Kashmir’s Forever War

At Kupwara in northern Kashmir, miles of lush green paddy fields spread out from the fringes of the run-down, cluttered town square. A short walk from the market, Shabir, a young shopkeeper, and I climbed up to a small plateau of walnut trees, willows and vegetable gardens, which was also one of the biggest graveyards described in the report Parvez’s group had produced. Unmarked graves covered with wild grass stretched ahead of us in neat rows. Shabir and others from the neighbourhood had placed a tiny white plaque on each grave, with a number and the date of burial. The number on the latest grave read: 241. ‘The police would bring the bodies and say they were militants killed in encounters or on the border,’ Shabir told me. ‘A lot of the faces would be disfigured. Some were mere teenagers, some older.’ I had heard similar accounts on visits to other such sites in the area. ‘We have no way of knowing who these people really are,’ Shabir continued. Parvez had sent a copy of the report to the head of the Kashmir government. Nothing happened.

Civilians continue to be killed and described as terrorists. In April, a spokesman for the Indian Army announced that the troops had killed the ‘oldest militant’ operating in Kashmir. Aged seventy, Habibullah Khan was from the village of Devar on the slopes of a mountain range by the border in the Lolab Valley, an hour and a half from Kupwara town.

Khan had had a tiny patch of land, not enough to feed his entire family. He and his three sons worked as labourers and sold timber they gathered in the forest to make ends meet. In the early nineties, one of Khan’s sons crossed the border into Pakistan and stayed there. In the summer of 1999, his oldest son, Ahmedullah, left to fetch wood in the forest; Indian troops patrolling there suspected he was a militant and shot him.

By 2003, Khan couldn’t work any more because of ill health. In desperation, he took to begging in the nearby town of Sogam. ‘I couldn’t stop him,’ his remaining son, Raj Mohammad, told me. On the morning of 11 April, Khan left for Sogam, where he would normally spend the day in the market, outside a mosque, returning in the evening with whatever generous strangers had given him. He never returned home.

On the fifth day of his father’s absence, having made enquiries in the neighbouring villages, Raj Mohammad travelled to Kupwara. He heard talk about the army killing of a seventy-year-old militant in the forests of Handwara District, a couple of hours from his village. In a press release, the Indian Army claimed that they had shot him in a joint operation with the police and that an AK-47 rifle, four magazines and sixty-seven bullets were recovered.

Raj Mohammad went to the police station closest to the shooting. ‘A police officer we met showed me a picture of the dead man on his cellphone screen,’ he said. ‘It was my father.’ He was granted permission to exhume his father’s body from the graveyard where he had been buried as an unidentified militant.

Two decades of insurgency and counter-insurgency have resulted in the creation of a state of affairs that provides incentives to troops and policemen to show ‘kills’. Those involved in counter-insurgency in Kashmir receive fast-track promotions, as well as monetary and other rewards for getting results. In February, the Indian government awarded one of the highest civilian honours, the Padma Shri, to Ghulam Muhammad Mir, a notorious counter-insurgent who worked with the Indian troops in central Kashmir and has several urder and extortion charges still pending against him. One of India’s top bureaucrats, Home Secretary G. K. Pillai, told a television channel, ‘Mir had done yeoman’s service for the national cause.’