India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down?’
Kashmiri youth, tortured in detention1
Srinagar, 9 January 2011.2 Amid the disquiet of winter, I listen to torture survivors recounting their life stories. ‘I am neither a stone-pelter nor a politician. I protest unfreedom,’ Bebaak tells me.3 Now nineteen years old, he participated in street protests in the summers of 2009 and 2010. ‘The police said I would be arrested unless I stopped going to rallies. Then the police filed a First Information Report against me because I protest. What are the charges? That I refused subjugation?’
In 2010, Bebaak was detained for more than ten days, in violation of habeas corpus. While in custody, he was tortured: struck repeatedly and violently and denied medical treatment. Other youths in custody at that time were water-boarded. Some were forced to remove their clothes, then threatened with sodomy. Officials attempted to coerce Bebaak into admitting that he had thrown stones and destroyed police property. Refusing to admit to crimes he had not committed, Bebaak was locked up in isolation, where he was beaten again. He recounts how, taking turns, two officers held him down while a third struck him with a baton, the butt of a rifle, and an iron chain: ‘They only stopped when they were tired.’
Bebaak and other youths I speak with testify that the physical attacks were accompanied by verbal abuse: ‘Your “race” is deranged. You are criminals. You are thieves. Your mother is a whore. Your sister will be raped by your people who are crazed. You will never see azadi.’
‘In the jail, in the dark, as I lose consciousness’, Bebaak says, ‘I think, “We Kashmiris are a people, not a race. Our struggles against India’s brutalities do not make us criminals.”’
Bebaak’s father was taken into custody when he inquired about his son. In one incident, he was injured with a rod that delivered electric shocks. In another, he was asked to bring a bribe of fifty thousand Indian rupees for Bebaak’s release. ‘When one member of the family participates in protest movements, they [Indian forces] try to break the spirit of the family,’ Bebaak says. ‘They try to destroy the economy of the neighbourhood in which we live, to turn our people against us. They say that if we want to stop the violence, we have only to stop our protest.’
State violence and abuse have left their imprint on Bebaak’s body; he lives with physical and psychological trauma. Many are fearful to speak out against their repression, but Bebaak is defiant, resilient. ‘I support azadi,’ he says. ‘How is it wrong to resist one’s bondage?’
I have travelled to Kashmir as co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in India-administered Kashmir. Outside the hotel where I am staying, intelligence personnel and sometimes men with guns are stationed to keep watch over me at the behest of Indian state agencies. Visitors are monitored, and many are stopped and questioned before being allowed inside the hotel. Whether I travel within Srinagar or outside, cars follow me. Phone calls are tapped. All in order to pry, intimidate, restrict movement and thought.
Each dimension of life in India-governed Kashmir is replete with the obsessions and absurdities of militarization. Every street, neighbourhood, public building and private establishment, forest and field, and road and alleyway has been ‘securitized’. The overwhelming presence of the military, paramilitary, and police, of their guns and vehicles, of espionage cameras, interrogation and detention centres, of army cantonments and torture cells, orders civilian life. Kashmir is a landscape of internment, where resistance is deemed ‘insurgent’ by state institutions.
Later that day, after speaking with Bebaak, I meet Khurram Parvez at our office at Lal Chowk. Khurram is a human rights defender, an amputee who lives with the daily targeting that ethical dissent begets.4 ‘We make choices in living in Kashmir,’ he says. ‘To be silent when people are being brutalized is refusing to take responsibility. It is our moral obligation to take responsibility, to resist in principled ways.’ Responsibility requires we bear witness as a call to action.
The word freedom represents many things across India-ruled Kashmir. But these divergent interpretations are steadfastly united on one point: freedom always signifies an end to India’s illiberal governance.
In the administration of brutality, India, the former colony, has proven itself equal to its former colonial masters. Governing Kashmir is about India’s coming of age as a power. Kashmir is the result of a fixation with haphazard and colonially imposed borders.5 India overwrites memory – histories of violence, conflict, partition, and events that remain unresolved – to maintain the myth of its triumphant unification as a nation-state with Kashmir at its headspring. India’s control of Kashmir requires that Kashmiri demands for justice be depicted as a threat to India’s integrity.
Marshalling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extraterritorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation.
Hindu majoritarianism – the cultural nationalism and political assertion of the Hindu majority – anctifies India as intrinsically Hindu and marks the non-Hindu as its adversary.6 Hindu majoritarian culture has been consolidating its power despite the interventions of secular, syncretic, and progressive stakeholders. Race and nation are made synonymous in India, as Hindus – the formerly colonized, now governing, elite – are depicted as the national race.7
India’s contrived enemy in Kashmir is a plausible one: the Muslim ‘Other’, the historically manufactured nemesis of Hindu-dominant India. India’s political and media establishments caricature the Kashmiri Muslim as violent, impure, anti-national, as one who does not belong and who has refused political, cultural, and economic assimilation. The Kashmiri, historically residing outside the present Indian nation, is branded ‘seditious’ for seeking a different self-determination, for not belonging, and for not accepting annexation.
Amid the unresolved histories of the subcontinent, the resistance in disputed Jammu and Kashmir has been ongoing since 1931, when it was signalled by the 13 July uprising and the establishment of the All India Kashmir Committee.8 The conflict morphed in October 1947, with the increasing encroachment of repressive Indian sovereignty.9 The period between 1947 and 1987 witnessed locally motivated, non-violent struggles for popular sovereignty and political self-determination.10 In the post–Cold War era, the Kashmir conflict has been framed by discourses on ‘terror politics’. The armed resistance in Kashmir began in 1988 and intensified following the Gawakadal killings in Srinagar in January 1990. The armed struggle abated between 2004 and 2007, yielding to a new phase of non-violent resistance.
