Kashmir: A voice from the abyss

This book is an outstanding study of the wellsprings of the anger of Kashmiri youth with the Indian state and its instruments of authority and torment. Their confrontation has now lasted for 30 years. It has caused the deaths of several thousand Kashmiris, several hundred security personnel, and has left millions of residents, filled with anger and hate, staring at a bleak future.

Mr Devadas points out that by 2007, militancy in Kashmir had died away and the stage was set for a slow recovery to normalcy. Surprisingly, the political and security authorities completely failed to see this development and continued to project the state as “terrorist-infested”, with militancy being promoted by Pakistan. The author disputes both these assessments.

He notes that that in 2007, a new generation of Kashmiri youth had come of age, having lived all its life in the shadow of “mayhem and terrible violence”. With militancy having abated, the youth expected their state to be free of the pervasive presence of security forces. What they saw instead was continued confrontation with police who, the author says, had grown used to the “bump-him-off” culture, the tradition of killing at will and with impunity.

Mr Devadas identifies the “killing of innocents” as the cause of the latest upsurge of the “stone-pelters” from 2016, ignited by the killing of the iconic figure Burhan Wani in July 2016 and the discovery of mass unmarked graves of thousands of Kashmiris killed in earlier encounters and crackdowns. This “rage of the new militancy” now faced repression from the police, with each confrontation feeding the next episode of violence, a scenario of mutual destruction that has continued for a decade.

Mr Devadas provides graphic accounts of the abuse, manhandling, molestation and humiliation that constitute the daily life of Kashmiris, often linked with personal experiences of relatives tortured and murdered, women mistreated and insulted, and relatives and friends casually thrashed.

The “conflict economy” is central to the Kashmir insurgency, and will not let it end. This refers to the huge amount of funds that flows in from Pakistan to sustain the conflict and the unaccounted monies used for India’s counter-insurgency operations, including buying of support and information.

The principal beneficiaries have been separatist “leaders” who have received funding from both India and Pakistan, and gangs of mercenaries, i.e., Kashmiris who are informers for Indian forces and extortionists of their fellow Kashmiris. Large sections of local politicians, army and paramilitary personnel and local police officials, flush with unaccounted funds, have accumulated extraordinary wealth.

The three-decade-old conflict has also generated an environment of pervasive corruption, including large payments by Kashmiris to security officials to release innocent relatives and the sexual exploitation of women arbitrarily detained.

Mr Devadas highlights the obnoxious arrangement among security forces to applaud and reward the “kills” that individual units have achieved, which has led to the murders of thousands of Kashmiris branded falsely as Pakistani militants or Kashmiri insurgents; since the former yield higher financial rewards, several innocent Indians killed have been identified as Pakistanis to benefit from the “bounty incentives”.

The Kashmir conflict has shaped sharp, mutually exclusive binaries in India — Kashmir versus India, Hindu versus Muslim, people versus “the forces”, Pakistan versus India, nationalists versus secessionists, and even Jammu versus Kashmir. These divides, Mr Devadas says, have been manufactured assiduously by the media and academia, so that a complex scenario has been reduced to a “two-dimensional polarity” in which “the other” is invariably seen as an object of hate. These divides have been exacerbated by assertions of hard “Hindutva” from Delhi and a divided and dysfunctional state government that has now mercifully been given a quiet burial.

The picture Mr Devadas paints is much more nuanced. His studies have shown, for instance, that the demand for azadiis in effect a demand for dignity, a life with rights and rule of law. Again, hardly any Kashmiri seeks a future with Pakistan. While several agitators define their identity as “Islamic”, most of them have very little knowledge of their faith or its diverse movements. And, in response to a survey by the author in 2011, while a third expressed anti-India sentiments, over 30 per cent spoke of unemployment, poverty and corruption as the biggest problems facing the state.

Mr Devadas offers no easy solutions: Daily humiliations over several years have alienated the people, while the “conflict economy” has ensured that the street battles continue, giving Pakistan fresh opportunities to aggravate the confrontations. Employment for Kashmiris has come to mean obtaining government positions that offer opportunities for patronage, social status and corruption. Overall, there is a coarsening of the moral fibre on all sides.

Perhaps, the only way forward is to gradually lift the state of siege in the state and restore constitutional rights and processes. This will be a slow and painful process. This book has offered an excellent diagnosis of the problem; we now need to move forward with the cure.

The reviewer is a former diplomat

THE GENERATION OF RAGE IN KASHMIR

David Devadas, Oxford University Press 225 pages; R495