Source: "Time Magazaine"
1 hr 50 mins ago
Courtesy Of "Yahoo News"
For weeks during Kashmir's long, angry summer, the largest mosque in its biggest city was shuttered by the authorities. Then, on Aug. 13, the first Friday of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, worshippers were finally allowed into Srinagar's 600-year-old Jamia Masjid to pray. The mosque's chief cleric, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, mixed his sermon with politics. "Oh, Allah, Ramadan is the month of blessing, of freedom," he said. "Bless us and give us freedom from the Indian occupation."
In the circular plaza outside, thousands had gathered to demand just that freedom. After his sermon, Farooq, who advocates independence for Kashmir through nonviolence, began leading what he hoped would be a peaceful procession. For a while, it was. Soon, however, the head and tail of the crowd peeled off to confront waiting security forces. Similar scenes were repeated all over the Kashmir valley, and by the end of the afternoon four people were killed and a dozen injured; all had been shot. Farooq was saddened but unsurprised. "India was banking on it - that Ramadan would calm things down," he told TIME. Instead, the protests and clashes are becoming more intense and violent. "One thing is clear," added Farooq. "[New Delhi] can't wish the issue away." (Watch an audio slideshow about Kashmir's war-weary population.)
Kashmir's story is complicated. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the territory since 1947, when Muslim-majority Kashmir became part of mostly Hindu India over Pakistan's objections. The two countries negotiated a Line of Control in 1971 dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, but that unofficial border has always been restive. In 1989, Kashmiri rebels, fighting either for independence or union with Pakistan, rose up against New Delhi; Islamabad supported some of them, as well as bands of cross-border militants. India sent in some 700,000 troops and paramilitaries, who are still there. The result is a land often convulsed by violence. It forms the largest obstacle to peace between India and Pakistan (which continues to support militants in Kashmir), as well as a justification for both countries' huge military spending. And by distracting Pakistan from the fight against pro-Taliban jihadists, Kashmir even affects the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
Today's protests, however, are not solely driven by lofty ideas of nationhood and autonomy or even material grievances like the poor local economy. The immediate issue is the Indian military apparatus in Kashmir. Ranged against it are stone-throwing young men who clash almost daily with security forces. About 60 people have died in the past two months, including an 8-year-old boy allegedly killed by paramilitary troops on Aug. 2. With each death, the anger builds. Says protester Rashid: "When they pick up an 8-year-old boy and beat him to death, how can I resist my feelings?"
The Stone Age
New Delhi is struggling to come up with new approaches to Kashmir, but "no one knows quite what to do," says Amitabh Mattoo, a professor of international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. The paucity of political, economic and community-building ideas is made all the more desperate by the fact that Kashmir is now rearing its third generation of rebels. The first comprised local politicians who tried to negotiate with New Delhi. The second was made up of separatists and their militant brethren, who took up the gun in 1989. The current crop, however, is amorphous. As one protest chant puts it, "Who is our leader?
The stone pelter!" Anyone can be a stone-pelter, as they call themselves, and crowds are drawing their numbers not just from angry young men but also from plucky schoolboys, government clerks and elderly shopkeepers. Umar, a 22-year-old wood carver, is one of them. Whenever he hears about a new protest, he says, "I just leave my work and go." (Read "A Violent Crime Resurrects Kashmir's Call for Freedom.")
The stone pelters have won the respect of a broad spectrum of Kashmiris. Shad Salim is an oncologist in his 50s who returned to Kashmir in 2007 after 20 years abroad. He was dismayed to find that underneath the surface calm, Kashmiris were still subject to security checks and intimidation by security forces, much as they were during the worst of the militancy. "The [same] amount of fireworks wasn't happening," Salim says. "But all the other things were as they were." He says he isn't a stone pelter but shares their anger. "The torch of independence has been handed over to them."
These young men are engaged in a 21st century form of protest. They form a rebellion collectively organized through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. (One of the reasons that India finds it difficult to respond to the movement is the fact that it has no obvious leaders with whom New Delhi can negotiate.) Text messages are blocked throughout the Kashmir valley, so young rebels find each other and share news of protests through Facebook pages like "I'm a Kashmiri Stone Pelter." They don't trust newspapers or television, but debate and share sometimes unreliable reports of the latest shootings on Twitter feeds. Their propaganda medium of choice is the YouTube video, setting handheld digital footage of protests and clashes to music like Everlast's "Stone in My Hand." Says Rashid: "The local media - they are caged. There is only social media."
