THE February 14 improvised explosive device attack on a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy at Lethpora in Pulwama, brought the vexed question of home-grown militancy in Kashmir into sharp focus. The attack was reminiscent of the fidayeen strike in 2000 on the Army headquarters in Srinagar’s Badami Bagh when militancy was at its peak.
The fact that the Pulwama operation was carried out by a 19-year-old local Kashmiri boy, who had joined the militant ranks in March 2018, shattered the persistent and unrealistic claims of the Central government that its iron-fist, militaristic strategy called “Operation All Out”, which lays emphasis on eliminating all violent actors from the field, is better equipped to end insurgency compared with the policy of negotiation, engagement, confidence-building and force moderation that was nurtured by the previous dispensation. Indeed, the developments in Kashmir in 2018 threw up enough reasons to believe that “Operation All Out”, which was introduced in January 2017, was, paradoxically, escalating home-grown militancy rather than containing it. The year 2018 saw the highest head count of militants, at between 280 and 300, in a decade. This, in spite of the fact that 110 militants were killed in 2014, 113 in 2015, 165 in 2016, 218 in 2017 and more than 240 in 2018. In what was a highly unusual phenomenon, described by the State’s former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah as “shocking”, of the 240-odd killed in 2018, the number of home-grown militants exceeded the number of foreign militants, whose number in the Valley is currently estimated to be around 50.
Centre’s failed doctrine
As the focus now shifts to the rapidly growing home-grown militancy in Kashmir, it is difficult not to take note of its timeline. As per records, in 2013, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a year away from capturing power in New Delhi, there were only 78 active militants in the Valley. This raises the pertinent question whether the increase in militancy was the outcome of Modi and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s militaristic and hawkish doctrine on Kashmir, which accords primacy to armed intervention while rejecting any political engagement with the stakeholders of the conflict. A cross-section of people in Jammu and Kashmir’s power corridors and the security apparatus, who spoke to Frontline off the record, believe it is so. According to them, this doctrine mistook knowing how to extirpate insurgents as extirpating insurgency. They said that the surge in home-grown militancy was the cumulative consequence of four developments after Modi rolled out his big-stage election blitzkrieg, drawn along an overtly communal trajectory, in 2013.
One, the groundswell of right-wing forces, in particular the violence and vandalism that accompanied the frequent Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) marches, including armed marches, in the neighbouring riot-torn region of Jammu, crystallised a reactionary sentiment for “jehad” among a section of the Kashmiri youths. Second, the refusal of the Modi government, formed at the Centre in May 2014, to bring issues to the negotiating table, understand the anger sweeping the Valley, and demonstrate the resolve to address it, deepened the sentiment to “wage war”. Three, political machinations and manoeuvres to erode the State’s special status, which were played out at India’s social and political landscape without much questioning or challenge from the media and the liberal class, gave rise to a perception of identity threat. And, four, the government’s drift towards belligerence, in the form of “Operation All Out”, created the perfect storm and incited an increasing number of youths from diverse backgrounds to either combat or die. The same resolve guided the large-scale public mobilisations seen at encounter sites.
The Vajpayee-Mufti policy
In order to understand the social, political, psychological and other enablers of the current home-grown militancy, it is important to study the systems, structures and strategies envisaged by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and developed and perfected by its successor, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, to contain militancy. The relaxation of position on Pakistan and the realisation of the need to explore constructive and meaningful bilateral partnerships, both at the government level and at the people-to-people level, was an important pillar of that mechanism. It had a direct bearing on Kashmir and assisted in ameliorating the situation there.
In the spring of 2001, Vajpayee invited Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to India. Although the subsequent Agra Summit in July that year ended in smoke and Musharraf returned to Pakistan boarding a midnight flight, a message went down in the Valley that India was willing to accept the centrality of the Kashmir issue in its relations with Pakistan. This feeling was leveraged by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-Congress coalition government headed by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, which was formed in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002.
In an exclusive conversation with Frontline , former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti described the broad contours of the policy that her father and the Vajpayee government adopted to give a “healing” touch to the people of Kashmir. “This was for the first time that both the Central government and the State government were on the same page about dealing with the situation in Kashmir. New Delhi under Prime Minister Vajpayee acknowledged that there was an external dimension to the conflict in Kashmir and showed willingness to politically engage with Pakistan. Mufti saab as C.M. fostered reconciliation between not just India and Pakistan but also between the people of Kashmir and New Delhi,” Mehbooba Mufti told this correspondent over phone from Jammu.
“We reduced the Army’s presence in civilian areas and persuaded it to vacate land in its possession, including the land in Fatehgarh, Anantnag, where now stands a university. We stopped the practice of frisking to restore people’s dignity. We disbanded the task force, and the bus routes to Muzaffarabad were opened for the first time,” she explained. “New Delhi facilitated the travel of Hurriyat leaders to Pakistan. This created an upbeat attitude in Kashmir that India was ready to resolve the Kashmir issue. Consequently, militancy began to recede,” Mehbooba Mufti said.
