No Valley for childhood

Insha Lone sits quietly in a room at her uncle’s home in Dangerpora hamlet in South Kashmir. It’s hard to miss her with her thick, black glasses that are large enough to cover her cheekbones. The contrast it makes with her beautiful face and fleshy nose only heightens the agony of the realisation that she can no longer see.

The 14-year-old was blinded just three days into the current upsurge of violence in the Valley, when she was hit by a barrage of pellets fired by the police to quell a protest outside her home in village Seedow. The image of her disfigured, pellet-riddled face went viral, generating widespread horror and anger, and forcing the State government to send her to AIIMS Delhi and, later, Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital Mumbai. But after several surgeries, the doctors declared her blind.

Her plight has since become emblematic of the Kashmir situation and her face a symbol of the mass blinding unleashed by indiscriminate use of the “non-lethal” pump action guns. Though the Centre had, in between, formed a committee to review the gun’s use, it ultimately decided not to ban it. Pellets continue to blind and maim protesters.

According to recent figures, 1,178 of the over 15,000 injured were hit in the eye and 300 have lost sight in one or both eyes; 150 minors, aged below 15, have impaired vision. As many as 991 of the injured have been admitted at SMHS, the Valley’s main hospital, and 135 at the SKIMS Medical College.

Sitting in her room, Lone is keenly conscious of her lost sight. She longs to see her mother’s face. She asks for her school bag, which her mother has hidden for now. What’s more, she wants to go to her school and meet her classmates. The frustration borne out of having these simple wishes unfulfilled pushed the child to leave home and move to her uncle’s house.

“I don’t want to live at my home. I got blinded there,” she says. “Besides, I can’t even go to my school now. What is left for me to do there now?”

Lone’s dejection is heartbreaking and, what’s worse, she isn’t alone in this. Injured or not, thousands of Kashmiri children are ensnared in the Valley’s unremitting political conflict and stare at an uncertain future.

Stalled education

Schools in Kashmir have remained closed since July 8, the day the popular Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces. The curfew over the following two months, alongside an endless separatist protest roster, ensured that no schools could reopen. This situation remains unchanged, even after the government successfully conducting board examinations for Std X and XII from November 14.

The schools confront a unique dilemma: The government sees their reopening as a major step towards normalcy, whereas the separatists are determined to prevent this for the same reason. The State cannot provide security to all the 15,000 educational institutions in the Valley, and the schools are anxious not to defy the separatist protest calendar, especially in the face of the widespread anger against the ongoing killings and blindings.

The tug-of-war has hopelessly politicised the situation. The government and the separatists alike are mouthing platitudes about their respective concern for education, but are, in practice, using the children to score off against each other.

In October, the State’s education minister Naeem Akhtar had, in a local daily, penned an open letter to the hawkish separatist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, seeking his intervention to re-open schools. “Sir, I am praying for education for we don’t have it though we do well in most other fields. Among 34 states of India we are at 33. Can’t we have a modest but more achievable target as a Muslim majority State to convert the wish of our Prophet to become number one by implementing his command,” Akhtar wrote. “Can we with our present performance card face Him (God) on the day of reckoning, you Jenab Geelani sahib as the David in the present equation and me as the Goliath, you as the angel of Azadi and me as the devil of subjugation?”

In response, Geelani in his “address to the nation” said “the people who were collaborating with India” had no right to exhibit concern for education. “It is a shame that those schooled in the art of slavery and collaboration are teaching us the virtues of education. Education is not making one’s self available at the service of a foreign Hindu fascist aggressor against one’s own people,” he said.

“Education is not mere literacy. It is the light by which we distinguish truth from falsehood. Our children are now educated in this; they see without exception the hollow men that these collaborators are.”

And even as this contentious discourse was playing itself out, schools started burning across the Valley. In a matter of six weeks, 36 schools — 16 in the four south Kashmir districts of Kulgam, Anantnag, Shopian and Pulwama, also the hub of the current turmoil — were set afire.

Initially, both the separatists and the government watched the development from a distance, then they dissociated from it, and later started blaming each other. It took the burning of 19 schools to finally rouse the Hurriyat to tamely condemn it. The separatist grouping merely issued a statement that those burning the schools “were not its well-wishers”.

The State government, which has so far arrested over 10,000 for alleged participation in protests and stone-throwing, managed to round up just over 30 people for alleged involvement in school burnings. Intriguingly, however, it stopped short of identifying them or revealing their motives and links.

So, who burnt the schools? Nobody seems to know. Yet, everyone is aware that there is a troubled political context to the development — the tussle between the government and the students backed by Hurriyat over the holding of the annual examination. Bizarrely enough, at some of the protests against the exams, students carried placards that read “No exams until Azadi”. This led many to surmise that the school burnings were an impulsive action by students seeking postponement of the examinations. But the organised and coordinated nature of the incidents, in places far removed from each other, put paid to such conjectures.

The State government, meanwhile, has gone ahead with the board examination as scheduled. And the Central government was quick to claim victory.

Human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar termed the board exams a “powerful surgical strike” on the separatists, and the latter were quick to retort that Javadekar’s statement was a “vindication of their position that the government was exploiting education for political ends”.

The battle over school reopenings, on the other hand, is an ongoing one and the state government can do little without the separatists’ consent. Nevertheless, a small number of government and private schools, most of them in far-flung villages, tried to get around this bind by opening schools for two hours in the morning.

