Trajectory of a space of conflict: Militarization and the ‘democratic state’ in Kashmir

Introduction and background to post-Partition era

The conflict in Kashmir is a legacy of British colonialism as the fault lines drawn by the colonial masters are still being contended along different borders in the subcontinent, resulting in fractured societies and international disputes that have spanned over several decades. With support of its Cold War allies, the Indian state has played a crucial role domestically and at the United Nations (UN) in shaping the Kashmir conflict after independence. Over six decades, the state, through constitutional amendments, political coercion and co-option, its use of military strength against civilians and the opportunistic use of its international allies at the UN, has exacerbated the conflict in the disputed region. Post-independence, it sought UN intervention but rejected its resolutions and has fought three wars over Kashmir with Pakistan.

In order to trace the trajectory of the space of the Kashmir conflict, this paper will delve into the processes in the region that have been occupying this space. It will also examine the role of state mechanisms in altering the constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir through manipulation and the state’s influence on the international committee in its attempts to resolve the dispute. The research will analyse the subsequent evolution of the resistance movement and will later touch upon the use of military force by the state to “integrate” Kashmir. This paper will also outline the backdrop of the rise of the armed struggle in the late 1980s and its transition into a mass civil disobedience movement. Political links and processes in Pakistan vis-a-vis Kashmir and Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) will be briefly discussed to present a holistic understanding of the trajectory of this space of conflict.

After India’s independence from its colonial masters, by March 1948 Jammu and Kashmir’s Maharaja Hari Singh was reduced to a constitutional head and Sheikh Abdullah the Prime Minister (Snedden 2012). But the fighting between India and Pakistan did not stop. On the Pakistani side, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Governor General and Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, saw in the Kashmir crisis evidence of conspiracy and believed that the situation had been so engineered as to provide the excuse for Kashmir’s accession to India beneath a defensive umbrella of Indian forces. Jinnah’s immediate reaction on hearing of the arrival of the Sikh battalion at Srinagar was to order General Gracey, acting Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, to send his own troops. But that did not happen as the Indian and the Pakistani armies were under the same command. During the course of 1948 fighting in Kashmir went on between the Indian Army and the forces of what Pakistani leaders liked to call the Government of Azad Kashmir (a body which first emerged just before the Indian intervention in October 1947). The Azad forces, which consisted of men who had taken arms during the Poonch revolt reinforced by Pathan tribesmen, began to receive support increasingly from Pakistani regulars. At first it was merely a question of individual Pakistani soldiers taking their leave, as it were, on the Kashmir front. By May, regular Pakistani units were involved (Lamb 1966).

The Azad Jammu and Kashmir government, led by Sardar Mohammed Ibrahim, had already come into being a few days before the Maharaja’s alleged accession. In March 1948, Ghulam Abbas became its Supreme Head of the area of 5,000 square miles. In one sense, therefore, the Partition of Kashmir was much a division of the territory between the Muslim Conference and the National Conference, as it was about India and Pakistan. The Gilgit region, in the north of the state, passed virtually without conflict to Pakistan during the course of the last three months of 1947. Under the British, this region since the late 19^th Century had carefully been kept away from the direct control of the Maharaja; and Pakistan, following this tradition, did not permit the Muzzafarabad authorities to meddle in northern affairs. Gilgit, Hunza, Nagar and the rest had by the end of 1947, in effect, passed outside the orbit of the Jammu and Kashmir State, notes Lamb (1966). The de-colonisation process in the sub-continent carved fault lines that are still being contested by India, and the violence that accompanied it, prevented non-partisan assessment and monitoring of the divide until intervention by the UN in the late 1940s.

The unsettled fact of Jammu and Kashmir’s position in independent India was further exacerbated by the special position accorded to it by the Indian Constitution. Article 370, a temporary provision adopted in October 1949, addressed the case of Kashmir alone, “in view of the special problem with which the Jammu and Kashmir government is faced, we have made special provisions for the continuance of the State with the Union on the existing basis”. According to this Article, the power of the Indian Parliament to make laws for the state would be limited to defense, external affairs and communications, which the government of Jammu and Kashmir had complete jurisdiction over other areas of governance, including its own flag, legislative assembly and constitution. For all intents and purposes, then, the government of Jammu and Kashmir did not adopt the Constitution of India as the constitution of the state (Zutshi 2003). After two years of fighting at the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir, the UN intervened and a ceasefire took effect on 1 January 1949, where both the countries signed an agreement defining the ceasefire line in Kashmir, which was to mark the effective limit of the sovereignties of the two States, that were led by British army till 1948.

Role of the United Nations and the Cold War

Kashmir was one of the first disputes put to the UN by India on 1 January 1948. Since then the UN has been able to devise formulae for a possible settlement and lend its good office at arbitration or mediation. The dispute was brought to the UN in the form of a complaint against Pakistan and under Article 35 of the UN Charter it requested the Security Council to instruct Pakistan to desist from meddling in Kashmir. While the Indian state’s argument was based on the validity of the Maharaja’s accession to India and that Pakistan has no right to aid the tribesmen or to permit her nationals from taking part in her fighting, Pakistan requested that the UNSC set up a Commission, which would arrange for a withdrawal of all outside troops as the prelude to the establishment of a fully impartial Kashmir administration and the holding of a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people. It was the troop withdrawal, once achieved, then a plebiscite might be held in which, Indian leaders certainly anticipated, there would be an overwhelming majority vote for Abdullah and his administration. Such a vote would mean the retention of Kashmir within the orbit of the Indian Union. In the UN Security Council (UNSC), the Indian and the Pakistani arguments produced by a Resolution on 17 January 1948, calling both sides to cease hostilities at once, followed by the formation of United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), whose main aim was to demilitarise the region for a plebiscite. This plan did not find favour with either side. India accepted the plan, perhaps in the certain knowledge that Pakistan would not agree to it, resulting in the first in a series of stalemates (Lamb 1966).

An interesting feature at this initial stage was a failure to define what was meant by the particular geographic expression, the State of Jammu and Kashmir. This “frontier undefined”, half a century later would be exacerbated with the subsequent withdrawal of the British from the continent, Lamb (1997), argues. This issue played an important role in entrenching the positions of both the states – India and Pakistan in the trajectory of the space of the conflict in Kashmir. It also led rejections of the UN plans by either parties in the conflict based on these positions. On 5 January 1949, the UNCIP stated that Jammu and Kashmir should pass under the control of a Plebiscite Administration, but India felt this challenged the legality of the accession and rejected one of the first plans, ending the first phase of UN’s involvement in Kashmir. In the same year, India rejected another plan, claiming it legitimised the concept of Azad Kashmir. In 1950, UN Representative stated that the dispute could not be solved by international arbitration and stressed on the role of peacekeepers on the border. Several attempts were made by the UN to demilitarise the region, but they failed and the plebiscite was not held. The failed UN plans, coupled with the emerging Cold War politics of the time, also impeded the resolution of the dispute.

India’s participation in the Cold War politics of the era helped the state wield its power and position itself in a bid to legitimise its rule in the disputed region. Russia’s stance on Kashmir as an “integral” part of India not only cemented its relationship with India but could also be viewed as a legitimising deal between two global power structures in the Cold War. With Russia’s backing, India was able to establish itself vis-à-vis the threat in China and a US-backed Pakistani military. The playing out of this global politics greatly influenced the trajectory of the Kashmir conflict and its resolution by the UN. For example, in 1955, after Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Russia and Soviet leaders Marshal Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Srinagar, India favoured the Soviet bloc’s support to its position on the international dispute. The Soviet veto on the UNSC resolution in 1962 played a pivotal role in stemming the scope of the resolution of the conflict. From this period, India began to receive Soviet military aid, which served, in some measure, to offset the military aid, which Pakistan was obtaining from the United States, Lamb (1966) notes.

American military aid to Pakistan and Russian moral support for India combined to convince Nehru and his advisers that it was no longer necessary even to pretend to be interested in the various schemes for a Kashmir plebiscite. The Chinese, on the other hand, had been evolving their own strategy towards the disputed territory and maintained during the same period that the conflict was being exploited by the UK and the US for their own ‘imperialistic’ objectives, for which purpose they were using the UN. China was also moving towards a confrontation with India because of disagreements over the demarcation of borders in the Aksai Chin of Ladakh, one of the three disputed areas along the 2,500-mile frontier. By the late fifties, growing ties between China and Pakistan perturbed India (Schofield 2000). The British and Americans were very suspicious of the political ideology of Abdullah, whom they saw as a potential Russian puppet in a rapidly evolving Cold War. There were question marks over the economic, political viability of such a new nation. But above all, the UNSC saw the Kashmir problem as a direct consequence of the process of British decolonisation in South Asia (Bazaz 2002).

‘Democratic state’ in Kashmir: Phase I

The Dogras managed to retain some foothold in the corridors of power in Jammu and Kashmir but the age of their absolute rule would never return (Lamb, 1966). After India’s independence, the state recognised the role of Sheikh Abdullah who had led the movement against the Dogra rule and made him prime minister. Certain measures taken by him to transition to autonomous rule would later be viewed by the Indian state as “separatist”, prompting the state to act against him and jail him in their bid to “integrate” Kashmir. This phase of the dispute would witness the state tactically using constitutional amendments to dilute the nature of autonomous rule in the region.

After assuming charge in Jammu and Kashmir, Abdullah concentrated on land reforms and ousted feudal rights like Jagirdari and Chakdari. In the process, he got hold of 4,00,000 acres of land without giving away any damages. He also declared, on behalf of his government, that in case any farmer repays 1.5 times of his/ her loan, it would be assumed that the credit had been recovered in full. His land reforms affected mainly Dogras and Kashmiri priests, resulting in a deterioration of his relationship with Maharaja Hari Singh (Ghosh 2011). The first Head of State to succeed the Maharaja was his son, Karan Singh who was a member of the RSS, an organisation of Hindu hardliners. The land reforms also affected the Indian National Congress, whose financial health was largely based on tributary kings and other feudal lords like Zamindars, Jagirdars and Chakdars. After assuming charge, Karan Singh refused to endorse the statute by the Abdullah cabinet and forwarded it to the President of India for approval, which was in violation of the India-Kashmir accord in relation to the self-governance of Jammu and Kashmir (Ghosh 2011). By 1950, 20% of Pandits emigrated from the Valley due to failure in land reforms which led to scarcity of grain and high food prices, widespread unemployment and starvation, posits Bazaz (2002).

At a time when Kashmiris were celebrating their first stint of democracy with Abdullah as their leader, Hindu fanaticism raised its hood in Jammu. The Janasangh and its associate, the Jammu Praja Parishad, created a situation of religious intolerance in the entire region. Abdullah, in order to weaken the communal forces, gave due care to the sentiments of the majority Hindus and Buddhists in Jammu and Ladakh, respectively (Ghosh 2011). On 5th November, 1951, the Constituent Assembly headed by Abdullah took the decision to draw up a Constitution for Kashmir, decide on the destiny of the monarchy, discuss the issue of paying compensation to the landholders whose land has been seized by the government and whether or not to take a final decision in the matter of getting integrated with India. The election for the Constituent Assembly was to be used increasingly by the Indian state as an argument for the rejection of proposals for a plebiscite to decide Kashmir’s future. The following year, Nehru and Abdullah defined the nature of Kashmir’s relationship with India with the help of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

Due to Sheikh’s “separatist” tendencies, in 1953, when he was away from Srinagar, his close associate Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, who had been the liaison between New Delhi and Kashmir during the Quit Kashmir movement, arranged for his dismissal by the Head of the State and became Prime Minister in his place. Once in control, Bakshi declared that Kashmir was an integral part of India. Abdullah was arrested by the Bakshi regime for treasonable correspondence with foreign powers (Lamb 1966). This was the first major step by the Indian state to takeover the Valley while flouting its own Constitution. This was New Delhi’s strategy of coercive integration, since Article 370 stipulates that India’s central government can take decisions even on matters related to defense, foreign affairs, currency and communications “in consultation with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir,” and on other subjects under the Indian Union’s jurisdiction only with “the… concurrence of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly (parliament)” (Bose 2009).

With Abdullah removed from the political scene, the Indian state set about the task of “integrating” Kashmir securely into the Indian Union between 1954 and 1965. It’s political autonomy in the legislative, judicial and fiscal spheres were effectively destroyed by a series of integrative and centralising measures enacted from New Delhi (Bose 2009). Several mechanisms were put in place by the autonomous government to showcase their will to the people, but this was a temporary phase with political structures were nullified and a strategic clampdown on Kashmiri political leaders by the Indian state. In 1954, blatantly flouting Article 370, the Indian state unilaterally disregarded its agreement with Kashmir as the President of India passed a Constitutional order stating that the Indian government could frame any law in Kashmir. To confer legitimacy to such an order, it needed the approval of the Kashmir government and Bakshi was more than obliged to do it. The autonomous space granted to Kashmir by the Indian democratic state was obliterated through these undemocratic measures. The outcome was the abolition of India-Kashmir accord and also the agreement reached between Nehru and Abdullah. With the obliteration of the treaty, Kashmir lost its right of self-rule and became another state of India.  A strong protest came from Mirza Afzal Beg, a close associate of Abdullah, who termed this move as an extreme act of deceit. After Abdullah’s arrest, Beg set up a forum by the name “Plebiscite Front” and was campaigning for referendum when he was arrested. This was a rebirth Kashmir’s movement for self-determination and political resistance in the post-Partition era.

In a further effort to retrench the Indian state’s position in Kashmir, the state resorted to manipulating elections. General elections were held in Kashmir in 1957, in accordance with the new Constitution and National Conference led by Bakshi gave a free hand to terror in order to win the contest. Part of Bakshi’s brief was to finalise the details of Kashmir’s accession to India. In 1954, the Constituent Assembly formally ratified the accession of the state, which was intended to legitimise the Instrument of Accession signed by Hari Singh in 1947. Abdullah was under arrest and his request to attend the session was refused. He therefore argued that the Constituent Assembly was not in a position to ratify the accession, since, without him and his supporters it no longer represented the will of the people. On 26 January 1957, Jammu and Kashmir approved its own Constitution. Abdullah described its introduction as a direct repudiation of the Indian commitment to a plebiscite under UN supervision (Schofield 2000).

The Indian state then imposed Indian laws on the autonomous region and manipulated elections as tactics to influence the space of the conflict in Kashmir. Bakshi’s ten-year reign ended but just before his departure, he announced proposed changes in the State’s Constitution and changed the title of the Head of the State, Sadr-i-Riyasat to Governor and further the Prime Minister would now be known as Chief Minister and that Kashmiri representatives in the Indian Parliament who were nominated by the Kashmir Legislative Assembly, should now be elected directly by the people of the State (Lamb 1966). The process of enacting Indian laws by the state continued in the region. Due to communal violence in the region due to the loss of the relic at Hazratbal, Prime Minister Khwaja Shamsuddin who had replaced Bakshi was replaced with G M Sadiq, who extended many Indian laws to Kashmir as a part of the process of occupation under the garb of controlling violence.