New Delhi seems to be getting the message. On Aug. 10, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the nation over Kashmir - only the third time that an Indian leader had done so. "Manmohan Singh did not respond to us," says Farooq, a moderate who has engaged in years of fruitless talks. "But he responded to [the stone pelters]. It means that what these kids have been doing is getting noticed." (Read about the 2008 clashes.)
In his address, Singh conceded that "many of [the protesters] have seen nothing but violence and conflict in their lives," and promised a solution "that addresses the alienation and emotional needs of the people." But he offered only one proposal: the formation of a committee to figure out how to create jobs for Kashmir's 600,000 unemployed. The offer was widely criticized in Srinagar as insultingly inadequate. Saleh, a stone pelter, says that if Singh had delivered jobs to Kashmir earlier, "It may have had a different effect." But bringing up jobs when young people are asking for justice, he says, is an affront. "The timing of the message is important."
Frozen In Time
Saleh's frustration reflects the fact that while India has moved on after the end of the militancy, Kashmir has not. There are 30,000 troops in and around Srinagar alone, with bunkers and barbed wire strewn around the city's labyrinth of lanes and squares, even though there are very few militants left to fight. The sense of being occupied is pervasive, and it's understandable that local youths draw parallels between their struggle and that of the Palestinians. They call their movement a "Kashmiri intifadeh."
Watch TIME's video "Playing Soccer Amid the Deadly Violence in Kashmir."
See pictures of Kashmir residents at the polls.
India's highest-ranking man on the ground, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, acknowledged to TIME that "levels of militancy are at the lowest that they have been for the last 20 years." Intelligence officers estimate that there are only about 500 militants still active in Kashmir, compared to thousands in the 1990s. In Srinagar, Abdullah says, "There is hardly any militancy whatsoever." So why not reduce troop numbers? The official explanation is that the authorities are waiting for calm to return, but there was no significant drawdown even during earlier periods of quiet in the valley. Instead, it seems that India will maintain a large armed presence as a show of strength as long as relations with Pakistan are tense.
New Delhi also has not addressed the culture of impunity that human-rights activists say has characterized the long counterinsurgency campaign. The failure to bring to justice the perpetrators of the disappearances, extrajudicial killings and rapes committed by security forces, despite documentation of hundreds of cases by human-rights groups, still produces intense bitterness among Kashmiris - and those wounds have been reopened by recent incidents. Among them were the deaths of 80 marchers during the peaceful protests of June 2008, the alleged rape and murder of two young women by security forces in 2009 and the death on June 11 of 17-year-old student Tufail Mattoo that ignited this summer's demonstrations. (Watch TIME's video "Earthquake Tourism in Kashmir.")
Since the protests resumed, Srinagar has tumbled back into a replay of the curfews and general strikes that disrupted life during the years of militancy. Leaving the house means negotiating both security checkpoints and makeshift barricades set up by the stone pelters. Some businesses have managed to keep running - those that can afford to offer employees meals, dorms and drivers with curfew passes - but most just close down, turning every day into a scavenger hunt for vegetables and milk.
Young Mattoo was killed by a tear-gas shell, but neither his death nor the deaths of 60 other people this summer have changed the tactics of the Central Reserve Paramilitary Forces (CRPF), which even Kashmir's Law Minister Ali Mohammad Sagar has called "out of control." Prabhakar Tripathy, the CRPF spokesman in Srinagar, says that his troops fire only in self-defense, but those TIME spoke to said they have no specific instructions. "It depends on the situation," says one CRPF soldier posted in the neighborhood of Nowshera.
Some troops have even started improvising weapons, answering the stone pelters with marbles launched from homemade slingshots. (One protester lost an eye after being hit by one.) Dr. Waseem Qureshi, medical superintendent of Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, says there have been 112 injuries among protesters since June, nearly all of them caused by bullets. He has recorded no injuries among members of the security forces.
The youngest victim to date is 8-year-old Sameer Ahmad Rah, whose death has become a focal point for the protests. The son of a fruit trader, Sameer lived in Batmaloo, a district that was once a hotbed of militancy. On Aug. 2, during yet another day of curfew, the boys in the neighborhood were throwing stones. His father, Fayaz Rah, says Sameer asked to go to his cousin's house in a quieter area nearby. His mother, Fareeda, remembers that Sameer ate his lunch and then left with "a pear and a two-rupee coin in his pocket." It was 3:20 in the afternoon; his parents received Sameer's body about four hours later. (Read "India's War at Home.")