Four-point formula
In 2003, Musharraf proposed a four-point formula which advocated a phased withdrawal of troops, free movement of people across the Line of Control (LoC) without altering the borders, self-governance without independence, and a joint supervision mechanism involving India, Pakistan and Kashmir. The four-point formula significantly reduced the support for armed resistance as people looked to the future with hope. Statistics attest to such claims. The number of militants killed dropped from 2,850 in 2001 to 84 in 2012. From 2005 to 2010, the number of active militants was believed to be in two digits.
People-to-people contacts established at that time yielded significant and persistent dividends. In 2007, Khurram Parvez, the noted rights activist from Kashmir, travelled to Pakistan as part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Representatives of the ICBL held deliberations for 17 days with Syed Salahuddin and members of his United Jehad Council (UJC). “Landmines were a major security concern back then and were used for both infiltration and ‘exfiltration’,” Khurram Parvez told Frontline . He said that they convinced the UJC to abide by the provisions laid down in the Geneva Convention, which, among other things, prohibit the use of any kind of weapons in civilian areas. “Initially the UJC was unmoved,” recalled Parvez, “but when we told them that the Taliban had banned the use of landmine since it did not conform to the Islamic idea of waging war, they relented.” Parvez maintains that the negotiations were not held at the government’s prodding, but sources in Jammu and Kashmir’s security apparatus think otherwise.
A source in Kashmir’s security wing, who was earlier part of the special task force trained to deal with fidayeen s, said it was during this meeting in Pakistan that a deal was struck that terror outfits operating from Pakistani soil would not carry out fidayeen attacks in Kashmir. “The Pulwama attack,” the source said, “essentially means that the Jaish-e-Mohammad [JeM], which claimed responsibility for the attack, has violated the ‘understanding’.” The source said that this was most likely a reaction to the prevailing high-decibel talk of nationalism and the Centre’s policy to kill all insurgents.
The rise of Burhan Wani
On February 9, 2013, Afzal Guru was hanged in Tihar jail in Delhi. His family was informed about the execution on February 11 by a letter sent through speed post. His body was not handed over to them. While this denial of basic human rights to Afzal Guru’s family did not immediately convert into an uprising, it eroded whatever semblance of trust that had been developed in the previous decade.
Two important events were unfolding around that time. In Kashmir, Burhan Wani was rising in prominence. He represented the Kashmiri youths’ sense of victimhood, their anger against India and their resolve to fight India. On the national turf, Modi and his brand of hate politics were gaining ground. Modi created an artificial sense of insecurity among Hindus through, among other things, proverbial expressions such as “pink revolution” which signified that Hindu belief and customs were under assault and it was time for “course correction”. Such exhortations festered a tidal wave of uncertainty among Muslims, in particular Kashmiri Muslims.
After his ascendance to power at the Centre, Modi announced a package of Rs.80,000 crore to Jammu and Kashmir in November 2015. But his failure to send a signal of reassurance over the State’s special status demonstrated his flawed belief that economic rollout in Kashmir could achieve emotional integration of Kashmiris. This policy was experimented in 1953, when an eighth-class pass Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was installed as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir following the unceremonious exit of Sheikh Abdullah. Bakshi Mohammad laid out a plan to economically build the State even as he simultaneously plotted to dilute its special status. The Central government invested $100 million in the State and built 500 primary schools. The salary of government servants was substantially increased and road construction was prioritised. Yet, people resisted Bakshi’s designs and the sense of alienation kept growing.
Months before Modi announced the economic package for Kashmir, the PDP and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) joined hands to form the government in the State. No single party got a majority in the November-December 2014 Assembly election. The PDP with 28 seats and the BJP with 25 seats entered into a post-election alliance and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed became Chief Minister in March 2015. This alliance was seen as a betrayal of the election mandate. As public perception began to increase that the BJP was imposing itself on the PDP, there was fear that the saffron party would extend its Hindu supremacist policies to the State.
Such fears were not misplaced as the RSS was given a free hand to pilot its communal projects in the Jammu region. Among other things, it took out an armed march in October 2015, which carried a far more dangerous social and political import than met the eye. In Jammu, Udhampur, Kathua and Doda districts, the presence of armed village defence committees (VDCs), originally formed for self-defence during the peak militancy years of the 1990s, has long been a source of communal tension. There are 221 registered criminal cases against the VDCs, including cases of murder, rape and rioting, all directed at the Muslim community. So when the RSS laid bare its communal agenda by taking out an armed march in Jammu, it created much restlessness among the Muslim majority Valley. This restlessness encouraged youths to gravitate back to militancy.
