Concertina Wars
A WEEK-AND-A-HALF AFTER HIZBUL LEADER BURHAN WANI’S KILLING, THE VALLEY IS STILL SIMMERING. AND THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN CM MEHBOOBA MUFTI AND HER ADMINISTRATION IN THIS TIME OF CRISIS ISN’T HELPING MATTERS
A week-and-a-half after Burhan Wani’s killing, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and her administration are still floundering for answers to assuage disaffected Kashmiris
Twoandahalf hours past midnight on July 16, a squad of the Jammu & Kashmir Police (JKP) laid an ambush at the entrance of Srinagar’s Press Enclave. Minutes later, as the solitary van showed up, carefully negotiating the coils of concertina strewn across the road, the waiting policemen sprang into action, aiming cocked Kalashnikovs, angrily barking orders at the lone occupant to get off. A cursory look in the back confirmed they had what they wanted—no, it was no wanted terrorist but stacks of freshoffthepress copies of Rising Kashmir, just one among some 65 Urdu, Kashmiri and English dailies that did not reach readers that morning.
The media blackout was part of the latest crackdown in the Kashmir Valley, set ablaze all over again by the slaying of Burhan Wani, the Hizbul Mujahideen commander who was gunned down by security forces at Bemdoora village in South Kashmir’s Kokernag area on July 8 evening.
The ensuing public fury, witnessed nationally on network television, was articulated through a spontaneous eruption of angry street protests. Clearly taken by surprise, the state police, paramilitary and army found themselves at the receiving end of an unrelenting barrage of stones and Molotov cocktails.
Close to a fortnight into the protests that unpredictably erupted at the unlikeliest of locations, the Mehbooba Muftiled PDPBJP government officially acknowledged that 37 protesters had died from bullet and shotgun (pellet gun) wounds. An astounding 1,948 civilians—men, women and children as young as five years old—suffered injuries. Numbers conveyed to Union home minister Rajnath Singh from Srinagar, as he rose to speak in the Lok Sabha on July 18 afternoon, stated that 1,671 security personnel were also injured, including some from grenade and gunshot wounds.
The July 16 Press Enclave Ambush, preceded by simultaneous police raids on several printing presses at Rangreth and Humhuma in Budgam on Srinagar’s outskirts, is being widely seen as proof of the establishment’s desperation to contain what could easily snowball into another long, bitter standoff between Kashmir’s people and the security forces (as in the summer of 2010).
For someone who had, back then, attacked the then chief minister Omar Abdullah for his “inability to connect with Kashmiris”, the response of Mehbooba’s own administration has been decidedly dyslexic.
Consider, for instance, the move to gag the press. Rising Kashmir’s editorinchief Shujaat Bukhari says that all Srinagarbased editors were individually called and informed of the state government’s decision to force a suspension of publication “in view of apprehensions of further trouble in the Valley”. Later, shortly after the editors and reporters staged a demonstration at Press Enclave, state education minister and PDP spokesperson Naeem Akhtar spoke to
india today. “We are responding to an extraordinary situation... the closure of newspapers is only a temporary measure,” he said, insisting that circulation of newspapers during curfew orders was anyhow not possible.
A sensible argument, one would think. But, aside from the fact that security forces were permitting vehicular and pedestrian movement as part of a deliberate strategy to restore normalcy in relatively peaceful Srinagar barely two days after Akhtar ‘explained’ the press censorship, the CM, ensconced in the comfort of Fairview, her official home along Srinagar’s Gupkar Road, was promptly disowning the move. “There is no ban on newspapers,” Mehbooba told Union minister for information and broadcasting Venkaiah Naidu when he called after the issue provoked a minor furore in the Lok Sabha on July 18. Shortly after, her advisor Amitabh Mattoo claimed the CM wasn’t on board with any such decision! A day later, they found a
convenient scapegoat in Budgam SP Fayaz Ahmed Lone, whose men had ostensibly raided the presses.
Notably, the clampdown on all mobile telephony, barring a small skeleton of BSNL postpaid phones, and all mobile internet and cable TV, continues without respite. Which isn’t a good sign. Past history has shown that the Valley is a place where whispers so easily metamorphose into concrete rumours without the benefit of technology.
Although it is true that only Mehbooba and her closest PDP confidants have been holding the fort in Srinagar (many of the BJP ministers are back home in Jammu enjoying an unexpected vacation on the other side of the Banihal tunnel), the state government’s response to the Wani killing have been dithering and distressingly prone to backtracking.
The handling of the Kokernag encounter and its aftermath, by both the state police and the political leadership, has blundered from the start. Believe it or not, but it now turns out that JKP personnel themselves the first pictures of the slain Wani were put out on social media by the! Then, addressing a news conference in
Srinagar the day after the killing on July 9, the state’s additional director general (Intelligence) S.M. Sahai and inspector general (Kashmir region) Javed M. Gilani broadly indicated that “the chief minister was aware” of the police operation, as it was ongoing.
