Srinagar: Earlier this month, Union home minister Amit Shah unveiled a “zero terror plan” for Jammu and Kashmir – just a few days before the big decisions of August 2019 were given the Supreme Court’s endorsement on December 11. The reality, however, is that the erstwhile state is likely to find itself pushed into a more uncertain political future now that the court verdict has shredded the last hopes that the Narendra Modi government’s controversial decision taken four years ago could be reversed. Instead, the impression cemented is that the country’s independent institutions are themselves vulnerable to majoritarian impulses, regardless of whether this is true or not.
While militancy has been on a decline in J&K since 2019, the kind of euphoria that the Union home minister demonstrated recently might be a bit off the mark when we take a hard look at the state of the insurgency in the region.
Addressing the Lok Sabha on December 7, Shah claimed that the Ministry of Home Affairs had been reviewing the security situation in Kashmir every month. “And every three months I, myself, visit there and review the security situation,” he said “Earlier only terrorists were killed, but now we have destroyed [their] entire ecosystem.”
Shah said that in less than three years from now, a complete “area domination plan” will be devised and implemented in the Union Territory (UT).
He also soft pedalled and nuanced his previous statement that J&K’s special status was a source of political violence in the UT. “I never said that terrorism in J&K would end by the abrogation of Article 370. I had said that with the removal of Article 370, there would be a huge reduction in separatism and due to this, terrorism would also reduce.”
What the data on militancy says
Empirically speaking, this is absolutely true, and is borne out by the statistics that Shah offered in parliament. The long trajectory of militancy shows it is experiencing a steep decline. Around 40,164 militancy related incidents took place in J&K between 1994 and 2004, 7,217 during the following decade, and only 2,197 in the last nine years of the Modi administration, accounting for a total 70% reduction.
But a rendition of figures in this format appears to conceal a very crucial detail. Data available with the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) shows that a precipitous decline in militant violence was already noticeable since the mid 2000s, and that militancy related incidents had dwindled to just 245 by the year 2014. (The figure stands at 253 in the year 2023 so far.)
However, the beginning of an uptick can be traced to the year 2016, when security forces gunned down the young leader Burhan Wani, infusing the militancy with new vigour. It is from there that militant activities escalated, culminating in the year 2018 which was the worst in a decade in terms of the number of attacks and fatalities. And the following year, in February 2019, the Pulwama attack killed over 40 soldiers.
2019 was a major reboot
That the Union government could control this spiralling situation only by placing over 10 million people under siege, cutting off communications (albeit briefly) and inaugurating an indiscriminate crackdown is telling. If this is what will ensure a “peaceful” Kashmir, then the Modi government will always have to go out of its way to continue directly administering J&K. This is likely to get more difficult for two reasons.
First, the totalitarian control which it claims has brought peace is fundamentally antithetical to the kind of democratic values the Modi government is under pressure from various quarters to uphold in Kashmir.
Come to think of it, a good number of laws used to police expression in Kashmir are actually emergency provisions granted within ordinary laws. Article 311 (2) (c) allows for terminating employees, sometimes for having written newspaper articles years ago, without giving them an opportunity to be heard. Section 144, a British-era colonial law, is invoked to control various aspects of civil life, sometimes for reasons as mundane as possessing a quadcopter.
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act’s highest usage in the country is now in J&K, as per 2021 figures. And the Public Safety Act is so widespread that there is now a mounting backlog of unheard cases. The Wire reported this aspect earlier in June as part of its two-month investigation into the use of PSA in J&K.
If there is any indication as to how arbitrary this crackdown can be, one only needs to read the bail orders of incarcerated journalists Fahad Shah, Sajad Gul, Aasif Sultan and hundreds of other people against whom very serious charges were levelled earlier but which, albeit after a prolonged lapse of time, came crashing down in the face of judicial scrutiny.
Union home minister Amit Shah. Photo: X/@AmitShah
Changing the level playing field
The second reason the government’s approach is unsustainable is because the Supreme Court has set a time frame for elections to be held in the UT by September 2024, after which questions over the restoration of statehood will grow shriller. We have already seen a slew of political manoeuvres intended to downsize the established political formations that are clearly on the opposite side of the Modi government’s agenda. Delimitation was one such weapon, where the Jammu region, despite having a lower population than Kashmir, was awarded extra assembly seats. As a result, Kashmir, which had nine more seats than Jammu, will now have only four more.
