EDITORIAL: JAMMU & KASHMIR KILLINGS: A DEPRESSING TALE WITH NO END IN SIGHT
Vinod Mubayi
The dastardly killing of 26 innocent men, 24 tourists from India (one Christian and the rest Hindus), 1 from Nepal (also Hindu) and 1 Kashmiri Muslim pony owner who worked in the tourist industry, by a group of terrorists on April 22 near the town of Pahalgam in the Kashmir Valley has been met with universal condemnation. The killings took place in the picturesque meadow of Baisaran a few miles beyond Pahalgam that was crowded with several hundred tourists. Why there were no army or police or other security personnel there on April 22 when the Kashmir Valley is filled with hundreds of thousands of military and paramilitary troops has not been explained by the authorities. It is useful to recall that after J&K statehood was abolished in August 2019, the control of all security personnel, including local police, is in the hands of the Central government in Delhi.
When news of the massacre became public, spontaneous demonstrations against the brutality and its perpetrators some of them featuring candle-lit marches were held in Srinagar and other towns in Kashmir. The demonstrators voiced considerable anger against those who committed the massacre and offered help to the families of the victims. Many local Kashmiris in fact provided shelter, meals and transport to the tourists who came from other parts of India, including those whose lives had been totally upended by the killings of their loved ones. As journalist Safwat Zargar wrote on the news platform Scroll “The Kashmir Valley observed a spontaneous shutdown on Wednesday [April 23] against the Pahalgam tourist killings – a rare instance of popular condemnation of targeted killings of civilians.” However, this sympathy that was a relatively rare offering from an otherwise largely alienated local population, given the history of the last several decades, could not last long following the formulaic, knee-jerk programed reaction of the Indian government.
Barely a day after the massacre, India blamed Pakistan-based groups and the “deep state” agencies of the Pakistan military for carrying out the operation without, however, presenting any clear, verifiable public evidence. Pakistan denied involvement and called for an independent, international investigation. India upped the ante by canceling all visas of Pakistani citizens, banning overflights of Indian airspace by Pakistani commercial aircraft, and closing down the land border crossing at the Attari-Wagah border between Amritsar and Lahore. Pakistan retaliated with tit for tat steps but India took further steps that have sharply escalated the confrontation. India suspended the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 that regulates the sharing of the waters of the Indus River and its tributaries, the rivers Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. This treaty that was negotiated with the assistance of the World Bank in 1960 withstood several Indo-Pak wars in subsequent years: 1965, 1971, and 1999. India, as the upper riparian, has definite obligations to refrain from interfering with the magnitude and timing of the flows of these rivers to the lower riparian, Pakistan, that depends on these waters for its very existence in terms of food and other agricultural production. While it would take India many years and billions of dollars to significantly impede the flows the threat remains largely symbolic although it vividly illustrates the shambolic state of the relations between the neighbors, which have been further poisoned by the lunatic rhetoric of some BJP politicians in the Modi regime who vowed “ek boond pani nahin denge” (we will not give them even a drop of water).
What has happened in the subsequent 10 days as these lines are being written (May 2) is worse. The mainstream Indian media, largely owned by a few crony mega-capitalists close to BJP and Modi, have gone on jingoistic overdrive not only against Pakistan but, as has happened with increasing frequency in the last decade, against Muslims in India in general and Kashmiri Muslims in particular. Some of the opposition political parties, who should know better, have joined in the cries for military action against Pakistan perhaps believing that what is emanating from the TV anchors reflects public opinion. The Indian authorities in Kashmir have bulldozed or demolished by explosives the homes of several suspected militants or their relatives, although in most cases it is unclear whether there is any proof of their involvement in the Pahalgam episode. Assaults on Kashmiri students and traders in parts of North India have taken place.
Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had repeatedly bragged about their “masterstroke” of August 2019 that abolished not only Jammu & Kashmir’s special constitutional status but also its statehood itself converting it into a union territory ruled from Delhi. They claimed that their action would end militancy in Kashmir Valley and boost the economy through tourism. While these claims were always hollow, the entire political trajectory of Modi and his party promoting majoritarian rule based on religious identity is inherently divisive and his fanatic followers, the ultra-nationalist Hindutva crowd, can begin harassing religious minorities on the slightest excuse. This is now happening in several BJP-ruled states in North India and will only further deepen the alienation of the Kashmiri Muslims.
An unusually sensitive and insightful article in the New York Times yesterday (May 1) stated “The region’s people have their own story to tell. It is one of festering alienation — magnified by last week’s horrific terrorist attack in Kashmir — after years of living under the watchful eyes of security forces while being deprived of many democratic rights.” The article has three other quotes that illustrate the reality of Kashmir clearly.
“We are treated as suspects,” said Sheikh Aamir, a lawyer in northern Kashmir. “Whenever something happens, they punish us all.”
Normalcy in Kashmir has always been “superficial and deceptive,” said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist and author who has studied Kashmir. He described life in the region as a “real-life hybrid of Orwellian and Kafkaesque.”
Militancy has been “replaced by a deep alienation of the Kashmiri polity,” said Siddiq Wahid, a professor of humanities and social sciences at Shiv Nadar University near Delhi.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military leadership in the person of Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir recently indulged in its own hackneyed rhetoric of the two-nation theory that led to Pakistan’s creation in 1947 and of Kashmir being Pakistan’s so-called jugular vein. Pakistan blames India for sponsoring and assisting terrorist groups in Pakistan like the Baloch Liberation Army that recently carried out a horrific attack on a train in Pakistan killing civilians while India blames terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba allegedly supported by the Pakistan military of carrying out terrorist actions like Pahalgam in Kashmir. This blame game keeps going on and on for years without end.
Over the decades of their existence, neither government on either side of the India Pakistan border has shown any genuine interest in striving for peace in Kashmir or, for that matter, in resolving other contested areas of their overall relationship. Their behavior reminds one of the famous remark used to describe the Bourbon monarchy in pre-revolutionary France: “they learnt nothing and they forgot nothing.”
The only hopeful note in this otherwise grim and depressing tale is the comment made by one of the victims of the Pahalgam massacre. Himanshi Narwal was on her honeymoon in Kashmir when her husband Navy Lt. Vinay Narwal was gunned down by the terrorists. During a blood donation camp organized on her late husband’s birthday a week after the killing, Himanshi told the media that while she wanted justice to be done and the killers punished, she didn’t want any hate directed towards Muslims or Kashmiris. For these comments she was attacked by Hindutva trolls, but effusively praised by the notable peace activist Lalita Ramdas, daughter of India’s first Naval Chief Admiral Katari and widow of India’s 13th Naval Chief Admiral Ramdas who wrote to Himanshi: “This is a personal tribute from one of the oldest Navy daughters/wives alive today… to the newest and youngest among the special fraternity of Naval Wives. I am so proud of you as I watch the clip of your words to the press, over and over again…Your extraordinary strength, composure and conviction when you speak out against hate and targeting of Muslims and Kashmiris after the horrific killing of so many innocent men in Pahalgam on the 22nd is truly remarkable! And so badly needed in our times.”
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