In June 2009, I travelled to Shopian to meet with the family of Asiya and Neelofar Jan, who were raped, reportedly by more than one perpetrator, then murdered. The complicity of Indian forces and state institutions pointed to obstruction of justice at the highest levels. The Shopian investigations, conducted by state institutions, shifted scrutiny from the paramilitary CRPF—recognized as an ‘Indian’ force—to the Kashmir police—understood as ‘locals’ (read: Muslims). The inquiry focused on manufacturing scapegoats to subdue public outcry—on ‘control’, rather than ‘justice’.
In July 2010, I sat with witnesses and family members in Islamabad/Anantnag who described how Indian forces had chased down and executed three of their friends who had been involved in acts of civil disobedience. I spoke with human rights defenders and journalists who had been denied passports and the right to travel. I also spoke with people who had been targeted by militants in the 1990s but whose experience of the reprehensible atrocities of militancy had not diminished their desire for self-determination, even as they do not have a realistic idea of what that should be.
I have met with torture survivors—non-militants and former militants alike—who testified to the sadism of Indian forces. Over 60,000 people have been tortured in interrogation centres: people who have been water-boarded, mutilated, and paraded naked, who have had petrol injected into their anuses, who have been raped, starved, humiliated, and psychologically tortured. An eagle tattoo on the arm of one man was reportedly identified by an army officer as a symbol of Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir. Though the man explained that the tattoo dated from his childhood, the tattooed skin was burned off. The man recalled the officer saying: ‘When you look at this, think of Azadi.’
Indian forces stationed in schools and colleges verbally and physically harass girls. Many young women have been traumatized by the conduct of Indian soldiers, and at times have been compelled to use the hijab or burkha to create a barrier against the unwanted advances of the Indian forces. There are 671 security camps in Kashmir.20 The structure and placement of the camps enforces contact between women, children, and Indian soldiers and creates contexts in which gender-based violence becomes endemic. Male youths and men refusing to participate in the sexual servitude of women have been sodomized. Third-gender and transgender youths have been threatened with rape.
Many have been forced to witness the rape of women and girl family members. A mother who was reportedly commanded to watch her daughter’s rape by army personnel pleaded for her child’s release. They refused. She then pleaded that she could not watch and asked to be sent out of the room or else killed. The soldier put a gun to her forehead, stating that he would grant her wish, and shot her dead before they proceeded to rape her daughter.
Since 1990, Kashmir’s economy has incurred a loss of more than 1,880,000 million Indian rupees (US $40.4 billion). The collapse of the non-military political economy through the imposition of arbitrary borders and the impeding of livelihoods and trade has compounded class inequalities among disenfranchised, land-poor Kashmiri groups such as Gujjars, Bakarwals, and Hanjis. The refusal of land rights and land reforms has taken from labourers their means of subsistence.
In December 2009, the Tribunal released a report entitled Buried Evidence, which documents 2,700 hidden, unmarked, and mass graves, containing 2,943 bodies, mostly of men, across 55 villages in the Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara districts of Kashmir. These bodies, bearing the marks of torture, burns, and desecration, were dragged through the night and buried next to homes, fields and schools. The graves were dug by locals on this village land at the behest of the military, paramilitary, and police.
The Indian forces claim that these graves house ‘foreign militants’. In most cases, the bodies have not been exhumed and identified. When they have been, the dead were revealed to be local people, ordinary citizens, killed in ‘fake encounters’, that is, the extrajudicial killing of civilians in staged encounters with security forces. The Tribunal examined fifty alleged ‘encounter’ killings by Indian forces. In these cases, thirty-nine victims were of Muslim descent, four were of Hindu descent, and seven were of undetermined descent. Forty-nine of the fifty had been labelled militants or foreign insurgents by Indian forces. Forty-seven of them were found to have been killed in fake encounters. Only one person was identifiable as a local militant.
