July 05
On 8 July 2016, as a colour photograph of a young man, dead, blood pooled in his open mouth, started circulating. The man in the photo was 22-year-old Hizb commander Burhan Wani. Near a butcher counter, where nowadays even “meat has become a luxury,” dozens of youngsters congregated, their voices melding to convey one message: this is the dawn of a war like no other.
Network connections were soon to vanish from phones, but not before a movement had taken root. There was a crystallization of despair at the system, of the disaster confronting Kashmir today. Angry youth, who had found a spokesperson in Burhan, piled on to trucks, bicycles, two-wheelers, cars… and they set off to the hospital where their idol lay cold.
Entire towns kept vigil all through the night, agitating, sloganeering, weeping, fighting for freedom from an unfair and oppressive system plagued by arrogance, misinformation and lust for power.
I barely have the language to express the deep anxiety that we felt. I feel as if we are in a haze, guided only by a single melody — “Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai (The Kashmir that has been soaked with our blood, that Kashmir belongs to us).”
The question across Kashmir’s Minscapes was, We are human, so why are we treated like sub-humans? We felt and still feel as if we have been sold to those who trade in politics, and our fate is to be passed on to their children, generation after generation. Yet, we refuse to surrender. And what’s the utmost offence of these young demonstrators? It’s that they cling to the utopian notion that if they fight enough they can find an alternative to fascism, capitalism, rigidness, jingoism, the murder of human rights. They are trying to wage a systemic war against the belief that everything is for consumption and for satisfying the national objectives. They are challenging the belief that the only value to be considered is exchange rate, as well as the notion that a large section of the public can be taken for granted. Thousands of citizens have been murdered for their political convictions in the horrible decades of Indian occupation; their words have been twisted by the country’s top commentators, creating gargantuan undercurrents of hostility against the Kashmiri people.
Guiding some journalists along the routes of Southern Kashmir, once held to be a bastion of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), I can viscerally experience the magnitude of the current uprising. The language of resistance speaks from the graffiti, it echoes from the loudspeakers of mosques. Today, we are going to the residence of Junaid Matoo, a slain commander of the armed struggle who carried out the KP Road attack in which two policemen were killed. People in groups of dozens move towards rally venues, shouting pro-independence slogans. At a distance, the mothers of a slain commander and a civilian Asif Ahmad, shot dead by government forces last year, are struggling hard to raise a green crescent flag near the martyrs’ graveyard.
I spoke to one of the mother’s of a slain youth. “He was like any common teenager, but the resentment seethed to form a gigantic volcano since 2010. The deaf refused to give an ear and the forceful refused to speak. The anger is simmering… In this locality, more than 20 boys, all demonstrators, were picked up constantly by troopers. If they weren’t caught, their relatives were and their family members were harassed. He was pushed against the wall…”
Rouf (name changed) is one of the men who is being hailed as a hero in this part of Kashmir. In addition to resisting the Indian occupation, he is trying to fight poverty and fulfill his responsibilities as a son and as a father to two children under five years of age.
He was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA)after the 2010 and 2016 civilian uprising and has been constantly harassed by the state since. He explains how the protests bring one’s personal experiences of “elimination” into straight conflict/discussion with existing narratives of patriotism. It is a search for solutions that is met only by suppression. Rouf in the current uprising has been hit with two teargas shells and by pellets twice, though he declined to get treatment so as to escape arrest. Indeed, the law enforcers are patrolling hospitals to arrest those who are seeking medical help after being injured by them.
The irony is that Rouf, like most protestors, is a product of the state. Even after his PSA case was quashed by a state court, he was repeatedly harassed by the cops — he was called to the station repeatedly, denied permission to work and often beaten ruthlessly without provocation. “Those of us who get profiled suffer day in and day out. We are so helpless.” It is this helplessness that the protests are addressing. Days after speaking to him, I see Rouf leading a stone throwing demonstration. His hands are no longer tied.
The uprising is on the street corners, in the medical and legal centres, in educational institutions, in homes. The movement shows no signs of stopping even if the mainstream media has ceased its regular coverage. Those who are claiming or believing that the majority of protestors are foreign-funded mercenaries or “instigators” need to only spend a minute on the ground. In South Kashmir, you can see and touch the alienation of virtually every citizen.
The “peace” purportedly sought by the Indian state is a delusion. How can peace be premised on brutal local governments and laws that work against the people? The state has declined to hear the pleas of the people dissenting against this “forcible marriage”, and the only alternative is a protest in which no holds are barred, and in which no escalation will be too much. A stable Kashmir at harmony with itself and with its neighbours will be an embankment of stability in the South Asian region, but only the Kashmiris seem to see this.