Kashmir 2024
Ghazala Wahab
Srinagar, October 19, 4.30pm. The photographer and the taxi driver are engaged in an urgent conversation in Kashmiri language. The collective volume rise and the speakers start talking at the same time, turning the conversation into cacophony. For a few minutes, I ignore the noise, giving them space. Then I pick up words like highway, airport, Raj Bagh, Lal Chowk, and curiosity gets the better of politeness.
“What happened, what are you two talking about,” I ask with a smile.
“He is saying that the main roads are shut tomorrow because of the marathon,” the photographer says pointing to the driver, almost accusingly.
“What does that mean?” my voice is calm.
The driver replies, “You won’t be able to leave the hotel tomorrow morning.”
“What time will the roads open,” I am still calm.
“I don’t know,” replies the driver. “Maybe noon, maybe 3pm, or 6pm.”
“So, who will know?” I ask the driver. I sense a subtle rise in the volume.
He shrugs.
I look at the photographer. “Nobody knows. I asked three different policemen. All gave different opening times,” he says.
“We have to leave in the morning,” my voice rises gradually.
The photographer laughs nervously. “The government has invited athletes from around the world,” he says. “Omar (chief minister Omar Abdullah) is also going to run. The Governor will inaugurate it. A lot of VIPs are coming.”
Exasperated, I repeat my statement.
“We have to leave in the morning,” my voice now roughly matches theirs. We are one.
“This is what happens every time,” the photographer continues, nervousness increases both his volume and speed. “Whenever there is a government function they close down the roads for us. What if somebody has to go to the hospital? What if somebody has to go to the airport? What if…”
“I know it is very bad,” I interrupt him. “But we have to leave in the morning. How do we do that? Who can we find out from?”
“Don’t worry, we will find a way,” he laughs again nervously. “What do you say,” he pleads with the driver. The driver nods, “We will find a way.”
“Didn’t you know about this earlier? After all, the traffic advisory would have been issued a few days back.”
“Where do they tell us anything,” says the driver.
“That is the problem,” says the photographer. “They don’t issue any notice in advance. All information is given at the last minute, and even then, the locals are not informed. We only find out when the police stop us…”
“Please find out from some reliable person,” I interrupt.
By now it is already 5 in the evening. I look wistfully at Dal lake. The evening will not be what I had hoped for.
5.20pm. The photographer suddenly remembers a friend in the CID. He calls him. No response. After several attempts, the friend answers. At the end of a long conversation during which the friends did some catching up too, the CID fellow has no answer; only speculation about which roads would be shut and until what time. His final words: shift to a hotel close to the airport.
Eventually, putting my trust in Kashmiri optimism—we will find a way–, we return to the hotel. Around 6.30, the owner of the taxi agency gives an assurance call, “We will find a way.” And sure enough, a way was found the next morning. We walked a certain distance in the bylanes circumventing the main road to reach the stretch beyond the route of the marathon. The taxi driver was waiting on the other side, smiling broadly.
As newly sworn-in chief minister Omar Abdullah ran the marathon with a selection of athletes from India and abroad, we raced through the deserted roads of Srinagar in another part of the city towards the highway. Two roads. Two realities. Celebration in one part. Indifference in another.
A New Narrative
Within a few months of coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government declared that the only Kashmir issue which needed resolution was getting Pakistan Occupied Kashmir back. This not only denied the existence of the Kashmir problem since 1947, but also put a shroud on the process started by the first prime minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Vajpayee apparently was very exercised about the Kashmir issue. So exercised that former chief of Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), A.S. Dulat wrote a 300-page book in 2015 chronicling Vajpayee’s efforts at resolving the Kashmir issue. According to him, Vajpayee once told him, ‘Iss gutthi ko suljhana hai’ (this gordian knot has to be cut). Thereafter, he spent a good part of his five-year tenure in normalising relations with Pakistan and mainstreaming the Separatists leaders (under the Mirwaiz Umar Farooq led All-Party Hurriyat Conference) in Kashmir by not only hosting them a number of times in Delhi, but also allowing them to travel to Pakistan to be hosted by President Pervez Musharraf.
Vajpayee wanted Kashmir to be his legacy. And to some extent it is. Even today, people in Srinagar, across the political divide, wistfully recall the Vajpayee years. Vajpayee adopted a three-prong approach towards its resolution—empowering the elected state government to engage with all sections of the Kashmiri society, engaging with the Hurriyat leaders and talking with Pakistan. His successor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh-led Congress government took the process forward, by instituting a quasi-formal dialogue between his interlocutor and Musharraf’s, which came to be popularly known as the Musharraf formula, even though the basic contours of it emerged from a study by the US-based Kashmir Study Group. Such was the level of advancement in talks that in early 2007, Mirwaiz was confident enough to announce in Kashmir that the protracted 60-year-old problem would be resolved by the end of the year.