Who are the Indian forces? In Kashmir, Indian forces tend to be aligned with Hindu majoritarian interests but are drawn from disenfranchised castes and other outsider groups: Assamese, Nagas, Sikhs, Dalits – once known as Untouchables – even Muslims from Kashmir are being used to combat the Kashmiri population. The figures indicate the levels of tension: thirty-four soldiers committed suicide in Kashmir in 2008; fifty-two fratricidal killings took place between 21 January 2004 and 14 July 2009. Between January and early August 2010, sixteen soldiers committed suicide, and two died in fratricidal killings.
The laws authorize soldiers to question, raid houses, make arrests without bringing charges, intimidate, perpetrate custodial violence, and permit protracted detentions without due process. Citing ‘national security’, Indian forces in Kashmir shoot and kill on unverified suspicion, and are immune from prosecution.
All of these actions are deemed ‘acts of service’, and rewards and promotions are given to personnel for killing presumed insurgents.21 This was exemplified in the Machil murders, which, it has been reported, were also motivated by the promise of cash rewards. On 30 April 2010, Indian Armed Forces claimed that three ‘foreign/infiltrating militants’ (from Pakistan) had been killed in an ‘encounter’ in the Machil sector of Kupwara district, along the Line of Control (LOC). The army reported that these killings had prevented armed combatants from crossing the LOC. On 28 May 2010, the three ‘militants’ were identified as Shahzad Ahmad, Riyaz Ahmad, and Mohammad Shafi, residents of Baramulla district in Indian-administered Kashmir, and their murders were authenticated as ‘fake encounter’ killings. The armed forces had been offering cash rewards of between 50,000 and 200,000 rupees to police or armed forces personnel for each militant killed. It has not been made public whether the relevant armed forces officers claimed 150,000 rupees in award monies for the three staged encounter killings in Machil.
Despite various debates since 2009, the Indian government has made no commitment to rescind the series of impunity laws deployed in the administration of Kashmir or to reverse the special powers, privileges, and immunity granted to the Indian forces there. Revoking the Armed Forces Special Powers Act alone will not stop the horror in Kashmir. India’s laws are not the primary problem. Legal impunity is the cover for the moral impunity of Indian rule.
Neither has the Indian government shown any willingness to consider withdrawing military forces from Kashmir. Between 2002 and 2008, it procured US$5 billion dollars’ worth of arms from the Israeli state to combat Islamic insurgents – a colossal sum for India,22 where 38 per cent of the world’s poor reside and where eight of the country’s poorest states are more impoverished than the twenty-six poorest countries on the African continent. Five billion spent on arms, in addition to the other monies and resources invested in the militarization of Kashmir, does not imply an intent to withdraw.
India needs to make the ‘Kashmir problem’ disappear, to force Kashmiris to forsake their claim for independent statehood (or, for some, to be assimilated with Pakistan), or their demand for full autonomy. Military offensives and multi-track diplomacy seek to nullify civil society’s legitimate anger and dissent. Diplomats and Indian peace agents traverse Kashmir, enacting the obligatory gestures of Track II Diplomacy, to secure a peace proposal that will be acceptable to India and, ostensibly, to Kashmiris.23 Only very few of these initiatives are successful. The terms of reference set by New Delhi exclude discussions of self-determination or heightened autonomy, boundary negotiations, and the Siachen glacier and other critical water resources, as well as renegotiations over the route of the Line of Control.24
Kashmiris are fatigu
ed by the interminable ‘new beginnings’ and the deadened political initiatives and confidence-building measures (CBMs) that accompany them. CBMs, which have tended to be about India–Pakistan relations, have not shifted the realities for Kashmiris. In April 2005, the bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad was set up. There followed a number of other initiatives: an agreement, in October 2005, to establish a hotline between the maritime security agencies of India and Pakistan, allowing early exchange of information on fishing communities’ infringement into each nation’s territorial waters; a bus service from Lahore to Amritsar, started in January 2006; and, in May of the same year, an agreement to trade raw produce between the various regions of Jammu and Kashmir. This trade agreement did not take into account the needs of local communities and it has been ineffectual in energizing local economies.25
In August 2007, a prisoner exchange saw 72 Pakistani nationals released from India’s gaols, with 135 Indian nationals going the other way. In April 2008, India signed a joint agreement with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan for a $7.6 billion, 1,680-kilometre, environmentally controversial pipeline project expected to supply 3.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas by 2015. In May 2008, Junoon, the Pakistani rock band, gave an Indian government–sanctioned performance in Srinagar. In the same month, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan proposed a series of Kashmir-focused CBMs, including a triple-entry permit to facilitate civilian movement across the Line of Control and permit consular outreach to prisoners.26 No measures sought to reconnect communities and families whose ties were severed through Indo-Pak border politics.
