The tell-tale photographs of the street protests in Srinagar and elsewhere in Kashmir that raged during the summer of last year are difficult to forget. Pitched battles were fought between Kashmiri youths and Indian security personnel. Indian authorities came down on the protests with a heavy hand and on the protesting youths too. Much was said in the Indian media about the youth having been led astray by parochial political leaders in Kashmir, and how these were hands that had been hired for a price. They were dismissed in the Indian media solely as stone-pelters. The story behind the masks that these young men of Kashmir wore were told in very few places, and fewer dealt with what went on in their minds.
Myths abound in mainland India about Kashmir, especial the street protests that have rocked the region since 2008. Myths that are perpetrated by the Indian establishment and gobbled up as the gospel truth by a gullible media. Voices have remained unheard, cries of agony have been turned a deaf ear to, the truth has been a sorry casualty of the politics of identity.
What’s happening in Kashmir today is a far cry from what it had been when militancy had seeped into the Valley over 20 years ago. The battle of guns has long given way to the battle of ideas; and this is a truth that we elsewhere in India are yet to reconcile with.
The youths of Kashmir today are like you will find anywhere else – decidedly smart, no pushovers, and certainly well-informed. And that’s one of the reasons why the Indian establishment is wary of the youth there. The tactic being deployed to counter this is of the carrot-and-stick kind. Students at Kashmir University, for instance, are not allowed to form a students’ union. Ruses offered are innumerable, but the logic is stark – the establishment does not want the young to organise themselves. At any cost. Young leaders are even offered chances to study abroad. If you can’t quell them, then buy them.
Kashmir Valley lost an entire generation earlier to the gun and the blood that overflowed, today it stands in the danger of losing another one thanks to the mindless crackdown on youth protestors. At the heart of this is a draconian law called the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 (PSA). Hundreds are locked up on spurious grounds under the PSA every year. Most of them are youths. The law’s provisions run counter to India’s obligations under international human rights law.
The law is ostensibly used to keep political leaders out of circulation. But then, leaders can only be so many or so few; most of the hundreds others are youngsters, a shocking number of them not even adults. It is difficult to get bail and get a case quashed, but the moment that happens, the youth concerned is taken away by the police and locked up again. It’s a never-ending nightmare.
The law is not a new one, but the impunity with which it has been used the last few years, was not noticed elsewhere in India. Till, of course, Amnesty International released in April this year a hard-hitting report documenting the rampant abuse of the law. Arbitrary detentions fell by as much as 70 per cent initially after that. But there are disturbing reports too. Now youths are being picked up just like that.
Despite an obligation under international law to treat anyone below 18 as a child, the police in Kashmir continue to jail 16- and 17-year old boys as adults. Amnesty conducted a campaign for the release of 17-year old Murtaza Manzoor, who was detained without charge in January this year. He was held for nearly four months in a prison that had no special facilities for children.
Although India has amended its national juvenile justice law to make it consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the law in Jammu and Kashmir has not yet been updated. But then, as Amnesty points out, Murtaza is not alone. Many other boys aged between 16 and 18 years are falling through the cracks in J&K’s juvenile justice laws and being treated as adults. It’s not only a merciless assault on dissent, it is also an all-out war against youngsters, against a entire generation.
But this is not what troubles me that much. What leaves me disconcerted is the fact that the youth elsewhere in India has not the faintest idea of what’s happening to their contemporaries in Kashmir. The differences in politics always comes later, it may even be inevitable. Yet, it is something that can always be talked about, sorted out. What comes first, and should always be so, is a feeling of empathy, a feeling of compassion. If you really think that Kashmir is indeed an integral part of India, then what stops you from reaching out to them? Is a caring hand on the shoulders of a traumatised boy too much to lend? Are words of kindness to a brutalised girl too much to utter? What kind of callous society do I live in?
And does it really matter whether they believe in our ethos of an integral India? Do not our hearts bleed when we see images of the ruthlessness with which security forces have been cracking down on protestors in the Middle East? Why do we become hypocrites when our own forces do that in Kashmir?
Subir Ghosh is a New Delhi-based independent journalist and writer. He has worked with the Press Trust of India (PTI) and The Telegraph, and handled publications/communications for the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the Federation of Hotels and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), and the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). He specialises in Northeast affairs and is an advisory council member with the Centre for Northeast Studies (C-NES). He is the author of ‘Frontier Travails: Northeast – The Politics of a Mess’ published by Macmillan India, and has won two national awards in children’s fiction. His subjects of interest include conflict, ethnicities, wildlife, human rights, poverty, media, and cinema. He blogs at www.write2kill.in . The above story was published as a column called AlterNative in a youth magazine, Yuva.