Until My Freedom Has Come. Sanjay Kak

returned in May 2009 after two young women were found dead in disputed circumstances in Shopian, a district with a heavy military presence to the south of Srinagar. The victims’ families alleged that the women had been abducted, raped and murdered by men in uniform.

      Several botched investigations into the incident triggered unrest once again. The state’s intelligence chief was changed for ‘misleading’ the government, and four police officers were arrested and charged with dereliction of duty and destruction of evidence in the case. Shopian remained under a forty-seven-day protest shutdown. An autopsy report confirmed that the women had been raped, and a government-appointed, one-man inquiry commission alleged that four police officers were involved in destroying evidence.

      Privately, officials told Jane’s Intelligence Review that in this process newly elected chief minister Abdullah lost some support, particularly from within the frontline counter-insurgency paramilitary units who were engaged in the fight against armed militants. But the separatist resistance campaign found new energy, with the protests being joined by youths who have grown amid the two-decade-long conflict. The resistance leaders were establishing connections with this new generation of Kashmiris.

      Alarmed, the government called in India’s premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), for a fresh probe into the Shopian deaths. The new investigation, conducted on the bodies exhumed four months after the death of the victims, concluded that they had died due to drowning in a local stream. Not many in Kashmir believed the findings, but the CBI filed cases against the doctors who had conducted the previous probes into the deaths, as well as the lawyers who were fighting the original case in the court. They were charged with inciting violence in the aftermath of the Shopian deaths.

      While Kashmiris were debating the ‘institutional denial’ of justice in the Shopian incident, in January 2010 Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers killed a schoolboy in Srinagar, and sparked off yet more protests. Witnesses said the soldiers opened fire on a group of boys without provocation, making it the sixth death of a civilian within a month that local residents blamed on government forces. Abdullah ordered a probe into the death, saying, ‘Incidents of unprovoked and innocent killings will not be tolerated.’ However, protests meant that a curfew was extended in Srinagar for several days and dozens of activists were arrested, setting the tone for the coming summer.

      In April, major protests erupted again, this time in response to the killing of three men by the Indian Army in Machil, near the militarized LoC. The army said it had killed three rebels trying to cross into Indian-controlled Kashmir from the Pakistani side of the border. However, local residents demanded an inquiry into the claims, saying three local men had disappeared from the village of Nadihal three days before the supposed firefight.

      Police exhumed the bodies and confirmed that the men had been local civilians. Farooq Ahmed, a senior police officer, said: ‘They were innocent citizens killed in a fake gun battle.’ The incident sparked protests involving thousands of local residents. Two army officers were removed from duty pending an inquiry into the killings, amid accusations from local residents that the men had been killed so that the troops could win rewards and promotions awarded for neutralizing militants.

      Fuelled by existing anger over the January killing, protests over these deaths spread across parts of the Kashmir valley, eventually reaching Srinagar. A tear-gas shell fired by police officers killed a student who local residents said had not been part of the protests. The death sent much of the Kashmir valley into a renewed cycle of intense protests—and more deaths—that continued throughout the summer.

      Omar Abdullah later blamed the fresh violence on the deaths in Machil and called for restraint in the use of the AFSPA, saying the army was acting as ‘judge, jury and hangman’. ‘There is absence of transparency, as a result of which people have lost faith in the system,’ he said. Each killing triggered more protests, often coordinated through text messages and over the internet, and led by youths throwing stones at everything that symbolized state authority, most visibly, men in uniform and their armoured vehicles.

      Many separatist resistance leaders and activists were soon jailed. However, one man who had just emerged after twenty-two months in jail in June 2010 went underground on his release. Masarat Alam Bhat, a thirty-nine-year-old resistance activist educated in a Christian missionary school and member of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference, started channelling the anti-India groundswell by issuing weekly protest calendars. He urged people to join the ‘freedom rallies’ that protests in Kashmir most often morph into. An activist for the right of self-determination since his student days, Bhat had been jailed many times.

      The fiery young man deployed an idiom of political resistance that immediately connected him with the protesting youths, electrifying the street. Bhat’s rotating protest calendars copied the First Intifada of Palestinians, dedicating each day of protests and shutdowns to specific demands, with different forms of protest against ‘Indian military occupation’ of Kashmir. Encouraged by the ascendant public response, the emerging separatist leader triggered a ‘Quit Kashmir Campaign’ calling for demilitarization and an end to Indian rule of the disputed region. A charismatic orator, Bhat also appealed to the ‘conscience’ of the Indian troops deployed in the region and asked people to reproduce his memorandum and deliver copies to military commanders in the hundreds of camps dotting the entire region. A video recording of the appeal and its text was sent to media outlets in Srinagar. An executive order from the authorities barred the press from reporting the contents of Bhat’s powerful appeal. However, he kept the pressure up from the underground and started issuing statements calling for social boycott of Kashmiri police officers and bureaucrats for being ‘collaborators’ of the ‘Indian occupation’.

      Bhat’s clear appeals resonated among the people, particularly youths and students. Local leaders and activists that no one knew about began emerging from neighbourhoods in cities, towns and villages all across Kashmir and kept organizing demonstrations in strict adherence to the ‘protest calendars’. The authorities responded with stringent curfews and, occasionally, lethal force. As the toll of civilian casualities mounted, so did the general anger. Protesters, sometimes in their tens of thousands, defied curfew and in a number of instances targeted government buildings, including railway stations. The houses of a few local police officials were also set on fire. The situation stretched the massive security grid to its maximum. At the peak of the unrest, the government brought in several hundred members of the federal Rapid Action Force (RAF), specially trained in riot control, to augment efforts directed at calming the situation.

      On 7 July, New Delhi tried to address the situation by allowing the army to be deployed for crowd control in Srinagar and across much of rural Kashmir. This decision, taken for the first time in nineteen years, received heavy criticism from much of Indian civil society, and sections of the political establishment expressed disappointment at the government’s failure to respond politically. Indian Army chief General V.K. Singh had already warned of the need to ‘handle things politically’. He emphasized that militarily the security situation was already under firm control and told the Times of India in July: ‘I feel there is a great requirement for political initiatives.’

      The sudden and significantly changed ground scenario choked space for field intelligence operatives who had worked for the police, the military and the paramilitary forces in the region, each operating their own separate intelligence-gathering networks. The unrest turned into a frontline contest between the protesting masses and the police aided by federal paramilitaries. Since a majority in the police force is composed of local Kashmiris, the clearly drawn lines made the mobility of its field intelligence staff very risky.

      Over two decades, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the police had focused on countering armed militants, like the federal and military intelligence agencies, and developed a frontline cutting-edge capability for anti-militancy operations. This massive intelligence-gathering network had penetrated so deep into the social structure that it was easily possible to get information about the activities of armed militants. The premium had been on the actionable and quick intelligence on armed rebels and their networks. The department’s Special Branch and Counter-Intelligence wings, specially designed to monitor separatist politicians and continually interrogate their plans, failed to anticipate and assess the