Custodial deaths of Gujjars in Poonch puts Army and BJP in a spot

Gujjar-Bakarwals demand criminal prosecutions as unrest boils over, threatening the BJP’s key voter base in an election year.

Security tightened ahead of Chief of the Army Staff General Manoj Pande’s visit to Rajouri district on December 25 to review the security situation. | Photo Credit: Rahi Kapoor/ANI

On December 21, 2023, hours after militants ambushed an Army vehicle at Dhatyar Morh in Poonch, killing four soldiers and critically injuring three other personnel, it was a terrifying sundown for residents of Dera ki Gali in Rajouri and Bafliaz in Poonch, the peripheral hamlets situated on either side of the site of the attack. At Topa Peer in Bafliaz, it was nothing short of a cordon, allege villagers, as a posse of surly men in uniform harangued them for leads and detained several of them for questioning. The villagers say the detentions were random; those who were picked had not said or done anything to arouse the needle of suspicion against them.

The following day the Internet was rife with videos that showed grisly treatment of some of the detainees: they were stripped and shoved and beaten, and chilli powder was applied on their bruised body parts. Three men succumbed to their injuries: Safeer Ahmed, 44; Mohammad Showkat, 26; and Shabir Ahmed, 28. All of them were from the Gujjar-Bakarwal tribes and lived at Topa Peer, where fear and disillusionment are the dominant sentiments now.

Noor Ahmed, the 53-year-old elder brother of Safeer, is yet to absorb the enormity of the Army’s actions, even as people of all political hues, including those from the BJP, flocked the village to commiserate with the kin of the deceased. The administration, on its part, wasted no time in awarding a hefty compensation to the families of the dead men. Talking to Frontline over phone from Topa Peer, Ahmed, who is a havildar in the Border Security Force and is currently posted in Rajasthan, described the state of the villagers as “filled with grief and anger, [and feeling] deeply betrayed”.

This is not unexpected from a population that has been immune to Kashmir’s three-decade-old separatist theatre despite its proximity to the Kashmir Valley in terms of landscape and shared religious belief. Ahmed emphasised the region’s unwavering pro-India stance and its distinct role in aiding anti-militancy operations. “We have been nationalists throughout. We have played a crucial role in abating militancy in the region. Today, this is how our years of loyalty are being rewarded. People here are benumbed. We want speedy justice,” Ahmed told this reporter. He rushed to his native place on receiving the news of his brother’s death.

Army personnel stand guard near the site where four soldiers were killed by militants in Poonch district on December 21, 2023. It was while investigating this ambush that the Army men picked up several civilians and detained a few of them, three of whom died later in custody.   | Photo Credit: PTI

On December 21, two Army vehicles carrying troops were moving in Dera ki Gali when terrorists fired on them, killing Naik Birender Singh from Chamoli, Uttarakhand; Rifleman Gautam Kumar from Pauri Gharwal, Uttarakhand; Naik Karan Kumar from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh; and Rifleman Chandan Kumar from Nawada, Bihar.

Proxy outfit of Pakistan-based terrorist groups

The People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF) claimed responsibility for the attack, and on December 24, it released photographs of four service weapons belonging to the deceased soldiers. The PAFF is widely believed to be a proxy outfit of the Jaish-e-Mohammed operating from Pakistan. It has been the practice of the Jaish and even the Lashkar-e-Taiba to give indigenous names to their offshoots in Jammu and Kashmir because of the pressure Pakistan is under from the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body mandated to prevent terror financing.

Ahmed gave an account of the Army’s misadventures with the villagers after the fateful attack: “They barged in from everywhere, detained some men randomly, and from what we have gathered so far from eyewitnesses, asked the detainees to identify the assailants and track the missing weapons. The hapless men obviously had no clue.

“But the forces would not listen. They began to manhandle them at once. An elderly man was let off, possibly because of his advanced age. He reported the incident to rest of the villagers, and then the video went viral,” Noor said in an anguished tone. According to him and several media reports, the nearest kin of all the three deceased men have received a compensation of Rs.30 lakh. A government job has also been promised, and in Safeer’s case, his widow’s biodata has been taken for processing.

But Ahmed said the villagers were clear about what they wanted: criminal prosecution and punishment of the guilty. “Only then justice would be served.”

But the contents of the FIR pertaining to the killings do not offer much hope. Although the Army is believed to have taken several officers off-duty in connection with the custodial killings, the FIR registered at the Surankote police station merely mentions “unknown” individuals as the perpetrators. The FIR, while acknowledging that a few local youths were “detained” by the Army for “questioning”, avoids making any mention of the Army brutalities that led to the casualties.

