Kashmir strife has irrevocably damaged legitimacy of Indian State in J&K

Any nation-state has a raison d’être and it has the monopoly of violence. A State’s national security establishment is the ultimate wielder of that violence. However, when the security establishment begins to eat away at that very raison d’être of the nation-state, then legitimate questions can be raised about the security establishment’s efficacy. The current state of affairs in the Kashmir Valley is one such issue, where India’s national security establishment has not only proved its incompetence, but its bureaucracy’s siloed approach has done irrevocable damage to the legitimacy of the Indian State in Kashmir. The wave of protests in the aftermath of the killing of a young local militant, Burhan Wani of the Hizbul Mujahideen on 8 July in Kashmir, has resulted in the deaths of more than 30 locals and injured as many as 1,000 people. Plus, stone-pelting and attacks on security forces have paralysed normal life for more than four days — not to mention the repeated calls for hartals by the Hurriyat-led separatist elements and the disruption of the annual Amarnath Yatra. An inept handling of the situation has now brought matters to the point where a beleaguered state government has had to call for the separatists’ help to restore peace in the Valley. This is an ironic proposition since just days earlier, the separatists had been termed as inimical to the maintenance of peace. And yet, it is the security forces — local police and paramilitary, that have been found deficient in their crowd control measures. This is particularly shameful because since 2008, security forces deployed in the Valley are experienced in dealing with the incidents of stone-pelting and civilian mobs they have faced. [caption id=“attachment_2889052” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of protests in Kashmir. PTI[/caption] It’s worth noting that the manifestation of this rage was in the making for a long time. For over a decade, or ever since Pakistan’s ‘cross-border terrorism project’ began to take root in the region, skylines of major towns in Kashmir began to be dotted by the rising minarets of the mosques, flush with bags of money from Saudi Arabia and its ilk and armed with the rabid Wahhabi ideology. Faced with the onslaught of this rapidly proliferating ideology, the state and security establishment attempted to play the game of ‘divide and rule’ and openly chose to back Sufism — that mystic faith propagating syncretic Islam. It’s likely that they were unaware of the consequences of such public support to one strand of Islam: That it would cause other competing strands to gang up against it, as was evident in the growing onslaught on Sufi shrines and its followers. For the past many years, ground reports and intelligence assessments had pointed out the growing resentment among the locals towards India, manifesting in simpler issues such as the failure of the state government to provide relief during the winter to the imposition of the National Food Security Act, which reduced the quantity of the rice — the Valley’s staple diet — through the public distribution system. However, every time such an argument of growing discontent against India was put forward, the security establishment tried to trumpet the voter turnout in the parliamentary and Assembly elections as an indicator of Kashmiri faith in the Indian democracy. Since the 2010 unrest, the role of social media was evident in mobilising like-minded saboteur elements, particularly during the post-Friday prayer gatherings. It was a platform that empowered the ordinary Kashmiris, allowing them to freely express themselves, its misuse notwithstanding. Yet the only way the security establishment chose to look at the phenomena was to block social media at the time of crises, creating anger among the local youths and forcing them to pick up stones to express themselves. It was also in 2010 when sporadic reports had indicated about that the local youths, increasingly disillusioned with the lack of any progress on the political front, were taking up guns and organising training camps in the forests of south Kashmir. Instead of genuinely addressing their grievances, the security establishment tried to pit one section of Kashmiris against another, in the form of the informers network — locally called mukhbirs. While the network yielded its tactical benefits of providing real-time intelligence, in the long run, it caused social divisions. In 2011, a seminal study conducted by the Kashmir division of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had brought out the nuances of the azaadi argument among the Kashmiri youth and the impact of the media on them. A study, which if properly analysed by the security establishment, would have given useful insights into the growth of the radical ideas, but apparently the MHA found it too much of a hot potato to handle. In the last two years, there were signs of increasing public support to militants — stone-pelting on the security forces during the encounters with the militants and the swelling numbers of civilians to the funerals of dead militants. However, all of this was blamed on the machinations of the hostile elements sitting across the border. Any effective outreach to the Hurriyat or even the moderate separatists was done away with — a red line that was drawn very publicly in August 2014; only to be quietly erased later. Going forward, the political leadership in New Delhi and the security establishment that it controls in Srinagar will need to introspect. No amount of talk of conspiracies hatched across the border to keep the Kashmir pot boiling is going to yield anything substantial, especially if India and its security forces keep providing the broth for that pot to keep boiling. Let’s admit that we are good at scoring own-goals on Kashmir. But let’s also accept that now we have a golden chance to undo our mistakes and make a new beginning. It’s the least that we can do for those Kashmiris who have chosen to put their belief in India and its democracy, in these times of turmoil. The author is a former intelligence officer with the Government of India. Views expressed are personal.