Rah says that somewhere on the way, a CRPF group caught hold of Sameer and started beating him up, perhaps believing he had been involved in the day's earlier stone-throwing. Neighbors told him later what they saw: "[The troops] took him to a marshy area and threw him to the ground," Rah says. "He hit his head on a stone, and they hit him further with their gun butts." The CRPF denies this version of events. Tripathy says that Sameer died in a stampede during a protest. "We have not at all touched the boy," he says. The local police report simply repeats the CRPF claim, but Rah says this isn't possible. "It was all curfew," he says. "People were not out. How could there be a stampede? It's a lie."
The family feels powerless to seek justice. Without police endorsement of his account, Rah cannot go to the state's human-rights commission. "I'm a fruit dealer," he says. "I have never been to the courts. I don't know how they will ensure justice." This level of despair is a dark sign for Kashmir's future. Says academic Mattoo: "Confidence in public institutions has been completely eroded."
Lost Opportunity
Though India's growing prosperity is uneven, there is a national (and international) sense that the country is boldly marching forward. Not so in Kashmir. New Delhi recently tried to offer economic progress, promising political change later, but the government has yet to deliver on either. As Kashmiris lose patience, that window is closing. So is the chance for dialogue. Having gotten the attention of the Prime Minister, the protesters are unlikely to stop there. "This has worked," says stone pelter Saleh. He and his fellow protesters are demanding, among other things, the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a law that gives security forces broad leeway to operate in Kashmir without fear of oversight or prosecution. After months of inaction, Chief Minister Abdullah now promises that if Srinagar is quiet for a week or so, he can get AFSPA revoked "in a matter of days." (See India's 15 most influential.)
India's Home Ministry, however, has been reluctant to touch AFSPA because of objections by the army and the political opposition, which rounds on any perceived weakness on Kashmir. A repeal will require the kind of political courage that New Delhi has yet to show in the region. If it continues with the same old strategies - blaming Pakistan for stirring trouble, imposing curfews and superseding talks with bloody crackdowns, it will engender the same cycles of violence.
According to Radha Kumar, an expert on conflict resolution who has been involved in recent negotiations with separatists, whatever the Indian government does won't work unless it is "something dramatic and bold." In other words, the only effective response to this new generation of Kashmiri stone pelters may well be a new generation of Indian statesmen.
- with reporting by Showkat A. Motta / Srinagar
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See the Cartoons of the Week.
View this article on Time.com
In the circular plaza outside, thousands had gathered to demand just that freedom. After his sermon, Farooq, who advocates independence for Kashmir through nonviolence, began leading what he hoped would be a peaceful procession. For a while, it was. Soon, however, the head and tail of the crowd peeled off to confront waiting security forces. Similar scenes were repeated all over the Kashmir valley, and by the end of the afternoon four people were killed and a dozen injured; all had been shot. Farooq was saddened but unsurprised. "India was banking on it - that Ramadan would calm things down," he told TIME. Instead, the protests and clashes are becoming more intense and violent. "One thing is clear," added Farooq. "[New Delhi] can't wish the issue away." (Watch an audio slideshow about Kashmir's war-weary population.)
Kashmir's story is complicated. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the territory since 1947, when Muslim-majority Kashmir became part of mostly Hindu India over Pakistan's objections. The two countries negotiated a Line of Control in 1971 dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, but that unofficial border has always been restive. In 1989, Kashmiri rebels, fighting either for independence or union with Pakistan, rose up against New Delhi; Islamabad supported some of them, as well as bands of cross-border militants. India sent in some 700,000 troops and paramilitaries, who are still there. The result is a land often convulsed by violence. It forms the largest obstacle to peace between India and Pakistan (which continues to support militants in Kashmir), as well as a justification for both countries' huge military spending. And by distracting Pakistan from the fight against pro-Taliban jihadists, Kashmir even affects the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
Today's protests, however, are not solely driven by lofty ideas of nationhood and autonomy or even material grievances like the poor local economy. The immediate issue is the Indian military apparatus in Kashmir. Ranged against it are stone-throwing young men who clash almost daily with security forces. About 60 people have died in the past two months, including an 8-year-old boy allegedly killed by paramilitary troops on Aug. 2. With each death, the anger builds. Says protester Rashid: "When they pick up an 8-year-old boy and beat him to death, how can I resist my feelings?"
The Stone Age
New Delhi is struggling to come up with new approaches to Kashmir, but "no one knows quite what to do," says Amitabh Mattoo, a professor of international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. The paucity of political, economic and community-building ideas is made all the more desperate by the fact that Kashmir is now rearing its third generation of rebels. The first comprised local politicians who tried to negotiate with New Delhi. The second was made up of separatists and their militant brethren, who took up the gun in 1989. The current crop, however, is amorphous. As one protest chant puts it, "Who is our leader?