The Indian state, however, propagates the misleading idea that the resistance movement is not locally inspired, that it aspires to violent resolutions, and that such aspirations are subsidized by Pakistan. These misconceptions ignore the fact that although Kashmiris did travel to Pakistan to seek arms training, such activity was largely confined to the early days of the armed resistance, the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Today, the crisis of state in Pakistan, and the role of its ruling elite in vitiating people’s democratic processes, does remain a pitfall for regional security. Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), responsible for domestic and foreign intelligence, with its perilous links with terror groups such as the Taliban, continues to infiltrate borders and endanger the region.
State racism – the primacy of Hindu majoritarian will in state decisions – orders India’s rule in Kashmir.11 India’s rule in Kashmir merges neoliberal democracy with authoritarian practices. The Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Armed Forces neutralize the independent functioning of the judiciary, educational institutions, and the media in the name of national security, continuing what is in effect military governance.
India, the post-colony, silences revolt. In Kashmir, violence is part of the fabric of everyday life. India’s governance of Kashmir requires the use of disciplinary practices and massacre as techniques of social control. Discipline is used on individuals and collectives by those authorized to perpetrate violence in the interest of the ‘national good’: the police, intelligence agencies, and paramilitary and armed forces. Discipline is effected through surveillance and punishment, in order to exact fear and obedience. Discipline flows through the formal and extra-legal capillaries of the state. Death is disbursed both through ‘extrajudicial’ means and those authorized by law. Discipline rewards forgetting, isolation, and depoliticization.
Summer 2010 saw a new phase in India’s manoeuvring against Kashmir’s determination to decide its own future. Amid the civil society’s indefatigable uprisings in favour of azadi in this third summer since 2008, the recurring use of violence by the Indian forces has been deliberate; their tactics have been cruel and precise.12
Summer 2010 witnessed strikes and mass protests, as hundreds and thousands of people marched through the streets, in cities, towns, and rural areas across Kashmir to protest against the suppression of civil society. Graffiti, songs, comic strips, prose and poetry were all used as mediums of dissent. Crowds carried banners demanding ‘Go, India, Go Back’; they daubed ‘Indian Dogs Go Home’ on the pavements; the call for India to ‘Quit Kashmir’ rent the air. It was reminiscent of another epoch in history, the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942, against British colonial rule.
Dominant Indian representations of the situation described the mass civil disobedience as something engineered by pro-freedom groups or cross-border interests, rather than a spontaneous response by the people to their experience of subjugation. Armed forces personnel characterized it not as civil disobedience but as ‘agitational terrorism’, and criminalized Internet-based protest, terming it ‘cyber terrorism’.
Between 11 June and 22 September 2010, India’s police, paramilitary, and military killed 109 Kashmiri youths, men, and women. Indian forces opened fire on crowds, tortured children, detained elderly people without explanation, and coerced false confessions. There were seventy-three days of curfew and seventy-five days of strikes and agitation. On 11 September, the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, celebrating the end of Ramadan, the assault continued. Large demonstrations, identified as a threat rather than an expression of rightful civil disobedience, were targeted by the Indian forces. The paramilitary and police verbally abused and physically attacked civilian dissenters. The Indian forces acted with the knowledge and sanction of the Government of India and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir.
Summer 2010 was not unprecedented. It was not the first time that the use of public and summary execution and civic torture had been considered necessary to subjugate Kashmir. The violence was a ritualistic reassertion of India’s power over Kashmir’s body.
Relentless state violence and the criminalization of nonviolent means of self-expression led Kashmiris to resort to stone-throwing. Continued repression prompted the civil society to engage in acts of violence and arson in some instances. Each instance of civilian violence was fomented by the Indian forces’ indiscriminate and pre-emptive use of force on civilians, force that included extrajudicial killings. The effect was cumulative. In peaceable civilian demonstrations, women and men protested the actions of Indian forces. Individuals caught in the midst of the unrest, or gathering to mourn the death of a civilian protester, were fired upon by state security, leading to more protests and to the ever greater use of force by the police and paramilitary: torture, killings, vandalizing of neighbourhoods. In response to that came larger, and sometimes violent, civilian protests, which in turn precipitated further state repression.
Paramilitary and police killings were not limited to encounters with protesters. On 12 June, Muhammad Rafiq Bangroo, twenty-four years old, was standing near his home watching the protests when he was set upon and severely beaten by the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). He died a week later at the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital in Srinagar. Yasmeen Jan, age twenty-five, from the Srinagar town of Dander Khah, was killed by a bullet fired into her chest by CRPF and/or police personnel on 6 July, while she stood near a window inside her home.
On 19 July, CRPF and police personnel fired at a peaceful funeral procession carrying the body of Faizan Bhuroo. Faizan, a minor, drowned on 17 July after he jumped into the Jhelum River when Special Operations Group personnel attempted to arrest him as he returned home from the Main Chowk in Baramulla district. Faizan’s funeral procession was intercepted while on its way to the district commissioner’s office to lodge a protest. The procession was attacked without provocation; in the clashes that followed, a large gathering of protesters threw stones. Police opened fire, killing Fayaz Ahmad Khanday, twenty-three years old. The crowd, infuriated, escalated to acts of arson, including an attempted attack on the house of a police officer allegedly involved in the drowning of Faizan Bhuroo.
Sameer Ahmad Rah, nine years old, died from the beatings he received from CRPF personnel on 2 August. Found playing near where a demonstration had taken place earlier in the day, he was grabbed, mutilated and killed by CRPF personnel. The torture they inflicted on him included driving a bamboo stick into his mouth.