That didn’t happen for reasons that are now part of historical record. Just as is the reality that between 2001 to 2007, India and Pakistan were engaged in a sustained conversation over Kashmir, among other things. Such was the intensity of that conversation that its fragrance lingered on until 2015, moving Dulat to conclude in his book that, ‘…a solution around the Musharraf formula would have disposed of the problem for the foreseeable future. Now we need to engage with Kashmir and with Pakistan as well.’ Of course, the world has changed since then, and Kashmir issue is now intertwined with the global geopolitics. And anyone with a sense of history can see it.
But Prime Minister Modi is not a man of history. He is a man of elections. In Kashmir, he saw the electoral future of his party with him in the top seat. There were two ways in which Kashmir could be used to keep his support base in the rest of India in a permanent state of mobilisation. One, by foregrounding the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits through repetitive reiterations in the mainstream and social media (films like The Kashmir Files and WhatsApp posts), a permanent communal cleave could be achieved without the expense of mounting large scale violence (always good for the elections); and two, reduction of the Kashmir issue to terrorism would keep the national focus on Pakistan and away from China, which, the government realised pretty early, was a challenge with diminishing electoral results.
But achieving this balance required the change of narrative. Hence, history was buried. The government declared that the only problem in Kashmir was the proxy war by the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world–Pakistan. Hence, it needed to be called out and cornered, globally. Of course, pursuant to this narrative, talking with Pakistan was out of question. Within a few months of coming to power, Modi government’s discourse at international events was standardised around terrorism. In all multilateral or bilateral engagements from Prime Minister down to the junior-most minister, terrorism was presented as the biggest threat facing the world. With the aim of isolating Pakistan, in his first outing at the United Nations in 2014, Prime Minister Modi urged the world community to adopt a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism.
The UN however didn’t rise to the occasion. In 2016, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon presented a ‘Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism’ to the General Assembly, under which he proposed ways to tackle extremist violence by addressing the underlying root causes. Speaking during his presentation, Ki-moon said, ‘Sweeping definitions of terrorism or violent extremism are often used to criminalise the legitimate actions of opposition groups, civil society organisations and human rights defenders. Governments should not use these types of sweeping definitions as a pretext to attack or silence one’s critics.’ Was he talking directly to us?
But this did not deter the government. While Modi’s predecessors saw all Kashmiris—even those who had indulged in violence in the past, such as Yasin Malik—as stakeholders who needed to be engaged, he had a different view. Modi government’s Kashmir policy was finetuned by his national security advisor Ajit Doval (the only other person, apart from the prime minister, whose status has remained unchanged since 2014), who realized that a new narrative can only become widespread if all other narratives were criminalized.
Hence, three truths were established. One, historically, the whole of Kashmir, including Gilgit-Baltistan, has always been an integral part of India; two, the violence in Kashmir is the consequence of Pakistan’s proxy war through export of terrorism; and three, the only issue that needed to be settled was the matter of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Anyone contesting these truths in Kashmir by pointing towards the recent history was treated as either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer. In the rest of India, the favoured phrases were anti-national or urban Naxal.
To reinforce these truths and to test their efficacy during elections, the government twice carried out ‘attacks’ against Pakistan—once the surgical strikes in 2016 and then the Balakot air strikes in February 2019. The latter delivered the second term to the Modi government with a margin bigger than 2014. The narrative was meeting its objectives. Once these terms of engagements on Kashmir were in place in the first term of the Modi government, the ground was set to move forward in the second term.
In August 2019, the government abrogated Articles 370 and 35A and passed the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act by which the state was partitioned into two Union Territories—Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. With this, whatever remained of the ‘Kashmir issue’ had been sorted out.
The success of the narrative was evident in the parliamentary debates on the abrogation of the above articles. Even the most trenchant critics of the government qualified their criticism by asserting that there could be no doubt that Kashmir is an integral part of India. There was worry that if even a whiff of the ‘Kashmir issue’ escaped from their arguments, they could be accused of treason. The only issues now were restoration of the statehood, and perhaps as some argued, the aforementioned articles. The goalpost had shrunk. As far as the government of India was concerned, the history of Kashmir began on 5 August 2019.
If only history was mere ink on a piece of paper. History lives in shared experiences, in collective memories and in the preceding political processes.
Return of Normalcy
Since the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A was preceded and followed by a massive physical and digital clampdown in the Valley, which continued for nearly a year, the government was keen to showcase that normalcy has returned to Kashmir as soon as possible. But there was one problem.
The Kashmiris had gone completely quiet. If there were no largescale protests against the government move, there was no jubilation either. It was as if the Kashmiris had ceased to exist. At least in public places. All one saw were security forces and concertina wires. And Indian tourists, who seemed to be in a hurry to visit the Valley and post happy pictures on social media in validation of the government move. Happy tourist pictures were the first sign of how the government had brought the Valley back from the brink.
