[Indian security officials accuse Pakistani authorities of sheltering the leadership of militant groups fighting in Kashmir as well as providing them with guidance, training and material support. Pakistan denies the accusations but recently launched a crackdown on militant groups inside its borders.]
By Joanna Slater
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Joanna Slater/The
Washington Post)
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SRINAGAR,
India — He was the kind of
professor students adored, always ready to help with books, advice or small
loans. His colleagues in the sociology department found him reliable and
ambitious, a scholar whose research on consumerism might propel him to a post
elsewhere in India.
So it was out of character when Mohammad Rafi
Bhat failed to attend a faculty meeting at the University of Kashmir one Friday
afternoon last year. His family, too, had no idea where he was. Two days later,
when his colleagues turned on their televisions, their concern turned to shock:
Bhat was dead. He had joined a group of anti-India militants and was killed in
a confrontation with security personnel.
Bhat’s brief transition from academia to
insurgency was part of a troubling trend. Growing numbers of young Kashmiris
turned to militancy in 2018, according to official figures, giving new energy
to an armed struggle that as recently as a few years ago appeared to be
diminishing.
Some of the recruits, like Bhat, are highly
educated and have promising careers ahead of them; others are high school
dropouts from rural villages. But each embraced violence, drawn to a three-decade
insurgency against India’s rule in its portion of Kashmir, the Himalayan region
claimed by India and Pakistan.
One of the recent recruits was Adil Ahmad
Dar, a 19-year-old suicide bomber who nearly sparked a war between the two
nuclear-armed neighbors. Dar drove a vehicle carrying explosives into a
security convoy on Feb. 14, killing 40 paramilitary personnel. It was the worst
such attack in the history of the insurgency, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, a
Pakistan-based terrorist group, asserted responsibility for the bombing.
Indian security officials accuse Pakistani
authorities of sheltering the leadership of militant groups fighting in Kashmir
as well as providing them with guidance, training and material support.
Pakistan denies the accusations but recently launched a crackdown on militant
groups inside its borders.
Though India has repeatedly denounced
Pakistan, it has remained nearly silent on the increase in local participation
in the insurgency. Last year, 191 Kashmiri youths joined militant groups, according
to an Indian army official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, nearly 52
percent more than in 2017, when 126 joined. As recently as 2013, the number of
local recruits was put at just 16.
Bhat, 31, received a PhD from the University
of Kashmir and began teaching there. His students said they were crushed to
learn of his death but described it as a form of martyrdom. “It is a personal
choice,” said Mohammad Rayees Rafeeqi, 24. “You cannot stop anyone.”
[The trouble with Kashmir]
Kashmir could be “hurtling towards a
heightened phase of terrorism,” according to an assessment recently published
by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a New Delhi-based website that tracks
militant groups in the region. Even as the Indian government has clamored for action
against Pakistan, “what is being completely overlooked are strategies to
restore internal stability and sober governance” in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s
only Muslim-majority state.
Critics say heavy-handed tactics by India
have bred anger and despair. Kashmiris describe a sense of daily humiliation,
sometimes petty and sometimes grave, together with a feeling of suffocation by
a conflict that shows no hope of immediate improvement.
“We can say that Pakistan is fishing in
troubled waters,” Mehbooba Mufti, who served as chief minister of Jammu and
Kashmir from 2016 to 2018, said in an interview. Last month, “a Kashmiri boy
brought the two countries to the brink of war,” she added. “It’s very important
to stop it now rather than wait for another bomb to tick.”
Today’s militancy in Kashmir is smaller and
less deadly than at the insurgency’s peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Indian security officials say 300 to 400 militants are active in the territory,
most of them operating in South Kashmir. Some of are locals, and others have
crossed over from Pakistani-controlled territory.
The lure of militancy for local youths is a
“cause of worry,” said an Indian security official who spoke on the condition
of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the
media. Militants have used social media to “glamorize gun culture,” he said,
while at the same time, “the world has become smaller.” Events elsewhere in
India or around the world now reverberate in Kashmir, feeding a sense among Muslims
that they are under attack.
In Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city,
paramilitary officers stand guard on bridges and roads against a backdrop of
stunning snow-capped mountains. Some walls still bear graffiti with the name
“Burhan,” a popular militant commander killed in July 2016. His killing sparked
massive and violent protests to which India responded with deadly force.
Naeem Fazili remembers his son Eisa, a
university student, coming to him in an agitated state after a young engineer
was killed in the 2016 protests. “You’re saying that we should arm ourselves
with degrees and knowledge” to help the Kashmiri people, Fazili recalls his son
saying. “But what did this degree give him?”
A school principal, Fazili placed a premium
on education and sent his two sons to the most prestigious private high school
in Srinagar. Eisa went on to study engineering at a university in the city of
Jammu. Then, one day during his final semester in 2017, he disappeared.
The day after Fazili began frantically
searching for his son, he received a call from a neighbor. “Uncle, do you know
how to use Facebook?” the neighbor asked, and he directed Fazili to a specific
page. There, he found a photo of Eisa holding an AK-47 rifle. It was “a bolt
from the blue,” Fazili said. His son was killed in an encounter with Indian
security forces in March 2018, the authorities said.
Umair Gul, a doctoral student who has studied
the history of the insurgency in Kashmir, wrote recently that educated
Kashmiris have long been present among the militants. But thanks to social
media, such examples are gaining new prominence and serving as a recruitment
tool.
Since the bombing on Feb. 14, India has sent
thousands more security personnel to Kashmir. It outlawed an Islamist
socio-religious group and arrested hundreds of its members. Authorities raided
the homes of well-known separatist leaders. They also postponed state
elections, deepening the crisis of democracy in Jammu and Kashmir, whose
assembly was dissolved in controversial fashion in 2018.
(Also last year, the Indian government began
requiring foreign correspondents to apply for permits to conduct reporting in
Jammu and Kashmir. The permit received by The Washington Post for this story
limited the reporter to Srinagar and included a condition that the reporter not
meet with people engaged in “anti-national activities,” without defining such
actions.)
At the University of Kashmir, students in
headscarves and hoodies strolled along paths beneath towering chinar trees,
their trunks pale in the winter sunlight. When Bhat disappeared from the campus
on a Friday last year, his students did not know what to think. Some thought he
had gone south for a job interview in the city of Hyderabad. Then they worried
that he had been detained by the security forces and launched a day-long
protest to demand his release.
Bhat’s father, Abdul Rahim, 64, a retired
civil servant, cried as he recalled the phone call he received from his son
early on a Sunday morning last May. Bhat told his parents that he was trapped
in an encounter with the security forces and was going to become a martyr, his
father recalled. He told them not to worry, that they would meet in the next
life.
Those who knew Bhat expressed shock that he
had turned to militancy, but, ultimately, they were not surprised at his
motives. “In Kashmir, anything is possible,” said Pirzada M. Amin, chair of the
sociology department at the University of Kashmir. “It is a conflict zone. It
can influence anybody.”
Ishfaq Naseem contributed to this report.
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