In India, politicians and the media blamed protesters for the remorseless violence of the state. But civil society demonstrations in Kashmir are not, as has been reported, a law-and-order problem. Stone-throwing and acts of arson are not the causes of the violence that is endemic in Kashmir today. Nobody has been killed by protesters throwing stones.13 Pro-freedom leaders (the Indian state uses the reductive term ‘separatists’) have emphasized non-violent civil disobedience and have exhorted people not to react violently to the violence and killings by Indian forces.
Distinctions in method and power – dissimilarities between the strategies of the Indian state and those of Kashmiri dissenters, between stone pelters and armed soldiers, between ‘terrorists’ (as Kashmiri dissenters are branded by the state) and ‘freedom fighters’ (as Kashmiri protesters designate themselves) – are ignored. In summer 2010, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, focused on the need for efficient tactics in ‘crowd control’. India’s intelligentsia, inured to the idea of ‘rational’ state violence, assessed the costs and benefits of military action. State violence is accepted as the sine qua non for the maintenance of the Indian nation.
The Government of India continues to monitor the resistance movement, shifting the definition of what does or does not constitute an acceptable exercise of civil liberties. Kashmiris are allowed to protest in New Delhi, but in Kashmir, sloganeering is met with force. When in July 2010 Masarat Alam Bhat, a rising pro-freedom leader, issued a written appeal to Indian soldiers to ‘Quit Kashmir’, Indian authorities banned its circulation.
As state-sponsored aggression increased, protestors were provoked into further acts of violence. On 13 September 2010, crowds protesting Florida pastor Terry Jones’s call to desecrate the Quran torched a Christian missionary school and some government offices. On that day alone, eighteen civilians were killed by Indian forces across Kashmir; a police officer also died. Provoking Kashmiri dissenters to violence served to confirm the dominant story of Muslims as ‘violent’, even though several pro-freedom leaders condemned the attack on the Christian school and renewed their call for non-violent dissent.
On 25 September, while the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly met in New York City, New Delhi announced an eight-point plan, the object of which was to maintain the status quo in Kashmir while keeping the disorder and violence there concealed from the international gaze. The plan committed India to releasing youths who had been arrested and detained without trial during the protests that summer; that commitment was never acted upon. The plan also proposed setting up task forces in Jammu and Ladakh to monitor and assess the situation in Kashmir. However, no task force was proposed for assessing the impact of India’s governance on Kashmir. Neither did the plan propose any reduction in troops.
The plan did promise compensation payments of 500,000 rupees (rather than the customary 100,000 rupees) to the next of kin of victims killed by Indian forces. However, it made no commitment to investigate the killings of more than a hundred Kashmiris by the Indian forces that summer. ‘ “Shining India” can afford to pay a larger price for murdering Kashmiris,’ one Kashmiri youth noted derisively. ‘Is the plan to continue to kill us, just for a better price?’14
The plan proposed one billion Indian rupees to rebuild Kashmir’s educational infrastructure. What is the status of academic freedom in Kashmir? Students in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences who seek to study the conflict and issues of violence and militarization are rarely permitted to do so. Kashmiri students who are related to former or deceased militants have not been permitted to travel abroad even when they have secured scholarships to do so.
The plan stated that New Delhi would support the efforts of the Government of Jammu and Kashmir to review and repeal detention cases filed under the Public Safety Act (PSA) of 1978. No action has ensued. The PSA is a preventive-detention law that, among other provisions, authorizes incarceration for up to two years on grounds of unconfirmed suspicion. In March 2011, Amnesty International reported that between eight thousand and twenty thousand people have been held under the PSA over the past twenty years.15
On 13 September 2010, the Government of India stated its willingness to engage with Kashmiri groups that reject violence. New Delhi did not apply the same precondition of non-violence to itself. Nor did it acknowledge that pro-freedom groups have repeatedly opposed the use of violence in recent years. Misogynist and violent groups such as the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba (a Pakistani group), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are mercenaries looking for takers in Kashmir. Per the Indian state’s pronouncements, there are between only five hundred and a thousand militants in the Kashmir Valley today. These groups have been unsuccessful not because the Indian army is effective in controlling them but because Kashmiris have been uninterested in alliances with them.
If India fails to act, if Pakistan acts only in its own self-interest, and if the international community does not insist on an equitable resolution to the Kashmir dispute, it is conceivable that, forsaken by the world, Kashmiris will be prompted to take up arms again. If state repression persists, it is conceivable that the movement for non-violent dissent, mobilized since 2004, will erode. Signs indicate that it is already fraying. It is conceivable that India’s brutality will induce Kashmiri youth to move from stones to petrol bombs, or worse.
If the mass movement in Kashmir descends into widespread violence, India will take advantage of the situation to reject Kashmiri demands for demilitarization and conflict resolution and to further entrench what is a civic and legal ‘state of exception’. India will then reinforce further its armed presence in Kashmir, which is presently 671,000 strong.16 If India succeeds in both provoking local armed struggle and in spreading the idea that Kashmiri resistance is linked to foreign terrorism from Pakistan and Afghanistan, rather than being the locally grown independence movement that it is, New Delhi will acquire international sanction to continue its Government of Kashmir on grounds of national security.
This policy of incitement is a mistake. Such legitimation of military rule will produce intractable conflict and violence. All indications are that in Kashmiri civil society dissent will not abate: it is not externally motivated but historically compelled. Repressive regimes tend to overlook that freedom struggles are not about the moralities of violence versus non-violence, but reflect a desire to be free. The oppressors forget that the greater the oppression, the more fervent the resistance. Violence is apt to reproduce itself in cycles.