By May 1965, the people of Kashmir embarked upon a campaign of civil disobedience after their leaders Beg and Abdullah were re-arrested after failing to condemn the role of China and Pakistan in Kashmir and meeting with a Chinese diplomat in Algiers after being granted a visa to visit Mecca. Moreover, the elections of 1957 and 1962 were carefully managed and opposition groups like the Muslim Conference and the Plebiscite Front were unable to participate effectively. These elections on any objective analysis cannot possibly be interpreted as a valid substitute for the kind of plebiscite advocated on several occasions by the UNSC. By the early summer of 1965, with increasing political tension and much resentment against Pakistan, the Pakistani authorities began to intervene covertly in internal politics on the Indian side of the ceasefire line, Lamb (1997) explained. This process was detrimental to the political stance taken by Kashmiris, as the Indian state used this as an excuse to delegitimise their struggle for self-determination and to this day, project it to the international community as interference and provocation by the Pakistani state in its national affairs. With every move, the autonomous nature of rule in J&K was systematically eroded by the Indian state in its attempt to obliterate the distance between the Central government in New Delhi and the government in Kashmir. The Presidential Order passed in 1964 enabling the President to govern the state of Jammu and Kashmir directly was bitterly resented by opponents of Indian state’s increasing control. So too was the announcement on 9 January 1965 that National Conference would be dissolved and that the Indian National Congress party was to establish a branch in Kashmir (Schofield 2000). Finally, Article 229 of the Indian Constitution was enacted in Kashmir, conferring the union government to frame laws even on matters, which are predominantly state subjects. Thus, the Indian government snatched away even the right of the Kashmir government to formulate rules on matters, which were primarily in the state list. Thus, Kashmir got disgraced even as a state (Ghosh 2011).

In response to the undemocratic measures undertaken by the Indian state, Abdullah organised mass protests against the state’s attempts to usurp power and so the state, time and again, snatched his democratic and fundamental rights and jailed him. Criminalisation of dissent perpetuated by the expansionist Indian state was incorporated as a method to reiterate the state narrative on the disputed territory. Despite such barefaced defiance of democratic principles by the state, no political party dared to raise their voice of protest in the Parliament. In 1975, Abdullah finally broke down to the pressure created by Indian PM Indira Gandhi and gave away his demand for self-determination of Kashmiris. In return, he was freed. In the words of Abdul Qayum, associate and secretary to Abdullah, “Kashmiris felt let down and humiliated by the Indira-Abdullah agreement. As a mark of protest, they prepared to strike work all around the Valley (Bose 1997). Simultaneously, Pakistan’s support to the Kashmiris was also fledging. India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement in 1972, which designates the UN ceasefire line in Kashmir as the ‘Line of Control’, to be respected by both parties. This move did not take into account the will of the Kashmiris. Abdullah was in and out of jail until 1972 and remained out of power till 1975 while Congress Party-led governments in Delhi made their arrangements with successors handpicked by them. For over three decades, in return for their endorsements of Kashmir’s accession, these selected politicians received the most generous grant-in-aid disbursed by the Indian Centre to any state. The ritual of elections was performed regularly enough, yet as most Kashmiris assert today, except those held in 1977 and 1983, not one of them was fair and free from manipulation. The comprehensive leaders they threw up funneled Delhi’s move and any boons into strengthening their own limited patronage networks rather than in alleviating the plight of the people they were meant to serve (Rai 2004). After Sheikh Abdulla’s death in 1982, his son Farooq, assumed his position and by 1986 entered a political alliance with the Congress.

The final blow to Kashmir’s autonomy came in late January 1990, when the United Front administration in New Delhi invoked Article 356 of the Indian Constitution, citing a breakdown in civil order, to dissolve the state electoral body and appoint Jagmohan Malhotra as governor of the state. A known hardliner, Jagmohan sought to secure the state by strengthening the central government’s authority within the state. Since that period, Kashmir Valley has, in effect, been in a state of siege. Civic services have broken down, developmental projects have ceased, public funding has been siphoned off and local industries have collapsed. These conditions have dramatically impacted the every-day lives of Kashmiri people (Duschinski 2009).

Rise of armed movement and ‘democratic state’s’ response: Phase II

After eroding Kashmir’s autonomy coupled with failed international efforts towards its resolution, the following stage marked Kashmir’s transition from a dispute to a phase of armed conflict, signifying a progression in the trajectory of the space of the conflict. The Kashmir insurgency of 1989 created a shift in the balance of power between the Kashmir secessionists and the Indian government. In order to weaken the growing secessionist movement and retard its further growth, the Indian government resorted to a preventive war on the secessionists starting in 1990 (Dos Santos 2007). India has tried to quell the pro-freedom armed movement in India-held Kashmir through the use of its military force, making it one of the most militarised regions in the world – higher that Iraq or Afghanistan (Greater Kashmir 2014). Kashmir has become the longest running unresolved conflicts at the UN (Pakistan Mission to United Nations 2014). State violence is viewed as an agency for assertion of assimilation in this disputed territory.

In Kashmir, the Indian state has sought to “discipline and punish anyone wavering on the issue of singular allegiance to the twin monoliths of state and nation” (Jalal 1995). To crush the movement for self-determination, the state used several mechanisms such as military force and unconstitutional legal structures that offer impunity to the perpetrators of state violence. This has resulted in killing of civilians by men in uniform, torture, rapes and molestation, enforced disappearances and the discovery of 7,000 mass graves – a few indicators of a militarised society. The various military and paramilitary units stationed in the region — the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) — work in conjunction with special counter-terrorism task forces of the state police such as the Special Task Force (STF) and the Special Operations Group (SOG) that operate in a semi-secret capacity outside of the law. The saturation tactics of these armed forces include checkpoints, surveillance, kidnapping, cordon and search operations, crackdowns, human shields, prison detention and torture. Since the 1990s, the state has succeeded in running a parallel-armed movement through the breakaway faction of the militants that make up personnel of the Special Police Officer (SPO) wing or the Territorial Army, a part of the Indian Army. The state has also used its structures or “emergency laws” like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) and Public Safety Act (PSA) to tighten its noose on mass dissent by the civilian population. Like other legal statutes designed to create states of emergency, the AFSPA produces a certain social and human type, categories of people who may be maimed, tortured, raped or killed with no legal or political consequence. The totalising logic of collective responsibility and punishment means that every Kashmiri is a political enemy, one whose life can be taken with impunity and whose death has no political consequence, legal sanction or sacrificial value (Duschinski 2009).

Declaration of Kashmir as a “Disturbed Area” has been used as an architect of war, exposing the functioning of the ‘democratic state’ in the region. The use of unconstitutional laws is central in the making of this conflict. Habermas (2005) contends that political institutions forge modern social orders and laws and that laws produced by political institutions that are open to input from civil society will tend to be rational. But this is not the case in Kashmir.  Draconian laws have prevented the ‘democratic state’ from creating a democratic space where dissent is not criminalised. One might argue, governments can be constrained in their use of violence by law and one can assert that repressive regimes are consistent with the rule of law precisely because their policies follow legal forms, but law does not solve the problems of state violence and evil; it merely provides another arena for inquiry and another set of questions and often shows itself to be the servant of the violent state. Nearly every rule has an exception, and every fact pattern raises the possibility of a different result even under a uniform rule. Therefore, the malleability and manipulation of law often favours state violence (Parry 2006). Habermas (2005) explains that if legally enshrined human rights are unable to protect civil society from erosion administrative bodies, the sources of communication and discourse on which political institutions depend will dry up and political decisions will be more prone to ideological distortion and bias. When certain groups are denied input into the legislative process, the laws they live under are likely to appear indifferent or hostile to them and their feelings of marginalisation, alienation, and cynicism will grow, Habermas deduces. This nature of rule in Kashmir has produced a similar pattern. For decades, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) has enabled serious human rights violations to be committed by soldiers in Jammu & Kashmir and shielded those responsible. Attempts to challenge the AFSPA have been met with weak responses from authorities and little commitment to tackle impunity, human right watchdog Amnesty International (2013) states.

The use of laws by the state, coupled with impunity for the forces are obvious indicators of a militarised state. In its report, Human Rights Watch, an international non-government organisation, states that efforts to end serious abuses by India’s security forces would be hampered so long as a culture of impunity persists in the country (Human Rights Watch 2013). Impunity is also extended to non-state actors in perpetrating violence against a group of people. Human rights defender K Balagopal has pointed out that the gang of terrorists of the Kuka group, which is against the inclusion of Kashmir with Pakistan, is nurtured by the Indian armed forces campaign for the right to self-determination. Yasin Malik, the leader of Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front, an indigenous pro-independence organisation, is of the opinion that the Kuka clan is a “servant” of the Indian army. The Indian government, akin to many nations, adopted the strategy of forming “fake militant” groups to estrange the mass from rebellious activities. Such strategy generates infiltration in the rebel groups, funds heavily to cause dropouts, thereby fragmenting the armed movement for self-determination. The whole idea was to confuse people about the activities of real and fake rebels. As a result, they will begin to misinterpret the genuine rebel groups. Once the rebels are alienated from the masses, they can be killed. Many such terrorist outfits looked after by the Indian government are active in Kashmir. Peoples’ Rights Organisation, a New Delhi-based civil liberties protection group, conducted a study in Kashmir on the terrorist groups fed by the Indian government and published a report which stated that there are at least eight terrorist organisations operating in Kashmir who are being aided by the Indian government with money, weapons and forces (Ghosh 2011). This is another method adopted by the Indian state to obfuscate the movement for self-determination in Kashmir and strengthen its hegemonic rule. Another state apparatus used to criminalise dissent in democratic public spaces in Kashmir is Public Safety Act, which is widely used on juveniles. Describing PSA as a “lawless law”, Amnesty International called for the abolition of the system of administrative detentions, which facilitate torture. Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2013 stated, “Administrative detentions under the PSA continued with political leaders and separatist activists held without charge or trial.” A majority of those arrested under the act for the last four years have been minors (as young as eight) and juveniles, the report stated.

The state has also used the police in Kashmir to percolate every aspect of an individual’s life – from its direct involvement in catering to medical needs to sports, jobs and education, a practice that is non-existent in other Indian states. In an attempt to understand the nature of state penetration and its power in a democratic state Habermas (2005) contend that the expansion of democracy has come at the cost of its continual degradation and excessive bureaucratisation and that centralisation of state power develops rapidly during the transition towards a more intensively organised (interventionist) phase of capitalism, as in India’s case. State violence raises the threat of – indeed, it actualises – tyranny and repression even as it holds out the possibility of protection and the tyranny of state violence could be more destructive than the anarchy of private violence. When we talk about state violence, whether in positive or negative terms, we must be careful to keep in mind what that violence produces (Parry 2006).

The effects of violence by both state and non-state actors in Kashmir have produced what Agamben (1998) refers to in ‘Homo Sacer’ as the sacred man, who may be killed and yet not sacrificed. The sovereign sphere that Agamben elaborates on is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life – that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed. He contends that the sovereign, by installing the state of exception, produces bare life; i.e. life exposed to death. Over six decades, there has been a gradual increase in coercive activity of the Indian state and simultaneously an unleashing of strategic violence on one side by the other, creating a set of right-less people who rebel. This rebellion leads to a justification of state violence. A specter of projected statelessness also becomes a part of the design of a bigger part of justification of violence to others. This instance of exception reveals a fundamental paradox of popular sovereignty, as the suspension of rights to the “enemy within” is justified through reference to the greater common good of rights-bearing citizens. This presents an impossible situation in which armed forces operating under the special act in Kashmir are exercising violence in the name of the sovereign people whom they kill (Suresh 2007).

The purpose and the method of militarisation in Kashmir can be explained with the help of Kaldor’s (2006) definition: “Militarisation contains an ideological element, i.e. the mobilisation of nationalism for political processes. This mobilisation corresponds closely to the “instrumental” use of nationalism that must be understood as a reaction to the growing impotence and declining legitimacy of the state and the struggle on its part to neutralise this challenge.” Kashmir is understood as a region where there has been a “habitualisation of war” – a condition in which the preparation and use of violence [are] no longer seen as exceptional or as deviations from the norms of civil society, but [have] bec[o]me their embodiment (Geyer 1989).

Justifications of killings by the state in Kashmir that accompanies a suspension of law finds roots in consent for violence meted out by the nationalists and the right wing in India, with the help of the media. Kazi (2009) notes that war in Kashmir functions as a source and symbol of national identity or sovereignty, where war can secure civilian approval and nationalism can endorse collective violence. Consent is manufactured to cloak the excesses by the military arm of the state and this habituation of violence in the region is deemed justified. Expanding on this dominant rightwing narrative in the press and in political realms, journalist and writer Balraj Puri (1995) links the conflict to the idea of national prestige. “Kashmir is much more than a dispute over real estate, a matter of national prestige, or a threat to Indian secularism. If the nation continues to remain desensitised to the human tragedy that is Kashmir, … the very existence of India as a civilised entity will be gravely threatened,” he writes. Habermas (2005) terms this nationalism as “a kind of social deviancy” and states that once the fire of nationalism is ignited, it can “lead to the oppression of internal minority groups, to racism, and ultimately to ethnic cleansing and genocide”, which is occupies the space of the conflict in Kashmir. Kabir (2009) also states that Kashmir has emerged as a bone of contention for three nationalisms, Indian, Pakistani and aspirant Kashmiri. It probes, “To re-inscribe desire into the geopolitical claims that (to use phrases in common circulation through India and Pakistan) “Kashmir is an integral part of India” or, in Pakistan’s view, that Kashmir is its “jugular vein” and its “unfinished business”, is to ask further questions about collective desire.”

Outcome of ‘democratic state’s’ apparatus of militarisation: Phase III

The US State department and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recorded varying categories of human rights violations, including political and extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, torture and custodial abuse, arbitrary arrests and detention, willful destruction of property, denial of fair trial, arbitrary interference into privacy, family, home and correspondence, use of excessive force and violations of humanitarian law, suppression of freedom of speech and press, suppression of freedom of peaceful assembly and association and suppression of religious freedom in Kashmir. These have been an outcome of militarisation  as a policy by the “democratic state” in the region.

Tariq Ali (2005), in ‘The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity’, explains the extent of damage to the civilians and the purpose of the state strategy before the armed revolt of the 1990s, “Young Kashmiri men were arrested tortured and killed by the Indian soldiers; women of all ages were abused and raped. The aim was to break the will of the people, but instead many young men now took up arms without bothering where they came from.” The nature of this type of state clampdown adversely affected the public sphere and drove the movement for self-determination underground. Habermas (2005) characterises the fate of the political public sphere under organised capitalism by as a process of ‘refeudalisation’, where ‘the distinction “public” and “private” could [no longer] be usefully applied’. He adds that ‘political discussions are for the most part confined to in-groups, to family, friends, and neighbors who generate a rather homogeneous climate of opinion anyway’. Criminalisation of dissent in Kashmir by the Indian state was responsible for the damage caused to the social fabric of the indigenous society. Gramsci (1975) deconstructs this practice and states that unitarian fanaticism produces a permanent atmosphere of suspicion towards anything that might smack of separatism. The violence and denial of justice by the repressive state systematically erodes the social fabric of the society and gives birth to cycles of unending violence.

