The bloodbath at Pehalgam has once again raised heated questions on who should take responsibility whenever terror gets a boost in Kashmir. I have raised such questions for years, but the only result is that my writing gets silenced. Meanwhile, violence keeps going, often by leaps and bounds.
News that militant commander Burhan Wani had been killed spread at 7 pm on 8 July 2016. By 9 pm, I had written a piece saying that anyone connected with intelligence or national security should either be sacked for incompetence or prosecuted for treason. I was angry, for I could see what was going to happen.
The place remained in violent turmoil for five months. Wani should have been captured aliveโor, the Valley should have locked down immediately after he was killed. Instead, the whole place was left open for lakhs of youth to stream towards Waniโs village through the night, and to attack security force camps across the Valley at dawn.
The very fact that the photo of Waniโs body went viral at 7 pm is a smoking gun. At least in Kashmir, pictures and videos donโt go viral if the state doesnโt want it. (I should know. My posts and articles generally get no traction.)
The trouble is that nobody pays a price when things go wrong. Far from being sacked, the chap in charge of intelligence in the place was only transferred, and later rehabilitated. He had spent those awful months doing things like arranging workmen for the fine ladies of upper crust Rajbagh.
Nobodyโs career was affected by the national humiliation when the hijacked Indian Airlines was allowed to leave Amritsar airport, where it had landed for refuellingโor for the subsequent release of three terrible terrorists in Kandahar to get the passengers back.
Nor did anyone pay a price for the passing of the buck between various forces that led to the devastating fire at Chrar-e-Sharief in 1995โor the slaughter of Sikhs at Chittisinghpora in 2000. In fact, some of those posted there were rewarded with very high office some years later.
Pandit exodus
The ethnic cleansing of Pandits in 1990 is a particularly tragic chapter in Kashmirโs history. The majority of Pandits worked in government, and it is clear that the announcement that their salaries would be paid in Jammu was encouragement to move to Jammu. Most of them never returned to the Valley.
If there was one thing that was demonstrated when the government instituted constitutional reforms on J&K in 2019, it was that the state apparatus has the resources to lock down every last nook and cranny in every lane and by-lane in the entire Valley. Why was that not done in early 1990, when the exodus began?
Instead, as I wrote in early March that year, there was no government worth the name beyond the radio station in Srinagar. In fact, the chairman of the Peopleโs League (of which the better-known Shabir Shah was the general secretary) was staying โundergroundโ in a house just a stoneโs throw from Srinagarโs cantonment.
The army had not been called out. The police had collapsed. The paramilitary forces struggled to keep order. Yet, nobody has questioned the government of the day. Instead, all the propaganda films sponsored by those who wield power now target todayโs main opposition party.
The deliberate misrepresentation of who was responsible for what went wrong over the past 40 years seems tailored to divert focus from those who have actually let the country downโwith criminal negligence, if not deliberate dedication to the objectives of Indiaโs enemies.
We never ask questions
A major reason why Kashmir has continued to burn for the past 35-odd years is that Indiansโand our public representativesโdo not ask tough questions of those in charge of providing security and upholding the law of the land.
Even in Kashmir, nobody seems to ever question how it was that Yusuf Shah, who had been in jail for three years, was suddenly released in March 1990, just when Kashmir was on the brink of being lost to India, and separatism was at a peak.
Almost immediately, Syed Ali Shah Geelani despatched him to wrest control of Hizb-ul Mujahideen from its Ahle-Hadith Amir, and turn it into the sword arm of Jamaat-e-Islami. Shah took the nom de guerre Syed Salahuddin, went underground and achieved that objective over the next few months.
In the first place, nobody asks how Geelani, an MLA with openly separatist views, was allowed to go to Kathmandu in January 1990. He met ISI officers and leading members of Pakistanโs Jamaat-e-Islami there, and agreed that the J-e-I would take over militant struggle from the JKLFโsomething the Pakistani establishment had decided earlier that month.
Nor does anyone ask how former militant Masarat Alam was released from jail in 2010, just when stone-pelting rage was sweeping across the Valley. He promptly went underground and started issuing โcalendars,โ which seemed a little complex for him.
Then, as soon as a certain Inspector-general of Police was transferred, a blanket curfew was successfully imposed, some police papers happened to get burnt, and Alam was back in custody. Everything was back to the way it had beenโexcept for that IGP, and weakened civilian authority.
Now that at least 27 innocents have been killed in a bloodbath in Pehalgam, we owe it to the future of our beloved countryโand to other innocents who might also be killedโto ask the questions that need to be asked, maturely but firmly.