Whether dissent in Kashmir continues as mass-based peaceful resistance or turns into organized armed struggle will depend upon India’s political decisions. Any future mobilization by Kashmiris would involve an even stronger mass movement than that which occurred in 1990 and between 2004 and 2007, led by youth whose lives have been shaped by two decades of militarization. If this transpires, it may well be impossible to avoid the infiltration of violent groups into the Indian subcontinent – making such infiltration a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who wants that? Can South Asia, already nuclearized, survive that? The onus is on India to keep this from happening – not through the use of unmitigated force, but through listening to the demands for change made by Kashmiris.
I spent considerable time between July 2006 and January 2011 learning about and working in Kashmir, making sixteen separate trips to the region. In July 2006, the noted human rights lawyer Parvez Imroz invited me to collaborate in instituting the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in India-administered Kashmir, which we convened on 5 April 2008, together with Zahir-Ud-Din, Gautam Navlakha, Mihir Desai, and Khurram Parvez.17
In undertaking work for the Tribunal, I have travelled through Kashmir’s cities and countryside, from Srinagar to Kupwara, through Shopian and Islamabad/Anantnag.18 I have witnessed the violence that India’s military, paramilitary, and police perpetrate against Kashmiris. I have walked through the graveyards that hold Kashmir’s dead, and have met with grieving families. I have listened to the testimony of a mother who sleepwalks to the grave of her son, attempting to resuscitate his body. I have met with the grave-diggers who were terrorized by Indian forces into performing the task of burial.
I recall Atta Mohammad’s testimony from June 2008. In his seventies, he is the grave-digger and caretaker at Bimyar, where he buried 203 bodies between 2002 and 2006. He told me, ‘My nights are tormented and I cannot sleep; the bodies and graves appear and reappear in my dreams. My heart is weak from this labour. I have tried to remember all this . . . the sound of the earth as I covered the graves . . . bodies and faces that were mutilated . . . mothers who would never find their sons. My memory is an obligation.’19
I have met with children and youth who were orphaned. I have met women whose sons were disappeared, and have witnessed the daily upheaval of anticipation and hopelessness in their lives. I have met with ‘half-widows’, women whose husbands have been ‘disappeared’. Half-widows do not qualify for state support, such as the pensions offered to ‘widows’. Women have been forced disproportionately to assume the task of caring for disintegrated families and to undertake the work of seeking justice following disappearances and deaths.
In June 2009, I travelled to Shopian to meet with the family of Asiya and Neelofar Jan, who were raped, reportedly by more than one perpetrator, then murdered. The complicity of Indian forces and state institutions pointed to obstruction of justice at the highest levels. The Shopian investigations, conducted by state institutions, shifted scrutiny from the paramilitary CRPF—recognized as an ‘Indian’ force—to the Kashmir police—understood as ‘locals’ (read: Muslims). The inquiry focused on manufacturing scapegoats to subdue public outcry—on ‘control’, rather than ‘justice’.
In July 2010, I sat with witnesses and family members in Islamabad/Anantnag who described how Indian forces had chased down and executed three of their friends who had been involved in acts of civil disobedience. I spoke with human rights defenders and journalists who had been denied passports and the right to travel. I also spoke with people who had been targeted by militants in the 1990s but whose experience of the reprehensible atrocities of militancy had not diminished their desire for self-determination, even as they do not have a realistic idea of what that should be.
I have met with torture survivors—non-militants and former militants alike—who testified to the sadism of Indian forces. Over 60,000 people have been tortured in interrogation centres: people who have been water-boarded, mutilated, and paraded naked, who have had petrol injected into their anuses, who have been raped, starved, humiliated, and psychologically tortured. An eagle tattoo on the arm of one man was reportedly identified by an army officer as a symbol of Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir. Though the man explained that the tattoo dated from his childhood, the tattooed skin was burned off. The man recalled the officer saying: ‘When you look at this, think of Azadi.’
Indian forces stationed in schools and colleges verbally and physically harass girls. Many young women have been traumatized by the conduct of Indian soldiers, and at times have been compelled to use the hijab or burkha to create a barrier against the unwanted advances of the Indian forces. There are 671 security camps in Kashmir.20 The structure and placement of the camps enforces contact between women, children, and Indian soldiers and creates contexts in which gender-based violence becomes endemic. Male youths and men refusing to participate in the sexual servitude of women have been sodomized. Third-gender and transgender youths have been threatened with rape.
Many have been forced to witness the rape of women and girl family members. A mother who was reportedly commanded to watch her daughter’s rape by army personnel pleaded for her child’s release. They refused. She then pleaded that she could not watch and asked to be sent out of the room or else killed. The soldier put a gun to her forehead, stating that he would grant her wish, and shot her dead before they proceeded to rape her daughter.
Since 1990, Kashmir’s economy has incurred a loss of more than 1,880,000 million Indian rupees (US $40.4 billion). The collapse of the non-military political economy through the imposition of arbitrary borders and the impeding of livelihoods and trade has compounded class inequalities among disenfranchised, land-poor Kashmiri groups such as Gujjars, Bakarwals, and Hanjis. The refusal of land rights and land reforms has taken from labourers their means of subsistence.
In December 2009, the Tribunal released a report entitled Buried Evidence, which documents 2,700 hidden, unmarked, and mass graves, containing 2,943 bodies, mostly of men, across 55 villages in the Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara districts of Kashmir. These bodies, bearing the marks of torture, burns, and desecration, were dragged through the night and buried next to homes, fields and schools. The graves were dug by locals on this village land at the behest of the military, paramilitary, and police.
The Indian forces claim that these graves house ‘foreign militants’. In most cases, the bodies have not been exhumed and identified. When they have been, the dead were revealed to be local people, ordinary citizens, killed in ‘fake encounters’, that is, the extrajudicial killing of civilians in staged encounters with security forces. The Tribunal examined fifty alleged ‘encounter’ killings by Indian forces. In these cases, thirty-nine victims were of Muslim descent, four were of Hindu descent, and seven were of undetermined descent. Forty-nine of the fifty had been labelled militants or foreign insurgents by Indian forces. Forty-seven of them were found to have been killed in fake encounters. Only one person was identifiable as a local militant.