With a population of about 10 million, thousands of military camps dot the region. By 2002, the armed rebellion was largely crushed, but public support in Kashmir for its independence from India appears to have remained robust. While the Ministry of Defence in late 2013 maintained that above 300 armed rebels were fighting, confined to the forested areas of the region, the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that the figure was lower than 200 (Greater Kashmir 2013). Despite the difference, the concentration of government troops across the region remains for the most part unchanged.

The armed struggle transitioned into an indigenous mass civil disobedience movement by late 2002, with massive street protests led by locals in their own neighbourhoods. Significantly, in 2008, 2009 and 2010, unarmed street protests by civilians led to a number of killings and a massive clampdown by the state on protesters through its various draconian laws (The Guardian 2011). A Report by the Independent People’s Tribunal Kashmir (2008), stated, “The hallmarks of the Indian government’s response to a struggle for self-determination are the dehumanisation of the population in the popular consciousness by labeling them as ‘terrorists’ and ‘insurgents’, the justification of violence against the population as responsive to a security threat and the deployment of central armed police forces to ‘maintain public order’ in so-called ‘disturbed areas’.”

The violence of the state has percolated to all corners of society, including women. Dr Dewan elaborates, “The extent of humiliation faced by the women of the Valley is probably unparalleled in India; no other ‘state’ has been occupied by security forces for so long, beginning barely a few months after ‘independence’.” She adds, “The rampant use of laws that offer immunity to prosecution to the armed forces and police like DAA and AFSPA which are unconstitutional and also aid in violating the right to life and freedom of expression in this vulnerable segment of the population.” As Mahmood (2000) observes, ‘it is the humiliating aspects of state terror, like the rape of one’s daughter, that occupy center stage in the narrations of its victims’. Gendered aggression ranging from ‘eve-teasing’ to rape is a source of great anxiety among the Kashmiri population at large. Such behaviour gravely jeopardises the izzat (honour) of both the women who have been assaulted and their male relatives (Kazi 2009).

Conclusion

Political problems of present-day Kashmir were born after India’s decolonisation in 1947. From 1947 onwards, a denial of basic political and human rights through strategic, direct and indirect methods of oppression by state and non-state actors on the population, in different spheres of their lives, has not only carved out the trajectory of the space of the conflict but has also played a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of the self-determination movement in Indian-held Kashmir. After stonewalling all attempts made by the international community to settle the dispute and flouting the UNSC’s resolutions on demilitarisation of the region in the Cold War era, the Indian state choose to align itself to military powers like Russia and later embrace “globalisation” policies to strengthen its arsenal in dealing with political dissent in Kashmir. Simultaneously, the state, through its methods of co-option, manipulated and appropriated the autonomous mode of J&K state’s functioning under the Indian Constitution by rigging elections and surreptitiously hijacking transparent constitutional exercises in its attempts to “integrate” the region to the Union of India. Over six decades, the Indian state has attempted to deal with this political dispute by the use of its military and has indulged in human rights violations which amount to crimes against humanity, flouting international covenants and its own Constitutional laws in order to obliterate the movement for self-determination and criminalise political dissent. The policy of militarisation has also set off an arms race in the continent, endangering Asia’s future.

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Trajectory of a space of conflict: Kashmir from 12th Century to mid-20th Century

Introduction
Over several centuries, the territory of Kashmir has passed on from regime to regime – the Mongols, the Sikhs, the Afghans, the Mughals and the Dogras. However, this paper will specifically shed light between two periods – from the era which brought Islam into Kashmir in the 12th Century to 1948, the end of the Dogra rule.

In the context of the conflict in Kashmir, this period contributes in the understanding that economic, social, religious and cultural persecution of the Muslim majority by successive regimes over nine centuries shaped their politics, revolt and demand for self-determination; and that this movement cannot be viewed simplistically as a religious conflict but a struggle for universal human rights. Zutshi (2003) notes that the political culture of pre-colonial Kashmir was defined by its creative interaction between a variety of languages of belonging and that the narrative on regional belonging transcended religious affiliations in expressing a vision that the region had to be saved from destruction by the outsiders. Therefore, the pre-colonial Kashmir discourse exhibited a comfortable coexistence of regional specificity and religious universality.
Given this context, it is deductible that religious persecution and a denial of educational, economic, cultural and human rights were the driving forces behind the rebellion of the indigenous Muslim majority, which traced its history centuries before Indian rule in Kashmir. Marginalisation because of differences in religion of the ruler and the ruled was an important factor that spurned the rebellion, but the oppressed subjects were burdened with more detrimental issues that put their survival in question and therefore directed their energies towards gaining equality in economic and education sectors, and finally self-determination. Despite having Muslim rulers centuries later, administrative duties remained entrenched in the hands of the local Pandits and that had a subsequent impact not on all the facets of the lives of the majority, but also created a sharp divide and power imbalance within the indigenous community.

Muslim rule in Kashmir
Islam’s entry in Kashmir can be traced to Shah Mir, a Muslim from Swat, who visited the region in search of work. Rinchen, a Tibetan Buddhist prince from Ladakh took refuge at King Sahadeva’s court in Kashmir around the same time. This coincided with the Mongol invasion of the region. Supported by Shah Mir, Rinchen killed his potential rival, the chief minister and married his daughter Rani Kota. After his accession to the throne, Rinchen wanted to convert to Shaivism, but was refused by the orthodox Brahmins of the kingdom. Searching for a new faith, Rinchen met a Muslim saint called Bulbul Shah who welcomed him Islam where he took the name, Sultan Sadr-ud-Din. This conversion marks the beginning of Muslim rule in Kashmir, notes Schofield (2000).

When Kashmir was threatened once again by the Mongols, Rani and Shah Mir countered the attack, after which Shah Mir proclaimed himself sultan and took the name Shams-ud-Din. The dynasty which he founded lasted for 200 years. Islam spread in Kashmir, with the arrival of refugees. In order to seek escape from the Mongol army, refugees from west and central Asia arrived in Kashmir in 1753. This increased the rate of conversion to Islam of the predominantly Hindu population. One of the most influential among these refugees was Mir Syed Ali, who arrived with Sayyids and missionaries from parts of Persia.
This was a period of social and political turmoil in Kashmir as a new dynasty was established and a new religion came to be propagated with much fervour by the Sayyid’s of Persia, particularly among the ruling class. (Zutshi 2003). Bamzai illustrates how it was during this influx of refugees that the Muslim administrative system together with its Arabic and Persian designations of offices came into vogue. Forced conversions, in order to avoid religious persecution also took place in the following years. Despite Muslim rule, the administration remained as before, in the hands of the traditional class, the Brahmins for whom the change of religion presented no advantage and the retention of their old creed apparently involved no loss of their inherited status (Khan 2006).

Another bout of mass conversion took place due to the threat of an invasion in the region. During Sikunder’s rule in 1389, Timur threatened to invade the region and demanded a large tribute from Sikunder. In order to raise money, Sikunder targeted the Hindus and began destroying temples and called for the conversion of the people. Known as an iconoclast, he sank all Hindu books in the lake and forbade the use of Hindu religious mark on the forehead. In order to escape Sikunder’s tyranny, many Hindus converted to Islam, Schofield writes.

Sufism in Kashmir
In the following century, religious persecution was one of the reasons why Sufism gained popularity among the masses who were suffering from the tyrannical rule. The Rishis, a popular Sufi sect believed in the love of humankind and did not seek to convert the population. They were therefore popular with both Muslims and Hindus. Sufism, unlike the other religions, did not pose a threat to the already tormented population. In the modern-day context, Sufism, which is prevalent in Kashmir, stands in direct opposition to Wahhabism, a Saudi-sponsored ideology that the militant groups, from both Kashmir and Pakistan, in the post-nineties conflict have been influenced by. Sufism also gained popularity as it promoted tolerance of other religions, was against organised religion and raised it voice against social injustice and the rulers.

Sikunder’s younger son ascended the throne in 1420 and was called Bud Shah (the great king). During his reign a celebrated religious figure, Sheikh Nur-ud-din better known as Nund Rishi, was active. Inspired by the mystic poet Lal Ded or Lalla, he found an indigenous order of Sufism known as the Rishi order which combined Buddhist renunciation with Hindu asceticism and traditional Sufism. (Schofield 2003) Since Sheikh Nur-ud-din is more squarely placed in the Islamic tradition, his writing had a significant impact on the Kashmiri Muslim identity. He was able to create a framework for a regional culture through his use of the Kashmiri language to propagate a devotional religion, which was outside the purview of the state. In fact, the reigning Sultan of Kashmir Ali Shah (1413-20), ordered him arrested for preaching rebellious ideas to the people.

Bamzai (2007) comments on the unique characteristic of the spread of Islam in Kashmir that the new religion was practised and preached initially by Sufis and saints who led a pious and noble life and mixing freely with the general mass of people, familiarised them with the general teachings of Islam. Though leading lives of self-abnegation, they took active interest in the affairs of the community and often raised their voice against injustice. For example, Lal Ded was undoubtedly against organised religion, particularly as represented by Brahmanism and laid the groundwork for the propagation of Islam by the Rishis. Her poetry presents society in a state of flux, with religious and regional affiliations. To identify an “ethos of tolerance” in her verse is an anachronistic reading of the Kashmiri mystic tradition, which was revived and popularised significantly in the 1930s and 1940s by her proponents of an emergent Kashmiri nationalism, summarised Zutshi (2003). The Sufi order is pervasive in present day Kashmir, where locals revere saints and shrines – a step away from Islamic tradition (Zutshi 2003). In the late 15th Century, Lalla inspired a ruler, ending forced conversion of Hindus and decreed that those who had been converted in this fashion be allowed to return to their own faith. Zain-al-Abidin provided the Hindus with subsidies to enable them to rebuild the temples his father had destroyed. The different ethnic and religious groups were not allowed to intermarry, but they learned to live side-by-side amicably.

Visits to Iran and Central Asia were organised so that Abidin’s subjects could learn bookbinding and woodcarving and how to make carpets and shawls, thereby laying the foundations for Kashmir’s indigenous industry. Decades later, the systematic erosion of this industry would prompt a large-scale migration and economic upheaval. By the end of his prosperous reign, a large majority of the population had converted voluntarily to Islam; the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims – 85% to 15% – has remained fairly constant ever since. The dynasty went into decline after his death and disputes over succession and unfit rulers paved the way for new invasions. In the end the Mughal conquest in the late 16th Century came as a relief to most people. (Ali et al. 2011) With the Mughal rule (1586-1758), the situation of the majority failed to improve because of the regime’s bias towards Shias and Hindus. Aurangzeb, who came to the throne in 1658, was the last of the Mughal Emperors to make any impact on Kashmir’s history.

Bazaz, in ‘Struggle for Freedom’, viewed the Mughal governors as “tyrannical, barbarous and uncultured,” and stated that they encouraged Hindu-Muslim and Shia-Sunni factionalism among the population from 1586-1758 (Bazaz 1973). The landlords were replaced by Mughal civil servants who administered the country more effectively, reorganising its trade, shawl making and agriculture. (Ali et al. 2011) The only significant aspect of the Mughal period was the arrival of an important Islamic relic to Kashmir. This thrusts the region’s close association with Islam even in the 21st Century.
In 1658, a strand of the beard of the Prophet Muhammad was brought by the servant of a wealthy Kashmiri merchant to Kashmir. The relic was taken to a mosque known first as Asar-e-Sharif – shrine of the relic – and then Hazratbal – the lake of the Hazrat, or the Prophet, where it lies to this date. This made the region an important religious site for Muslims across the world to this day. A Kashmiri verse by Mohammed Ishaq Khan in ‘Experiencing Islam’, elaborates on the importance of the relic, “Whosoever has seen the sacred hair of Mohammad, (h)as had in reality the vision of the prophet.” In Kashmir, liberal, tolerant, Sufi-inspired Sunni Islam was practiced. It allowed the veneration of saints, individuals and even objects considered holy (Snedden 2012).

Decline of Mughal rule and rise of the Afghans
The end of the Mughal rule and the war of succession between Aurangzeb’s three sons after his death in 1707 led to a steady decline of Mughal rule in Kashmir. Aurangzeb was intolerant of other religions and the memory of his reign is tarnished by his persecution of Hindus and Shias. Brahmins were, however, still retained within the administration and opportunities existed for both Muslims and Hindus to prosper on merit and learning. If the Mughal period is seen as the beginning of the end of Kashmiri independence by historians, the 50-year Afghan rule is seen as its end. During the Afghan period, starting from 1752, Kashmiri Pandits attained proficiency in Persian and not only began to form part of the administration of the land but became an integral voice in the expression of a sense of longing for and belonging to the Kashmiri homeland, Zutshi explains. Governance policies adopted by the regime to control and subjugate the indigenous population were later emulated by the Sikhs and the Dogras.

Kashmiri nobles invited Ahamed Shah Durrani, the brutal ruler of Afghanistan, to liberate their country. Durrani obliged, doubling taxes and persecuting the embattled Shia minority with a fanatical vigour that shocked the nobles (Ali et al. 2011). The Afghans targeted all indigenous citizens, regardless of class or religion. Merchants and noblemen of all communities were asked to surrender their wealth to the first Afghan governor or face death and with their departure and the peasantry avoiding cultivating the land for fear of exactions, the Kashmiri economy was effectively ruined. The rulers who were also suffering heavy losses in war with the British were actually trying to extract the compensation from their colonial subjects. It was also the first time sectarian clashes took place in the region. This fault-line has been exploited by other regimes to break the indigenous movement for self-determination in the 20st Century. The class divide between the Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims and the entrenchment of the Pandits in the governance mechanism also occurred in this era. This would later be exploited by successive regimes as a policy of divide and rule. The Afghan regime lasted till 1891 until the Sikhs invaded Kashmir.
Kashmir sold to the Sikhs by the British

The province of Kashmir had been purchased from the British in 1846. The ruler of the Sikhs, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, entered into a treaty with the British in 1809 whereby the British agreed to abstain from interference in territories north of the Sutlej, if he gave up claim on territories south of the river (Rai 2007). After the conclusion of the treaty, Ranjit Singh began his campaigns to conquer principalities north of the Sutlej, and expelled the Afghans from Multan, Dejarat and Kashmir. He valued Kashmir not only for its revenues, but also for its strategic position which facilitated his numerous military campaigns, Zutshi writes in her book.

The Sikh governors deputed by the Maharaja followed anti-Muslim policies in Kashmir, thus subjecting the majority to severe hardship in relation to the practice of religion. Lands attached to several shrines were appropriated and mosques were declared the property of the state by the invaders. This assertion of Hindu and Sikh beliefs was a part of an attempt by the Sikhs to articulate a separate Sikh identity, distinct from the Mughals (Rai 2007). Kashmiri historians regard the 27 years of Sikh rule as the worst calamity to ever befall their country (Ali et al. 2011). Muslims were prohibited from reciting the azan (call to prayer) from the mosques in the Valley. Discrimination in policies by the regime on the basis of religion was fundamental to the Sikh rule. The continuation of this policy under the Dogras in the late 19th Century would provide fuel to the Kashmiri leadership to take this up as a cause (Zutshi 2003). Discrimination based on religious lines would psychologically corner the locals in asserting their identity with religion in the fore, giving the dimension of a religious-political conflict. To escape the harsh economic policies, the peasant class started migrating to the state of Punjab. This had an adverse impact on the economy and production of food grains, thereby exacerbating the indigenous people’s status. However, due to the nature of these policies, Kashmir became the second richest province of the Sikh kingdom in terms of revenue receipts, next only to Multan.