Recently, the Union government also passed four bills related to J&K. They pertain to awarding two assembly seats to representatives from the ‘Kashmiri Migrant’ community, and West Pakistan refugees in J&K. The other bills also concern expanding the definition of, as well as incorporating more communities into, the list of Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the UT. Perhaps this is why the polls are being delayed in J&K under one pretext or another. The BJP government wants to gerrymander the region to the point that it ends up changing the very nature of the electoral playing field for its political rivals.
There was talk on holding urban local bodies (ULB) elections earlier this year. Then came informal reports that parties opposed to the BJP were likely to sweep any such polls. Perhaps that is why the J&K lieutenant governor announced in November that the ULB elections would be delayed and will take place “after the completion of delimitation as well as the process to reserve seats for Other Backward Classes (OBCs).”
Over the past few years, governance in Kashmir has primarily been about railroading decisions that have far-reaching consequences for the local people. Almost all of these decisions, whether about allowing non-locals to acquire residency permits, or delimiting seats to the BJP’s benefit, or opening land purchases for outsiders and more, are actually generating anxieties over the shrinking role that people are having in the decision-making process.
Mounting political despair
All this is resulting in widespread political despair, which is seeping down to the people. And although the law enforcement agencies have largely been successful in preempting any expression of resentment, there was one serious lapse recently when a non-local student at the National Institute of Technology triggered demonstrations after an allegedly inflammatory social media post about Islam’s Prophet.
For the government, the protests probably rekindled older fears when the Nehru administration, through his client-politician Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, was able to implement similar far reaching changes to J&K in the aftermath of Sheikh Abdullah’s deposition, but ended up facing a massive uprising in 1963 as the public came out in unprecedented numbers to protest against the theft of the Holy Relic associated with the Prophet in Srinagar. Such is the fear of protests today that even anticipated pro-Palestine demonstrations have been restricted.
How politics and militancy overlap
So what bearing does all this have on militancy? Over the past few years, there has been a gradual rise in what law enforcement calls “hybrid militancy” in Kashmir, referring to the shifting dynamics within the insurgency where young teenagers with no previous record are recruited as helpers for militants before they themselves end up perpetrating big attacks.
The recruiters mostly draft youths using encrypted chat mediums. They are asked to pick up weapons from a particular spot and then return it after having committed the attack, without actually knowing who is coordinating the whole affair. This aspect has turned the militancy into a more secretive affair where the actual number of recruits will always remain difficult to determine. In 2021, the security forces gunned down militant Abbas Sheikh, who had been instrumental in reviving militancy in Srinagar. A senior official told this correspondent that police investigations established he had been in touch with at least 25-40 young men in just the two square kilometres of downtown Srinagar.
Although the “hybrid” activity has also come down, the dynamics it involves tells us that militant groups are always able to leverage the discontent within society to carry out high-visibility attacks like earlier in Rajouri, ahead of the G20 meeting. Or last month when, soon after the new director general of J&K police took office, militants shot dead two policemen and one labourer in three different regions of Kashmir. These attacks reveal a calculated strategy of carrying out attacks timed with symbolic political developments.
The changing faces of militancy
A number of hit-and-run killings that took place in Kashmir over the past few years have had some kind of involvement from these teenagers.
When this correspondent visited the house of Natish Shakeel, a 17-year-old militant who was killed in April last year in Pulwama, and was recruited via similar “hybrid” modules, it emerged that Natish was the grandnephew of Yousuf Halwai, a political leader associated with the National Conference who was killed in the early 1990s by militants. Asked what may have motivated Natish to resort to such a step, his uncle, among many things, blamed the choking of all spaces of political expression.
At the same time, a new theatre of violence is opening up in the Jammu regions of Rajouri and Poonch which has accounted for 40% of the total security related fatalities in J&K this year. Last month, five soldiers including two captains were killed in the Kalakote area of Poonch. This week, five soldiers have been killed in another incident in Rajouri. Conversations with senior serving and retired police officers makes it clear that militants are trying to open new fronts in the hope of pivoting the focus away from Kashmir where they are seeking to escalate action in the future, as and when conducive.
With political disillusionment growing in the Valley, it is hard to imagine Amit Shah’s “zero terror plan” working in the long term. On the contrary, the situation on the ground tells us that realities are actually more convoluted than we care to admit.
