What Is 'Normalcy' in Kashmir?

That Kashmir is a powder-keg is known to all. Things can change real quick in Valley. Just days after Omar Abdullah took charge as the chief minister of the erstwhile state, a sudden rash of militant attacks and gunfights in both Kashmir as well as Jammu, kept the region on edge. The number of civilians killed in militant attacks in J&K in 2024 is now higher than those killed last year.

The nullification of the major provisions of Article 370 was supposed to have ended this violence, or at least liquidated the factors responsible for driving locals towards militancy. One could have taken the government for its word when it insisted that things do not change overnight and that ending terrorism will take a few years. But five years have passed since the epochal decision of August 2019. At the turn of 2024, the violence should have only been ebbing, not showing signs of resurgence.

Yet as a journalist covering militancy in J&K for six years, and being familiar with the ebbs and flows of insurgency, I was taken aback when J&K police paraded two young men during a press conference on November 9. Hailing from Srinagar, the offenders had reportedly been responsible for committing (or helping commit) a grenade attack last week near the Tourist Reception Centre area in Srinagar that led to serious shrapnel injuries to 12 passers-by. Wearing faux leather jackets and hoodies, the young men seem to be in their late teens or early twenties.

The ‘hybrid redux’

In 2022, a similar paroxysm of violence gripped Srinagar city in what the security agencies then described as “hybridisation of terrorism,” where previously unknown militant associates (mostly in their teens) called over-ground workers (OGWs), took active part in the militant operations. The 2022 escalation had led to questions over the reliability of claims that repealing of special status will uproot terrorism.

But the brief phase involving hybrid militants gradually petered out, allowing the government to telegraph that the blip in security situation was transient and fleeting. Last year was pretty peaceful, cementing hopes that violent impulses had been contained.

But the resurfacing of what appears to be the militancy with hybrid dimensions amid a spike in the attacks (six) and gun-battles (nine) (resulting in the death of nine civilians, three security forces personnel, two Village Defence Guards and two army porters since the elected government took charge) points to the dynamics that the government’s narrative had not taken into account, and the one that exemplifies the kind of volatility that is inherent to the very nature of political dispute in J&K.

The layered nature of dispute

It is this complexity of the conflict roiling the J&K region that political scientist Sumantra Bose in the newly updated edition of his book Kashmir at the Crossroads tries to impress upon his readers.

Bose argues that the ‘normalcy’ interludes that the hot conflict in Kashmir has seen over decades haven’t always proven sustainable and a risk for serious escalation always remains one incident away.

He writes that such an incident could be a major terrorist strike akin to what happened In Pulwama in 2019 when a suicide bomber blew up a paramilitary motorcade killing 40 CRPF men, or an episode of mass killings at the hands of security forces in response to a big uprising, or a big attack on the scale of 2008 hostage crisis in Mumbai.

“Each of these eventualities represents a grim scenario for escalation in a period when India has a radical hyper nationalist government and Pakistan, politically unstable as always, seethes with frustration at the government’s Kashmir policy,” Bose writes.

The genesis of trouble

Kashmir’s rise as a major conflict begins with accession itself, when the former princely state entered into an understanding with Pakistan and India, to ensure it continues to retain sovereignty or at least some forms of it. However, as the raiders from Pakistan’s tribal provinces stormed the Western part of the state, it set the stage for its eventual joining with India, culminating into the first India-Pakistan war.

Sheikh Abdullah, then Kashmir’s tallest leader, whose release on September 29, 1947, Pakistan had objected to (perhaps the reason why it tacitly approved the invasion at the hands of tribals), came to lead the state as its first prime minister.

Busy in their struggle for self-government against the Dogra monarchy before 1947, the accession had caught Kashmiris unawares. Realising how it would not sit well with Kashmiris, Abdullah resolved to protect the political autonomy of J&K, and made negotiations to have its key elements enshrined in the Indian constitution in the form of Article 370.

The crowning achievement of this special status were the land reforms which redistributed agricultural land from a handful of exploitative landowners to almost a million landless tillers, including two lakh lower caste Hindus. “Before land reforms, entire privately owned farmland of 2.2 million acres was owned by 396 big landlords and 2,347 medium sized landlords,” Bose writes.

The land redistribution helped create a basis for economic prosperity that Kashmir went on to harvest through the 1960s-70s, thereby deepening the reverence for Article 370.

Special status as bone of contention

But Hindu traditionalists from Jammu and elsewhere in the country would soon raise a banner of revolt against what they viewed as “appeasement,” forcing Nehru to cut short Abdullah’s political enterprise. Abdullah was himself partly to blame. He ruled his first seven years as PM with authoritarian zeal, winning elections unopposed and stifling all forms of dissent.

The arrest of Sheikh Abdullah in 1952 set stage for a game of musical chairs, with one CM after another being replaced at the Union government’s whim and without any credible elections. “Their sole qualification was that they were prepared to do the bidding of Indian government’s without any dissent,” Bose writes.

