India Is Arming Villagers in Restive Region
As night fell in the tiny Himalayan village of Dhangri, a dozen armed men emerged from their homes, their rifles slung over their shoulders. They scanned the moonlit surroundings for signs of danger.
During the day, the men are drivers, shopkeepers and farmers. At night, they are members of a local militia that the Indian government is reviving in the Jammu and Kashmir region in response to deadly militant attacks targeting Hindu families.
“We can’t sit back and watch our people being killed,” said Vijay Kumar, a volunteer who works as an electrician.
That the Indian government has felt compelled to arm thousands of civilians shows the limits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s approach to controlling the region.
For decades, a separatist militancy has haunted Jammu and Kashmir, as the region disputed by India and Pakistan is called. Thousands of people, both Kashmiri civilians and Indian security forces, have died in the violence.
In 2019, Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government suddenly revoked the semiautonomous status of the Muslim-majority region, bringing the valley under the direct control of New Delhi, which moved in more troops, cracked down on dissent and put even local leaders loyal to India under house arrest.
Mr. Modi’s lieutenants point to the large number of tourists flooding into the area as a sign that normalcy has returned. But democracy remains suspended in the region. Repeated attacks on civilians have raised questions about the military approach to what analysts say is fundamentally a political problem. The region’s Hindus, many of whom fled the valley during an earlier outbreak of violence in the 1990s, again feel under threat, even on the Jammu side in the south, which had escaped the worst of the earlier carnage.
“It seems strange that in the world’s most militarized zone, you need to arm civilians to secure the citizens, which presumably is the army’s job,” said Siddiq Wahid, a political historian.
The government first created local militias in Jammu in the 1990s, at the militancy’s peak. Eventually, the tensions eased and the militias, which were accused of abuses against other civilians, were largely phased out.
In Dhangri, the impetus to again arm civilians was a series of bloody attacks against Hindus in January. Saroj Bala, 58, was washing dishes in the evening when she heard gunfire, followed by the screams of her elder son, Deepak Sharma. She and her younger son, Prince Sharma, rushed outside and saw two masked gunmen. They shot Prince at close range — he died in a hospital — and then continued to fire into Deepak’s lifeless body.
Then the attackers locked 32-year-old Neeta Devi and her children in their kitchen before fatally shooting her husband, Shishu Pal, and father-in-law, Pritam Lal. The gunmen also killed Satish Kumar, a retired army officer, as he tried to secure his gate.
The next morning, as mourners gathered at Ms. Bala’s home, a bomb went off, killing two young relatives.
Indian officials blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant outfit. Now, in the Rajouri district, which includes Dhangri, 5,200 volunteers are being armed.
Dhangri residents are frustrated that the militants remain at large. As the militia members patrolled one recent night, they acknowledged that they were underequipped and insufficiently trained.
“Even if we don’t have advanced weapons,” said Amaranth, a farmer who is a volunteer, “we will do our best to defend our community.”