The stone pelter!" Anyone can be a stone-pelter, as they call themselves, and crowds are drawing their numbers not just from angry young men but also from plucky schoolboys, government clerks and elderly shopkeepers. Umar, a 22-year-old wood carver, is one of them. Whenever he hears about a new protest, he says, "I just leave my work and go." (Read "A Violent Crime Resurrects Kashmir's Call for Freedom.")
The stone pelters have won the respect of a broad spectrum of Kashmiris. Shad Salim is an oncologist in his 50s who returned to Kashmir in 2007 after 20 years abroad. He was dismayed to find that underneath the surface calm, Kashmiris were still subject to security checks and intimidation by security forces, much as they were during the worst of the militancy. "The [same] amount of fireworks wasn't happening," Salim says. "But all the other things were as they were." He says he isn't a stone pelter but shares their anger. "The torch of independence has been handed over to them."
These young men are engaged in a 21st century form of protest. They form a rebellion collectively organized through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. (One of the reasons that India finds it difficult to respond to the movement is the fact that it has no obvious leaders with whom New Delhi can negotiate.) Text messages are blocked throughout the Kashmir valley, so young rebels find each other and share news of protests through Facebook pages like "I'm a Kashmiri Stone Pelter." They don't trust newspapers or television, but debate and share sometimes unreliable reports of the latest shootings on Twitter feeds. Their propaganda medium of choice is the YouTube video, setting handheld digital footage of protests and clashes to music like Everlast's "Stone in My Hand." Says Rashid: "The local media - they are caged. There is only social media."
New Delhi seems to be getting the message. On Aug. 10, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the nation over Kashmir - only the third time that an Indian leader had done so. "Manmohan Singh did not respond to us," says Farooq, a moderate who has engaged in years of fruitless talks. "But he responded to [the stone pelters]. It means that what these kids have been doing is getting noticed." (Read about the 2008 clashes.)
In his address, Singh conceded that "many of [the protesters] have seen nothing but violence and conflict in their lives," and promised a solution "that addresses the alienation and emotional needs of the people." But he offered only one proposal: the formation of a committee to figure out how to create jobs for Kashmir's 600,000 unemployed. The offer was widely criticized in Srinagar as insultingly inadequate. Saleh, a stone pelter, says that if Singh had delivered jobs to Kashmir earlier, "It may have had a different effect." But bringing up jobs when young people are asking for justice, he says, is an affront. "The timing of the message is important."
Frozen In Time
Saleh's frustration reflects the fact that while India has moved on after the end of the militancy, Kashmir has not. There are 30,000 troops in and around Srinagar alone, with bunkers and barbed wire strewn around the city's labyrinth of lanes and squares, even though there are very few militants left to fight. The sense of being occupied is pervasive, and it's understandable that local youths draw parallels between their struggle and that of the Palestinians. They call their movement a "Kashmiri intifadeh."
Watch TIME's video "Playing Soccer Amid the Deadly Violence in Kashmir."
See pictures of Kashmir residents at the polls.
India's highest-ranking man on the ground, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, acknowledged to TIME that "levels of militancy are at the lowest that they have been for the last 20 years." Intelligence officers estimate that there are only about 500 militants still active in Kashmir, compared to thousands in the 1990s. In Srinagar, Abdullah says, "There is hardly any militancy whatsoever." So why not reduce troop numbers? The official explanation is that the authorities are waiting for calm to return, but there was no significant drawdown even during earlier periods of quiet in the valley. Instead, it seems that India will maintain a large armed presence as a show of strength as long as relations with Pakistan are tense.
New Delhi also has not addressed the culture of impunity that human-rights activists say has characterized the long counterinsurgency campaign. The failure to bring to justice the perpetrators of the disappearances, extrajudicial killings and rapes committed by security forces, despite documentation of hundreds of cases by human-rights groups, still produces intense bitterness among Kashmiris - and those wounds have been reopened by recent incidents. Among them were the deaths of 80 marchers during the peaceful protests of June 2008, the alleged rape and murder of two young women by security forces in 2009 and the death on June 11 of 17-year-old student Tufail Mattoo that ignited this summer's demonstrations. (Watch TIME's video "Earthquake Tourism in Kashmir.")
Since the protests resumed, Srinagar has tumbled back into a replay of the curfews and general strikes that disrupted life during the years of militancy. Leaving the house means negotiating both security checkpoints and makeshift barricades set up by the stone pelters. Some businesses have managed to keep running - those that can afford to offer employees meals, dorms and drivers with curfew passes - but most just close down, turning every day into a scavenger hunt for vegetables and milk.