Who are the Indian forces? In Kashmir, Indian forces tend to be aligned with Hindu majoritarian interests but are drawn from disenfranchised castes and other outsider groups: Assamese, Nagas, Sikhs, Dalits – once known as Untouchables – even Muslims from Kashmir are being used to combat the Kashmiri population. The figures indicate the levels of tension: thirty-four soldiers committed suicide in Kashmir in 2008; fifty-two fratricidal killings took place between 21 January 2004 and 14 July 2009. Between January and early August 2010, sixteen soldiers committed suicide, and two died in fratricidal killings.
The laws authorize soldiers to question, raid houses, make arrests without bringing charges, intimidate, perpetrate custodial violence, and permit protracted detentions without due process. Citing ‘national security’, Indian forces in Kashmir shoot and kill on unverified suspicion, and are immune from prosecution.
All of these actions are deemed ‘acts of service’, and rewards and promotions are given to personnel for killing presumed insurgents.21 This was exemplified in the Machil murders, which, it has been reported, were also motivated by the promise of cash rewards. On 30 April 2010, Indian Armed Forces claimed that three ‘foreign/infiltrating militants’ (from Pakistan) had been killed in an ‘encounter’ in the Machil sector of Kupwara district, along the Line of Control (LOC). The army reported that these killings had prevented armed combatants from crossing the LOC. On 28 May 2010, the three ‘militants’ were identified as Shahzad Ahmad, Riyaz Ahmad, and Mohammad Shafi, residents of Baramulla district in Indian-administered Kashmir, and their murders were authenticated as ‘fake encounter’ killings. The armed forces had been offering cash rewards of between 50,000 and 200,000 rupees to police or armed forces personnel for each militant killed. It has not been made public whether the relevant armed forces officers claimed 150,000 rupees in award monies for the three staged encounter killings in Machil.
Despite various debates since 2009, the Indian government has made no commitment to rescind the series of impunity laws deployed in the administration of Kashmir or to reverse the special powers, privileges, and immunity granted to the Indian forces there. Revoking the Armed Forces Special Powers Act alone will not stop the horror in Kashmir. India’s laws are not the primary problem. Legal impunity is the cover for the moral impunity of Indian rule.
Neither has the Indian government shown any willingness to consider withdrawing military forces from Kashmir. Between 2002 and 2008, it procured US$5 billion dollars’ worth of arms from the Israeli state to combat Islamic insurgents – a colossal sum for India,22 where 38 per cent of the world’s poor reside and where eight of the country’s poorest states are more impoverished than the twenty-six poorest countries on the African continent. Five billion spent on arms, in addition to the other monies and resources invested in the militarization of Kashmir, does not imply an intent to withdraw.
India needs to make the ‘Kashmir problem’ disappear, to force Kashmiris to forsake their claim for independent statehood (or, for some, to be assimilated with Pakistan), or their demand for full autonomy. Military offensives and multi-track diplomacy seek to nullify civil society’s legitimate anger and dissent. Diplomats and Indian peace agents traverse Kashmir, enacting the obligatory gestures of Track II Diplomacy, to secure a peace proposal that will be acceptable to India and, ostensibly, to Kashmiris.23 Only very few of these initiatives are successful. The terms of reference set by New Delhi exclude discussions of self-determination or heightened autonomy, boundary negotiations, and the Siachen glacier and other critical water resources, as well as renegotiations over the route of the Line of Control.24
Kashmiris are fatigued by the interminable ‘new beginnings’ and the deadened political initiatives and confidence-building measures (CBMs) that accompany them. CBMs, which have tended to be about India–Pakistan relations, have not shifted the realities for Kashmiris. In April 2005, the bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad was set up. There followed a number of other initiatives: an agreement, in October 2005, to establish a hotline between the maritime security agencies of India and Pakistan, allowing early exchange of information on fishing communities’ infringement into each nation’s territorial waters; a bus service from Lahore to Amritsar, started in January 2006; and, in May of the same year, an agreement to trade raw produce between the various regions of Jammu and Kashmir. This trade agreement did not take into account the needs of local communities and it has been ineffectual in energizing local economies.25
In August 2007, a prisoner exchange saw 72 Pakistani nationals released from India’s gaols, with 135 Indian nationals going the other way. In April 2008, India signed a joint agreement with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan for a $7.6 billion, 1,680-kilometre, environmentally controversial pipeline project expected to supply 3.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas by 2015. In May 2008, Junoon, the Pakistani rock band, gave an Indian government–sanctioned performance in Srinagar. In the same month, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan proposed a series of Kashmir-focused CBMs, including a triple-entry permit to facilitate civilian movement across the Line of Control and permit consular outreach to prisoners.26 No measures sought to reconnect communities and families whose ties were severed through Indo-Pak border politics.
In January 2009, for the eighteenth consecutive year, India and Pakistan exchanged lists of nuclear facilities located in their respective territories. Six months later, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan met on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Egypt and issued a joint statement ‘charting the way forward in India–Pakistan relations’.
New Delhi and Islamabad appear to be in collusion. If Pakistan overlooks India’s conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir, India seems willing to forget Pakistan’s occupation of its own fragment, Azad Kashmir. And although Pakistan’s politicians constantly flag India’s injustices in ‘Indian’ Kashmir, they do not reciprocally address issues in the management of the Pakistan-held portion, including the undermining of movements for the unification of Kashmir. Access to Azad Kashmir remains restricted, and human rights violations there are not spoken of.27 For Pakistan’s government, Afghanistan is the current priority, not Kashmir. Kashmir’s future as a democratic, inclusive, and pro-secular space is linked to what happens within India and Pakistan. Kashmir’s resolution, however, cannot mean a sanction to Pakistan’s encroachment on Afghanistan, which remains a highly likely possibility. For the United States and India, the containment of China is another issue, also linked to Kashmir. Conversations on the phased withdrawal of troops by India and Pakistan at the border, on local self-government or the creation of a joint supervision mechanism on Jammu and Kashmir, involving India, Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, and Pakistani Kashmir, are at an impasse.
