The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

THE heated exchanges over Kashmir between Pakistan and India at the Saarc ministerial conference in Islamabad this week and the abrupt departure for Delhi of the Indian home minister were indicative of the situation on the ground in India-held Kashmir.

Even then, the exchanges hardly captured the real mood in the Kashmir valley which is in the grip of seething anger. The brutality with which protests are being put down by the security forces has ensured things remain on the boil.

The statistics speak for themselves. Since the 21-year-old militant commander who was more of a social media star, Burhan Wani, was killed early last month and protests erupted across the valley after tens of thousands participated in his funeral, at least 60 people have been killed and some 4,000 injured.


Many Kashmiris stress that when they say ‘azadi’ they mean both from India and Pakistan.


One aspect of the brutal repression is the use of shotguns by both the dreaded paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Shotguns in use of police forces are also called ‘riot guns’.

Deployed in crowd control situations, these guns are supposed to use ‘non-lethal’ ammunition including rubber pellets and are normally aimed and discharged at more or less the legs or feet of the protesters. Often they are less powerful than shotguns used for hunting.

Evidence (both of their use and the impact) suggests the Indian security forces have used hunting shotguns with steel pellets and fired their weapons at the upper torso and faces of the protesters. Photo­graphs and X-rays of dozens of young men and women have appeared on the social media showing multiple pellet wounds in their upper bodies and faces.

The worst possible consequence of such use of shotguns against the mainly young (some not even in their teens yet) demonstrators is that they have been blinded. The number of those being treated for eye injuries is said to be in excess of 300 while some 50 have lost their sight completely.

Of course I have had no access to the valley itself but on a recent visit to London, where a serious ankle injury confined me mostly to bed, I was still able to talk to many friends and acquaintances from Srinagar and other places in the valley.

Their common refrain was that Kashmiris have now travelled a long distance from the last elections where many voted in the hope for peace. This proved to be elusive and now their children, kith and kin are being brutally oppressed. All are saying one word in unison: ‘Azadi’ (freedom).

I’d rather not name my friends for the fear of their family members’ safety who are in the valley itself, but many of them seemed to have reached a pass where they don’t care and maintain a high-profile presence by writing about the atrocities in the media and raising awareness via social media on a daily basis.

Side by side with their common demand for azadi, many Kashmiris I talked to were also equally clear about saying ‘no thanks’ to Pakistan-based militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). This is simply because they believed that such groups undermine their indigenous struggle.

As one London-based Kashmiri elaborated, “Look at what happened to what was purely our own struggle in the 1980s and 1990s. It was hijacked by the Pakistan-based groups. Their jihad based on an ideology pretty alien to the valley targeted innocent civilians and even foreigners in Kashmir, which discredited our movement and isolated it internationally.”

Another factor that all these Kashmiris were keen to stress on was that when they say ‘azadi’ they mean both from India and Pakistan. They wish to govern themselves. “The best act of friendship by Pakistan would be to let us be. We have reached a stage where we’d be horrified to contemplate a day when, say, Islamabad replaces New Delhi.”

Ironically, it was the man responsible for the Kargil fiasco, Gen Pervez Musharraf, who also saw and addressed this factor, perhaps less to respect the wishes of the Kashmiris but more to provide India with an acceptable solution, when he proposed a ‘borderless’ region during the 2005 summit with the then prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Considerable progress had been made four years earlier also when Musharraf met prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the Agra summit and matters appeared close to an agreement when ostensibly loose remarks by the Pakistan president were pounced upon by hard-line BJP leaders opposed to any accord.

The hardliners were led then by Lal Krishna Advani and they found their spokesperson in Mrs Sushma Swaraj (the current foreign minister) whose characterisation of the dialogue before the assembled media was such that nobody who was part of the discussions on the Pakistan side could recognise it. This jettisoned the process that was generating considerable optimism in 2001.

But the progress made in 2005 again crawled to a halt when Musharraf became embroiled in a fight for survival at home, following his March 2007 attempted sacking of the then Supreme Court chief justice. The 2008 attack by LeT terrorists targeting unarmed civilians in Mumbai almost pushed the two nuclear powers to the very edge.

Today, regardless of the peace initiatives Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may be keen on, the GHQ seems to have drawn red lines for him not to cross, including vigorously trying the Mumbai carnage accused.

And having won the election due to his appeal among both big business and hard-line Hindu nationalists, his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi appears also lost in no-man’s land where relations with Pakistan are concerned.

While those who call the shots in the two countries are currently locked in on one-upmanship, the defence budgets on each side are ballooning, the Kashmir valley continues to bleed with no respite in sight, and the subcontinent remains teeming with millions steeped in poverty and misery. And there appears no light at the end of the tunnel.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2016

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