An inconvenient truth has bubbled over in Indian-held Kashmir, blowing the lid off a method that suggests madness in the Indian army’s fight against militancy in the troubled region. The method has made murderers of soldiers, and there’s no saying how much of the fall of militancy to an all-time low in the troubled region in recent times is owed to terrified submission by the local population.
But now that the truth is out, pro-independence Kashmiris are back again rampaging through the streets. As of Wednesday morning, 11 civilians have died in the worst flare-up of street violence in the Kashmir Valley in a year.Curfew has been clamped in the northern, central and southern parts of the valley, but as of late Tuesday,
pro-independence Kashmiris were still coming out in their hundreds, attacking troops with rocks and sticks in the face of gunfire, teargas bombardment and baton charge.
The ongoing uprising has its roots in a shocking finding by the state police earlier this month that confirmed long-held suspicions by Kashmiris and human rights activists of brutality by sections of the nearly 500,000 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) soldiers deployed in the region.
The report revealed that the paramilitary soldiers had staged a gunbattle in the town of Anantnag, 55 km south of the capital city of Srinagar, in order to kill three civilians and claim that they were militants. The army was forced to suspend two officers and order a court martial inquiry following the expose..
Police and human rights activists say several other recent incidents were similarly staged. These include the killing of three laborers this month who police investigators found were lured to their deaths by locals bribed by an army officer. In another suspicious incident, the army claimed that a 70-year-old beggar they had shot dead was a militant.
And as recently as last week, police opened an investigation into the deaths of two porters who, according to the army, were hit by gunfire from Pakistani troops across the Line of Control. Doctors who carried out a postmortem, however, found that the two were shot at close range.
The killing of civilians is evidently because the CRPF’s method to notch up the headcount of militants is incentivized by a bonus for soldiers bringing in each kill.
The method, while helping inspire bounty hunters among the troops, can be seriously flawed because, in a region wracked by militant violence for the past 30 years, it’s not impossible to pin the charge of militancy on anyone.
Kashmiri outrage over the stage-managed killing of civilians erupted on June 11 after a 11-year-old schoolboy was shot dead by CRPF soldiers deployed to quell a street protest staged by pro-indepence Kashmiris. On Tuesday, the death toll rose to 11 after three more Kashmiris were killed by the troops.
Eyewitnesses said the soldiers barged into houses and shot people dead. “My nephews were killed in our compound. There was no provocation,” one report quoted a Kashmiri man as saying.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who had challenged the Saudi Gazette a year ago to cite any recent instance of a civilian death in Kashmir, is now fast losing ground and goodwill as the new generation leader who has what it takes to turn Kashmir around.
“The Omar Abdullah government has succeeded in turning the state into a land of licensed murder,” says Membooba Mufti, his fiercest political opponent and a former chief minister. She blames the troubles on Abdullah’s “poor administration” and inability to speak the local language and thereby vibe with the people.
For the right-wingers in India’s arch-enemy Pakistan, the uprising could not have been better timed. Last week, the Indian and Pakistan governments resumed talks for paving the way toward lasting peace and succeeded in arriving at a two-track procees whereby discussions on developing commercial relations would be delinked from the political dialogue.
India had broken off all talks with Pakistan following the Dec. 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks which it blamed on extrremists operating freely from Pakistani soil. Extremists in Pakistan are against any dialogue with India, and the elected civilain government in Islamabad is taking a grave political risk by pursuing the peace process with New Delhi.
Political analysts in India argue that the current uprising is staged by Pakistan-implanted extermists operating in Kashmir and that it is not quite a groundswell of popular sentiment. They point to video clips of policemen being brutally assaulted by protestes to make their point. But that’s no argument against the madness in the army’s method and fire that has been lit.
The situation is escalating out of control. SMS text-messaging services have been blocked throughout the Kashmir valley to stop more residents from massing. In north Kashmir, cell-phone services have been completely suspended.
Opposition politicians and protest groups plan to mount a general strike and organize an extended march this weekend.
And worse, tens of thousands of Hindus started pouring into the Valley Wednesday for their annual pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave shrine in south Kashmir.
A public demand by hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani that the Amarnath pilgrimage be curtailed to 15 days instead of the present two months has been countered by Leela Karan Sharma, former convener of Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti (SASS).
“If anybody tries to disrupt or create impediments in the (Amarnath) yatra, he will be given befitting reply,” Sharma has warned.
The battle lines are drawn. New Delhi is rushing more troops to the Valley.
And the discredited army remains central figure in it all, having more than one battle to fight.
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