Young Mattoo was killed by a tear-gas shell, but neither his death nor the deaths of 60 other people this summer have changed the tactics of the Central Reserve Paramilitary Forces (CRPF), which even Kashmir's Law Minister Ali Mohammad Sagar has called "out of control." Prabhakar Tripathy, the CRPF spokesman in Srinagar, says that his troops fire only in self-defense, but those TIME spoke to said they have no specific instructions. "It depends on the situation," says one CRPF soldier posted in the neighborhood of Nowshera.
Some troops have even started improvising weapons, answering the stone pelters with marbles launched from homemade slingshots. (One protester lost an eye after being hit by one.) Dr. Waseem Qureshi, medical superintendent of Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, says there have been 112 injuries among protesters since June, nearly all of them caused by bullets. He has recorded no injuries among members of the security forces.
The youngest victim to date is 8-year-old Sameer Ahmad Rah, whose death has become a focal point for the protests. The son of a fruit trader, Sameer lived in Batmaloo, a district that was once a hotbed of militancy. On Aug. 2, during yet another day of curfew, the boys in the neighborhood were throwing stones. His father, Fayaz Rah, says Sameer asked to go to his cousin's house in a quieter area nearby. His mother, Fareeda, remembers that Sameer ate his lunch and then left with "a pear and a two-rupee coin in his pocket." It was 3:20 in the afternoon; his parents received Sameer's body about four hours later. (Read "India's War at Home.")
Rah says that somewhere on the way, a CRPF group caught hold of Sameer and started beating him up, perhaps believing he had been involved in the day's earlier stone-throwing. Neighbors told him later what they saw: "[The troops] took him to a marshy area and threw him to the ground," Rah says. "He hit his head on a stone, and they hit him further with their gun butts." The CRPF denies this version of events. Tripathy says that Sameer died in a stampede during a protest. "We have not at all touched the boy," he says. The local police report simply repeats the CRPF claim, but Rah says this isn't possible. "It was all curfew," he says. "People were not out. How could there be a stampede? It's a lie."
The family feels powerless to seek justice. Without police endorsement of his account, Rah cannot go to the state's human-rights commission. "I'm a fruit dealer," he says. "I have never been to the courts. I don't know how they will ensure justice." This level of despair is a dark sign for Kashmir's future. Says academic Mattoo: "Confidence in public institutions has been completely eroded."
Lost Opportunity
Though India's growing prosperity is uneven, there is a national (and international) sense that the country is boldly marching forward. Not so in Kashmir. New Delhi recently tried to offer economic progress, promising political change later, but the government has yet to deliver on either. As Kashmiris lose patience, that window is closing. So is the chance for dialogue. Having gotten the attention of the Prime Minister, the protesters are unlikely to stop there. "This has worked," says stone pelter Saleh. He and his fellow protesters are demanding, among other things, the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a law that gives security forces broad leeway to operate in Kashmir without fear of oversight or prosecution. After months of inaction, Chief Minister Abdullah now promises that if Srinagar is quiet for a week or so, he can get AFSPA revoked "in a matter of days." (See India's 15 most influential.)
India's Home Ministry, however, has been reluctant to touch AFSPA because of objections by the army and the political opposition, which rounds on any perceived weakness on Kashmir. A repeal will require the kind of political courage that New Delhi has yet to show in the region. If it continues with the same old strategies - blaming Pakistan for stirring trouble, imposing curfews and superseding talks with bloody crackdowns, it will engender the same cycles of violence.
According to Radha Kumar, an expert on conflict resolution who has been involved in recent negotiations with separatists, whatever the Indian government does won't work unless it is "something dramatic and bold." In other words, the only effective response to this new generation of Kashmiri stone pelters may well be a new generation of Indian statesmen.
- with reporting by Showkat A. Motta / Srinagar
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See the Cartoons of the Week.
View this article on Time.com
Related articles on Time.com:
1 comment:
Hi,
I think our prime minister and cabinets Ministers are just wasting their time for this issue.
The workable solutions are below.
We have to take out the special status of Kashmiries in Kashmirand have to allow more Indians citizen to go and settle in Kashmir and make kashmiris mix with other ethnic population. A brotherly relationship will grow between them. Economy will grow young people will find more job so separatist will not get enough support.
The people who are seeking freedom from India are not Indians, they have to be treated separately and they are not eligible to enjoy the constitutional freedom given in India. Please allow military to take position before it get worst. So that at least we can save service man’s life.
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