This period is extremely crucial as it inculcated a sense of collective victimhood and an awareness of exploitation by foreign invaders. Due to immense suffering, for the first time, Kashmiri voices articulated a sense of belonging for their land, “a land that now required the loyalty of its inhabitants to rise from the depths of suffering and tribulations” (Zutshi 2003). A collective separate Muslim identity was carved out of this policy of exclusion in the state’s development and excessive economic repression of the majority. This identity, years later, would further sharpen and take root in the narrow spaces for dissent that the regime had failed to appropriate. Geopolitical changes and alliances in the region, later ushered in a regime change and Kashmir was sold to the Dogras.

Treaty of Amritsar and the Dogra rule
The first Anglo-Sikh war in Kashmir resulted in a victory for the East India Company, which acquired Kashmir in 1846 as a part of the Treaty of Amritsar, but, aware of the chaos there, hurriedly sold it for Rs 75 lakh to the Dogra ruler of neighbouring Jammu (Ali et al. 2011). While the Dogras remained subject to constant scrutiny, Kashmiris became the subjects of a twice-removed situation within colonial rule, with dual loyalties and no clear mechanism of seeking redressal for their grievances (Rai 2007). This gave birth to a space for dissent to the indigenous people. Affluent Kashmiris used their influence with the British to effectively address their grievances and complain about the Dogra regime. Subsequent changes brought on the British gave the locals more access to education, which played a pivotal role in voicing for their demand for freedom.

The Valley came under Dogra rule (1846–1947) under Raja Gulab Singh who laid down its economic structure, whereby even the distribution of rice became a monopoly of the state, pushing the commoners further into depravation (Rai 2007). Even as Kashmiri voices spoke out against the oppression of the governing power, the religious component of identities was to become increasingly important toward the end of this period. The regime’s oppressive measures were chiefly responsible for carving of these identities and this shaped a public sphere where citizens could voice their discontent, Zutshi states. Since the Dogra rule did not encourage any form of dissent, the only space that developed as a public space were the mosques. Interactions organised in these spaces were responsible in the amalgamation of the Kashmiri nationalist and religious narratives and the demand for education and equal economic opportunities for the Muslim majority. During the same time, economic exploitation of the indigenous industry, another form of colonial oppression, pushed the local population into further despair. In keeping with the harsh policies, the Dagh-Shawl Department that controlled the taxation and production of shawls was reorganised and brought firmly under state control. Zutshi (2003) notes that heavy duty was levied on the shawls at various stages of their production and distribution. Duties were also imposed on the raw material that was imported during the manufacturing process. This had an adverse impact on the indigenous craft and the future of the artisans. Artisans were not permitted to leave the Valley, relinquish their employment or change their employer by the state. But weavers migrated to Punjab in large numbers in hope of better working conditions, states Zutshi.

The Dogra Maharaja revived the law banning slaughter of cows which was instituted by the Sikhs. Drawing the legitimacy of his rule from the framework of Hinduism, Gulab Singh initiated the construction of temples throughout the princely state and established institutions such as the Dharmarth, a religious trust, to funnel the funds favourably to the minority community. This denial of equal opportunities based on religion firmly entrenched their position at the bottom of the hierarchy. Export of shawls to Europe declined. The backbone of Kashmir’s indigenous industry was shattered. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 exacerbated the situation for the artisans. By the 1890s, the state had withdrawn from the industry and abolished the Dagh-shawl department. A good number of the shawl merchants who went out of business, were also involved in the management of shrines in Srinagar. Their first move on facing hardship was to re-establish control of the shrines. The locals were economically deprived, and the regime’s laws destroyed the backbone of traditional indigenous industries, the majority were affected; and citizens reciprocated by uniting to form a national movement against the establishment.
“This early Dogra period is critical for an understanding of the development of identities in the Valley, since it set the stage for a transformation within the public discourse of the Valley, from an emphasis on regional identities to a privileging of the religious component of identities,” Zutshi (2003) cites. During this period, Kashmiriyat rose to the fore most vociferously in the historical narrative of the Dogra period, she adds. Economic and cultural oppression based on religious lines carried out by the ruling class of Dogras through the administrative class of the Pandits would decades later play a pivotal role in the consolidation of the demand for change in policies that affect the ordinary citizens.

Even though the majority was denied education, jobs and an upliftment of their prospects, Kashmiri Pandits had entered the administrative machinery of the state during the Afghan period and by the Dogra period, had established their positions in the lower levels of the state bureaucracy. Although the Pandits were, like all Kashmiris, excluded from the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, they continued to exercise control in the countryside, away from the urban centres of power. The revenue assessment and collection structure of the Dogras placed the entire operation in the hands of this traditional administrative and educated class, Zutshi (2003) states. Given this distribution of power, the minority indigenous administrative class now turned oppressor for the majority. This schism brought on by the imperialist policy of divide and rule would later be exploited by subsequent regimes. Consequently, the transfer of power deepened the religious and the class fault-lines among the indigenous people.

British interference and evolution of public space
One of the first manifestations of a change in governance was the introduction of a State Council and a change in the education policy and land division due to interference by the British Residency on the pretext of bringing a change in the nature of governance. Earlier, access to education was limited, as exclusionist policies had emanated from the class structure based on religion instituted by the Dogra regime. In a bid to address the complaint of denial of education by the majority, a change was introduced by the British as a measure to uplift the social aspect of the people. This was one of the key functions played by the British, where their interference in the Dogra rule in Kashmir, based on their vested interests, gave rise to a space of dissent and conflict.

On the pretext of investigating the bias against the majority by the administration, governance was transformed from a commercial institution to a colonial state. By 1872, education had become state responsibility. The British educational system was defined by different types of education for different classes of people. The Valley was in the throes of a major transformation in its polity, economy and society and it threw communities into disarray with the reconstitution of social groups and the dismantling of the state structure as it came under the control of the British Residency, Zutshi (2003) states. Since the colonials insisted on mass education, the Dogra state could not but delineate an educational agenda, states Schofield. Despite full co-operation by the Dogras, they were unable to keep the British out of the kingdom for long. The permanent Resident who would finally be appointed, after pinpointing the ruler’s shortcomings and on the pretext of propagating fair rule for the majority, would interfere in the Maharaja’s administration and finally sideline him. This toppled the power hierarchy and directed the administrative power to other bodies that were out of the Maharaja’s purview.
In 1885, Maharaja Pratap Singh took over and British Residency along with the State Council was established and dominant groups had to be included by the imperialists to manage the colonial empire. British conceded Maharaja’s request of not to have a British resident present in court after the Land Settlement deal in 1885, which was an aspect of the larger British intervention in the political administration of the state. He granted Chak lands to Hindus who were a part of the administration, on condition that they remain Hindus, accept service nowhere else and pay at a low revenue assessment. The Dogras were attempting to create a class of men loyal to the state who, significantly, were not drawn from the ranks of Kashmiris; most were Punjabis or Dogras, alongside a few Kashmiri Pandit bureaucrats (Rai 2007). This further alienated the Kashmiri Muslims and contributed to the growing discontent among the majority.

Various chaks granted by Ranbir Singh had multiplied, which ultimately lead to the subverting of state rules and land-grabbing by administrative officials of the state. Legally acquired chaks gradually swelled to include much larger tracts of land than were handed out in the original chak, sharpening the divide between the classes and empowering the administrative and the feudal class, the Pandits, and denied the peasantry their basic rights. The British presented the direct intervention in the affairs of the princely state not merely as a strategic move but to alleviate the misery of the Kashmiris, including the peasantry by reforming the administration. By 1888, a permanent resident was appointed, and Maharaja Pratap Singh was, de facto and control of the administration was passed on to him. By 1889, the Maharaja was made to sign an edict of resignation that relieved him of all part in the administration, which was placed, subject to the control of the Resident in the hands of a State Council.

Initially, political awareness in the princely state was not linked to the movement for ‘responsible’ government which was making itself increasingly evident to the British in the opening decades of the 20th century, spearheaded by the activities of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League (Zutshi 2003). Muslim leadership’s rhetoric on education, language, class and government employment had an impact on the educational and other policies of the Dogra state toward its Muslim subjects. The informal system of indigenous education that had prevailed was systematically converted into a state-sponsored system, far from centralised and homogenous in nature (Zutshi 2003). This encouraged the Muslim majority to ask for a separate status.
In the following decades, the backwardness of Muslims in the field of education and the insistence on state recognition of Muslims as a separate category in the field in the 1920s, became central components of the Kashmiri Muslim leadership’s political rhetoric in the 1930s. Simultaneously, the administration, under pressure from the British, continued to devise exclusionist policies to prevent the Muslim majority from altering their backward status. The replacement of Persian with Urdu as the court language and as the language of administration, justified the import of Punjabis into the state administration and excluded the locals from participating. School curricula in the state were reorganised along the lines of the Punjab University syllabus and affiliated to the university, relegating Kashmiri language to the background. The few Muslim literates who belonged to a traditionally educated caste, were associated with shrines and mosques of Kashmir. Due to the structural violence woven into the educational system to exclude the Muslims, education held no value for the majority of the agricultural class. But Kashmiri Pandits realised the importance of education in order to be able to hold on to their positions at the lower levels of bureaucracy.

Shift in land policies
Another shift in the power balance occurred when the Land Settlement issue rose. The rules governing jagir lands were laid down on paper in after the State Council was asked to intervene to repair the flaws in the jagirdari system which was prevalent since the Mughal era (Zutshi 2003). This intervention resulted in the curtailment of the powers of jagirdars and the revenue farmers in whose hands their estates had fallen. The Settlement Commissioner’s report suggested that active interference of the state in the jagir holdings, along with specifying the status of jagirdars and the tenants on these holdings. Jagirdars were not given occupancy or property rights to their estates. This threatened the financial and social bases of the Kashmiri landed elite for the first time, replacing this class with a non-Kashmiri, Hindu landholding one. The 1901 census stated that cultivators were better off than before and enjoyed peace and prosperity as a result of the settlement and that considerable areas had been converted to flourishing fields over the past decade (Rai 2007). Not only was the peasant not at the mercy of the revenue officials, he was now in a position to sell his surplus grain to urban grain traders, thus entering the sphere of legitimate and lucrative trade. Peasants became a recognisable class whose interests became the focal point of movements that were to emerge in Kashmir in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s.

Economic relevance of global events on Kashmiris
The advent of the First World War increased the vulnerability of the Valley’s economy to the vagaries of the market, leading to the major grain crisis of 1921. The grain crisis was a symptom of rapid urban growth, which led to a sharp increase in the population of the city, as well as growth of towns dependent on it for the supply of grain. Another global event which would impact Kashmiri society was the economic slump of the late 1920s. The Great Depression of 1929 contributed to an increase in urban-rural migration, collapse of urban factories as the price of agricultural produce fell, Rai noted in her book. With people in the throes of poverty, the death of age-old indigenous occupations, the lure of state jobs changed the dynamics of Kashmiri society.

Communities were further divided when the Maharaja Pratap Singh diversified the administration of Srinagar by passing the power on to its elected representatives of each community and adversely affecting its traditional hereditary occupations. Through elected members representing different communities, the darbar had created a battleground for inter- and intra-community contests over political and economic influence in the Kashmir Valley. The 1932 census noted that castes were not following their hereditary occupations any longer, preferring jobs in labour or government service (Zutshi 2003). In 1925, Maharaja Hari Singh opened several schools unlike his predecessors and raised standards of existing ones. Institutionalising a class bias and in order to reinforce the existing elitist governance structures, the Examination Board of the Education Department stated that no admission would be given to third division graduates, matrics and under-graduates, restricting the small number of Muslims in the department. The British and the Maharaja would view any action on the part of the Kashmiri Muslims to secure political and economic rights as “communal” in nature, implying that it was directed specifically against another religious community and more significantly against the Dogra state.

A seditious speech was delivered by Abdul Qadir, a Punjabi butler, at a meeting at the Shah-i-Hamdan shrine, the only political space spared by the administration to the people. He described the Dogras rulers as a “dynasty of bloodsuckers” who had “drained the energies and the resources of our people” (Ali et al. 2011). Qadir was arrested and a crowd clashed with the police outside Central jail where he was arrested and 21 civilians were killed by the authorities. Riots followed during which Muslims destroyed shops and homes of Pandit landholders, moneylenders and petty officials in the city (Rai 2007). This was the founding moment for Kashmiri nationalism and the first massacre in Kashmir, which had violent repercussions with the majority Muslim population targeting the minorities – the rulers and the administrative class. Even when the incident of 1931 represented genuine political and economic grievances of the Kashmiri Muslim population, the admission by the state as per its report was couched in the knowledge that Muslim leaders used these grievances to incite followers into communal disharmony (Zutshi 2003). Since then, a similar stance of castigating Kashmiri pro-freedom leaders and the movement for self-determination, has been utilised by the Indian government to describe the political turmoil in present-day Kashmir.
The tussle between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits in and after 1931 was more about political and economic representation than religious antagonism. Kashmiri Muslims, tired of being excluded from education, the government and the lower rungs of the administration, rallied around the cry of “Islam in Danger” raised by youth recently returned from British India with professional degrees. The Lahore Muslim press had been consistently highlighting the condition of the Muslim Kashmiris and newspapers critical of the Maharaja were sent into the state. At the same time, small groups joined together to discuss their grievances (Schofield 2003).

P. N. Bazaz argues that the movement of 1931 was a spontaneous mass uprising with political and economic causes behind it. He reasons that as the masses were inexperience and untrained and had no leader, they fell into the wrong hands of the upper class who used them for their own vested interests. “It was not difficult for the Muslim bourgeoisie to give the movement a religious colouring… The purpose underlying this move of the Muslim upper classes was to utilise the forces of the masses against the superiority of the Hindu bourgeoisie, which, we have seen, had been established to a great extent under the Dogra rule and was still in the process of its consolidation.” Organisation of local groups and association of educated youth from Kashmir also spurned a political movement which criticised the Dogra king. As more and more educated Kashmiris flocked to Kashmir, the articulation of their demand for equal opportunities and equal rights gained prominence. Supported by the majority, they complained to the British Resident, asking him to investigate the key issues that affected the locals, mainly why they had been denied education and economic opportunities. Political activists like Ghulam Abbas and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah rose to prominence. Abdullah became a member of a political outfit called the Reading Room Party and was called the ‘Lion of Kashmir’.

