Kashmir crisis: Is redeployment of army the only option left to tackle the unrest?

SRINAGAR: Earlier in the week, a senior police officer was surfing TV channels at home in Srinagar, when his five-year-old questioned him about the gory footage of young pellet victims on a news channel. “What happened to them? Who did this?” the boy asked.

His father, the police officer, baffled by the volley of unexpected questions, had no answers. The elder child came to his rescue: “These are just mosquito bites.” “I was shocked and dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine this has reached my house, my kids,” the officer told ET Magazine.

The bloody unrest in Kashmir has entered its third month, with people experiencing the longest curfew and communication blockades in recent history. The police, army and paramilitary forces have killed 78 civilians and injured more than 10,000, including more than 2,000 possibly blinded, even as protests continue across the Valley, with participation from the unexpected fringe areas of north and south Kashmir and Chenab and Pir Panjal region.

Since July 8, the distance between Kashmir and New Delhi has increased by many light years. The non-quantified “sky is the limit” promise of former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao and the unexplained “Insaniyat, Jhamooriyat and Kashmiriyat” of AB Vajpayee, which the current PM chose to echo, have over the decades only resulted in contrary interpretations that suit those decoding these truisms.

The Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP-BJP government in the state continues to live in denial, perhaps resigned to Murphy’s Law: that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Action plans with ostensibly new points keep getting made, but don’t succeed in breaking new ground.

PM Narendra Modi invoking humanity, democracy and the Kashmir ethos a la Vajpayee, a visit by Union home minister Rajnath Singh — another comes up next week — followed by the visit of an allparty delegation of parliamentarians have resulted in little progress.

The failed attempt of non-BJP delegation members to initiate a dialogue with jailed Hurriyat leaders only resulted in the home minister (who led the delegation) distancing himself from the move with “neither did we say yes, nor did we say no (to some members trying to meet Hurriyat leaders)”. To put it mildly, the Centre and the non-BJP members of the delegation weren’t on the same page on the issue of engaging with the separatists.

If New Delhi reckons that talking to Hurriyat isn’t a good idea, a further crackdown on its leaders, some of whom are already in jail, is a worse option. “Any Hurriyat-only strategy is bound to fail. This is not about Hurriyat but the sentiment they represent. You cannot heal the heart with a plastic surgery of the face,” a police official told ET Magazine.

More Boots on the Ground
Those who were hopeful that New Delhi would begin a process of gradual demilitarisation would have been disappointed with what was to come. On Saturday, reports emerged from South Kashmir that the army had taken up positions in rural areas of four violence-hit districts. For the first time since 2014, the troops are back in these troubled rural areas.

The redeployment flies in the face of the PDP’s long-held view that the army’s footprint should reduce; it also points to the PDP’s failure to wrest control from the protesters; and it also has the makings of yet another flare-up in a bid to stamp down the protests and riots. “Excessive use of force is always counterproductive.

At some point in time you need a genuine political intervention. I think we have already crossed that stage in Valley,” a top police official, who deals with the law and order situation in Kashmir on a daily basis, told ET Magazine. “New Delhi suffers from absence of clarity on Kashmir. Should we go with the prime minister’s statement of him being pained and concerned over what is happening in Kashmir or his ministers playing hardball by planning to hand over south Kashmir to army?” asks professor Siddiq Wahid, a former vice chancellor of the Islamic University of Science and Technology.

The Agenda of Alliance between the PDP and the BJP after forming the government in J&K clearly mentions that dialogue with the Hurriyat has to be initiated but, people like Wahid, say there seems to be no political will in New Delhi to come to terms with what is happening in Kashmir. The way forward in Kashmir is the same as what has been recommended for at least three decades, he says, which is that the “government forces should stop killing and maiming people and it should be followed up by resolving Kashmir issue permanently”.

“Now, it is completely different from the 1990s. You don’t have militants in huge numbers. It’s people’s mobilisation at grassroots,” says professor Gul Wani, who heads the Institute of Kashmir Studies at Kashmir University. New Delhi, he adds, should not discredit genuine dialogue. “I don’t understand why a powerful BJP is shutting the window when Vajpayee could do it in a coalition government with the same Hurriyat.”

For its part, New Delhi may well be in a catch-22 situation. While it may feel justified in believing that the Hurriyat does not have the interests of Kashmiris at heart, it can’t turn a blind eye to the lack of governance and development. History will tell us that deployment of the forces is hardly the panacea to deal with insurgency and build confidence. Governance, development and sustained political initiative from New Delhi — long overdue in Kashmir — are a better bet.