Valley fights fire with ire

When in the afternoon of December 9 last year, the police and paramilitary forces silently cordoned off the two-storey house of Mushtaq Ahmad Ganai at Hassanpora in south Kashmir’s Kulgam district, the two Lashkar-e-Taiba militants — Majid Zargar and Rahil Amin — holed up on the second floor were oblivious to the fact. Zamrooda, the 16-year-old daughter of Ganai, who was outside, saw the army taking positions in the neighbouring houses. She rushed inside to inform the militants.

“They tried to peer through the windowpanes and asked me to check if any side of the house was not covered by the army. I said ‘no’. One of them tried to jump through the rear window but stopped after I warned him that he would run into the waiting security personnel,” says Zamrooda, who was in the house with only her two brothers and a younger sister for company. Their parents were away visiting a relative since the previous day.

“When the militants were convinced they could not escape, they told us to leave. They also urged us to go to the nearby mosque and get the news of the encounter announced through the loudspeaker, so that the villagers could come to their rescue.”

But before the siblings could do so, the exchange of fire had begun, which alerted the villagers. Soon, scores of them gathered and began raising slogans and throwing stones even as they advanced towards the encounter site to try and help the militants escape. The forces managed to halt their advance but not their protest, which continued with increasing ferocity as the encounter dragged on for 42 hours.

Both militants were killed, and their burnt and unrecognisable bodies were later handed over to their respective families in the adjacent villages. The house was blown down. The encounter became long-drawn as the militants kept changing their position in the house, the then director general of police coordination (law and order) SP Vaid told the media. Vaid is now J&K DGP. One protester, Arif Ahmad Shah, was also killed in the firing.

Spreading fire

Seated in a two-room shack rigged out of corrugated roofing sheets and plyboard, Zamrooda’s mother, Mehbooba, doesn’t know what to say about the violent incident in her old home. Instead she bewailed the loss of her 22-year-old son, Jahangir, who was killed last August during the unrest that followed the killing of the militant leader Burhan Wani.

“My house will be rebuilt. But my son will not return,” says Mehbooba as she takes out his passport-size picture from her pocket, looks at it and breaks down. “He was neither a militant, nor a protester. He was walking through a market when forces fired at him.”

The chain of events in the Hassanpora incident is now a familiar one, encountered every now and then in the nearby villages and districts of south Kashmir. Just 10 km away at Frisal, on the night of February 13, forces surrounded the house of Abdul Majid Reshi, as four Hizbul Mujahideen militants were lodged in it.

The militants asked the family to leave the house. Two of Reshi’s sons, Ishfaq Majid and Shafi Majid, were taken into custody by the army. The exchange of fire began soon after. By dawn, Ishfaq had been killed, with the forces claiming he died in the cross-fire and the family alleging he was tortured and killed.

The village soon erupted in revolt, and several youth from the neighbouring villages joined in. Another familiar spectacle unfolded. The crowd shouted anti-India and pro-Azadi slogans and hurled stones. Knots of protesting youth appeared from behind the nearby hillocks and pressed towards the encounter site, with little concern for consequences. The security forces turned their guns towards them.

One civilian, identified as 22-year-old Mushtaq Ahmad Itoo of Hatigam village, died in the firing. Fifteen others sustained bullet injuries and many more were hit by pellets, including two who were injured in the eye.

The encounter ended in the afternoon, leaving four militants and two security personnel dead. The villagers, however, stoutly defend the public anger against the encounters, saying they owe it to the militants “who are fighting their cause”.

“How can we sit idle when our children who have taken up the gun for our Azadi are getting killed,” asks Mohammad Abdullah Dar, a 73-year-old resident whose grandsons were among the protesters. “Youth can’t stop themselves and run to the rescue of their brothers.”

A recent phenomenon

Even as the number and size of funeral processions for slain militants have grown in the past few years, the mobilisation of the public against encounters is of more recent provenance. It was in early 2016 that people began disrupting encounter sites in a bid to help militants escape. This development serves as further evidence of a deepening pro-militancy sentiment and a spike in recruitment of militants, especially in the months after the killing of Wani. According to security estimates, the number of militants in the Valley is now around 300, up from 180 before Wani’s death. Six civilians have died and scores sustained bullet and pellet injuries in the attempts to save militants from capture.

The people, however, remain undeterred even after Army Chief General Bipin Rawat’s stern warning that those trying to disrupt anti-militancy operations would be treated as “overground workers of terrorists” and can be fired at. In fact, the very day after Gen Rawat’s statement, hundreds of people pelted stones at security forces at Urivan village in Pulwama district, forcing them to call off the cordon-and-search operation they were to launch in the area.

Seething anger

A video of the protest at Frisal which went viral on WhatsApp and Facebook even as the encounter was underway reflects the seething anger on the ground. It shows a group of youth hiding behind a mound of earth and shouting slogans and epithets against the police and paramilitary forces. Suddenly, the boy sitting atop the mound slides down and informs the others matter-of-factly that he has been “hit by bullet in his thigh”.

“Anyone has a muffler that I can wrap around the wound,” he asks his fellow protesters as they carry him away, all the while raising anti-India slogans.

This readiness to hurl themselves in harm’s way in their bid to save militants is now spreading among the youth across the Valley, more so in the southern parts. In Frisal’s neighbouring villages such as Chingaum, Redwani, Hassanpur, and others, the stories about militants and their “heroic deaths” are part of the new folklore. Many among the local youth now harbour a sneaking fancy for the “adventurous life” of militancy and the attendant “martyrdom”.

“You know all of us would be militants if militants themselves had not discouraged us from joining,” says 20-year-old Zahid Rasool from Redwani, as his friends nod in approval. Why? “Because they don’t have weapons for us. They don’t have enough weapons even for themselves.”

Rasool’s revelation is borne out by the intermittent incidents of rifle-snatching by the militants from security personnel. Around 70 weapons were snatched by militants and mobs during the six-month-long post-Burhan Wani unrest, according to security estimates.

Though some of the stolen weapons were retrieved, many are believed to have fallen into the hands of the new militant recruits. These recruits are among those since killed in encounters with security forces. Last year, 150 militants died in fighting with security forces and since January, 22 more have been killed. But this has hardly dampened the renewed ardour for jihad among the youth and the general public.

Skipping a generation

The older generation, however, is more circumspect, mindful as it is of the violence of the ’90s and its still-unfolding fallout. But their opinion counts for little among the new generation, which is delirious with feelings of hero-worship triggered by the massive funerals; the determined rescue bids for trapped militants are another way for them to take the plunge and bask in public adoration.

Ghulam Rasool Dar, a 54-year-old banker from Marhama Bijbehara, came to a painful understanding of this new reality when his blogger son Basit Dar didn’t return after leaving home to attend evening prayers at the local mosque. After days of frantic search, Ghulam Rasool learnt from the police that Basit had joined the militants.

“He had never shown any inclination to become a militant. He didn’t even talk politics at home. It was only when I read his blog after his death that I learnt he had all along been conscious of the developments around,” Ghulam Rasool said, his voice choking.

Basit was killed in an encounter on December 14, just 53 days after taking up the gun.

“I tried hard to bring him back. But I couldn’t trace him. Nor did he contact us. Not even once... not even his mother, who waited for a phone call from him every second of those 53 days.”

Riyaz Wani is a journalist based in Srinagar

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