Fire moves on quick knees - Comments & Analysis - Opinion - The Economic Times
Independence day came and went with a disgruntled former policeman throwing a shoe at Omar Abdullah, the embattled chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Since June 11, when a teenager called Tufail Mattoo died after being hit in the head by a teargas shell, nearly 60 people, almost all of them young boys, have been killed by the police or central agencies like the CRPF in Kashmir. What began as random episodes of stone throwing now resembles a full blown intifada.
How did we get here? Initially, New Delhi pointed fingers across the border, arguing that the violence was sponsored, if not orchestrated, by Pakistan. Increasingly, this argument sounds threadbare: thousands of people dont break curfew, at risk of injury and death, because theyve been paid off. The anger in Srinagar is real and has real causes.
New Delhi starts squirming every time Kashmiris raise slogans about azadi. It should, instead, listen more closely to what freedom Kashmiris want. Twenty years of trouble has convinced many people in the Valley that freedom from India isnt a viable option. Jammu in the south and Ladakh in the east arent going to be a part of azad Kashmir. And Pakistan isnt likely to give up the nearly-third part of the state that it controls. Nobody believes that a handful of districts Srinagar, Sopore, Baramulla and Anantnag can form an independent country.
But Kashmiris want freedom from fear, from constant bandhs and curfews that paralyse cities, and disrupt supplies of food, fuel and medicines. They want schools and colleges to open, businesses to function normally and for people to get the fundamental right to walk the streets without worrying that theyll catch a bullet. And they want a government they elected two years ago, to work for them.
For the last 32 years an innocuously named law, the Public Safety Act, has been in force in Jammu & Kashmir. Its a vaguely worded, but deadly piece of legislation that lets the police hold people for over two years without a trial or even without any charge, simply on the suspicion that they might do something dangerous. Agencies like Amnesty point out that people hauled away under this law have frequently been tortured. The Public Safety Act doesnt make people feel any safer for ordinary folk its a menace.
For 20 years, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which was created to tame the Naga insurgency in the 1950s operates in J&K. This allows the military to fire on people in disturbed areas. Troops can enter anywhere and arrest people without warrants. The local police is armed and dangerous with the PSA; the military and central security forces draw their reckless force from the AFSPA. In other states, police answer to the local government; state governments can, but rarely call the military out of its barracks. In Kashmir the state government has to struggle to call off security forces.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh correctly wants investments and jobs to move to Kashmir. But he wants this done by a committee, headed by his trusted adviser C Rangarajan, who has headed two similar committees in the past. The first was in 2005, when he had for company telecom tsar Sunil Mittal, Hero Hondas Sunil Munjal, J&K Banks boss Haseeb Drabu, Max India founder Analjit Singh and Duvvuri Subbarao, now the RBI governor, among others. Another set of panels was set up in 2006 to work on several topics: the economy panel was again headed by Rangarajan.
All these committees made many good suggestions, but nothing has happened on the ground. Kashmirs investment climate has frozen over and even state-owned companies have to be pushed to put a paisa there.
Indias mobile phone players are a competitive, adventurous lot and theyre the main private sector players there. But even theyre hobbled by government curbs when the prime minister visits, the networks are switched off, sometimes SMSs are blocked and the intelligence bureau has recently asked for a ban on rolling out 3G services in J&K.
Among other things, Indias human rights watchdog does not operate in the state. K G Balakrishnan, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, now heads this body. He wants the national human rights commission to function in J&K. What are the chances that hell be heard? The Right to Information law, a powerful tool for people to uncover information that the sarkar wants to conceal, also doesnt apply to J&K. Why not?
It doesnt need a committee to find whats going wrong in Kashmir. And it doesnt need another panel to find a way forward. If governments in Srinagar and New Delhi want peace in the Valley, here are some things which they should do. The state government should start by scrapping the PSA and make the police fully answerable to the elected government. New Delhi should scrap the AFSPA and get the military out of cities and back to patrolling the border.
Scrapping both these laws will be a huge booster for peoples morale. Supervised by elected governments, the police and the paramilitary will be forced to contain their trigger-happy instincts. Once the shooting stops, the protests will also become quieter.
Kashmir has an elected government, which now seems comatose. Its Omar Abdullahs job to crank it back to life. To do that, he has to make a start by visiting people whove been affected by the troubles and helping them out. He wont have to work too hard to find such people theyre all over the place.
Omar doesnt have too much time to get down to the ground and win back some support. His main rival, the Peoples Democratic Party of Mehbooba Mufti has smelt blood and is gunning for the Congress-NCP government. All J&K parties came to a conference called by the PM last week only the PDP stayed away.
Mehbooba and her father Mufti Mohammed Syed enjoy a huge amount of popularity in the city of Srinagar, whereas the Abdullahs, father and son are regarded as aloof and remote. With 21 assembly seats, the PDP was just seven seats short of the National Conferences 28. Its a gap that could vanish if troubles push this government beyond the brink and elections are called soon.
The Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali once wrote, Fire moves on quick knees. In Kashmir, it does indeed.
