Kashmir’s Forever War

By the time Malik came out of prison, however, a pro-Pakistan militant group called Hizbul Mujahideen dominated the fight against India. Its leader was Syed Salahuddin, a Kashmiri politician turned militant who had been a candidate for Kashmir’s assembly in the 1987 elections. By the late nineties, most of Hizbul Mujahideen’s Kashmiri fighters had either been killed in battles with Indian forces or arrested, or had spent time in Indian prisons and returned to civilian life, like Malik’s men. Pakistan’s ISI began backing jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had no roots in Kashmir politics and were motivated by the idea of a pan-Islamist jihad. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a Lahore-based former university professor and veteran of the Afghan jihad, heads the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Most of Saeed’s recruits came from the poverty-stricken areas of Pakistan’s Punjab province. The jihadis from Pakistan introduced suicide bombings and took the war to major Indian cities – most dramatically with their attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of full-scale confrontation.

Yet by late 2003, after vigorous American and British diplomatic intervention, a peace process between India and Pakistan was under way. The insurgency began to wane. Pakistan reduced its support to insurgent groups and India’s long campaign of counter-insurgency appeared to be a success. However, Kashmir remains heavily militarized, and the abuse of civilians by Indian security forces continues, fuelling more rage and attracting recruits for Islamist radicals like Saeed.

The dead speak in Kashmir, often more forcefully than the living. Khurram Parvez, a thirty-two-year-old activist, is part of a Srinagar-based human rights advocacy group, the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), which produced a report in 2009 exposing hundreds of unidentified graves in the Kashmiri countryside. We met in a garden cafe in Srinagar. Parvez, a tall, robust man with intense black eyes, walks with a slight limp. In the autumn of 2002, he was monitoring local elections in a village near the Line of Control. As he drove out of the village with a convoy of military trucks ahead of him, a group of militants hiding nearby detonated an improvised explosive device which blew up under his car. The driver and his friend and colleague, a young woman, Aasiya Jeelani, died in the attack. Parvez lost his right leg. Several months later, with the help of a German-made prosthetic, he began to walk again and returned to work. ‘I couldn’t give up,’ he said softly. His engagement with the pursuit of justice in Kashmir has been personal from the beginning. His grandfather, a sixty-four-year-old trader, was one of the protesters killed by the Indian paramilitaries on the Gawkadal Bridge in January 1990. For months, Parvez had thought of taking up arms in revenge, but was persuaded to stay in school by his family. They lived on Gupkar Road, where the Indian security forces ran some of the most notorious detention and torture centres in Kashmir. Almost every other day, he saw desperate parents walking to the gates of the detention centres in his neighbourhood, looking for their missing sons.

Parvez’s cousin and mentor, the lawyer Parvez Imroz, co-founded the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, along with a Srinagar housewife Parveena Ahangar, whose son, Javed, had been missing since early 1990, when he was seventeen, after being taken from their home in a night raid by the Indian Army. Ahangar and Imroz campaigned for information about the whereabouts of 10,000 people who had disappeared in Kashmir after being taken into custody by Indian troops and police. Parvez joined them full-time after graduating from college; by late 2005, when a devastating earthquake struck Kashmir’s border areas, he was a veteran of civil rights activism. ‘We were doing relief work in the earthquake-hit areas when we began hearing about mass graves of unidentified people,’ he told me. His group placed several advertisements in Kashmiri papers requesting that people contact them with any information they had about the unidentified graves. Parvez, Imroz and a few other activists travelled widely, documenting this information. Their report, ‘Buried Evidence’, startled Kashmir.