By the morning of 5 August 2019, the entire Kashmir Valley had been locked down. Men in one sort of uniform or other were deployed in every last nook of every last lane and byway—army, paramilitary, police. They remained deployed for several weeks thereafter, even though it had become obvious that they were not required by the time August turned to September, and the people’s shock over the constitutional changes had subsided.
So tight was the deployment that only in a pocket of the reclaimed area of what was once the Anchar lake did a revolt take place: youth there placed barricades, behind which they demonstrated for several days. Plus, two baker’s boys from near Ganderbal shouted some slogans while running towards Srinagar.
A few days later, I heard that youth on motorcycles told shopkeepers in a part of south Kashmir to down shutters. A short while later, another bunch of youth came by to tell them to open their shutters. It sounded suspiciously staged. Just theatre.
So calm was the rest of the place that the Inspector-General of Police in charge of Kashmir (an exceptional officer) was able to arrange a little tour for Left-leaning activist-intellectuals to see that no one was being tortured.
No deployment in 1990
I was repeatedly reminded during those days of what I had witnessed in the last week of February 1990, when I was in Kashmir to report on the situation. It was an utter contrast.
In 1990, there had been no deployment, except around the ever-guarded VIP enclave on Gupkar Road and the mini-secretariat and the radio station—a three km stretch. The police had collapsed. The army had not been called out. And the redoubtable Ashok Patel, who had been sent to head the BSF in the state a month before, was struggling to get a grip.
The Pandit community in Kashmir was terrified, following some utterly horrific killings and rapes. Several families were fleeing to Jammu for safety.
Each time I went to Habba Kadal, the centre of Pandit life in Srinagar, taxis would refuse to go. I would take an auto from MA Road to Habba Kadal. There, I roamed the distraught streets and met leading Pandits such as Mr H N Jattu.
I wrote a series of articles, which were published in the first week of March that year, describing the ungoverned condition of Kashmir, with no effective state beyond the radio station.
Those articles were noticed at the Centre. The prime minister sent a delegation of MPs to Kashmir on 17 March. It was led by Deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal, and included Leader of the Opposition Rajiv Gandhi and Railway Minister George Fernandes.
A couple of days later, Fernandes was appointed the Minister in charge of Kashmir Affairs. He had the task of seeking a political solution. Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed remained in charge of law and order and deployment.
Ashok Patel was given a freer hand by GC Saxena, who was sent as the state’s governor on 26 May that year. Some measure of order—and deployment—was gradually restored. The arrest of Yasin Malik and a bunch of his JKLF men on 6 August 1990 was a psychological blow to the `movement’ in the popular Kashmiri mind.
The steady flow of Pandits fleeing the Valley was much reduced after that August, and soon was no more than a small trickle. Many of the Pandits who remained (a minority of the total) were able to carry on living there.
Radicalisation of militancy
Of course, the 6 August arrests were more a psychological marker than a real marker of change. For, by then, the JKLF had been reduced to a shadow of what it had been in 1989. Since January 1990, Pakistan had greatly reduced support to it, transferring its affections to Hizb-ul Mujahideen, which was backed by the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan and J-e-I cadres within Kashmir.
The biggest militant group that summer was the Muslim Janbaz Force, and Al Umar was the most prominent in Downtown Srinagar. However, Pakistan and its friends on the Indian side of the Line of Control (including whichever diplomats based in New Delhi supported them) made sure that the doctrinaire Hizb’s religious radicalism gained supremacy in the Kashmir militancy over the next two years.
The people of Kashmir were disillusioned by then. Beyond the Jamaat cadres, its doctrines were unpopular among the large majority of the population. The J-e-I strength in Kashmir had remained below about 10 per cent of the population ever since its doctrines were brought to Kashmir in 1944.
As Indian forces gained the upper hand, Pakistan’s ISI despatched far more hardened militants under the banners of Harkat-ul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba. The former were mainly Afghans. The latter mainly Pakistanis. They too were religiously radicalised.
Ever since then, those in charge of dealing with the militancy in Kashmir have tended to fight it rather than finish it. Even after Mr Vajpayee managed to largely end it, and make peace with Pakistan on 6 January 2004, Kashmir’s insurgency was revived from 2008.
Preparations for that revival got huge boosts in 2006, when Yasin Malik was allowed to wend his way through south Kashmir with a `safr-e-Azadi,’ and books, documentaries, and a new generation of Islamised journalists were put in place.
Throughout, little more than cosmetic measures were taken for a multi-religious society to be re-established in Kashmir. Indeed, a great deal of space was given for blinkered fundamentalism to be promoted during the very time when peace had been tentatively restored.
A promise belied
Despite the best intentions of one prime minister after another, Pandits were never permanently rehabilitated in Kashmir in large numbers in their original environs. In the meantime, a very large number have resettled in various other places, including Western destinations.
The promise of a new beginning with radical changes, which many had in mind when the constitutional changes were made in 2019 have also come to nothing.
That deployment in 2019 only heralded renewed militarisation, under which the polarisation of society has grown relentlessly for three-and-a-half decades now. It did not bring security for a multi-cultural, inclusive society to thrive again.
Several Pandits, including some of those who were taken back under government schemes, were killed mercilessly in broad daylight over these past five years.
The tragedy continues.
