[As the crisis in the Kashmir region drags into its sixth week, a visit by a New York Times journalist showed that the violence is morphing. The tensions, set off by India’s swift and unilateral decision last month to wipe out Kashmir’s autonomy, are no longer as simple as protesters pelting security officers with rocks and the officers firing shotguns back.]
By
Suhasini Raj and Jeffrey Gettleman
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Asma
Jaan, who was shot by militants, at a hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest
city.
Credit The New York Times
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SOPORE,
Kashmir — Four men carrying
pistols and wearing black masks knocked a week ago on the Hamidullah family’s
gate. Furious that the wealthy apple traders had violated their ban on doing
business, the militants announced that there was a price to pay.
They took three men into a sitting room in
this Kashmiri town and shot them in the leg, right below their knees.
When 5-year-old Asma Jaan heard her father
scream, she ran into the room to see what was wrong. The militants shot her,
too. Now, confused and in pain, she lies bandaged up in a hospital bed and may
not be able to walk for months.
“This has never happened before, that they
hit out at a 5-year-old so mercilessly,” said her distraught aunt Nighat.
As the crisis in the Kashmir region drags
into its sixth week, a visit by a New York Times journalist showed that the
violence is morphing. The tensions, set off by India’s swift and unilateral
decision last month to wipe out Kashmir’s autonomy, are no longer as simple as
protesters pelting security officers with rocks and the officers firing
shotguns back.
Kashmiri separatists are conducting their own
reign of terror, threatening or even attacking civilians in a campaign to
destroy any semblance of normality that may be creeping back after more than a
month of heavy military crackdowns.
Beleaguered Kashmiris are now getting hit
from two sides, caught between the militants and security forces who, residents
say, continue to abuse and torture them.
Even as the Indian government begins to lift
some of the restrictions that it imposed in Kashmir last month, the militants
are enforcing their own restrictions, ordering people not to go to work or even
leave their homes. Their intent is to paralyze life in Kashmir and make it
ungovernable, raising tensions inside the region and with neighboring Pakistan,
which also claims part of Kashmir.
There is no doubt that most Kashmiris are
bitter about the recent developments. On Aug. 5, the Indian government
unilaterally wiped out the degree of autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir State,
which includes the restive Kashmir Valley, had held since India’s independence.
Then, in anticipation of widespread outrage,
India imposed punishing security measures, including cutting off cellphone and
internet service to millions of Kashmiris and jailing more than 2,000
academics, politicians and activists.
While those moves infuriated a vast majority
of Kashmiris, they are, at the same time, desperate to get back to the
businesses, schooling and relationships that have been disrupted since the
lockdown.
On the one side, they don’t want to show
support or even acceptance of the Indian government’s actions. Many people
sympathize with the militants, and fear them. They heed the mysterious fliers,
posted at roundabouts or slipped quickly under the doors of Kashmiri news
stations, warning people of consequences if they go back to work.
But as the clampdown stretches on, it gets
harder to maintain resistance. People are running low on money and food. They
have little to do, with schools, offices and markets closed and their phones
dead. And so they feel trapped, torn between their sympathies and their needs.
As the days pass, more shops are opening and
more people are moving about, perhaps explaining why the militants, determined
to reinforce their message, resorted to deliberately shooting a child.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” said Aayat
Tarik, a high school senior. “From this side, there are militants; from there,
stone pelters and here, the military. They don’t care what happens to us. I
don’t think anyone cares what happens to Kashmiris.”
Aayat hopes to be a doctor. But she said she
had become so unsettled since her school closed on Aug. 5, along with almost
all the others, that she can’t sleep.
Many of her male friends have been rounded up
and beaten, she said. And men — militants or soldiers, she doesn’t know which —
keep appearing in the middle of the night at the mosque next to her house,
banging on the gate. Her younger brother can’t step outside because the family
fears he could be taken by either side.
It has been another descent into hard times
for Kashmir, a mountainous territory once fabled for its beauty that for
decades has flared as a battlefield between Indian forces and insurgents backed
by Pakistan. Since both India and Pakistan have nuclear arms, security experts
consider the dispute over Kashmir one of the world’s most dangerous.
In recent weeks, India has beefed up its
forces, deploying tens of thousands of extra troops. They suppress the small
protests that frequently erupt and hunt down the tiny, quixotic militant force
— perhaps 200 to 300 young men from a handful of groups, mostly Kashmiri, a few
from Pakistan, local officials say.
The insurgents say they are fighting to split
Kashmir off from India and create a separate state, but militarily they are
insignificant. The security forces steadily hunt them down and apply enormous
pressure on anyone close to them.
One morning last month, according to several
witnesses, soldiers summoned Bashir Ahmed Dar, a plumber whose brother had
become a militant. At an army camp near the village of Heff Shirmal, the
soldiers demanded that Mr. Dar disclose where his brother was hiding.
After Mr. Dar told them he didn’t know, he
said, the soldiers smashed his body with sticks, kicked him in the ribs and
broadcast his sobbing pleas for mercy from loudspeakers on the road,
terrorizing his village.
Then, Mr. Dar said, the soldiers ransacked
his house and dumped his supply of rice, flour and kerosene into a water tank,
contaminating it.
Several news organizations, including the
BBC, have recently reported Kashmiri residents’ accusations of torture and
sadistic behavior by Indian military personnel. Indian officials have called
them baseless, and a spokeswoman for India’s home ministry declined to comment
for this article.
Ajit Doval, India’s national security chief,
blames Pakistan for Kashmir’s problems. If the internet is restored in Kashmir,
he says, Pakistan will flood it with misleading information and stir up hatred.
If the Indian soldiers relax, Pakistan will exploit the situation and send in
more militants.
“They will be very happy if there is
bloodshed,” Mr. Doval said.
Pakistani officials have denied India’s
accusations of supporting militants. The country’s prime minister, Imran Khan,
has harshly criticized India’s crackdown and has called for international
intervention to keep the countries from stumbling into another war.
Indian officials say the chances of war are
close to zero and insist that Kashmir is getting back to normal. Land-line
telephone service has been restored in some areas, and many of the military
barricades that blocked the roads just a few weeks ago have been removed.
Asif Majeeb Dar, a young man who works behind
a cafe counter at the airport in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city, said that
before India’s move on Kashmir, few people supported the militants.
“But that’s changing,” he said. “The
government has forced our hand.”
Many Kashmiris feel that Prime Minister
Narendra Modi of India betrayed them. They don’t like even hearing his name.
“My mom says, ‘Stay away from the TV, don’t
pay any attention to Modi, just get back to your studies,’” said Sofi Maryam
Javeed, a fifth-grade student.
The competing pressures that people face put
them in untenable positions every day.
One of them, a wholesaler named Ghulam
Mohammed Mir, had been warned by militants to close the shop where he sold
rice, flour, sugar and other provisions. The separatists fatally shot him on
Aug. 29, according to witnesses and security officials.
Other shopkeepers expressed little sympathy.
Several said he deserved it because he had been warned.
But a prominent merchant is one thing; a
5-year-old girl another. A new sense of outrage has been stirred up by the
militants’ shooting of Asma Jaan after wounding three men at her family’s home.
As a wealthy apple trader, Hamidullah, the
girl’s grandfather, had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and said he
needed to move his apples to stay afloat. Apples are a huge business in
Kashmir, the source of countless livelihoods, and several Kashmiris said
shooting a child crossed a line.
“Those militants committed a heinous crime,’’
said Irshad Ahmed, a waiter at a Srinagar hotel. “Who do you think will side
with them now?’’
Suhasini Raj contributed from Sopore, and
Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi.