Never mind that normalcy was to return for the people of Kashmir and not the tourists, who incidentally had been able to holiday in Kashmir even when there was no normalcy. Barring the first half of the decade of the 1990s, tourists, including religious tourists, have been going to the Valley uninterrupted. Of course, the numbers waxed and waned. Even I went to Kashmir on the department of tourism-sponsored trip in 1998 to see and report that it was safe for tourists to holiday in the Valley.
This has been possible for two reasons. One, for a state heavily dependent upon tourism for its sustainment, the locals have been very conscious of ensuring their security. Barring a few incidents, Indian tourists and pilgrims have not been targeted in the Valley; another evidence that it is not merely imported terrorism but a home-grown insurgency. Two, tourism in Kashmir follows the corridor principle. All the major tourist sites, within Srinagar and outside, for instance, Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonamarg etc., are removed from the turmoil and the politics of the state.
Given this, the government realised that the narrative of normalcy needed Kashmiri faces. To achieve this, the BJP first cannibalised its pre-2019 coalition partner the People’s Democratic Party to prop up a new political outfit Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party. Subsequently, it also floated the Kashmir chapter of the BJP with some local leaders, who were happy to praise the prime minister on camera from time to time.
This was not enough. Narratives need constant feeding. The J&K administration, led by the Governor, used the labourers from construction sites, usually of Bihar and UP, to showcase how happy Kashmir was after the removal of the articles that came in the way of its development. As one local journalist says, “These labourers are hired for a day, given Kashmiri-style clothes to march, dance and wave the tricolour behind the local performing artists, quite similar to ‘rent a crowd’ for political rallies.”
Unfortunately, rented narratives did not stick. Worse, they made the labourers vulnerable to attack, like the October one in Ganderbal, by those who wanted to challenge this narrative with theirs. Attacks on the labourers were not attacks on development as the government spin projected them. They were attacks on the narrative.
The marathon, mentioned in the beginning, the show football matches, the poetry symposia and other such events which are organised from time to time are all the part of the narrative-building. Kashmir is a mere venue for these events, which require that the local are kept away for their hazard-free conclusion.
Alternate Reality
The government-ordered ‘normalcy’ is frequently interrupted by the refusal of the Kashmir issue to fall in line. In low-level targeted attacks on security personnel, 189 have died between 2020-24. Among the dead have been Indian Army officers too.
In the last two years, there has been a spurt in attacks in the Jammu division of the Union territory. This was attributed to the gaps which had formed in the security grids because of the redeployment of troops to the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh. The gaps were subsequently filled. In the last couple of months there have been attacks in north Kashmir, in areas which were assumed to be clean, such as Ganderbal, Tangmarg and even Srinagar. Once again these were gaps, of which the militants took advantage of.
Clearly, the illusion of peace is maintained by a huge presence of the security forces, which include the Indian Army, the central armed police forces and the state police. Whenever there is any let-up in their vigilance, the terrorists strike. Such is the level of anxiety among the security personnel in the UT that every once in a while, some one speaks the truth, even if inadvertently. In July 2024, director general police, Jammu & Kashmir police R.R. Swain told the media that, “Pakistan successfully infiltrated all important aspects of civil society, thanks to so-called mainstream or regional politics in the valley,” thereby admitting that there was widespread disaffection against the Indian administration, despite that so-called normalcy.
However, Swain was only partly correct. It’s not only the civil society and the politicians who are disenchanted with India, even Kashmiri members of the J&K bureaucracy are. And the government of India is aware of it. Since August 2019, Kashmiris are being eased out of key administrative positions, replaced by officers from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and so on. In fact, the current DGP Nalin Prabhat is an Andhra Pradesh cadre officer, who was shifted to the AGMUT cadre in July (meant for the Union Territories) to facilitate his transfer to J&K in September. Incidentally, the Kashmiri officers are also AGMUT cadre now since the state has been turned into a UT, and this is being used to post them out of Kashmir.
In the last two years, the Modi government has also whittled down the institutions of self-governance in the UT. For instance, no Panchayat elections have been held since 2023. There have been no urban local body elections. The existing professional associations or unions have been dismantled. For example, by arresting several members of the bar association—some under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)—, the government rendered it dysfunctional. The members of the bar were engaged in fighting cases of human rights violations, fake encounters and forced disappearances. Thereafter, a parallel and amenable bar association was sponsored by the state administration. The traders’ association has had a slightly better fate. While none of its members have been arrested, it has ceased to function or speak for the rights of small traders who comprise the majority of businesses in Kashmir.