Ashwani Handa, a leader of the Democratic Progressive Azad Party (DPAP) led by Ghulam Nabi Azad, attributes the Army’s rash actions to the Centre putting unprecedented pressure on it to weed out militancy before the general election. “The politicisation of the Kashmir conflict and Narendra Modi’s constant attempts to turn elections into a mandate on national security have led to a syndrome where New Delhi mounts enormous pressure on the Army after every terror strike. The Army’s higher officials go after the bottom-rung personnel to complete investigations and eliminate the assailants in record time. And that provokes the use of coercion at the first instance. The genesis of this is in the BJP’s quick-fix strategies in combating militancy.”

National Conference leaders hold a protest over the civilian killings, in Srinagar on December 23. | Photo Credit: NISSAR AHMAD

The BJP’s leaders are at work to minimise the fallout of the killings. The party’s Jammu and Kashmir president, Ravinder Raina, and former legislator Abdul Ghani Kohl are among those who met the victims’ families and assured them of their solidarity. The National Conference’s (NC) Javed Rana and the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) Talib Chowdhury are among those from the opposition who rushed to meet the aggrieved villagers. The constant rush of politicians to the area reveals the electoral clout of the Gujjar-Bakarwal community, who are being wooed by the BJP but have also developed deep apprehensions about the party given its stance on tribal reservation.

Highlights

• Four soldiers were killed by militants in Poonch district on December 21. While investigating this ambush the Army men picked up several civilians and detained a few of them, three of whom (Safeer Ahmed, Mohammad Showkat, and Shabir Ahmed) died later in custody.
• All of them were from the Gujjar-Bakarwal tribes and lived at Topa Peer. The People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF) claimed responsibility for the attack and released photographs of four service weapons belonging to the deceased soldiers.

Third largest ethnic group in Jammu and Kashmir

Gujjars and Bakarwals constitute 11.9 per cent of the erstwhile State’s population and are its third largest ethnic group as per Census 2011. They were granted Scheduled Tribe status along with two other communities in 1991, and since then they have been entitled to 10 per cent reservation in government jobs and educational institutions. Although these largely nomadic people live in pockets in almost every district of the Kashmir Valley, a majority of them are concentrated in Rajouri and Poonch districts of Jammu’s Pir Panjal region. The three men who died in Army custody were Gujjars.

The community’s flashpoint of controversy with the Union government is over the introduction of the Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir) Scheduled Tribes Order (Amendment) Bill, 2023, in the Lok Sabha, which proposes the incorporation of four other groups in the Scheduled Tribes list of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Paharis.

The Gujjars and Bakarwals view this as a bias against the predominantly Muslim tribals. Paharis comprise people from different religious communities, including Hindus, Muslims, and even Sikhs.

Growing unease

The Amshipora (Shopian) staged encounter in July 2020, in which three Gujjar labourers hailing from Rajouri were killed, and the mysterious death-in-custody of Mukhtar Hussain Shah of Mendhar, Poonch, in April 2023, have only compounded the growing unease of the Muslim population of the Pir Panjal region, which first majorly surfaced in the aftermath of the abduction, gang-rape, and murder of an 8-year-old Bakarwal girl in Kathua district. The BJP lawmakers from Jammu and Kashmir had, at that time, openly rallied support for the accused, who were Hindus from a dominant caste.

The revival of the village defence committees (VDCs) by the Ministry of Home Affairs in March 2022, with the changed nomenclature of village defence guards, has also created foreboding and vulnerability in Muslim neighbourhoods. The VDCs were first established in 1995 to contain the spread of Kashmir’s militant uprising to Rajouri-Poonch, but as reports of human rights violations piled up, they were disbanded in the early 2000s. The demand to revive them gained momentum after targeted attacks on Hindu civilians in Rajouri and other areas, more prominently in Dangri on January 1, 2023.

As controversy rages with the latest round of killings, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh issued a note of caution to the armed forces. During a day-long tour in Rajouri district on December 27 to review the security situation in the wake of the terrorist ambush, Singh said: “[A]long with protecting this country, winning the hearts of its citizens is also a very big responsibility on your shoulders. I know that you are all trying to do this from your perspective. But it is possible that sometimes you feel sad. You should not feel sad in such a way that will harm the citizens of India. You are serving the country. You should stay close to the people of that country. You should gain their trust. You should increase their understanding.”

But as collective fear grips the Muslims in Rajouri-Poonch, political battle lines are expected to shift in favour of the Congress, NC, and the PDP.

Since Ghulam Nabi Azad’s DPAP is perceived to be close to the BJP, there is a possibility that Muslim votes might consolidate in favour of the Congress and the NC. This has the potential to upset the game plan of the BJP, which is banking heavily on its covert allies such as the Apni Party and Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference in the Kashmir Valley and the DPAP in Jammu to come to power whenever the Assembly election is announced.