STATES OF MATTER. Unfinished dialogues, unlearned lessons

Kashmir’s collective mirth was briefly aroused by Union defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s claim that the scrapping of high denomination currency notes on November 8 caused the protests that have roiled the Valley since July to die out. These months have not by any means been the first that the Valley has suffered a prolonged paralysis of civic life. Ways of coping without currency as a social mediator, have long been part of the survival kit of Kashmir’s people.

November 19 was the first full day of free movement in Kashmir since the strife began in July. Another day of freedom followed before the conglomerate of dissident political parties, the Hurriyat Conference, reimposed closure. In the weeks since July 9, State-imposed curfews, Hurriyat-ordained general strikes and closures enforced by the street, have often shaded into each other.

Unrest exploded in Kashmir following the July 8 killing of 22-year-old Burhan Wani, a militant of the banned insurgent group Hizbul Mujahideen. Wani’s funeral in Anantnag district drew hundreds of thousands of mourners the next day. The first shots in the confrontation that ensued were fired as mourners left the burial.

The subsequent arc of escalating violence was all too familiar: a killing, a funeral with rage vented in slogans and stones, and volleys of lethal fire in response. July and August were perhaps the worst months of the fury. Statistics with the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Police show that after an Eid spent under curfew on September 12, protests began wearing down by October.

The arc descended because every such flare-up of protests has a tendency to exhaust itself.

To fall into a mood of triumphalism here would be a profound act of unlearning by State and society in India. History is an obsession in the Valley and no discussion on the present can escape constant references to the tortured past. Kashmir has remained a bleeding wound so long because memories in the Valley are long and perilously brief in India.

On November 9, the Central Information Commission, on a petition moved by activist Venkatesh Nayak, ordered full disclosure of the Indian Army’s record of the court martial involving the infamous Macchil encounter. Macchil was where three innocent villagers were killed and then labelled as terrorists in 2010, unleashing waves of unrest that rocked the Valley for four months and led to 124 deaths.

Yet the deterrent value of the court martial that followed has not been evident. Through the 2016 unrest, crowd-control techniques, severely at odds with accepted norms, including the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement, have been responsible for close to a hundred deaths and the maiming of many more.

There have also been cases where even the thin extenuation of crowd control in a highly volatile situation has been unavailable, as with the killing of an ATM guard, Reyaz Ahmed, on August 3, schoolteacher Shabir Ahmad on August 17 and 11-year-old Junaid Ahmad on October 7. All these involved deliberate intent by Army and paramilitary forces.

Yet the promised criminal investigations have not begun, despite repeated assurances by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

It is an absolute necessity that the learning processes initiated in the past, however limited, be retained. The 2010 unrest caused the appointment of a panel of interlocutors who were authorised to engage with the entire range of social and political opinion in J&K and suggest ways towards effecting a durable reconciliation within. The interlocutors’ 2012 report fell far short of expectations, though it promised a “new compact” with the people of J&K in its title.

In the years since, neither State nor society in India showed the slightest inclination to take on board these very limited lessons.

The report of the interlocutors was consigned to the dusty archives, amid a new bid by majoritarian forces to impose their will upon Kashmir.

The 2014 assembly elections in J&K were the most disastrous ever, not as in the past, because of tampering with fair procedures, but because of its sharply polarised outcome in ethno-religious terms. The BJP won the largest number of votes but lost every one of the seats it contested in the Kashmir Valley and forfeited its deposits in most. More than 93 per cent of its votes was won in Jammu.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), though narrowly behind the BJP in votes, won three seats more. The PDP’s performance, though skewed towards the Kashmir Valley, was nowhere near as lopsided, with 27 per cent of its total votes coming from the Jammu region, where it won two seats.

The rather perverse electoral outcome left no choice for the PDP but to enter into an alliance with the BJP. If the BJP drew any cautionary lessons from the deep schisms in the State’s polity, it showed no sign as it pushed ahead with an aggressive politics of majoritarianism.

A sequence of intelligence reports prior to Burhan Wani’s killing pointed to growing public resentment. One of the indicators was the rising turnout at funerals of slain militants and the fervour of accompanying slogans. The upsurge that followed Burhan Wani’s killing was predictable, though intelligence obviously erred in estimating its magnitude and longevity.

What needs uncovering now is the longer-term intent the official response suggests. Is there a future for the politics of dialogue and reconciliation, or is Kashmir headed for longer and more brutal repression? There has been little in the way of formal clarification, but the track record so far this year clearly suggests the latter.

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