The closure of the Kashmir Press Club two years ago made some news in the national media. But since then, a new press club has opened on the orders of the Governor, comprising journalists amenable to the regime. This is also an indication of which journalists are allowed into government events, now closed to all old, mainstream journalists. The new Kashmir being crafted by the government is creating a new coterie of courtiers and collaborators. Yet, the past refuses to melt into the sunset.
With the fading light of dusk casting a shadow on his face, a middle-level police officer of the Kashmir (now AGMUT) cadre says with a tinge of sadness, “The sentiment of azadi is something every Kashmiri is born with. It hurts you. It kills you. But it never dies. In uniform, I do what my job asks me to do. But when I take off the uniform, the sentiment burns inside me like an ulcer.”
What is azadi?
“Who knows?” he says. “And, actually it doesn’t matter. What matters is the yearning it fills you with. The feeling that the present moment is not your political destiny. That you need a political closure.”
Didn’t 5 August 2019 bring that closure? What hope remained of anything else after that?
He chuckles. The Kashmiri people these days wear an intricately woven mask of silence and anonymity. The conversation comprises meaningful silences and abrupt chuckles, as if there is mirth in their misery.
“You’d think that it would bring closure. It deepened the wound. It showed the Kashmiris how powerless they are,” he says, then adding with another chuckle, “Actually, it rekindled the azadi sentiment even among those who didn’t think about it earlier.”
A somewhat similar sentiment is expressed by a young shopkeeper, who after a few minutes of general chit-chatting senses that he could trust his visitors. The moment the lone customer in his shop leaves, he wordlessly glances towards his assistant, who darts towards the shutter, partially downing it in an indication that the shop is momentarily unavailable.
“Whatever we may tell each other,” he says, referring to us, “we both know that a Kashmiri is not an Indian. Our foremost identity is Kashmiri. Please don’t misunderstand me. I have lived in Bangalore, and I have a lot of Indian friends. I like Indian people. But they are Indian people. They are not us. We are not them. This is the way it is.”
While he may speak for himself, how can he speak for us? How can he presume that we don’t regard Kashmiris as Indians?
With a sad smile on his lips and a glisten in his eyes, he says, “If that was true, why would the government of India say that it wants to integrate Kashmiri people into the Indian mainstream? Wouldn’t we already be integrated? Why would the tool of that integration be military force?”
His words bring to mind a slogan I saw written at the back of a truck: ‘Azadi nahin to kam se kam zulm se toh azadi do’ (If you can’t give us freedom, at least free us from cruelty). Tough ask in the present times.
A middle-aged man, who until 2019 slogged as a civil rights activist compiling data on the number of dead and disappeared Kashmiri people now sits in his vacant office crammed with files, where nobody comes. The young volunteers stopped coming after the National Investigative Agency raided his office and residence in 2020, taking away a lot of his documents.
“I trust you, so I can tell you,” he begins. “You wrote that Kashmiris have become invisible (referring to the August 2024 article). No, we are leading a vegetative existence, unable to do what we like to do.” The same sadness, which has now become a default condition for the Kashmiris, permeates his being. He refers to the same state of helplessness as the police officer, adding the word hopelessness to it.
“What kind of justice can Kashmiris expect when even Indian citizens are facing injustice at the hands of the Indian government—look at BK-16 (16 human rights activists/ journalists implicated in false cases), Umar Khalid and other ordinary Muslims who are lynched and their houses bulldozed,” he points out.
“Once many Kashmiris had pinned their hopes on Pakistan. But see what is happening there. Forget Kashmiris, the Pakistan Army has consistently let down its own people, most recently by imprisoning Imran Khan. Kashmiris adore Imran Khan,” he says.
Whatever the government may insist, Pakistan has always been a recurring theme in Kashmir and continues to be. While some say that there is disillusionment with Pakistan because it did not do enough after 2019, a young mainstream politician does not agree. According to him, the connect with Pakistan goes beyond religion and politics.
“Pakistani people have come into Kashmir and fought alongside Kashmiris against the ‘supposed Indian oppression’. They have died here. They were buried here by Kashmiri people, alongside the Kashmiris. The Kashmiri have read the namaz-e-janaza (the prayer before burial) for them. They maintain their graves,” he says. “All Muslims understand the importance of the burial place and how it draws the living.”
“It is tragic,” he continues, “that the government still doesn’t understand the importance of a grave, especially an unmarked one, which clearly belongs to a militant, a person who died for the Kashmiri people.” He gives the example of the militant Riyaz Naikoo who was killed in 2020. His body was not handed over to his family, but buried in Sonamarg, a tourist town, in the belief that it would be lost. “But the guides know where it is. Today, not only Kashmiris, but curious tourists also visit it,” he says.
Clearly, force can enforce a narrative. But sentiment sustains it. Five years after the government’s attempt to rewrite the history of Kashmir, sentiment continues to clash with force in the war of narratives.