In January 2009, for the eighteenth consecutive year, India and Pakistan exchanged lists of nuclear facilities located in their respective territories. Six months later, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan met on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Egypt and issued a joint statement ‘charting the way forward in India–Pakistan relations’.
New Delhi and Islamabad appear to be in collusion. If Pakistan overlooks India’s conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir, India seems willing to forget Pakistan’s occupation of its own fragment, Azad Kashmir. And although Pakistan’s politicians constantly flag India’s injustices in ‘Indian’ Kashmir, they do not reciprocally address issues in the management of the Pakistan-held portion, including the undermining of movements for the unification of Kashmir. Access to Azad Kashmir remains restricted, and human rights violations there are not spoken of.27 For Pakistan’s government, Afghanistan is the current priority, not Kashmir. Kashmir’s future as a democratic, inclusive, and pro-secular space is linked to what happens within India and Pakistan. Kashmir’s resolution, however, cannot mean a sanction to Pakistan’s encroachment on Afghanistan, which remains a highly likely possibility. For the United States and India, the containment of China is another issue, also linked to Kashmir. Conversations on the phased withdrawal of troops by India and Pakistan at the border, on local self-government or the creation of a joint supervision mechanism on Jammu and Kashmir, involving India, Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, and Pakistani Kashmir, are at an impasse.
India’s actions are directed toward assuming a role as a world power, a world market, and a world negotiator in global politics. By pushing forward a diluted “autonomy,” the Government in New Delhi is seeking to assimilate Kashmir irrevocably into the India nation-state. Local self-government – a weak autonomy – would be New Delhi’s compromise, with a joint supervisory body made up of India, Kashmir, and possibly Pakistan.
What constitutes India’s dialogue with Kashmiris in conditions of extreme subjugation? The Indian government’s ‘inclusive dialogue’ in summer 2010 disregarded the demands of Kashmiri civil society. Conflict resolution and diplomatic processes are largely directed by the state, or by individuals and groups financed by it. New Delhi invited to the table various stakeholders from Kashmiri civil society, including rights groups and journalists. Bringing people to the table creates an image of inclusiveness, but there is no shift in the agenda. The Indian government’s promises are empty and there has been no follow-through; such promises are a national public relations campaign for local and international consumption.
New Delhi also anticipates that the Kashmiri leadership, including pro-freedom groups, can be restrained and weakened by their own infighting. Indeed, certain sections of the pro-freedom religious and political leadership have shown themselves to lack vision, honesty, and the ability to prioritize collaboration for justice and peace in Kashmir; equally, elements of the leadership have been unable to collaborate meaningfully with civil society, or with observant Muslims, unobservant Muslims, and non-Muslims.
Mosques have functioned as spaces of refuge and forums for dissent, and were also used as granaries and shelters during the uprisings in 1931 and 1990, and in 2008 and 2009. Yet the theocratic elites have been unable to close the distance between themselves and the grassroots. The spiritual commitment to justice has diminished as religious politics have embraced real-politik. The objective of freedom has been deferred in favour of smaller, more immediate political gains. This has enfeebled segments of the complex Hurriyat (Freedom) alliance, which has been unable to develop a framework for power sharing among constituents and is often unable to capitalize on the exuberant people’s movement on the streets of Kashmir.28
Segments of the pro-freedom leadership and the Kashmiri elite have aligned with New Delhi rather than with Kashmiri civil society. New Delhi has encouraged this dynamic to create an elite collaborator class in Srinagar that undermines the will of the Kashmiri people. The complicity of Kashmir’s collaborator class with India’s state agenda reaps individual benefits, provides security for collaborators, and strengthens Indian national interest.