India’s actions are directed toward assuming a role as a world power, a world market, and a world negotiator in global politics. By pushing forward a diluted “autonomy,” the Government in New Delhi is seeking to assimilate Kashmir irrevocably into the India nation-state. Local self-government – a weak autonomy – would be New Delhi’s compromise, with a joint supervisory body made up of India, Kashmir, and possibly Pakistan.
What constitutes India’s dialogue with Kashmiris in conditions of extreme subjugation? The Indian government’s ‘inclusive dialogue’ in summer 2010 disregarded the demands of Kashmiri civil society. Conflict resolution and diplomatic processes are largely directed by the state, or by individuals and groups financed by it. New Delhi invited to the table various stakeholders from Kashmiri civil society, including rights groups and journalists. Bringing people to the table creates an image of inclusiveness, but there is no shift in the agenda. The Indian government’s promises are empty and there has been no follow-through; such promises are a national public relations campaign for local and international consumption.
New Delhi also anticipates that the Kashmiri leadership, including pro-freedom groups, can be restrained and weakened by their own infighting. Indeed, certain sections of the pro-freedom religious and political leadership have shown themselves to lack vision, honesty, and the ability to prioritize collaboration for justice and peace in Kashmir; equally, elements of the leadership have been unable to collaborate meaningfully with civil society, or with observant Muslims, unobservant Muslims, and non-Muslims.
Mosques have functioned as spaces of refuge and forums for dissent, and were also used as granaries and shelters during the uprisings in 1931 and 1990, and in 2008 and 2009. Yet the theocratic elites have been unable to close the distance between themselves and the grassroots. The spiritual commitment to justice has diminished as religious politics have embraced real-politik. The objective of freedom has been deferred in favour of smaller, more immediate political gains. This has enfeebled segments of the complex Hurriyat (Freedom) alliance, which has been unable to develop a framework for power sharing among constituents and is often unable to capitalize on the exuberant people’s movement on the streets of Kashmir.28
Segments of the pro-freedom leadership and the Kashmiri elite have aligned with New Delhi rather than with Kashmiri civil society. New Delhi has encouraged this dynamic to create an elite collaborator class in Srinagar that undermines the will of the Kashmiri people. The complicity of Kashmir’s collaborator class with India’s state agenda reaps individual benefits, provides security for collaborators, and strengthens Indian national interest.
What do a majority of Kashmiris want? First, to secure a good-faith agreement with New Delhi and Islamabad on the right of Kashmiris to determine the course of their future, set a time-frame, and define the interim conditions necessary to proceed. Following this, civil society and political leaders must put in motion processes to educate, debate and consult with that society, including its minority groups, in sketching out the terms of reference for a resolution, prior to negotiations with India and Pakistan.
New Delhi is incredulous that Kashmiris overwhelmingly reject its overtures, criticizing Kashmiri youth for turning down the employment that India promises and for continuing to protest on the streets. The civil society’s dissent is perhaps the solitary roadblock to New Delhi’s course of intransigence against Kashmir’s resolution. New Delhi has refused to acknowledge the extent of its human rights violations, and how integral they are to the maintenance of Indian control in Kashmir. New Delhi has not explained why militarization in Kashmir has been disproportionately used to brutalize Kashmiris, when ostensibly the Indian forces are there only to secure the borderlands. Human rights violations cannot be stopped in Kashmir without removing the military. The military cannot be removed from Kashmir without rupturing India’s will to power.
India also charges that in keeping alive the call to azadi, Kashmiri pro-freedom leaders prevent young people from attending schools and leading normal lives. ‘Normality’ is far outside the ambit of Kashmiris! India also disparages the Kashmiri pro-freedom leadership and speaks of the wealth and property these leaders have amassed. Scarce mention is made of leaders who are from working-class backgrounds. On the part played by the Indian state in corrupting political leaders in Kashmir, in order to distance the pro-freedom leadership from civil society, India is silent.
The Indian government’s ‘inclusive dialogue’ fails to recognize Kashmir as an international dispute and conflict zone. Nor does it offer an immediate halt to, and moratorium on, extrajudicial killings by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police, or an immediate halt to, and moratorium on, the use of torture, kidnapping, enforced disappearance and gender-based violence by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police. Nor does it include a plan for the release of political prisoners, for the return of those exiled, or for resolving the issue of displacement; or agreements on an immediate ‘soft border’ policy between Kashmir, India and Pakistan to enable the resurgence of Kashmir’s economy; or a commitment to the free exercise of civil liberties by Kashmiris, including the right to civil disobedience or freedom of speech, assembly, religion, movement and travel.