Under pressure from the British Resident, Hari Singh appointed a commission, headed by Sir Bertrand Glancy to inquire into the complaints of the people. In April 1932, Glancy presented his report which recommended reforms for the development of education, the appointment of government servants and the establishment of industries to create employment opportunities. Religious grievances, it became clear, could not be divorced from their social and political contexts, Zutshi elucidates. Some of the significant recommendations were the conferral of limited freedom of press, publication and political organisation; urging the government to address economic issues such as unemployment through the promotion of industries in the state; and not setting the minimum qualifications for appointment to a government post unnecessarily high so as “to prevent the due interests of any community from being neglected, the report stated. The only sort of ‘public’ activity allowed was the formation of societies for religious and social reform with prior sanction from the state. The result of mushrooming of these societies after Glancy’s recommendations was the creation not of a singular ‘public’ space, but numerous segregated spaces of different communities that further fractured the body of state subjects along religious and caste-based lines, according to Rai. When the Glancy recommendations began to have effect, a large number of Muslims were appointed to Government posts in all ranks and grades. Those already in state services were raised to higher grades out of their turn and over the heads of their non-Muslim colleagues (Bazaz 2002). This changed the caste and class demographic in Kashmir and had an impact on the the hold of the minority on behalf of the Dogra regime over the majority of the Muslim population.

With access to education, formation of political parties took place. The All-Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was founded in Srinagar in October 1932 while Abdullah and the other political leaders were detained in Srinagar Central Jail and Abdullah was elected its president. Non-Muslims in Kashmir were mainly Hindus, dominated by the Pandits, upper-caste Brahmins who looked down on Muslims, Sikhs and low-caste Hindus alike, but looked up to their colonial masters. The British, characteristically, used the Pandits to run the administration, making it easy for Muslims to see the two enemies as one (Ali et al. 2011). Meanwhile, the arrest of Muslim leaders by the Maharaja led to a demand to overthrow him and called for the establishment of a Muslim government. Hari Singh dealt with this unrest by jailing political leaders who opposed him. A hallmark of Abdullah’s political struggle was his continuing emphasis on secularism, however, eventually led to an internal disagreement, which also had some foundation in religious differences amongst the Muslims (Rai 2007). Several prominent Muslim leaders, including Mirwaiz Muhammad Yusuf Shah, broke away, due to ideological differences with him and “volunteered himself to serve as the henchman of the vested interests”, according to Bazaz.

At the end of August 1938, the Kashmiri political leaders again started protesting against unemployment, high taxes, revenue demands and lack of medical facilities. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs made common cause and went to jail together and once more reiterated their commitment to secularism. In a bid to appear secular, on 11 June 1939, the Muslim Conference finally changed its name to the ‘National Conference’. Abdullah’s adherence to secularism brought him closer to the rising Congress Party leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promised a secular and socialist India. Those Muslims who were discontented with Abdullah’s pro-Congress stance, especially the non-Kashmiri speakers, became staunch supporters of the Muslim League (Zutshi 2003). But by 1941, Ghulam Abbas and Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah joined hand to revive the Muslim Conference, which eventually came out in support of the movement for Pakistan. Abdullah meanwhile busied himself with his plans for a ‘New Kashmir’ in what was one of the most advanced socialist programs of its time. As Abdullah admitted, initially ‘New Kashmir’ was opposed by ‘reactionary’ elements from amongst both the Hindus and Muslims, but eventually the Indian National Congress Party approved the manifesto (Zutshi 2003).

After the decision was taken to partition the sub-continent in 1946, the interim government, effectively controlled by the Congress Party, set up a States ministry to encourage the princely states to join India or the new dominion of Pakistan either by acts of accession or ‘standstill’ agreements. In retrospect, that the Muslim League did not join the interim government at the outset meant that it lost the opportunity to attain parity with the Congress Party at ‘the most important moment in the demission of British authority’ (Schofield 2003). Abdullah objected to leaving the decision to the Maharaja, who he maintained did not enjoy support from the majority of the people. Mirroring Gandhi’s Quit India movement in 1942, he launched a Quit Kashmir Movement, describing how ‘the tyranny of the Dogras’ had lacerated their souls. In January 1947, even though the main political leaders of both parties remained in jail, Hari Singh called for fresh elections to the legislative assembly. The National Conference boycotted the elections, with the result that the Muslim Conference claimed victory. This fissure laid the grid for further discord in the space of the Kashmir conflict. The alignment of the factions later determined the path the conflict would take and the long-lasting political repercussions the parties involved would have to endure.

Perry Anderson, in his article in London Review of Books, titled ‘After Nehru’ writes, “When partition came, Abdullah made no case of this demand for freedom. For some years he had bonded emotionally with Nehru, and when fighting broke out in Kashmir in the autumn of 1947, he was flown out from Srinagar to Delhi by military aircraft and lodged in Nehru’s house, where he took part in planning the Indian takeover, to which he was essential. Two days later, the maharajah – now safely repaired to Jammu – announced in a backdated letter to Mountbatten, drafted by his Indian minders, that he would install Abdullah as his prime minister.”

Throughout his reign, Hari Singh had been working to regain control of Poonch. In the spring of 1947, the residents of Poonch had mounted a ‘no-tax’ campaign. The Maharaja responded by strengthening his garrisons in Poonch with Sikhs and Hindus. He ordered all Muslims in the district to hand over their weapons to the authorities. But, as communal tension spread, the Muslims were angered when the same weapons appeared in the hands of Hindus and Sikhs. They therefore sought fresh weapons from the tribes of the North- West Frontier Province (NWFP) who were known for their manufacture of arms. This, Rai argues, laid the basis for direct contact between the members of the Poonch resistance that announced the existence of Azad Kashmir and the tribesmen who lived in the strip of mountainous ‘tribal’ territory bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unrest in Poonch had turned into an organised revolt against the Dogras, and 237,000 people are said to have been killed. In response to these atrocities, tribals of NWFP who had close ties with the people of Poonch, came to their rescue without support from the Pakistani administration. The ferocity of the Dogra repression stimulated doubts on the region’s political future post-Partition (Abdullah 1993). Significantly, thus, it was the revolt of the Poonchis against the Maharaja’s authority – and not a Pakistani movement against India, as the latter claims it (Zutshi 2003).

A Question of Accession
On 26 October 1947, the Maharaja is said to have allegedly signed the Instrument of Accession in a bid to request India for help in dealing with the tribesmen. The much-debated accession, is nonetheless, viewed as “provisional pending a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people”. The following day, the Indian armed forces entered Kashmir and the battle turned into the first war with Pakistan disputing the accession and eventually sending in regular forces (Ali et al. 2011). To this day, the ambiguity surrounding the accession has benefited India’s narrative and the occupation of other parts of Kashmir by Pakistan and China has complicated this international dispute, making it the longest running conflict.

In his book on the “accession”, researcher Alastair Lamb writes that the Indian forces landed in Kashmir even before documents of the accession were delivered or signed by the Maharaja. He explained that Secretary of the States Department V P Menon’s account of that day was false and that he did not make a trip with Mahajan to the Maharaja and that on the same evening, when the Defence Committee’s meeting ended, it was made clear that ‘there was in existence no officially acknowledged document signed by the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir to formalise his Accession to India”. Similarly, Zutshi (2003) states that the matter of accession before or after India’s direct military intervention (on 27 October 1947) is unclear and only mires the Kashmir question in the political wrangles of these nation-states. With the uprisings in Poonch and Gilgit, the Maharaja started to lose power to the Indian Army and to Abdullah and gravitated towards India. (Rai 2007) Maharaja’s foe Abdullah was hastily sworn as the head of the NC-dominated administration on 31 October – a condition put forth by Nehru if India was to send her army to push back the “tribal invaders” of North-West Frontier Province. By March 1948, the Maharaja became a constitutional head and Abdullah the Prime Minister (Snedden 2012).

Conclusion
Political problems of present-day Kashmir are not only a culmination of several regimes playing a key role in shaping the identity and demands of the people, but they are also a product of the final phase of Kashmir’s history, manipulation by India and the role of the Maharaja. The issue of Kashmir’s alleged accession and merger to India is a controversial aspect as several researchers have indicated in their work spanning over several years. The alleged accession was a process in which power shifted to the Indian and later, because of the United Nations, to the Pakistani state. Role of India in this transfer of power clearly reveals the steps taken by the state to hold on to the territory of Kashmir without the consent of its people and by relegating “power” to “local leaders” who were manipulated, coerced and co-opted by the establishment. The roles of the states of India and Pakistan and also that of the United Nations will unravel the subversions and the complications of the conflict in Kashmir in the following chapter.

Bibliography
Ali T, Bhatt H, Chatterjee A, Khatun H, Mishra P, Roy A. (2011) ‘Kashmir: The Case for Freedom’, Verso, London, UK

Anderson P, (Volume 34 no 15, 2 August, 2012) ‘After Nehru’, London Review of Books, UK

Lamb A. (1997) ‘Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute 1947-1948’, Roxford Books, Hertingfordbury, UK

Bamzai P. (2007) ‘Culture and Political History of Kashmir’, Gulshan Publishers, Srinagar, Kashmir

Bazaz P. (2002) ‘Inside Kashmir’, Gulshan Publishers, Srinagar, Kashmir

Khan I. (1997) ‘Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of the Rishis (15th to 18th Century’, Manohar Publishers & Distributers, New Delhi, India

Khan M. (2005) ‘The History of Medieval Kashmir’, Gulshan Publishers, Srinagar, Kashmir

Schofield V. (2000) ‘Kashmir in conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War’, I B Tauris Publishers, New York, USA

Snedden C. (2012) ‘Kashmir The Unwritten History’, HarperCollins Publishers, Uttar Pradesh, India

Rai M. (2004) ‘Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir: Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects’, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, India

Zutshi C. (2003) ‘Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir’, Permanent Black, Delhi, India

Meghalaya’s uranium exploration problem

1 Forwardman Nongrem, president of Khasi Student’s Union, South West Khasi Hills District, points to the cracks in one of the tailing ponds which holds 650 tonnes of uranium mining waste from the 1990s, in the remote village of Mawthabah in South West Khasi Hills, in the Northeastern state of Meghalaya, India.

2 Mining waste has seeped into the ground through cracks in the underground tailing pond, contaminating the groundwater and leading to deaths of cattle, dogs and fish in the area. Foul smelling puddles such as these are seen in depressed areas around the tailing ponds in Mawthabah.

3 Spility Lyngdoh (85) lives with her clan in Domiasiat village, which lies on a hill adjoining Mawthabah where the uranium mining waste is stored. Since the 1980s, Spility has resisted offers to mine for uranium from the central government’s Atomic Minerals Division and has turned down enormous amounts of money. She has lost many of her relatives to “mysterious illnesses” after the government “explored” her hill for uranium in the 1980s and 1990s.

4 Spility Lyngdoh’s son-in-law Norman Donald Syiem recalls how Spility was devastated when her second son died of throat cancer in 2014 at the age of 54. Domiasiat which has only seven households has witnessed abnormal deaths of five people, many others will illnesses that indicate typical symptoms of uranium exposure, including babies born without ears. Norman himself suffers from stomach problems and says many have died without diagnosis.
5 A drilling machine at the uranium mining exploration site at Nongjri, a village not far from the Bangladeshi border. A mining company hired by the central government is drilling holes in the hill, exploring for uranium. Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council, the governing body for indigenous affairs in Meghalaya, has clearly stated that no No-Objection Certificate was issue for exploration or mining of uranium in the region.

6 Soil samples extracted every 3 meters will be sent to the laboratory for processing and extraction of uranium from the Nongjri site. Exposed soil samples pose a health risk to workers and those residing in villages around the excavation site. This uranium will be used for military purposes.

7 A recently cemented borehole at the Nongjri mining site. Meghalaya accounts for 16% of India’s uranium reserves, according to the Atomic minerals Department. Almost 131 km of drilling has been completed in Nongjri, and there are 1800 boreholes have resulted in procuring 16000 tonnes of uranium ore in this “exploratory” phase.

8 Mining waste lies in the open at the Nongjri site.

9 Attendance register for the month of January 2017 shows the number of workers employed in the drilling exercise. Labourers are paid Rs 450 a day and are not provided any safety or precautionary guidelines or equipment.

10 An abandonned Public health Centre lies in Wahkaji, 139 km from Meghalaya’s capital Shillong. The healthcare centre has been lying vacant since 2006. It was given by the government to UCIL when the company was mining for uranium in Domiasiat in the 1990s. The UCIL has since then returned it back to the government.

11 The Ranikor river which has turned from blue to green after mining affluence was dumped. Every monsoon tonnes of dead fish was washed up in the river, locals say. The river that flows from Bangladesh lies next to the Nongjri site.

12 Bluetiful Thongni (8) was born with several disabilities in Nongtynniaw, 112 km from Shillong. His village lies on the other side of the hill from Domiasiat. His father recalls how mining waste was dumped in the village in 1990-1991. The village has 15 teenagers born with genetic abnormalities.

13 Bluetiful Thongni (8) needs constant attention, says his father Borlin Marthang (35). Bluetiful is one of seven children and has been refused a disability certificate like many others in his village by the health department.
14 Kyrshanbor Marthong (23) stands with his mother Earnestina Marthong (42), a farmer and a daily wage labourer. She grows a plant which is used to make brooms and is single-handedly raising her son who is unable to speak. She has four other children. She says she cannot afford to have her son diagnosed and has to take care of him as he cannot be left alone.
 

‘Stop uranium mining, spare our kids’

As a rising nuclear power, India is on a frantic hunt for uranium within. In the remotest parts of Meghalaya province, this pursuit has led to a clash with locals who blame the uranium exploration for never-seen-before illness patterns and the destruction of the environment

Spility Lyngdoh (85) has lost her husband of 67 years just the previous day to a prolonged illness. Her mourning mirrors the mood in her village of Domiasiat, 135 km from Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya – the epicenter of India’s feverish quest for uranium. While the jury is out on how successful that quest has been, the villagers have no doubt about its impact on their health and the environment.

Home not just to a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons but also a skyrocketing demand for power, India has been exploring for uranium in Meghalaya since the 1980s.

In the 1960s, Spility moved to Domiasiat, a tiny village in the South West Khasi Hills, with her husband. Here, she cultivated her land and reared cattle. Soon, her family grew and today her clan occupies seven homes on an idyllic hill. Hard-to-reach areas like Domiasiat are also home to attractive near-surface uranium deposits. Even though no mining has been done in the village, pre-mining activities like survey and exploration, which includes drilling for hundreds of meters into hills have affected the villagers and the environment.

“For years, the government pressurised Spility to sell her land for big money but she always refused,” say Norman Donald Syiem, the village headman and Spility’s son-in-law, as he prepares for the funeral. Many people have taken ill and died since the 1990s, including Spility’s 54-year-old son Pon who succumbed to throat cancer in 2014.

Spility recalls that in 1991, when Nepali labourers from Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL) discovered high-quality uranium in Domiasiat, warned her of the danger. “That’s when I decided not to sell my land. No matter how much money UCIL offered, I never wanted to sell for reasons of health and environment,” she explains. Villagers claim that no medical studies have been conducted there so far.

The Domiasiat uranium deposit, being explored through the Kyelleng-Pyndengsohiong-Mawtahbah Project, was discovered in 1984 and exploration drilling was completed in 1992.

Globally, clinical metal toxicologists have verified the link between the presence of uranium in the body to more than 90 debilitating diseases, including cancers, deformities, stillbirths, decline in sperm count and muscular defects. Studies on other populations exposed to the mineral elsewhere revealed nephrotoxic effects even at low concentrations. It’s worth noting here that the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years.