What do a majority of Kashmiris want? First, to secure a good-faith agreement with New Delhi and Islamabad on the right of Kashmiris to determine the course of their future, set a time-frame, and define the interim conditions necessary to proceed. Following this, civil society and political leaders must put in motion processes to educate, debate and consult with that society, including its minority groups, in sketching out the terms of reference for a resolution, prior to negotiations with India and Pakistan.
New Delhi is incredulous that Kashmiris overwhelmingly reject its overtures, criticizing Kashmiri youth for turning down the employment that India promises and for continuing to protest on the streets. The civil society’s dissent is perhaps the solitary roadblock to New Delhi’s course of intransigence against Kashmir’s resolution. New Delhi has refused to acknowledge the extent of its human rights violations, and how integral they are to the maintenance of Indian control in Kashmir. New Delhi has not explained why militarization in Kashmir has been disproportionately used to brutalize Kashmiris, when ostensibly the Indian forces are there only to secure the borderlands. Human rights violations cannot be stopped in Kashmir without removing the military. The military cannot be removed from Kashmir without rupturing India’s will to power.
India also charges that in keeping alive the call to azadi, Kashmiri pro-freedom leaders prevent young people from attending schools and leading normal lives. ‘Normality’ is far outside the ambit of Kashmiris! India also disparages the Kashmiri pro-freedom leadership and speaks of the wealth and property these leaders have amassed. Scarce mention is made of leaders who are from working-class backgrounds. On the part played by the Indian state in corrupting political leaders in Kashmir, in order to distance the pro-freedom leadership from civil society, India is silent.
The Indian government’s ‘inclusive dialogue’ fails to recognize Kashmir as an international dispute and conflict zone. Nor does it offer an immediate halt to, and moratorium on, extrajudicial killings by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police, or an immediate halt to, and moratorium on, the use of torture, kidnapping, enforced disappearance and gender-based violence by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police. Nor does it include a plan for the release of political prisoners, for the return of those exiled, or for re
solving the issue of displacement; or agreements on an immediate ‘soft border’ policy between Kashmir, India and Pakistan to enable the resurgence of Kashmir’s economy; or a commitment to the free exercise of civil liberties by Kashmiris, including the right to civil disobedience or freedom of speech, assembly, religion, movement and travel.
Neither does the ‘inclusive dialogue’ provide a plan for proactive demilitarization and the immediate revocation of authoritarian laws. It fails to address the identification and dismantling of detention and torture centres, including those in army camps, and the return of 1,054,721 kanals of land occupied by Indian forces.29 There is no mention of a plan for international and transparent investigations into the unmarked and mass graves created by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police. Or plans for a truth and justice commission, or political and psychosocial reparation and healing. Such omissions make a travesty of any process promising ‘resolution’ – they are a guarantee of continued disaffection on the streets of Kashmir.30
Hindu-majority cultural nationalism seeks to form the nation by cementing its territorial cohesion and geopolitical dominance. Kashmir is crucial to this recipe. New Delhi has been the self-appointed arbitrator in determining the justifications for Kashmir’s claim to freedom. The Indian state is apprehensive that any change in the status quo in Kashmir would foster internal crises of gigantic proportions in India. Across the nation there is considerable discontent, as differences in culture, imagination, and aspiration are mortgaged to the idea of India as fabricated by its Hindu elite. Kashmir remains India’s excuse to avoid dealing with its own internal matters. Adivasis (indigenous peoples), Dalits, disenfranchised caste groups, women, and religious, ethnic and gender minorities are tired of waiting for the continually deferred fulfilment of the nation’s promises.
Forty-four million Adivasis have been displaced since 1947. Central India has been torn asunder, and as Maoists are designated the latest ‘national threat’, national memory forgets the systematic brutalization of peoples in the tribal belt that led to the Maoist call to arms. Then there are the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, riots against Christians in Orissa, suicides of desperate farmers, and the plight of peasants and Adivasis in the Narmada Valley, where dams are not the ‘temples of modern India’, but its burial grounds.
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom Page 11