One of these is the Government Middle School at village Haran in Ganderbal. Its headmaster, Mushtaq Ahmad Hakeem, 51, leaves his home in nearby Bamloora at 7.30 in the morning, as do some of his colleagues in the adjacent villages. They walk furtively — some ride a cycle — the three km to the school and return home by 11 am.

“I first talked to the villagers. It was only after they encouraged me to reopen the school that I went ahead,” says Hakeem. “We did our best to provide education to our children. But there is not much that can be done in two hours.”

This exercise has proved costly for some. In Bamloora, teachers who attempted to hold morning classes were attacked. On the whole, an estimated 90 per cent of schools have remained shut — a state of affairs that is tied to the predominantly rural character of the current revolt.

Drift towards militancy

The disruption in education aside, the fallout of the unrest on Kashmir’s children has been profound and sweeping. For one, the ferment has been, more or less, led by 15- to 20-year-olds. According to police data, there were 2,249 incidents of stone-throwing in the first 100 days of the current turmoil; and on the day after Wani’s killing, there were 200 incidents, with nearly 2,000 stone-pelters involved in each — that is, 40,000 youth pelted stones on that single day.

Similarly, as many as 5-10 protest rallies, each with nearly 5,000 participants — were taken out every day in the first 45 days after Wani’s death. The government’s response has been ruthless: 96 dead, several hundred blinded and over 15,000 injured.

In a Valleywide sweep, more than 7,000 have been arrested and over 500 slapped with Public Safety Act — a “lawless law” that sanctions six months of incarceration without trial, and can be extended up to two years. A predominant majority of the killed, blinded and arrested are youth, many of them minors.

Militancy has been in step with this groundswell of agitation: In the first 100 days, there were 68 militancy-related incidents — shootings, gunfights, grenade attacks and fidayeen (suicide) strikes. The dead included 35 security personnel — Army and CRPF, six cops and six civilians.

Additionally, more than 50 Kashmiri youth have embraced militancy during this short period of unrest, which is unprecedented over the past decade. This, coupled with the infiltration by 105 militants in the first nine months of this year, has given a marked boost to militancy in the Valley.

According to J&K DGP K Rajendra Kumar, nearly 300 militants are currently active in Kashmir, which is a substantial jump from the annual average of 100-150 over the past decade. Kumar described the situation as “extremely fragile” at a recent meeting of top civil and police officials of the State, chaired by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

The signs are ominous for Kashmir. It is now the third generation of its youth — since the outbreak of the armed secessionist campaign in 1989 — that looks set to be consumed by the conflict. That is, unless the Centre embarks on a sustained ameliorative response that addresses the issues underpinning the eruptions in the State.

“We lost the 90s generation to militancy. At the turn of the millennium we witnessed a slow transition to a less militant struggle, forced in part by geopolitical factors and a consequent realisation that the gun no longer served the Kashmir cause,” says Naseer Ahmad, a local columnist, who adds that the separatist movement transitioned to street protests through three successive summer revolts until 2010.

“But the current agitation is different. The drift now is back in favour of militancy. There is a renewed fancy for the gun, largely because it now commands the same public respect and awe that it did in the early 90s,” Ahmad says.

The unconscionable number of killings and mass blinding, on top of the massive humanitarian fallout of three decades of violence, has only deepened the feelings of desolation and consequent alienation from New Delhi. Along the way, the romanticised discourse on Azadi becomes enmeshed with the discourse of violent means to achieve it, and, further ahead, touches base with ideologies — some of them transnational in their appeal — that champion an endless armed resistance.

Politically troubled future

The four months of mass groundswell, attendant with the curfews and shutdowns, have brought Kashmir to the brink of an economic collapse. Nearly everyone, with the exception of government employees, is losing their livelihood. Shopkeepers have thrown out their salesmen, hoteliers their cooks and waiters, and daily-wage earners have been forced to live on doles. Other small businesses, including the local newspapers, have either sacked staff or drastically cut wages.

New Delhi appears impervious to these hardships. After initial feeble attempts at some engagement, it gave up all pretence of a political outreach. Ever since the visit in August of the all-party delegation, which found no takers among the separatist and civil society groups, the Centre has not embarked on any initiative to defuse the volatile situation.

This has left Kashmir feeling embittered. The youth apprehend an economically unwelcoming and politically troubled future, caught up in the parallel narratives of Islamabad and New Delhi, and their respective play in the competing politics of the separatists and mainstream parties in the state.

According to the 2011 J&K Economic Survey, the number of unemployed youths registered at the district employment and counselling centres was 6.01 lakh. Officials reckon the number would go up to 10 lakh in 2017. But there are fewer job opportunities for them.

The Annual Employment and Unemployment Survey Report for 2012-13 says that at 10 per cent, J&K has the highest unemployment rate in north India. The reason for this is the absence of a robust private sector; the State government, which is currently the largest employer, is in no position to provide jobs to all.

The prevailing situation in J&K is as follows: The uncertain and interrupted schooling deprives Kashmiri youth of proper education and skills. The lack of employment opportunities denies them a future. And the lingering conflict in the State frames their world view and determines their lives and choices. It also exacts heavy costs in terms of loss of life and injury.

If anything, this renders the Kashmir of today structurally unfavourable to its children. And this scenario can only be expected to continue unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors at play.

Riyaz Wani is a journalist based in Srinagar

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