Norman recalls how the river fish were “diseased” when “uranium was being processed to produce yellow cake”. “Fish were alive but their flesh was spoilt. In our village, we witnessed stillbirths, deformed babies and muscular diseases, seizures, epilepsy and cancer. Many died without diagnosis,” he murmurs.

Norman says Domiasiat had never witnessed such symptoms before UCIL work began. “Even villagers who worked for the Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD) for exploration and research got sick – many people died of diseases we had never seen before. And to think our village has only seven households. People in villages surrounding the hill have suffered similarly.”

Neither the government nor an independent body has conducted a medical study on here. The study is the need of the hour, says Forwardman Nongrem, president of the Khasi Students’ Union (KSU), South West Khasi Hills District. “Taking all this destruction into consideration, we will not allow uranium mining here.”

 

Uranium for nukes

Since India’s uranium imports from Australia and Canada can only be used to generate energy and not to make nuclear weapons, the government is straining to tap local uranium deposits despite the disastrous effects on people in places like Jadugoda in Jharkhand province, where open-cast uranium mining was carried out.

Power generation too is a priority since imports are insufficient and costly. India has 21 operational nuclear power reactors that contribute less than 3% of its energy generation. The government is keen to boost this to 25% by 2050. Several pressurised heavy water reactors are working at half their capacity due to insufficient supply of natural uranium, which is used as fuel. The success of India’s nuclear energy programme depends on the availability of natural uranium.

 

Expert calls for health impact study

Professor MV Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia and member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, believes there is evidence from around the world of the health impact of uranium mining.

“Nuclear establishments typically deny that any observed illness patterns are related to mining and related activities. However, if there is clear evidence of an excess of ill health that could plausibly be related to uranium mining and its processing, the government should order an independent epidemiological study carried out by experts not associated with the nuclear establishment,” says Ramana.

The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), which reports to the Prime Minister’s Office, is responsible for nuclear technology and research. The AMD is one of its units, handing out contracts to private firms for mining ‘strategic minerals’.

 

Exploration continues

Maheshwari Mining Pvt Ltd., one such company based in Kolkata, has been authorised by the AMD to bore holes in Nongjri’s hills and find uranium. Nongjri, just a few kilometres from the Bangladesh border and 146 km from Shillong, is not connected to the nearest town by road. It is a hard-to-reach area, where crime mafias and underground insurgent groups are said to operate.

Shobhan Pujari, supervisor of Maheshwari Mining at the site, says his company was contracted by the AMD and has been operating in Meghalaya since 2007. “We’ve been drilling one hole per month in the hill. Each hole costs us Rs 3 crore and we’ve been sending soil samples from every 3 meters to the AMD for analysis,” he says, pointing to tiny bags of soil lying by drilling machines on the dusty hill. Labour attendance logs reveal that boring began at Nongjri in 2015.

According to the AMD website, “Nearly 131 km of drilling through 1,800 boreholes has resulted in the proving of 16,000 tonnes U3O8 accounting 14% of the country’s total uranium reserve. This includes, 9,500 tones U3O8 at Domiasiat, 5,300 tonnes U3O8 at Wahkyn, 570 tonnes U3O8 at Tyrnai and 760 tonnes U3O8 at Lostoin.” Nongjri is not on the list.

Meghalaya falls within Schedule VI of the Indian Constitution, which rests more rights (including mineral rights) with tribal landowners, which makes approval of the local tribal council mandatory for mining. Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council (KHADC) chief PN Syiem, however, categorically denies issuing a no-objection certificate (NOC) to any company for mining. “The government cannot go against the people’s opinion; we don’t want uranium mining here.”

Locals like Albert Marwein (31) in the adjoining village of Nonghyllam are alarmed. The wine shop owner is concerned not just for his family, but also his village. “Most locals now know that we suffer from bad health because of the uranium exploration; they were not aware of such things 25 years ago. It’s not safe to live here. I have a shop, so I have money to move to Shillong but what about the rest?” Albert asks, removing the mask that covers his nose and mouth.

Bored holes left open in Nongjri pose a health risk along with the dust the drilling generates. Uranium is absorbed in the body by breathing in the dust that is carried over several kilometres by the wind. Uranium is harmful if ingested because it is radioactive and because it can cause renal failure. Studies on plants and animals demonstrate that radiation can induce hereditary effects even in humans. Other maladies linked to it include strokes, heart disease and various respiratory diseases. Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated that the health of people who live close to some nuclear facilities is impacted.

Ioanis Hadshah, a teacher in Nongkulang, details the changes he has observed since drilling began in Nongjri. “Two decades ago, there was flora and fauna and aquatic life in Ranikor river. Now, the blue water has turned green due to mining pollution. Officials have been clearing our forests for miners to live in. Even the private lands of the Hasha clan have been destroyed,” he says, pointing to a dusty mountain.

Recalling the days before mining began, Loanis says: “In half an hour, I would catch plenty of fish in the river. Now, there’s nothing. During the monsoon, we see dead fish floating by. No one cares about the land or the people who are suffering from diseases we never saw earlier.”

The management of effluents from years of “exploration” for uranium has also drawn locals’ ire. Storage of nuclear waste from uranium exploration and processing in tailing ponds in the forest 141 km from Shillong, in Mawthabah, have brought death and disease to cattle and villagers.

Tailings are produced in large quantities in uranium milling because the typical amount of uranium in the ore is about 0.1% or less. “This is a seismically active region with high rainfall, so there are leaks in the cement structures which spread contamination,” laments Forwardman, pointing to several cracks in the concrete structure.

Since radioactive materials emit ionising radiation that is hazardous to health, the dangers of nuclear waste will last as long as the constituents remain radioactive. Exposure to these wastes will remain harmful even as contamination of water sources and seepage of effluents into the ground due to heavy rainfall is likely contributing to the spread of nephrotoxic effects among the population.

 

Officials silent

AMD’s regional director Sandeep Hamilton refused to comment despite being asked repeatedly how the mining had commenced without an NOC from the KHADC. He also refused to comment on the illness patterns observed after the mining, saying his seniors had not authorised him to do so.

 

Human cost

Meanwhile, in Nongtynniaw, just 10 km from Nongjri, 15 differently-abled children gather to collect blankets handed out by the KSU. Among them is Bluetiful Thongni (8), accompanied by his father Borlin Marthang and sister Shinetesful Thongni. Bluetiful suffers from a congenital defect, which Borlin blames on the UCIL dumping mining waste in their village in the 1990s.

“The government refuses to give him a disability certificate. There are many children like him with physical and mental disabilities here. No one has bothered to come and check why this is happening,” says Borlin, a daily wage labourer.

When asked what he’d like to convey to mining officials, an emotional Borlin says: “I’ve spent everything I had on my son – trying to get him medical care 60 km away, commuting by bus to the Nongstoin health centre… But the government is still not giving us a disability certificate. Then they will have to give them to the other kids too and everyone will know something very bad is happening here. I want to ask the UCIL to stop uranium mining in Meghalaya and spare our children.”

As Meghalaya gears up for provincial elections next year, the absence of medical attention – and, more importantly, justice – may well become a hot-button issue.

Legacy of stones

A stone

For every bone broken on your tables.

A stone

For every limb hacked.

A stone

For every unclaimed corpse.

A stone

For all the teenagers raped in your jails.

A stone

For every bullet shot.

A stone

For every journalist bought.

A stone

For all the jailed men.

A stone for breaking every law in the book.

A stone

For maiming our history.

A stone

For the gift of mass graves.

A stone

For our unbreakable spirits.

A stone

For our unquenchable thirst

For freedom.

Women bear the brunt of demonetization in slums

The distress caused by India’s surprise withdrawal of bank notes is intensifying. And it’s the poor who are hurting the most

Fifty-year-old Shahabuddin Nasir Ansari’s stomach rises and falls rhythmically as he draws laboured breaths while seated on the floor of his hut in New Azad Nagar, Bhiwandi. His wife, Hakeemunisa, tries to shut out his distress as she carefully separates the chaff from a pile of wheat on the floor next to him.
Shahabuddin, who has worked in Bhiwandi’s power looms all his life, is suffering from asthma but cannot avail of a doctor as he is out of work. Several power looms in this city – 20 kilometres north-east of India’s financial capital, Mumbai – have shut due to the cash crunch brought on by the withdrawal of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes in India since last November.
Months after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetisation – justifications for it have ranged from reining in unaccounted-for money to curbing terror funding and counterfeiting – the plight of workers in the unorganised sector who reside in slums in and around Mumbai is deteriorating rapidly. In Bhiwandi, Ward No 22, where the Ansaris reside, has a population of 80,000 in 13,000 to 14,000 homes.
Informal employment dominates India’s labour market; more than 90%, or 400 million, are such workers. This astounding ratio is among the highest in the world. With 10 million people migrating to cities and towns annually in search of livelihood, India is also home to the largest rural-urban migration of this century.
Almost 90% of power loom workers in Bhiwandi are from the northern states of Bihar, one of India’s poorest regions, and Uttar Pradesh, which has more people than Brazil. As the profession is caste-based and passed on from generation to generation, they workers have little or no education and thus no alternative means of livelihood.
Hurling a fist of wheat into the pile, an angry Hakeemunisa says: “This is what Modi is telling us – here, take only this much and eat! How are we to live like this? Things have gone from bad to worse. We have been weakened; the country has been weakened.”
On a good day, that is, when the power loom ran all day, Shahabuddin made Rs 100 (roughly $1.5). But since demonetisation, power loom owners who ran undeclared units (to save tax) have shut operations and laid off labourers.
The Ansaris have five children and their eldest, a 20-year-old son, has been missing for weeks. The family has no money for transport and is unable to visit a police station to file a complaint or distribute pamphlets with their son’s photograph and their contact details in the vicinity of their neighbourhood.
Since Shahabuddin has not been paid for a month, the younger children’s school fees are pending. “They will have to stop attending school. How can I pay fees when I have no money? The government says the money I have saved is useless,” murmurs a breathless Shahabuddin, who has lived for 35 years in the congested slum.
He tried to see a doctor a month ago, climbing down at 5 am from the hill on which his shanty sits. “The doctor arrived only at 4 pm and then refused to accept the old Rs 500 note I had. I didn’t get treatment and my health worsened after I climbed the hill to get home again. These days, the doctor has no change so he has shut the clinic.”

No ID = no bank account
Bhiwandi has the largest number of power looms in India, but the workers usually have no identification and are declared ‘illegals’ by the government. As a result, they are unable to open bank accounts to deposit old currency.
Those who do have the paperwork and bank accounts are no better off – they can deposit old notes but cannot get new currency as the government is not sending enough of it to the banks. The poorest are suffering the most.
Even government ration shops don’t have new notes and chemists have stopped returning change, instead offering customers soap, powder and tonics they don’t need, laments Shazia Momin, a senior member of the community. “Families are in extreme distress,” she says.

‘Must our children starve?’
One such family is that of 22-year-old Ramzanbi Ajmal Shah, whose husband too lost his job in a power loom. Ramzanbi, a mother of two, who manages to smile despite the crisis, recounts the beginning of her ordeal when she first ran out of cash:
“I was too embarrassed to ask for more credit from the shopkeeper. I had only Rs 10 left and had to choose between milk for my 11-month-old son or food for the rest of the family.” She bought the milk.
“By late evening, I was starving. I remember thinking I shouldn’t worry; it wasn’t as if I was going to die. I felt God was testing me. I had to feed both my children with that one glass of milk,” says Ramzanbi.
The following day, after working at home all day, Ramzanbi couldn’t bear the hunger anymore. “I was feeling awful,” she says, wiping the sweat from her forehead on a hot afternoon. Her hut has no electricity.
“My husband got a job at a tea stall after the power loom shut. He made Rs 100 to Rs 200 a day. But people don’t have money even for tea, so the owner of the stall shut shop and my husband was unemployed once again,” says Ramzanbi, who spends Rs 100 every day on 100 litres of water for drinking and cleaning. Against her husband’s wishes, she borrowed Rs 100 from her mother who too was in dire straits.
As we step out of Ramzanbi’s house, an angry middle-aged woman stops us to ask if the rich are suffering. A mother of a son and four daughters, Noorjehan Ansari (55) is unable to control her anger: “I want to ask the prime minister what he is doing to the poor. What are we supposed to do? Our jobs are gone and we can’t access to food or medicines. We can starve but what about our children?”
The pain in the sprawling slum is intensified by fear of the law as most people don’t have any identification papers, explains Vinay Tatke, a project coordinator with Saryajani Mahila Utkarsha Sanstha, a non-profit that works for the upliftment of women’s and children’s health in the area.
Tatke says that daily life has been thrown out of gear. “The slum’s residents are migrants, so shopkeepers don’t sell them groceries on credit. They think the residents will leave without paying him,” he explains. Many families have, in fact, left for their villages as they can no longer pay the rent of Rs 1,000 per shanty.
Rows of locked homes testify to Vinay’s assessment. Even social workers like Shazia Shaikh, who has been working in the slum for years, is pessimistic about the future. “People are getting desperate. They sleep outside the bank so that they can reach the counter by noon the next day. A few days ago, there was a stampede at an ATM. There’s little we can do except guide them to the agency that issues Aadhar cards (national ID/social security cards) and then to banks for new accounts.” A Reserve Bank Of India’s report reveals that 41% of India remains unbanked.
There are people like Saiba Nissar (22) who can’t afford to spend Rs 200 on an Aadhar card that is needed top open a bank account. With a family of 10, Saiba needs at least Rs 200 a day. “I sold my phone for Rs 1,000 and spent that money on food for my parents, brothers and sisters-in-law,” she says.
Saiba, who suffers from malnutrition, is two months pregnant. Showing prescriptions for vitamins, she whispers hoarsely that she lost two children during childbirth. “The doctor says my heath does not permit me to have children. I had to have an abortion but couldn’t afford it. My husband lost his job and there’s no money,” she says, washing clothes at the door of her house.
It’s the same story in Mumbai’s slums. M-East, which has the lowest human development index of the city’s 24 municipal wards, lies next to the city’s largest dumping ground and is home to 8,07,720 residents.
In Bhim Nagar, Cheetah Camp, Mankhurd, Rupali Kamble’s (29) family of four is finding it impossible to cope. A matron, Rupali had to get her husband’s infected leg treated at the hospital she works at. “I had two Rs 500 notes and his treatment cost Rs 800, but due to paucity of cash the hospital did not return the balance,” she says. Despite making Rs 7,000 a month from 12-hour shifts, Rupali is unable to run her household. “We are poor people. We cannot afford to lose change like this. How long will this continue?” she asks.
Rupali says it’s impossible to get change for the Rs 2,000 denomination note that the government recently issued. “I can’t buy vegetables or milk with a Rs 2,000 note as no vendor has change,” she complains. With two daughters, studying in the fifth and sixth grades respectively, Rupali and her husband Surendra don’t know how they will pay their school fees with old notes.
“We will have to exchange the old notes for a commission eventually,” Surendra says. “How come it’s the poor who are suffering? I have not seen any businessmen on TV complaining. Where are they exchanging their bundles of cash?” he asks.

