Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak

‘separatists’ seemed unmoored now. In the summer they had seemed to be out there, in touch with the people, but now found themselves forced right back into the corner painted for them.

The highest ranking Indian Army general in Kashmir took the time to step outside his brief and accuse social networking sites of being ‘used as a tool of propaganda against the army and other security agencies, by elements hell-bent on disturbing peace in the Valley.’⁴ When the press asked for an update on the army’s fake ‘encounter’ of three civilians in Machil, the incident which first triggered the avalanche of protests, he was more taciturn, saying he had no comment, and the matter was ‘sub judice’.

      A top-ranking police officer told the press in Srinagar that of the 1,000 young men they had detained, 72 per cent were social misfits, either drug addicts, or people with problems at home. Waving a picture of a young man attacking a police jeep with a stone, he said ‘They do such acts of heroism only under the influence of drugs.’

Meanwhile, from an exhibition of defence products in faraway Bengaluru came news of a new toy on offer to security forces in Kashmir—a US-made ‘pain gun’, which sends out beams of radiation that stimulate human nerve endings, causing extreme pain. It ‘barely’ penetrates the skin, Raytheon, the global weapons giant, promised, so the ‘ray gun’ cannot cause visible or permanent injury.⁵ A step ahead then, from last year’s catapults, which blinded so many young men on the streets of Srinagar. (The US military first used this Silent Guardian Protection System in war-torn Afghanistan, but withdrew it last year, amidst opposition from human rights activists.)

      Khoon ka badla June mein lenge. Blood will be avenged, they had said.

      Who will retaliate, I wonder, and what will be avenged, this coming June, and in the summers to come?

      From Sopore, heartland of the pro-Azadi movement, comes news of the killing of two young women, seventeen-year-old Arifa and nineteen-year-old Akhtara. They had been warned twice, neighbours said, explicitly told to break links with security forces. Sopore had seen handbills recently, warning people not to consort with police, military or intelligence people. On the day of their cold-blooded execution, bystanders confirmed that more than a dozen men brazenly walked into the neighbourhood, a few went in to meet the girls, while the rest stood guard on the street. Arifa and Akhtara were later taken away, and killed a bare twenty minutes away from their dingy one-room home. All evidence pointed to the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

      So there they were, the Lashkar, that ruthless Army of the Faithful, trained to destroy and dislodge, back after several years of lying low. The quiet rumble of public opinion had discreetly made them concede the resistance to the mass of people, to the stone-pelters, to the open street. As the police hunt down the sang-baz, grade them in categories A, B, and C, and put them in jail; as they take in the hot-headed Kale Kharab, and smash windowpanes in town and village, people are once again being forced to step back. The tired, sullen silence of the street will inevitably create a vacuum, and make space for the old fighters to return. It will be an invitation to the earlier ways, of armed resistance, of the Hizbul-Mujahidin, and heaven forbid, the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

      In the 1990s, this valley was also drawn into the cauldron of war by its neighbours, as the defeat of the Soviet Union in the mountains of Afghanistan redirected the energies of the mujahidin into Kashmir. That neighbourhood is teetering dangerously again. Preparing for defeat this time is the United States, shadowy victors of that earlier war, even as they try to dress it up as a strategic withdrawal.

      There is an ominously familiar feeling in the air.

      The fire is indeed at the heart.

      This collection brings together a diverse set of responses to the events of 2010, a time of great upheaval in Kashmir. It seemed as if the events and ideas that have animated the struggle of its people had, after almost twenty years of a muted, subterranean existence, entered a new phase. A time marked—we imagine—by openness and candour, and by a diversity of opinion.

      Most of what appears here came in a furious rush in the summer itself, and reflects the intensity of what people were responding to. The chill of winter was yet to settle in. It is left to the readers to discover what runs common through the range of ideas in Until My Freedom Has Come. But attention can—and must—be drawn to the hope that attends this volume. As always, we know we can trust Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmiri poet, to make eloquent our present hopes—and ever-present fears.

       We shall meet again, in Srinagar

       by the gates of the Villa of Peace,

       our hands blossoming into fists

       till the soldiers return the keys

       and disappear. Again we’ll enter

       our last world, the first that vanished

       in our absence from the broken city.

      SANJAY KAK

      New Delhi

      March 2011

¹Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-administered Kashmir, 2009 [http://www.kashmirprocess.org/reports/graves/toc.html].

² http://kafila.org/2011/01/18/these-are-not-stones-these-are-my-feelings-kashmir/

³ http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Feb/10/protesters-had-personal-problems-claims-ssp-50.asp

⁴ http://www.indianexpress.com/news/facebook-used-to-fuel-unrest-in-kashmir-army/745010/

⁵ http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/us-made-pain-gun-to-tackle-kashmir-protests-6371.aspx

       Summers of Unrest

      Azadi is our birthright and we will leave no stone unturned to get it.

      Yirvun Kreel

       Summers of Unrest Challenging India

       Parvaiz Bukhari

      The summer of 2010 witnessed a convulsion in the world’s most militarized zone, the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, an unprecedented and deadly civil unrest that is beginning to change a few things on the ground. The vast state intelligence establishment, backbone of the region’s government, almost lost its grip over a rebelling population. Little-known and relatively anonymous resistance activists emerged, organizing an unarmed agitation more fierce than the armed rebellion