Neither does the ‘inclusive dialogue’ provide a plan for proactive demilitarization and the immediate revocation of authoritarian laws. It fails to address the identification and dismantling of detention and torture centres, including those in army camps, and the return of 1,054,721 kanals of land occupied by Indian forces.29 There is no mention of a plan for international and transparent investigations into the unmarked and mass graves created by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police. Or plans for a truth and justice commission, or political and psychosocial reparation and healing. Such omissions make a travesty of any process promising ‘resolution’ – they are a guarantee of continued disaffection on the streets of Kashmir.30
Hindu-majority cultural nationalism seeks to form the nation by cementing its territorial cohesion and geopolitical dominance. Kashmir is crucial to this recipe. New Delhi has been the self-appointed arbitrator in determining the justifications for Kashmir’s claim to freedom. The Indian state is apprehensive that any change in the status quo in Kashmir would foster internal crises of gigantic proportions in India. Across the nation there is considerable discontent, as differences in culture, imagination, and aspiration are mortgaged to the idea of India as fabricated by its Hindu elite. Kashmir remains India’s excuse to avoid dealing with its own internal matters. Adivasis (indigenous peoples), Dalits, disenfranchised caste groups, women, and religious, ethnic and gender minorities are tired of waiting for the continually deferred fulfilment of the nation’s promises.
Forty-four million Adivasis have been displaced since 1947. Central India has been torn asunder, and as Maoists are designated the latest ‘national threat’, national memory forgets the systematic brutalization of peoples in the tribal belt that led to the Maoist call to arms. Then there are the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, riots against Christians in Orissa, suicides of desperate farmers, and the plight of peasants and Adivasis in the Narmada Valley, where dams are not the ‘temples of modern India’, but its burial grounds.
Indian civil society assumes that an autonomous or separate Kashmir would take the form of an Islamist state and would therefore be a threat to India’s democracy. The assumption that a Muslim-majority state in Kashmir would be ruled by Islamist extremists in support of global terror reflects the racism of Hindu-dominated India. Indians of Hindu descent too easily overlook that India’s own democracy is infused with Hindu cultural dominance. Indian civil society, in line with the inflamed Islamophobia that influences the polities of the West, assumes that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Indian society must rethink its characterization of Kashmiris as prevalently Jamaati—the Arabic word for ‘assembly’, but used by India to imply an Islamist or fundamentalist group.
The logic that predominantly Muslim Kashmir must either stay with secular India or join Muslim-dominated Pakistan is a function of India’s and Pakistan’s internal ideological needs and identity politics. Neither nation speaks to the foremost aspiration of Kashmiris. Neither acknowledges the histories of feudal and colonial betrayal, in which Kashmir’s inclusion was sought in assembling India and Pakistan as nation-states. India all too easily forgets its own history under British rule, and the declaration of its freedom fighters that the oppressor does not have the privilege of judging when a people are ‘deserving’ of freedom.
Kashmir is a Muslim-majority space. The population of India-held Kashmir was recorded at approximately 6,900,000 people in 2008, and approximately 95 per cent of them are Muslim. Kashmir’s future as a democratic, inclusive and pro-secular space is linked to what happens within India and Pakistan. Kashmiris who desire a different future must assess the difficult alliances yet to be built among Kashmir, Jammu (a Hindu nationalist stronghold), and Ladakh (with its Buddhist majority), and among Muslims and Hindu Pandits, Dogra Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, indigenous groups, and others.
Then there is the question of what lies ahead between Indian-held Kashmir and Pakistan-held Kashmir. Minority groups such as Kashmiri Pandits must resist the attempts of Hindu nationalists and state institutions to use the Pandit community to create opposition between Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, a tactic intended to further religionize the issue and govern through communalization.
Where is the international community on the issue of Kashmir? In recent history, Palestine, Ireland, Tibet and Kashmir have shared common features. In Tibet, between 1949 and 1979, 1.2 million people died and 320,000 were made refugees. In Ireland from 1969 to 2010, 3,710 died. For Israel, the occupation of Palestine has resulted in 10,271 dead (1987–January 2011), with 4.8 million refugees registered with the United Nations (1947–June 2010). In Kashmir, 70,000 are dead and over 8,000 have been disappeared. More than 250,000 have been displaced (1989–2010), including minority Kashmiri Pandits of Hindu descent.31 Between 209 and 765 Kashmiri Pandits have been killed.32
Confronting India’s political and human rights violations in Kashmir has not been a priority for powerful nations, and the international human rights community has been reluctant to approach the issue of Kashmir and take meaningful action.
At a September 2010 meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, India focused on terrorism and national security and called for the expansion of the United Nations Security Council, with the objective of its own inclusion. India reiterated that Kashmir is ‘an integral part of India’ and identified the region as the ‘target of Pakistan-sponsored militancy and terrorism’.
Unreflective support of India by the global North reduces state-sponsored injustice and violence in Kashmir to the status of collateral damage, justified as necessary to combat Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. This conflation of Kashmir with Pakistan stifles debate and condones atrocities. When British prime minister David Cameron visited India in July 2010, he was asked to refrain from bringing up the ‘K word’. US president Barack Obama’s visit to New Delhi in November 2010 was laden with prohibitions, the mention of India’s rule in Kashmir and its larger human rights record among them. Right-wing Hindu advocacy groups have also been successful in securing the silence of many politicians on Capitol Hill on the issue of Kashmir. The Kashmiri diaspora, its exiled and new and old immigrant communities, remains ideologically and politically fragmented.
A culture of grief hangs like a shroud over Kashmir. The sounds of war haunt whole mohallas (neighbourhoods). Abandoned buildings and deserted public squares, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, armed personnel and counter-insurgents mark Kashmiri lives.
In the course of our work, Parvez Imroz and I have been taken into custody and detained for questioning. An explosive device was thrown at Imroz’s home in 2008, targeting his family. That year, a First Information Report charged Zahir-Ud-Din, editor of the Etalaat English daily, and me with acting to incite crimes against the state, following his publication of an article I wrote on mass graves. Khurram Parvez has been threatened, and he is constantly monitored. My mother, living alone in Kolkata, has been questioned by intelligence officers. I am stopped at immigration each time I enter or leave India.33
It is 1 November 2010, and my life partner, Richard Shapiro, a Jewish-American academic whose scholarly focus is not South Asia but Continental philosophy and anti-racist work, has been refused entry into India without reason or due process, presumably to target the Tribunal’s work. I call Kashmir from Delhi International Airport, undecided whether I should stay or leave. Khurram Parvez tells me, ‘Your coming here [Kashmir] today is necessary. If you do not come, this move to separate you from Richard will also become a move to further isolate Kashmiris.’34 I proceed from the international terminal in Delhi to board the flight to Srinagar. The estrangements inflicted through nation-building on the subcontinent are palpable to me on this day, my own experience an eerie reminder of the state’s reach into domestic life.