Re-presenting Kashmir in India: Who speaks on behalf of whom and why

Brutal images of blinded children on social media have propelled Indian left liberals in condemning India’s “actions” in the internationally disputed region. Without challenging the state narrative on Kashmir being India’s “atoot ang”, bleeding heart pseudo-lefties have made various appeals to the Indian state through petitions and drafts from Delhi to Amritsar…. don’t worry, I won’t say from “Kashmir to Kanyakumari”.

Indians who have visited Kashmir on fact-finding missions have suddenly been appalled by the government’s brutal methods of repression over the last few months and have concluded that Kashmiris, who have been tormented by the security forces “since 2008”, want to live a “normal” life. The recent visibility of violence (thanks to Kashmiris posting accounts on social media) has encouraged these Indians to ask the government to immediately take for various measures to alleviate Kashmir’s suffering – from the release of the PSA detainees who have been jailed this year to repealing AFSPA. Little do they know that PSA has been used in Kashmir for several years. Sp why only ask for release of this year’s detainees, and why not all political prisoners jailed since 1990?
This is where the problem of representation of Kashmir’s demands arises. What have the Kashmiris been screaming on the streets since 1947? That they want AZADI. Not Kanhaiya wali azadi. They want azadi from India, a country that has been militarily occupying them since 1947.

Kashmiris are not asking the government to ban pellets because they’re blinding hundreds of children; or send them doctors to fix their eyes. Nor are they asking the government to drain all the rivers where youth fleeing security forces have deliberately been “drowned” by troops firing from both sides of the river banks, year after year; Kashmiris are not asking the government to ban soldiers from conducting night raids on the campuses of their university or in their homes or asking for a ban on the use of electricity that thousands of unconstitutionally detained boys and men have been subjected to during incarceration since the 1990s.

Kashmiris are not asking for ANY of this. Kashmiris simply want India, Pakistan and China to vacate their land. The Indian Constitution is not important to them like it is to their chief minister who has her “heeling touch’ and neither are India’s unconstitutional laws like PSA, AFSPA, DDA, etc.

So why should people from India assume that Kashmiris want pellet guns banned but not AK 47, teargas, mortars, mines and Insas – all weapons that have claimed tens of thousands of lives of men, women and children over 69 years? Why are Indians not floating petitions for urgent international investigations of the 2,600 mass graves of North Kashmir and a few thousand mass graves from the South?

Kashmir’s history in India and Kashmir has been falsified and caricaturized to absolve the occupying Indians of their war crimes over the decades. This obfuscation of history has it roots in power. Foucault’s model of power and knowledge is derived from Nietzschean philosophy. It explains very clearly that knowledge is used by agencies wielding power, which have at their disposal the established language structures through which all forms of imposition on society are made. This powerful minority decides what is ‘truth’: it regiments and systematically regulates the subject to suit its own goals by operating through a discourse. Foucault believes that a group of people can have the power to create a world-view if they have the knowledge. He says that ‘the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information’. In other words, both are ‘integrated with one another’. Power constructs and dominates at the same time as it aims to know. Thus knowledge engenders power, which in turn cannot be exercised without knowledge. Such use of power and knowledge generates a discourse that creates beliefs and defines all that is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. This notion, when applied to institutions and disciplines, shows how they work in unison in order to regulate behaviour through the strategies of power.

Gramsci’s idea of hegemony links the spontaneous consent of the masses to the maintenance of power by a minority class through the use of persuasion and collaboration. This consent is caused by the aura and prestige of the dominant fundamental group which constantly manipulates its social and political strategies to maintain the acceptance of class society which otherwise should turn revolutionary in response to such hegemony.

Edward Said links this hegemony to formation of dominant narratives when he says, “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism and constitutes one of the main connections between them.” Kashmir has found this power through powerful writings by men and women who feel compelled to tell their stories of life in a militarised hellhole, which India calls its “crown” or “paradise”.

And since power is everywhere, Foucault felt it was probably better to concentrate on the local micro-physics of power that surrounded the individual. In Kashmir’s case, those who have lived through its bloody history should once again for the benefit of Indian liberals (who don’t budge on inch for Indian children who are dying of malnutrition in their own backyards), reiterate their age-old claims of AZADI. Kashmiris must bring the Indians up to date about how they have, over time, witnessed the complicities between the post-colonial security state and the intellectual national elite.

After all these years, why should the colonisers, who ask for concessions within the framework on the Indian Constitution, speak on behalf of the colonised who have endured its effects?

A stone-pelter’s tale

I spent 2010 in Kashmir where the police and security forces shot and killed 124 unarmed men, women and children. Some of them had demonstrated on the streets against the Indian rule in Kashmir. Notices for central Kashmir’s “most wanted persons” went up around town, featuring a string of young men, all wanted for stone pelting. Irshad (name changed) was one of them.

Early one summer morning in 2010, I walked into Irshad’s neighbourhood. Interrupting a cricket game on a curfewed street, I asked a few children about this most wanted criminal. Pointing to a hill, they yelled for him. Trudging down a slope was a boy who pulled up the neck of his shirt to cover his face. It was Irshad. At 14, he already knew the implications a camera could have on his life.

Whatever I had expected Irshad to be, it wasn’t this. I asked him if we could talk in some quiet place and he led me home. Why had a boy as young as him thrown stones at the police, when he knew the danger it entailed?

“Why do they (security forces) commit atrocities? Why do they hit us and misbehave with women?” he asked me, in his modest home. I had no answer.

Irshad’s journey to the “most wanted list” started on a winter afternoon earlier that year, when he was on the street with his older friend, Yakoob. They were playing carom when suddenly out of nowhere, Yakoob was shot in the abdomen. It wasn’t uncommon in those days for security forces to start open fire on the street during protests. But there were no protests around.

Irshad told me he removed his shirt to cover Yakoob’s stomach wound but he was losing too much blood. Yakoob who used to take Irshad for rides on his scooter and played cricket, died en route to the hospital. “He died. We didn’t make it to the hospital,” he recalled. That is when Irshad took to pelting stones. The personal had become political.

After Yakoob’s death, Irshad had a hard time eating or sleeping. He still carried the bullet cartridge from when Yakoob was shot. Irshad held out the cartridge to me. “This is what killed him”, he said. I took it and rolled it between my fingers. I still have it to this day.

Irshad’s father saw the cartridge in my hand. “Take it,” he said. “As it is, they are after him for stone pelting. If the police find this on him, it could be much worse.”

Irshad’s father was 50 years old. He knew only too well who would win the battle between a stone and a bullet. He had been dragged with his 70-year-old father during a police raid, during the hunt for Irshad. Previoulsy, the police raided his house, assaulted and detained Irshad’s father and grandfather, while Irshad sped away on a bicycle, right under their noses. The police had no idea that the 14-year-old who cycled past them was the one they were looking for.

I left Irshad’s house, shaken. When I went to Kashmir in 2015, I wanted to meet Irshad to see how he and his family were doing. I’d always wondered what became of him; I’d always looked for his name in the list of the dead that Kashmir generates on a daily basis. That tends to happen to all those who have friends in the Valley.

In 2015, I tracked Irshad down on the phone and asked him to meet me. He sounded different, older and evasive. After several promises of meeting me, Irshad didn’t show up. I ended up waiting for hours at our appointed time and place — twice — but there was no sign of him. I had no choice but to give up this idea of meeting a kid who clearly didn’t want to show up.

Days later, Irshad’s name cropped up in an interview on camera with another protestor. While interviewing him about torture, he recalled how during the same period, his friend, a very young stone-pelter, was sexually tortured with knitting needles while in jail.

I confirmed Irshad’s identity by asking him where he hailed from. There was no mistake. This was my friend Irshad, all right. The boy I was interviewing went on to reveal details of what happened to Irshad. I could only cover my mouth in horror as the camera rolled.

The boy recollected how he had to accompany Irshad to the toilet (as he was unable to walk on his own) where he would howl in pain because of the damage done to his body by the female officers of the Central Reserve Police Force. “I would hold him in my arms, he couldn’t even sit in the toilet,” he said. “Finally, the authorities hooked him on to drugs in jail. They’ve done this to a lot of underage boys. Because of the pain, it’s easier to get them addicted,” he alleged.

Suddenly it all made sense to me. His desire to not meet me, his promise of showing up and then disappearing. His furtive ways. Irshad was now a 19-year-old drug addict.

On the flight back home, I deeply regretted not having tried harder to meet him. Back home, rolling the spent cartridge between my fingers, I wondered if Irshad would meet Yakoob’s fate or if drugs would kill him.

Staring into the Abyss

The dizzying epidemic of drugs in the backdrop of militarization and violence in Kashmir

Inam Rashid (name changed) was among the many unfortunate ones who was picked up and interrogated by state agencies on the pretext of having links with militancy. For five days he was put under extreme interrogation and was subsequently released without being charged. The mental scars of this ordeal refused to heal. As if this was not enough this 35-year-old lost 12 members of his family to the massive earthquake of 2005 in Uri. This was more than Rashid could bear. He sought a grim refuge in multiple addictive substances “to erase the memories of his extended sufferings”. He turned to cannabis, nicotine, opium, ethanol and benzodiazepine in search of relief.

Another addict explains the reason for drug abuse saying that he felt no peace, only blood in the air. This resonates with a common perception that the thousands who died violent deaths in Kashmir weigh heavy in the air in Kashmir.

A young addict recalls the desperation of his friend, who during a strike in the city, was forced to pay Rs 5,000 for three bottles of Codeine. “He was in such a bad state. He needed it badly. So he shelled out the money and bought the bottles on the black market.”

A patient’s mother who is waiting for the doctors to discharge her son from a de-addiction center says, “Why is the drug problem of this magnitude? Why are the authorities not doing anything about it?”

With hardly any mental healthcare facilities or de-addiction centres in the Valley, Kashmiris have been left to fend for themselves in their attempt to deal with the emotional scars which have resulted from the brutal effects of a conflict raging for a little over two decades now.

This 26th June, the Valley has little to show for, as the world observes International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Several studies carried out on addiction in the Valley reveal a strong correlation between conflict and drug abuse. The studies show that in Kashmir, drugs are not used for recreational purposes but as a coping mechanism to deal with the stresses of conflict in the most militarized region in the world.

The stark contrast
Apart from the immediate damage to drug abusers, the medium and long term corrosion to the very fabric of the society by the use of prescription drugs and banned narcotics has been well established in many other places in the world.

Reliable statistics on addiction are notoriously difficult to come by in Kashmir. According to a study conducted by the United Nations Drug Control Programme in 2008, there are 60,000 substance abusers in the Valley. Dr Mushtaq Margoob’s book, Menace of Drug Abuse in Kashmir, published in 2008, states that the Valley has 2.11 lakh drug abusers. The difference in figures can be attributed either to the stigma around addiction or other factors, for instance addicts themselves tend to exaggerate, while their families try to downplay the problem. Any figures therefore should not be treated as absolutely conclusive but an approximation.

In a study done at the Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital (GPDH) in 2002, doctors compared drug trends from 1980-88 and 2002 in patients – before the armed conflict erupted and after. The figures not only show a shocking state of affairs, but also indicate how deep-rooted the scourge of addiction is. An alarming increase of over sixty percent was reported in the use of opioid-based preparations (9.5 per cent to 73.61 per cent), and an over twenty five percent increase in multiple substance-abuse (15.8 per cent to 41.6 per cent), from the 1980s to 2002.

In another study conducted by GPDH, with help from the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2006, out of the 561 substance-use disorder patients, it was discovered that 63.85 per cent of patients had either experienced or witnessed multiple traumatic events, qualifying for the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) compared to 36.14 per cent patients who had exposure to one traumatic event.

This startling connection establishes the link between violence, PTSD and recourse to addiction, where PTSD is a primary disorder and subsequent substances abuse is used to self medicate symptoms of the disorder.

Currently, in Kashmir, 80 per cent drug-users comprise those who consume prescription medicines. Easy availability of pharmaceuticals across the counter has contributed to the enormity of the malady. Drugs containing opioids, such as Corex and Codeine are consumed by most addicts. Benzodiazepines like Diazepam, Alprazolam and cannabis derivatives like hashish, marijuana and alcohol are also responsible for the steady surge in addiction. For many school students including girls, items of common use like polish and glue double up as inhalants. The use of nicotine, Iodex, diluters, sleeping pills and inhalants like boot polish, fevicol and ink-removers has been observed in female addicts who might not have the means to obtain other not-so-easily available substances.

Toothless law or complacent state?

In Kashmir the problem has metastasized for several reasons. To begin with, the role of the drug monitoring agencies in controlling the menace in the Valley is zero, emphasizes a doctor. In fact, the law chooses to look the other way. Any person booked under the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act can be released on bail; whereas, the act is non-bailable in any other state. The police are not authorised to act against the chemists under the NDPS Act, for misuse of prescription drugs.

It is difficult to break the nexus between the chemists, the peddlers and the police, admits a high-ranking police official. As per his estimation, Sopore and South Kashmir are the worst hit in the Valley. “There is a problem of denial in Kashmir. As long as that persists, it is impossible to resolve this problem.” The official adds, a lack of awareness compounds the problem. In rural Kashmir, families are unaware if a drug is being abused in their midst. “The womenfolk don’t know that the man of the house is an addict. They think he’s taking medicines. In that case, how can they help him?” he asks.

He also feels the current laws are inadequate, “The laws that exist are not implemented.”

The past
A study titled, “Deviance among adolescents” conducted on 300 boys and 400 girls in 2005, reveals that youth are the most vulnerable to drugs. College students in Srinagar and Kupwara, both male and female, were observed using drugs and alcohol.

The objective of the study was to research deviant behaviour of adolescent boys and girls under conditions of armed conflict. The report states that a total of 20 per cent boys and 14 per cent girls were involved in drug abuse, and 34 per cent cases were at the risk of potential suicide. Interestingly, boys and girls from middle class families constituted 70 per cent of drug-abusers.

“A big reason of students taking to drugs and alcoholism is poor performance in academics, insecurities and peer pressure,” said Professor A G Madhosh, who was the lead researcher for the study. He says, “By 2010, there has been a 15 per cent rise in addiction.”

Operation Drug ‘Em All?
The connection between the intensity of internal conflict and prevalence of drug abuse is not incidental. The conflict in the North East of India, especially Manipur, saw a marked decline and success in containment by the state in the past decade or so. This was in great measure due to several reasons – one of them being the easy availability of drugs during this period and its direct link to intravenous drug use and HIV, which swept through the entire population like a raging wildfire, consuming an entire generation of young people with it. Some 1,00,000 people live with HIV and AIDS in the North East, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) states.

Kashmir too, is on its way if the situation remains unchecked.

Four studies have been commissioned by the Government of India, undertaken by specialists here, titled “Women and children under armed conflict”. Professor Madhosh says the studies are complete but he is unable to comment on them any further. But sources related to the study revealed, “In highly militarised regions of North Kashmir such as Kupwara, we found the highest concentration of addicts. It is an alarming situation as there is free access to drugs and alcohol due to army presence.”

A doctor from Srinagar confirmed this connection after he came across a patient who used to source his prescription drugs from an army camp. Not only have the armed forces encouraged addiction openly, but in instances they have also come down heavily on locals who have resisted this.