Even the ratification of accession took place in an assembly where the majority of members had been elected through massive irregularities. The succeeding list of chief ministers of J&K obediently deleted the significant parts of J&K’s special status and, to the growing anger of Kashmiris, concentrated all meaningful authority into the hands of the federal government.

Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad gave India’s Supreme Court heightened powers over J&K, put the state’s financial status at par with the other Indian states, and even helped the Union government extend fundamental rights promised by the Indian constitution over J&K – albeit with the condition that they would be cancelled by the Union government anytime in the name of national security.

This was the beginning of the end of Article 370 and increased securitisation of Kashmir as a raft of emergency provisions such as the Defence of India Rules would be used with stunning regularity.

Also read: Five Years After Article 370 Move, the Simmering Cauldron of J&K Remains Highly Flammable

Article 370 weakened by puppet regimes

Under Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq’s rule, J&K’s special status witnessed yet another round of depletion as Articles 356 and 357 were rammed into the state, allowing the Union government to dismiss state governments under specific circumstances. Pertinently, the same laws were used in 2018 to impose the Union government’s rule in J&K, which became a basis for Article 370 ‘s deletion.

Sadiq also ended the titles of the ‘prime minister’ and Sadr-e-Riyasat, and dissolved the NC, and merged it into Congress, erasing all spontaneous forms of political agency for Kashmiris, and setting the stage for a violent riposte.

Under Sheikh Abdullah’s patronage, the Plebiscite Front (PF), which was committed to fighting for a referendum in J&K, mobilised thousands of people and mass protests gripped Kashmir valley, which were quelled brutally by large scale arrests.

Sensing that anger in Kashmir had reached a tipping point, Pakistan began blowing the embers of rebellion inside the valley, aided by a stream of armed foreign mercenaries. But as Bose writes, both the operations, called Gibraltar and Grand Slam, failed to whip up a revolt as majority of Kashmiris were unwilling to endorse guerrilla warfare as a tool to usher in a change. That hesitation would end two decades later.

Also read: Understanding the Present Phase of Militancy in Jammu and Kashmir

The 1975 reckoning

The elections of 1967 and 1972 allowing Sadiq and his successor Syed Mir Qasim to retain power respectively were also marred by the allegations of irregularities. With the creation of Bangladesh, the cold war politics handed a diplomatic upper-hand to India.

As Pakistan was torn asunder, Sheikh Abdullah reckoned that the ground beneath his feet was coming loose. In 1975, he gave in and inked a deal with the Indian government that saw him resile on his demand for referendum, and come to terms with the accession. But this also stirred a widespread outrage against him in Kashmir.

The government was able to establish a brief period of lull on account of free and fair elections in 1977, and 1983. In the meantime , Sheikh passed away, leaving a leadership vacuum in J&K which his libertine son Farooq seemed incapable to fill. His freethinking and overambitious politics led to his falling out with Indira Gandhi who made sure she removed him from power in a coup in 1983 – yet another stab into the Kashmiri body-politic.

But after her death, Farooq was ready to put everything behind and cozy up to her son and successor, Rajiv. This was a grave miscalculation and Kashmiris interpreted it as a craven surrender bigger than what his father had committed. Rajiv and Farooq jointly fought an election that was fixed, setting off, at last, a mass rebellion in 1989.

Dovish leader of a hawkish party

In 10 years, however, the brutal revolt in Kashmir petered out and ended in a stalemate. But tensions were renewed after Pakistan launched incursions into the ice-swept mountains high up in Kargil in 1999, followed by a big attack on India’s parliament in 2001, bringing the region to a brink of war. On both occasions, the dovish policy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee prevailed, preventing the crisis from blowing up.

The “legacy-seeking” Vajpayee also began to make peace overtures towards Islamabad which do seem to have made several headways and almost neared fruition before running aground during the Manmohan Singh’s tenure following an internal crisis in Pakistan that led to the ouster of the then President Parvez Musharraf.

With the talks collapsing, Kashmir erupted the following year in 2008. These unarmed uprisings became a common feature and continually resurfaced in 2009, 2010 and 2016.

In 2019, when the Article 370 was finally done away with, the protests were brutally contained. Since then, Kashmir has been swinging precariously between war and peace.

State subject law predates India’s creation

Bose’s critical scholarship, thus, busts three major orthodoxies about the region:

First, that Article 370 did not create separatism and militancy in Kashmir. Instead, it was its gradual erosion that did. Article 35-A, which was a part of Article 370, comes from ‘hereditary state subject rules’ that predate India’s creation as a sovereign country by two decades. So the politics for its preservation was not an anomaly. It is the politics for its removal which is.

Second, contrary to modern perceptions, the eruption of militancy in J&K in 1989 did not stem from rigged elections alone, but was the outcome of decades of accumulated anger over the political subterfuge that had become a norm under Congress, and which BJP now appears to have taken to its new astonishing heights.

And third, the concept of normalcy will always remain a deceptive phenomenon in Kashmir.

Shakir Mir is independent journalist.