Omar Abdullah shares this view. He told Frontline : “The alliance represented a betrayal of the election mandate and triggered unrest.” The sense of betrayal was profound, as at the time of electioneering, Mehbooba Mufti had presented herself as ideologically proximate to the Hurriyat and sold dreams of “self-rule”.
The Mirwaiz sees a ‘link’
The PDP-BJP government made deliberate, consistent efforts to sideline the Hurriyat Conference. The movement of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leaders was blocked, Hurriyat cadres were arrested, and their activities were curtailed by denying the required police permits. On December 10, 2018, the APHC was barred from holding a seminar inside its Rajbagh office in Srinagar. According to Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the APHC, the confinement of the separatist leaders meant that the leadership of the pro-independence constituency slipped into the hands of local village boys.
Burhan Wani’s encounter in July 2016 exploded the accumulated resistance among the youths, provoking the “do or die” combats that are being witnessed now. A new crop of militant commanders emerged each time the existing commanders were felled. The list includes Sabzar Ahmad Bhat, Ahmad Dar, Manan Wani, Umar Ganai, Azad Malik, Shakir Hassan Dar and Zeenat-ul-Islam. Their elimination acted as a magnet and attracted more recruits, including educated youths. Manan Bashir Wani, former Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) research scholar; Md Rafi Bhat, Kashmir University lecturer; Junaid Ashraf Sehrai, an management graduate and son of the pro-Pakistan leader Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai; Esa Fazli, a B. Tech student; and the Army man-turned-militant Mohd. Idrees Sultan are some prominent examples.
Global jehad-driven outfits
The Mirwaiz told Frontline that the transfer of the pro-independence leadership to village youths signalled a fundamental shift in the political and religious calculus of their struggle. “Although we are against New Delhi, we are not a banned, militant organisation. We seek a political resolution to the conflict, and so long as I, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, and Yasin Malik were travelling to the hinterland and meeting young boys, the mandate really was for political resolution. But by limiting our movement and cracking down on our cadre, New Delhi destroyed that architecture. Now, you have militants who are questioning the legitimacy of the Hurriyat leadership and professing allegiance to global jehadi leadership,” he said. Mirwaiz was alluding to Zakir Musa, chief of Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, an outfit modelled after Al Qaeda. In May 2017, Musa posted a video on social media, threatening to chop off the heads of the Hurriyat leaders. He said they were an impediment to his mission of establishing Sharia in the State. Informed sources in the State’s security apparatus said that though Musa’s statement evoked condemnation from all quarters of Kashmiri society, there is a gradual sprouting of support in far-flung militant hotbeds for such extreme ideological moorings.
It is by virtue of this support that some jehadi terror outfits became operational in Kashmir. Among them are the Islamic State of Jammu and Kashmir, which considers itself an offshoot of the Islamic State; Lashkar-e-Islam, which carried out attacks on telecom towers in northern Kashmir in 2015; and the (now slain) Zeenat-ul-Islam-led Al Badr.
JeM recovers ground
The sources further explained the “comeback” of the JeM, which was nearly defunct in the past decade. According to them, the JeM was never wiped out, but in the post 9/11 context, it decided to lie low. The Pakistan-based JeM, or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, did carry out terror strikes, but these were claimed by the local Hizbul Mujahideen since there was pressure on Pakistan to contain terror groups operating from its soil. The JeM’s open admission of orchestrating the Pulwama attack, therefore, suggests that that pressure has now receded. From 2014-15, the JeM started recovering lost ground. This was made possible by the “famed presence” of JeM commander Noor Trali who established contact with JeM founder Masood Azhar.
Among other factors that contributed to home-grown militancy was the failure to adopt standard procedures while dealing with civilian protests in post-Burhan Wani Kashmir. In 2018, 160 civilians were killed, and over the past two and a half years more than a thousand have suffered pellet injuries; 100 of them are fully or partially blinded. The list includes a 20-month-old baby in Shopian named Hiba. When New Delhi sent Dineshwar Sharma as interlocutor to Kashmir in October 2017, he talked of “bijli, sadak, pani” instead of addressing the current mayhem in its historical and political context. This compounded the chasm of discontent and offered no hope for the future.
Opinions of prominent people in the State’s political and administrative circles and in the security apparatus converge on one line of advice to deal with the present situation. They advocate rescuing diplomacy and repairing the ties with Pakistan, pragmatically engaging with the Hurriyat and exploring areas of agreement, exercising maximum caution while carrying out military operations, and refraining from creating fissures in the State’s regional parties. They fear that terror outfits that draw ideological motivation from the Islamic State may coalesce and take over the reins of militancy. If that happens, fidayeen attacks will become a constant feature in Kashmir and the consequences will be enormous.
The situation can be best understood in the words of Sheikh Abdullah: “History has seen such times, when the crime was committed by a moment, but the punishment was suffered by centuries.”
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