A journalist remembers an incident in North Kashmir where after several fruitless attempts to get the police to act upon a group of addicts who would routinely gather at a bus terminal, some youth and elders of the village joined hands to deal with the nuisance. Violence ensued after the group of addicts refused to budge from the spot. The following day, the same villagers were assaulted by personnel from a local army camp, recalls the source. “The villagers were assaulted brutally, and were categorically warned by the army to leave the addicts alone.” A police official agrees to the fact that the army was involved and elaborates on how it all started and why. He recalls how in the nineties, drugs were used by the security forces as a strategy in seeking information on militants.

“In the 1990s, when militancy was at its peak, the security forces used to exchange drugs for information provided by ex-militants. The situation is different now – militancy is almost eliminated, but the drug issue has become worse with the years.”

The present: Scale of the epidemic
Dr Arshad Hussain, a psychiatrist at the GPDH, recounts that historically, Kashmir used to be a low drug addiction zone. In the 1980s, when the entire sub-continent, a part of Golden Triangle, was witnessing an opioid boom, Kashmir had resisted. Not anymore.

The situation has taken a drastic turn. Just the statistics are alarming, as per the GPDH figures – 90 per cent abusers belong to the age group of 17-35, with a lifetime prevalence of drug addiction. This is a very conservative estimate, experts say. Many deaths have been reported in young men because of opioid use. Epidemiologists categorically state that this indicates an ongoing epidemic. Dr Abdul Maajid of the Psychiatry Department of the SKIMS Medical College, Bemina, informs about the deaths of three drug abusers in rural areas in North Kashmir in the last three months alone – two persons, who died of drug over-dose, and one died in a road accident because he was high on drugs.

What is more alarming is the fact that the first time user belongs to the much younger age group. Steadily, Kashmir is losing the most productive age group to drugs, with manifold repercussions on social and occupational function, affecting both society and economy.

The social and economic implications of substance abuse are worrisome. Increased absenteeism and deterioration in quality and quantity of work output are also witnessed in substance abuse cases. These youngsters who should be at the prime of their abilities become dysfunctional entities within society in the long term.

The effects of drug abuse are long-term and limitless, as they percolate through all the aspects of life. Dr Arshid Hussain says, “There is an increase in the crime rate, road accidents, suicides and suicidal attempts, deaths due to overdose, psychiatric disorders and high cost on general health issues due to chronic drug abuse like liver disorders, gastritis, accidental injuries and an increased risk for HIV infections due to Intravenous Drug Use (IDU).”

Not to mention the toll it takes on a family. The emotional trauma, shame, and grief resulting from abuse and the frequent threat of violence and subsequent separation cause irreparable damage to the family structure. Addiction impacts children’s lives too, often leaving them to bear its consequences till late adulthood.

‘Lost: one generation to gun, next to drugs’
A study by the Sociology Department of Kashmir University reveals that 35 per cent of youth between 15 to 25 years of age have taken to drugs. Sociologist Dr B A Dabla says, “We lost one generation to the gun and we are going to lose the next to drugs.” The number of girls involved is also high, even school girls are addicts, he adds. The solution, explains Dr Dabla, lies in providing solid economic, religious and psychological remedies.

There have been efforts towards this, in the year 2004 the Department of Psychiatry of Government Medical College conducted awareness and intervention programmes in Srinagar, Anantnag and Baramulla. A record number of 2,500 patients were identified and a treatment plan was formulated. Many underwent detoxification and a lesser number continued treatment because of the absence of proper de-addiction facilities.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian aid organisation also works to address this burgeoning situation in the Valley. MSF tries to help clients through weekly counseling sessions. A team member informs that awareness is a big part of trying to form a solution, “Psycho-educating them and their families about the problem, the nature of the drug-disorder, the necessary treatment and on the manner in which to deal with the person is a very important part of this work.”

In Kashmir’s case, he adds, “The emphasis should be laid on judicious and appropriate prescription of psychotropic drugs. For example, prescription of benzodiazepines and the duration they should be prescribed for.”

Obstacles: Stigma and poor rehab facilities
The Department of Psychiatry is treating at least 2,000 patients a year with drug related problems. Experts say that 90 per cent of patients are between 17 to 35 years of age. Almost all of them were abusing one of the following drugs – opioids, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids and solvents. In a departure from standard practice, these patients are being treated along side with mentally-ill patients with no separate OPD or IPD or rehabilitation facilities because of lack of professional staff.

The youngest victim, in Srinagar’s Police Control Room’s seven-bed de-addiction facility in Batamaloo, was a 13-year-old heroin addict. Despite the social stigma attached to being treated by the police, this facility sees two to three fresh cases a day, doctors say. “If this centre was located outside these premises, we’d get thousands of cases,” opines a doctor. After grappling with the difficulty of talking patients into getting treatment, the families bring them to the centre, only to have the doctors turn them away for lack of beds.

“So many patients come from faraway villages, but we can’t treat them as we lack the infrastructure in dealing with such huge numbers. It’s heartbreaking but we have no choice,” explains a doctor. The centre currently has 28 patients on its waiting list from different parts of the Valley. Three patients died after they were turned away due to unavailability of beds. A psychiatrist states: “Two patients died of over-dose and one committed suicide.” Explaining this, Dr Arshid Hussain says that the addicts have a high dependence level on prescription drugs that is facilitated by easy availability.

Tip of the ice-berg
This is only the tip of the ice-berg. Dr Hussain adds that out of the addiction cases that are reported at the hospital, school-going children comprise 15 to 20 per cent of that population; and of this two to three per cent are those who abuse solvents like polish and glue. He says it all started in the nineties with the population turning to drugs like Corex cough syrup, injectable Pentazocine, Benzodiazepines and Spasmo Proxyvon. The result of the damage done then is surfacing now.

Experts say that the Kashmir situation is quite different from any other part of the world. Here, addicts avoid alcohol due to religious reasons and also because it is traceable (it has a strong smell); injectables also leave marks, so they stick to benzodiazepines, codeine phosphate and opiates, which are easily available and can only be traced during the middle and the severe phases of addiction.

Dr Wiqar Bashir of the Batamaloo Drug De-addiction Centre (DDC) blames the gravity of the situation on agencies that monitor drug control, “Almost 50 per cent of medical shops in the Valley are unlicensed.” Easy availability of the drugs is a huge contributing factor to addiction, he believes.

Dr Bashir has also noticed similarities in the cases that he has treated – a close-knit relationship exists between domestic violence, children from broken homes and drug addiction. “It leads to destruction in all areas of life.”

Sources in the peddling business reveal that the valley consumes 6000 bottles of Codeine per day, and out of this Sopore alone consumes over 3,000 bottles. “If you visit the Degree College in Sopore, you will find that 80 per cent of the boys are on Codeine,” say ex-addicts who shared this information with doctors. The foregoing scenario shows clearly that the situation is turning for the worse and is deteriorating at a rapid pace. If a large-scale intervention is not initiated by the state at multiple levels, Kashmir will continue to sink in an abyss.

Dr Bashir explains the extent of deterioration, “Three years ago, initiation age for addicts was 16 years, now it is 11 to 12 years. In Kashmir, drugs are used as a coping mechanism for stress and depression.” Almost 50 to 75 per cent addicts, doctors at the DAC have found, use drugs to overcome depression, PTSD and anxiety. The DDC has been getting telephonic queries from girls who are addicted to sleeping pills. “We cannot admit them here as we don’t have a female ward,” Dr Bashir admits. Expansion plans are underway at the Batamaloo facility, but they do not encompass a separate ward for females.

Social worker Yasir Zahgeer who has been helping addicts recover for the last eight years, shares his insight on the causes of the sky-rocketing levels of abuse. He reveals that almost 50 per cent of drug abuse cases he has come across are directly related to violence. “Patients who are unable to deal with the after effects of torture and violence, those who have been witness to blasts and shoot-outs finally seek refuge in drugs.”

Due to the lucrative nature of drug peddling, he adds, locals hoard these medicines and sell them at higher prices to the addicts.

According to him, increasing the number of doctors is not the answer to this problem which is spiraling out of control. Even if the existing de-addiction facilities are expanded, there will be a shortage of counselors who are a crucial input in preventing relapse. Zahgeer explains, “Initially, when the addict is admitted to our centre, doctors play 70 per cent of the role until the withdrawal symptoms disappear, and the counselors play 30 per cent of role in the first week. After that, the ratio is reversed. We need counselors in the long-term to teach them how to resist going back to drugs and to develop new techniques in coping with everyday stress factors.”

Future tense: Genotype altered
Unless there are immediate measures taken from all quarters of society, and a long term effort is made to re-integrate this population into the mainstream, this youth of Kashmir will pass on this disease to their next generation, warns Dr Maajid.

“It is scientifically proven that chronic stress alters the genotype of the individual. Children will imbibe the behaviour of the parents if they are suffering from PTSD. Stress will lead to drug abuse. The next generation will be genetically pre-disposed to using drugs and this will exacerbate the problem.”

Instead of alienating addicts, or “hanging them from Lal Chowk”, as a community leader puts it, the need of the hour is that society supports him or her through de-toxification and counseling thereafter. Societal and familial support can play a major role in the recovery of the individual. They also must ensure that they exert pressure on the authorities to crack down on suppliers, and expose the entrenched nexus that protects drug peddlers.

What people need to understand about why addicts resist treatment?

The addict will be apprehensive to seek treatment

He/she is afraid of withdrawal symptoms

He/she doesn’t know about the treatment in detail

Lack of awareness about how he can be helped

Kashmir’s unique case

The drug addiction scene in Kashmir is different from the rest of country, as was concluded in multiple studies.

Majority of the drug addicts in Kashmir have resorted to drug abuse as a coping mechanism for negative emotional states, as mental trauma, witnessing violence and sociopolitical uncertainty
Majority of the drugs abused are medicinal opioids and prescription anxiolytics, contrary to the national scenario
Free availability of drugs (prescription or otherwise) is a major reason behind abuse/ spread of abuse of drugs

‘Our hearts are filled with fire’

My name is Khalid (name changed) and I’m 26 years old. I’m head the Sangbaz (Stone-pelters) unit in my area in Srinagar. I have been picked up by the police and have also been jailed for stone-pelting. Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) had a signature drive that I was involved in for the cause to free Kashmir – make it an independent Kashmir. We had a school union back then and we campaigned against the use of drugs then. In 2007, I was picked up for the first time when I was in the tenth grade and taken to Kothi Baugh police station for interrogation for five days, and later, released on bail. In 2008, the revolution had started.

In 2008, I was picked up again and taken to Cargo (a notorious interrogation/torture chamber used by the police and other security forces). There, they talk to you normally about your background and ideology. Then the mental torture started. There, they accused us for fighting for independence for Kashmir for money. I denied this, as it was untrue. They had a room called Upper Town. It’s a big, black hall. I was taken there with two other boys. They made us sit on chairs and hit us with their hands. Then they told us to confess on camera for TV that we get paid to throw stones on India’s security forces. When we refused they forced us to drink too much water. You can’t imagine how much water we drank. I could feel the water come right up to my esophagus. After that they make you lie down and use the roller on you. Then automatically you throw up the water.

After that they made me lie on a wet mattress and gave me electric currents. I passed out for two hours. Then officials from Counter-insurgency Kashmir (CIK) visited me and asked why I was pelting stones, I told them the truth but they didn’t seem convinced. They told an SP from Cargo to give me the third degree.

They tied my hands at the back and hung me for six hours each for three days continuously. They I was taken for treatment to the Police Control Room where there was a lady doctor who said I needed treatment from a proper hospital. But the police refused. They brought me back to Cargo and kept me there for eight days. After that, I was passed on to CIK’s custody.

When I was taken there, I saw 12 more boys like me. CIK’s torture is different. They put me in a tiny, dark cell with four others. You can neither stand in there nor lie down or see anyone. They give you very less water and you can do whatever you want with it. They kept me there for eight days. We hadn’t even washed our mouths for all that time.

When they let us out they threw water on us and told us to use soap. When we lathered ourselves on our heads and bodies, they shut off the water and told us to wear clothes. Then we were sent to the cell again for two days. Then we were taken out and allowed to bathe, after which we were sent to our respective police stations. Till then my family had no idea where I had been. The police charged us under Public Safety Act (PSA). They didn’t even do the mandatory medical tests on us. I was in bad shape.

Then I was in jail in Kot Bhalwal in Jammu. They had a DSP there called Rajani saw my condition and said she couldn’t keep me there. She made some calls. She tried to talk to me and said to give in writing that I would quit stone-pelting so she could give me access to normal facilities in jail or I would continue to be a stone-pelter and be denied of all facilities. I refused. After consulting other boys, I told her I would give up my struggle if she gave me in writing that the Indian government stopped shooting in our streets from today. I was sent to my barracks. Three months later, the court quashed my PSA.

The CIK people picked up the boys whose PSAs were quashed as soon as they stepped out of jail. I was anticipating this, but my friends bundled me in a car and helped me escape. During 2009 and 2010 when the civil disobedience movement started here and mass protests with men, women and children occurred every day, I was underground. I tried to appear for my XII grade exams but the police were looking for me in Srinagar.

I saw a Scorpio follow me. Suddenly, I was blindfolded and taken by some people. Later, I discovered it was the police and I was in an army camp in South Kashmir. A CIK SP took my phone and asked for my Facebook password. He went through my messages and sent a message to a friend. So my friend called me. He picked up the phone and talked to her. Then he called all my friends. He accused me of having links with militants of South Kashmir. He showed me a picture of me burning a vehicle and threatened me, prodding me to be an informer for him and give him names of stone-pelters. He told me how they broke the Punjab movement by giving drugs to all the freedom fighters who asked for Khalistan and that the same would happen to Kashmir. They slapped another PSA on me and took me to a jail in Udhampur. I spent three months there until the PSA was quashed.

I’ve witnessed sexual torture in jail. They haven’t spared a single boy in jail. No one talks about this. When you are beaten for ten minutes, you become immune. But that’s not the case with sexual torture. They’ve filled our hearts with fire. Now boys want revenge because of this torture. You can’t forget it. Teenagers can’t even talk about it.

I’ve seen children who have had knitting needles inserted in their anus by female CRPF personnel. This boy used to scream and cry while going to the toilet, I would have to hold him. We were older, we forgot about our bouts of sexual torture and attended to the younger boys. The torture room resembled an operation theatre. They burnt us with a blue lamp on our private parts. The female officers and lady constables would taunt us. They chained our hands and legs and hurt us.

I remember begging the officer to let the young ones go and take me instead but they just laughed at me. I’ve heard of cases of male officers sodomising young boys. Then in prison, they hook these boys who are in pain to drugs. There’s so much checking in Central jail, then how do the drugs get through? The police brings it in. the state is trying to break our movement ‘the Khalistan way’.

The state is trying to associate us with ISIS when we have been condemning their unIslamic way in Syria. According to Islam, you are supposed to give water and feed your prisoners and not cut their throats. Our stone-pelting units have strongly condemned this ISIS after several discussions. All ISIS weapons are made in US and Israel, we all know who they are affiliated with. Kashmir won’t support ISIS.

We’ve been through so much of hurt and pain. The fire in our hearts will never die after what they have done to us. Whether there is Hurriyat in Kashmir or it is dissolved or if we get political space or not, the hate in our bellies will live forever.