J&K: Politics in the Labyrinth A political solution, every political actor in Srinagar and Delhi faithfully parrots, is required to resolve the unending crisis of violence and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). The evidence, however, suggests that the very people who are loudest in their proclamations of the ‘political solution’ are often the fountainhead of problems in the State, at a time when extraordinary gains have, in fact been registered on a wide range of security parameters. Thus, a major breakthrough was secured – entirely without the mediation of the State’s principal political formations, or the Centre and its interlocutors – when moderates within the separatist constituency broke rank to speak out for the first time, with exceptional courage and candour, against the terrorists who had hijacked the movement in Kashmir, and who had murdered some of the State’s most notable leaders. Most conventional political players, however, continue to pander to the extremist political formations and constituency, while others remain simply disruptive. On January 2, 2011, the chief spokesman of the separatist Hurriyat Conference, Abdul Ghani Bhat, broke through the conspiracy of silence and terror that had enveloped J&K for over two decades, to declare: Lone Sahib, Mirwaiz Farooq and Professor Wani were not killed by the Army or the police. They were targeted by our own people... The story is a long one, but we have to tell the truth. If you want to free the people of Kashmir from sentimentalism bordering on insanity, you have to speak the truth.... Here I am letting it out. The present movement against India was started by us killing our intellectuals... wherever we found an intellectual, we ended up killing him... Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq, father of Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the current chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference-Mirwaiz (APHC-M), was killed on May 21, 1990; Abdul Gani Lone was killed on the same date in 2002, while participating in a programme commemorating the late Mirwaiz’s death anniversary; Professor Abdul Ahad Wani was killed on December 31, 1993; each of them by unidentified gunmen. Other voices quickly echoed Ghani Bhat’s sentiment, albeit more guardedly, including Gani Lone’s sons, Sajjad and Bilal Lone, who regretted their own past failure to expose their father’s assassins, because of an element of fear. Ghani Bhats offensive went further, to directly attack the campaign of stone pelting and disruption that had enveloped the Valley through the summer of 2010 under the principal leadership and direction of the rival Tehrik-e-Hurriyat chairman, Syed Ali Shah Gilani. There was a hartal (shut down) for five months and 112 people died, Ghani Bhat argued, And at the end of it there is nothing by way of achievement. This is what happens when there is no thinking, no strategy. In this declaration, Ghani Bhat was articulating a widespread sentiment that had been actively, and often violently suppressed through the stone pelting campaign. Any failure to follow Gilani’s ‘calendar’ of disruption ordinarily met with swift reprisals; shop keepers who failed to down shutters were thrashed, their shops vandalized; special buses transporting children to school were stopped and burned; trucks and cars moving along highways were forced to stop on the roadside for hours on end, and those who argued or protested would have their screens, and sometimes more, smashed. Despite the intimidation, resistance to the unending strikes and stone-pelting was not unknown. There were numberless cases of non-cooperation, particularly of what became known as the ‘half-shutter phenomenon’, where shops and businesses operated with their shutters only half open, to quickly evade reprisal in case a wandering gang of separatist ‘enforcers’ came by. Indeed, on September 1, 2010, at the height of the campaign, activist Farooq Ganderbal had organized a small protest demonstration at Residency Road. Again, on November 7, 2010, activists of the Jammu & Kashmir Non-governmental Organisations (NGO) Forum managed to stage a small peace rally in Srinagar, against the shut-downs. It is crucial to note, in this context, that the entire protracted stone-pelting campaign was directly backed by Pakistan and by Pakistan-based terrorist formations, in a strategy to offset declining capacities for terrorist action. Masarat Alam, chief of the Muslim League, a constituent of the Geelani’s Tehrik-e-Hurriyat, who had engineered and enforced the calendars of shut-downs and stone pelting from the underground, was arrested in Srinagar in the night of October 18, 2010. In his disclosures to the Police, he admitted that he had received INR 4 million from Geelani through different channels to fuel the protests and incite the stone-pelters. Disclosing details of Alam’s confession, J&K Director General of Police (DGP) Kuldip Khoda stated that Pakistan had been using different channels to fund the separatists, including Geelani, to sustain the stone-pelting campaign, as part of its ‘new strategy’. He added, further, It was not that everybody engaged in protests was paid. The organizers had been paid and they incited the people to hold protests and subject security forces and Police to stone pelting. The militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) had also been working behind the scenes to fuel the protests.’’ Given the atmosphere of enveloping terror and intimidation the open voicing of dissent against the dominant, terrorist-backed, separatist position in J&K was unprecedented, and was quickly seized upon – but just as quickly relinquished – by the media. Despite the sea change in the ground situation that these tentative developments indicate (and they can easily be reversed at the cost of a few bullets), no constitutional political formation, and neither the State Government nor the Centre, appear to have significantly accommodated these changes within their current policy framework. Indeed, the unsettling nonsense that has been the essence of the political discourse, and of various ‘peace-making initiatives’ in J&K, and the relentless appeasement of the most extreme voices, remains the hallmark of all policy and pronouncements. Ignoring the turmoil of the preceding year, and the abject failure of state agencies to bring the orchestrated disorders under control till the Valley’s unforgiving winter froze them out, Union Home Secretary thus announced, on January 14, 2011, As a CBM (confidence building measure) in J&K, the strength of the Security Forces [SFs] would come down by 25 per cent. Troop reduction has been the most strident of separatist demands, even through periods of extreme disorder and significant terrorism. The fact that this is part of the strategy of appeasement of extremist elements, and not an initiative based on a considered security assessment, is borne out by the immediate response from both the Army command and the Ministry of Defence. Even as speculation on troop reduction mounted in Delhi, Army Chief General V.K. Singh had cautioned, on January 13, 2011, that care had to be taken to ensure that extra pressure was not put on the already stretched troops in J&K, and that only the Forces which were ‘dispensable’ were removed. On January 15, 2011, General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Chief, Northern Command, Lt. Gen. K.T. Parnaik cautioned, I dont think it is the right time to go for troops reduction in J&K. It may be somebodys opinion or perception but we think there is no scope for reduction of troops at this moment. Defence Minister A.K. Antony added that the Army had already reduced nearly 30,000 Army troops in the State and that there was no proposal to reduce the number further. The lack of a tangible Kashmir Policy in Delhi is further manifested in the activities of the weak group of interlocutors who have been appointed by the Centre to find a political solution in J&K. On October 13, 2010, the Union Government appointed journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, academician Radha Kumar and former Central Information Commissioner M. M. Ansari, as its interlocutors for the State. On December 9, 2010, Home Minister P. Chidambaram, with Panglossian optimism, assured the nation that the contours of a political solution to the Kashmir problem are likely to emerge in the next few months. His interlocutors, however, have failed to speak to a single prominent separatist leader till date, including ‘moderate’ factions of the Hurriyat, and their most significant achievement is that they have prevailed upon Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and some leaders of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), to speak to one another. Beyond this, they have regurgitated tired proposals for administrative relief and CBMs, including ‘demilitarization’ proposals that have led to the Home Ministry’s hasty announcement of troop withdrawal. They have also intervened to secure the release of 66 youth and the withdrawal of 22 cases under the Public Safety Act. The situation has been muddied further by conflicting and ambivalent political postures. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram, on June 30, 2010, had claimed that the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) was fuelling the unrest of the stone pelting campaign in J&K. On December 9, 2010, he shifted positions to distinguish between ‘two types of violence’ in the State, arguing, The violence perpetrated by militants and infiltrators must be dealt with in a strong and resolute manner. On the other hand, the violence witnessed during protests by residents of the State requires deft and sensitive handling. Chief Minister Abdullah added to the muddle, insisting that the stone-pelting campaign had no correlation with militancy and, at one stage, raised a question mark on Kashmir’s accession to India. He has also chosen to add his voice to the separatist clamour for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), ignoring the vehement opposition of the Security Forces to any such move and, more significantly, the fundamental conundrum that the Army cannot perform internal security duties without the legal mandate that this Act provides. It is useful, in passing, to record here the mischief a Bharatiya Janata Party initiative to engage in a highly publicised flag-hoisting campaign at the Lal Chowk in Srinagar on Republic Day, January 26, 2011, not in any meaningful assertion of a long-standing and substantive engagement with the State, but rather as a red rag to the separatists and ambivalent elements within the larger population. While the constitutional legitimacy of such a move is beyond doubt, its political sagacity and strategic utility is far from evident, outside a framework of competitive political communalisation and electoral brinkmanship. All these positions have been held and articulated with little or no reference to the situation on the ground. Crucially, a trend of dramatically declining terrorist activities in J&K, commencing 2002, appears to have stalled in 2010. Total fatalities in 2010 stood at 375 – the same number as the previous year (all data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal database). 2008 had witnessed 541 terrorism-related fatalities, 2007, 777, and, at peak, 2001, at 4,507. There was, however, a significant increase in terrorist fatalities, at 270 in 2010, as against 242 in 2009, while fatalities in both the civilian and SF category fell, from 55 and 78 in 2009, to 36 and 69 in 2010, respectively.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 05:35:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015