While Mehbooba refuted this as well when she appeared in an emotional videographed appeal three days on, perceptions that the PDP government had actively participated in what many see as the “execution” of Wani, may just have been responsible for the particularly ferocious public reaction in south Kashmir. In fact, the CM’s home district of Anantnag has been the worst hit, accounting for close to half the civilians killed.
It has also elicited a response from PDP MP and former deputy CM Muzaffar Baig that strains credulity. Insisting that standard operating procedures that could have resulted in Burhan being captured alive had not been followed, he not only demanded an inquest but also told India Today TV on July 18 that officials within the JKP hierarchy had “betrayed” the CM by keeping information from her.
Baig’s outburst may not have
THE PRESENT CRISIS MAY HAVE INSTIGATED A CRITICAL CHANGE IN THE STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE FOR CROWD CONTROL ACROSS KASHMIR
found many takers in Delhi but a senior official privy to meetings convened at Fairview since July 8 says civil servants have ignored the CM’s directions more than once. He points to the decision to announce the reopening of schools in Srinagar from July 18, unanimously agreed to an evening earlier. “But for some curious reason, the official release sent out said school vacations had been extended for another week!” he says.
Out on the streets, word is that, like always, “everything is being orchestrated from Delhi”. Sitting in a snug, pinewood-panelled office on the second floor of one of the many stateowned buildings in Press Enclave, Bukhari says the popular perception is not unfounded: “From Farooq Abdullah to Mehbooba Mufti in Srinagar and between Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi in Delhi, the system that runs Kashmir remains unchanged. Only the faces keep changing,” says the journalist.
Nearly a fortnight into the current unrest, both north and south Kashmir remain under lockdown, with vehicular movement being discouraged equally by the security forces as well as gangs of young stone-pelters, like the lot that emerged from nowhere on July 17 night to stone PDP legislator Mohammad Khalil Bandh’s car in the Prichoo area of his home constituency Pulwama on his way to Srinagar.
But as predicted by a former JKP officer who had been in the thick of similar trouble in 2008, 2009 and 2010, things do seem to be easing up, evidenced in the diminishing frequency of demonstrations. From a dangerously high peak of 201 separate incidents resulting in several civilian deaths and injuries just on July 9, the day after the Burhan encounter, 10 days on (July 18), the police control
room at headquarters in Srinagar’s Batmaloo area reported just two incidents in the deep southern Kazigund area of Anantnag district.
“Tense but under control,” says a young DSP, borrowing a famous Jaspal Bhatti comedy one-liner to describe the situation. Much of the success, says an officer at the apex of the JKP establishment, is a consequence of more boots on the ground—the additional paramilitary forces air-dashed to the Valley at home minister Rajnath Singh’s behest. “We can now protect even the remotest of our posts in the hinterland,” he says. Unlike, say, in 2010, where driven by calls from separatists, fresh protests would erupt at the same location following the death of a stone-pelter, the current strife has witnessed something completely different.
“This time crowds emerged spontaneously at unlikely and remote locations to target police stations and posts with small personnel contingents,” says the officer, adding that though impossible to predict, there is almost no recurrence of a demonstration at the same location.
And while the security establishment and the Mehbooba government have been faulted in failing to imbibe any lessons from the 2010 unrest or the success in maintaining peace after the Afzal Guru hanging in 2013, the present crisis may just have instigated a critical new change in SOP for crowd control across Kashmir.
Contrary to the procedure in place till now where pump-action shotguns (pellet guns) were deployed only as a last-ditch measure (before firing), forces on the ground have now been instructed to use these as an early resort, alongside teargas, to disperse a violent crowd when it is no closer than 70-80 yards away. “The problem was that by the time the shotguns were deployed, the protesters were invariably much too close. As we have seen in the rush of pellet injuries in Srinagar’s hospitals, this often resulted in grievous injuries, even death,” a police officer who spent the past week test-firing pellet-filled cartridges on dummy targets says. “The added distance,” he promises nonchalantly, “will drastically bring down injuries.”
Back in Srinagar, things are beginning to look calmer, although shops remained shuttered in view of the continuing curfew orders, the hartal call by Hurriyat separatists and Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s declaration of July 20 as a “black day”. But though the streets look more ‘normal’, the anger and deepening sense of alienation among Kashmiris, particularly the youth, is palpable. “Our first priority in the present circumstances is to stop the violence with minimum or no collateral consequences. But peace cannot sustain itself in the Valley unless there is political engagement with the people,” says a senior police officer who has become a bit of a pundit on Kashmir after close to three decades of service. And perhaps not for the first time, the cop is in close agreement with moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq who tells india Today that New Delhi’s emphasis on deploying only “military means will push an entire generation (of Kashmiris) towards violence”.