The conditions of everyday life in Kashmir reveal the web of violence in which its civil society is confined. Through summer heat and winter snow, across interminable stretches of concertina wire, broken window-panes, barricades, check-posts, and literal and figurative walls, the dust settles, only to rise again. The agony of loss. The desecration of life. Kashmir’s spiritual fatalities are staggering. The dead are not forgotten; remembrance and mourning are habitual practices of dissent.
‘We are not free. But we know freedom,’ KP tells me. ‘The movement is our freedom. Our dreams are our freedom. The Indian state cannot take that away. Our resistance will live.’35
1 Personal communication, January 2011. Name withheld for reasons of security.
2 Srinayar is the summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
3 Bebaak: The word means ‘Outspoken’ in Urdu. Real name withheld for reasons of security, and certain information omitted or left vague.
4 Parvez is part of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in India-administered Kashmir. His leg was severed by a landmine in 2004, while he was on a trip to monitor an election. This mine had been placed by militants. In 2009, Parvez participated in a campaign to secure a commitment from militants to abandon the use of mines. The Government of India is not a signatory to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.
5 Unless otherwise specified, ‘Kashmir’ refers to India-held Kashmir. India governs the largest fragment of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Ladakh, and a major portion of the Siachen glacier. Pakistan controls Azad Kashmir and northern areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. China controls Aksai Chin and the Shaksgam Valley.
6 Some Hindus (Brahmins, northern Indians) are deemed more ‘authentic’ than others, and their special privileges are institutionalized. Epic violence has been perpetrated by Hindu nationalists in recent times, against Muslims in Gujarat (2002) and Christians in Orissa (2007, 2008).
7 Influenced by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and the construction of the Jew as the internal enemy in the West, Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist leader, stated in 1923: ‘Hindutva [Hinduness/Hindu supremacism] is not a word but a history . . . not only a Nation but also a race’. See V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva, New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 2003, pp. 84–85.
8 The All India Kashmir Committee was established to secure the rights and freedoms of Muslims in Kashmir.
9 Three wars have been fought over Kashmir, in 1947-8, 1965, and 1971 between India and Pakistan, and one in Kargil in 1999.
10 The argument for self-determination was recognized in the United Nations Resolutions of 1948; the promise of a plebiscite was made by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (to rethink the temporary accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India by the Hindu-descended maharaja, Hari Singh); and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution gives Kashmir the right to live under its own laws.
11 Racisms of state. See M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. D. Macey, New York: Picador, 2003.
12 This section is based on research which I undertook between June and November 2010, with follow-up in March 2011.
13 A case alleging that stone-throwing led to the death of Shafiq Ahmad Sheikh was registered in April 2010. Investigations conducted by journalists uncovered information that Sheikh’s murder and the registration of the case were linked to subterfuge.
14 Personal communication, via telephone, September 2010. Name withheld for reasons of security.
15 Amnesty International, ‘A “Lawless Law”: Detentions under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act’, London: Amnesty International Limited, 2011.
16 Figure is derived from government and journalistic sources, September 2011, and includes counter-terrorism and special forces.
17 See kashmirprocess.org for more on the Tribunal.
18 Both names have particular histories. Presently, in Kashmiri politicized discourse, local communities often identify Anantnag as Islamabad.
19 Taken from A. P. Chatterji, P. Imroz et al., Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-Administered Kashmir, A Preliminary Report, Srinagar: International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir, 2009, 18.
20 Figure derived from government and journalistic sources, October 2009.
21 Human Rights Watch, ‘Everyone Lives in Fear’: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006, 65–6.
22 T. Ali, ‘Not Crushed, Merely Ignored’, London Review of Books, 22 July 2010.
23 Track II Diplomacy: Informal diplomacy, in which non-state actors engage in conflict resolution or confidence-building measures, often understood as a containment tactic.
24 The disputed 740-kilometre Line of Control (also cease-fire line, which includes the 550-kilometre Indian Kashmir border) established at the end of the First Kashmir War (1947–8) between India and Pakistan.
25 This section is based on research I undertook between September and October 2010.
26 These were jettisoned following the terror attacks in Mumbai of 26–29 November 2008.
27 Human Rights Watch, ‘“With Friends Like These”: Human Rights Violations in Azad Kashmir’, New York: Human Rights Watch, vol. 18, no. 12(C), 2006.
28 The All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of over 20 groups and parties, including the Aawami Action Committee, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and People’s Democratic Front.
29 A kanal is equivalent to 510 square metres.
30 See www.kashmirprocess.org.
31 Human Rights Watch, ‘India’s Secret Army in Kashmir: New Patterns of Abuse Emerge in the Conflict’, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996; and M. Kolodner, ‘Violence as Policy in the Occupations of Palestine, Kashmir, and Northern Ireland’, Master’s thesis, Amherst College, 1996.
32 M. Jaleel, ‘209 Kashmiri Pandits Killed Since 1989, Say J-K Cops in First Report’, Indian Express, 4 May 2008.
33 I am a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States.
34 Personal communication, November 2010. We share gratitude for the solidarity we have received from various international institutions and collectives, and from segments of Indian civil society, public officials, and the press.
35 Personal communication, September 2010.