If you have been following events in the Kashmir Valley, you will have heard of the huge crowds that turned up at Burhan Wani’s funeral. If not, you would at least know of the 70-odd civilians killed in the protests that followed, of the hundreds blinded, and of the innumerable wounded. But Burhan Wani was not the first militant to have had a funeral in the Valley. Over the last few months, you might have read of a number of such funerals. You would also have read that they had numerous mourners. If you read the local newspapers from Jammu & Kashmir, you might have come across reports from villages in Tral and Awantipora districts where locals were competing to host funerals of the slain.

It is impossible to ascertain the motivation in such circumstances. For some, it is part of the resistance against an oppressive, militarised structure they have lived with for the last 27 years. The battle between militants and the security forces have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians — with no justice for the dead, and no real hope of change for the living. For others, the motivation is far more complex. The political, secular world has failed them, and they have retreated to their culture and religion as markers of what they know. Funerals for the dead are part of that.

The more intriguing question is why these funerals are allowed. The security forces and the local government are well aware of what is happening. Moreover they cannot but be aware that such occasions, although largely about mourning, are also sites for protesting against, and the delegitimisation, of the state. So why are such funerals allowed? If all of Kashmir Valley can have curfew clamped upon it for two months, stopping a funeral for a slain militant — especially a foreign one — should be easy to do.

Intrigued by this question, I asked around, and found an interesting explanation. As everybody knows, the key to victory in any battle is information — who is your enemy, where they are, what are their capabilities and so on. If you cannot answer these questions, you cannot win. In the complicated mess that is Kashmir, the security agencies get this information from a variety of sources, whether through technical means or human, but the most important source of information is the mukhbir — the informant.

Just as with the funeral-goers, the incentives for the mukhbirs are many, and complicated. Some of them may genuinely be against the militants, others may be taking revenge for wrongs against themselves or their loved ones, some are surrendered militants who are forced to work as informants for the fear of being sent back to jail, being tortured or killed. And for others, the motivation is merely money, huge sums of which have been distributed to “pacify” the population in the Valley.

It is the mukhbir who tells the security forces — primarily the police, but sometimes the military — where the militants are hiding, who they are, and when they can be expected. The mukhbir is the targeting system of the guns of the state which, finally, hunt down and kill militants.

But for a mukhbir to be effective he has to be a trusted local. Somebody the militants don’t suspect, who is let in on the secrets, who is seen as sympathetic to the militancy. Therefore one of the first things that a mukhbir must do on the killing of a militant is to mourn the death. He must be at the funeral, he must fight to be one of those in the forefront of the mourners. Because anybody who seems to be a laggard, who does not express such feelings, is likely to be suspected by the militants of being the mukhbir who tipped off the security forces, somebody they would want to kill.

Of course, the security forces do not want to lose their prime source of information, and because they have more than one such source, they cannot but allow the mourning to occur. They have to protect their mukhbirs , each and every one, across the villages in which they operate, and so as the anti-India, anti-security forces slogans are shouted, they are secure that some of those shouting those slogans are their own people, doing what they do with the blessings and money of the very security forces who they are, publicly, condemning.

Omair Ahmad is the Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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