combined the explosion with an ambush and opened fire while the CRPF men were still disoriented and frightened. The CRPF concedes that nine jawans were injured. I am willing to take a bet that at least nine were killed outright, and more injured.

The other reaction of the now thoroughly frightened jawans is brutal aggression and a desperate desire to get quick results, if by no other means than through sheer

terror. That is what is causing incidents like Pattan, Pathribal and indirectly, the latest killing in Srinagar. That is also why no national agency seems willing to hold an inquiry against its own jawans. Unfortunately this desperation is being fed by exhortations from New Delhi to adopt a "pro-active" strategy against "cross-border terrorism". At the local commander's end this only means a demand for more bodies.

Today, a dual despair is settling like a pall over the Valley. The armed forces know that this kind of purely defensive war, against an inexhaustible supply of Islam-inspired fanatics from across the border who are able to simply melt away into an alienated local population, is simply not winnable. Thus, the prospect they face is of an endless body count that serves no political or military purpose. Over time all this can do is to sow demoralisation and eventually sap the will to fight. Indeed, to see where the Indian army is headed we have only to shed our arrogance towards our smaller neighbours, and our mystical belief in the 'fighting qualities of the Indian jawan', and look at where the Sri Lankan army, which has been caught in a similar no-win guerrilla war for 17 years, has gone.

Another type of despair is settling into the bones of the Kashmiri people. After six nightmare years they had begun to hope in 1996 that their lives were returning to normal. That hope has been dashed. As a result, they too have begun to believe that there will be no end to the present guerrilla war until India gives up and leaves the valley. This may leave them to the tender mercies of the Islamic fanatics from Pakistan and Afghanistan. But at least there will be peace. So the flow of information to the Indian security forces has dried up. This has forced the latter to rely more and more on coercion to extract information. This is a vicious circle that is feeding the Kashmiri's despair and further isolating the Indian security forces.

The most alarming feature of the crisis brewing in Kashmir is the complete lack of vertebra within the Indian government. When the army informed the government last December that it couldn't sustain the four to six-fold rise in casualties since August indefinitely, and asked for permission to hit the terrorists across the border, the Vajpayee government ordered it not to do so under any circumstances. But it did not equip the army to prevent the infiltration either. In 1998, the former corps commander, Gen Krishnapal, whose strategic brilliance regained Kargil for India, had asked for Rs 248 crore worth of sensors and other electronic intelligence devices to detect and intercept the foreign militants. But in the end he received barely half that amount. As a result, when troops had to be pulled out of the Valley to fight in Kargil, the terrorists moved in with impunity. One would have thought that the defence ministry would have learned its lesson. But rather than cut procedural red-tape to obtain equipment quickly, it preferred to return Rs 700 crore worth of defence allocations unused to the ministry of finance last year.

The Vajpayee government is equally bereft of a political plan. It released the Hurriyat leaders, but made sure they would not enter into talks by simultaneously announcing that talks would only be held within the framework of the Indian constitution. It has told Pakistan and the world that it will only resume the dialogue with Pakistan after it ends cross-border infiltration. The army has informed us that, in terms of numbers, cross-border infiltration has not diminished, and the attack on the CRPF convoy has shown that the attacks have escalated. But has the government issued a single news bulletin to the world press giving details of the number of attacks, the number of interceptions and the number of casualties suffered by the security forces since the snows on the passes melted? Does it even have a spokesman for Kashmir affairs? Has it told the world and Pakistan that its patience is nearing its end? The truth is that Vajpayee's inaction is not statesmanship. It is confusion at best and cowardice at worst.