MODI’S WAR
THE NEW FOUR-LANE HIGHWAY connecting Srinagar and Jammu is supposed to have reduced the travel time across the Kashmir Valley. But in the weeks I spent there in August, each time I tried to go to south Kashmir, I was held up in blockades that lasted up to an hour. It was on this highway, in Pulwama, that a suicide bomber attacked a Central Reserve Police Force convoy in February this year, killing over forty personnel. The blast happened where the road slopes upward and traffic slows down—probably to inflict the most damage. In the aftermath of the attack, the government completely banned civilian movement from Udhampur in Jammu to Baramulla in north Kashmir on two days of the week, to facilitate the movement of armed-forces convoys. The highway has since been repaired, but vehicles passing over the spot can still feel a bump.
While I was there, this highway brought in convoys at various times on all days except Friday. When a convoy passes, all other traffic is brought to an immediate halt. Armoured vehicles and security forces block the way, the sense of emergency evident in the shrill sound of their whistles. The traffic piles up—even ambulances are not allowed to move. Most passengers dare not step out, but some become impatient and get out of their cars. They stand about, looking at the convoy and commenting on it, as if chatting about the weather.
One day in late August, I watched as a family with an ailing child drove down the wrong side just to be able to move. The child sat in the lap of the passenger, and the driver held a pink medical report out of the window, waving at the security-forces personnel to let them pass. After getting a go-ahead over wireless radio, the personnel allowed the car to go. The vehicles in the convoy that day were a curious mix: private buses, trucks, minivans and even Taveras. Some took a right turn and went towards the Tral and Pulwama districts; the rest kept moving towards Srinagar. Most of the uniformed personnel sitting inside these vehicles were asleep. Bystanders tried to guess the name of the force by their uniforms.
As word of the never-ending convoys travelled, Kashmir became rife with speculation of either a full-scale crackdown in the Valley—“It has been peaceful, why are they bringing in more forces?”—or a war with Pakistan. One middle-aged man standing in front of me on the road turned back to say something. When he realised that I am not Kashmiri, he said, “Kashmiri ko maarne ke liye itne forces chahiye kya?”—Do you need so many forces to kill Kashmiris? I wondered if the state, with Pulwama on its mind, was as scared as it made the people feel.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR, Ajit Doval, arrived in Kashmir on 6 August, the day after the Indian government announced that it was revoking the state’s special status, enshrined in Article 370 of the Constitution, and transforming the state into two union territories. It then launched a complete clampdown in the Valley, blocking roads, imposing curfew and cutting off internet and phone connectivity. Since 1 August, the Indian government has moved over eighty thousand troops into the region, which was already the most militarised zone in the world.
The crackdown was ongoing when Doval left the Valley, on 16 August, amid applause by his cheerleaders in the national media. Kashmiris “see greater opportunities, a better future, more jobs for youths,” he said upon his return to Delhi, while interacting with select journalists. “There is a vocal minority that opposes it. It appears to people that that is the voice of the people. That is not necessarily true.”
How Doval reached this conclusion is reflected in a video from his visit to Anantnag, released by ANI. He is seen asking a teenage boy, “Khush ho?”—Are you happy? An elderly man standing next to Doval replies, “Khush kahan hai? Aap batate hain, khush kaun hai yahan?”—Who is happy? You tell us who is happy here. Doval smiles and says, “Bachhe toh khush hote hain”—The children are happy. The elderly man again says, “Koi khush nahi hain yahan”—Nobody is happy here. Doval moves on to the next person, as does the camera.
“All this talk of war, what do you think it is?” a senior journalist asked me. He answered his own question: “Fatalism. Depression.”
My visit to Kashmir overlapped with that of the NSA. I reached on 11 August, a day before Eid, and stayed there for two weeks. I travelled extensively, from Kulgam in the south to Uri in the north. It was not difficult to find images of supposed normalcy—a place such as Srinagar, which has been the epicentre of the conflict in the Valley since the 1990s, is hardened. Despite the restrictions, people sometimes step out just to get a breath of fresh air. Driving past the deserted Dal Lake one day, I saw a man sitting alone, completely immersed in fishing. Had the media published his image—a silhouette against a golden sunset of early autumn—it would have been seen as proof of peaceful everydayness. Most visiting journalists did, in fact, return with equivalent images.
The Indian government has devised certain indicators to find and prove normalcy in Kashmir: the number of primary schools reopened, the number of police stations that have relaxed restrictions in their neighbourhood, the number of active landlines in an age of mobile phones. Reducing an entire people to a few conveniently chosen activities, it has, in effect, declared that only violent deaths in clashes with security forces will be considered abnormal.
To understand Kashmir today, however, it is important to understand how everyday life is being lived. The insularity of the Valley was so intense that it seemed to have gone back in time. People were bringing out old radios and DVD players, and cycles to get around. “Don’t throw anything away in Kashmir; it’s gone back twenty to thirty years,” a Srinagar resident said, not entirely in jest. Most newspapers had stopped publication. The largest daily, Greater Kashmir, published only four pages and carried no news that contradicted the government’s narrative. Its main utility became the classifieds page, where many announced cancellations of weddings and other events, “due to prevailing situation in the Valley.”
Though the government claimed the restrictions would gradually be removed, nobody believed it. Most people told me they expected the restrictions to continue until at least the winter. In the past, separatist leaders—Syed Ali Shah Geelani most prominent among them—had led agitations in the Valley, calling for protests and shutdowns. But even young kids knew that this time, it was not Geelani who had given them holidays. It was Narendra Modi.
It is easier to explain with stories from other countries, and other times. “In every war zone, there is another battle, a shadow conflict that rages quietly behind the scenes,” the American journalist Annia Ciezadlo writes in her book Day of Honey, set in war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon. “You don’t see much of it on television or in the movies. This hidden war consists of the slow but relentless destruction of everyday civilian life: The children can’t go to school. The pregnant woman can’t give birth at a hospital. The farmer can’t plow his fields. The musician can’t play his guitar. The professor can’t teach her class. For civilians, war becomes a relentless accumulation of can’ts.”
Telecommunications were replaced by word of mouth, and journalism by the telling and retelling of stories. Every now and then, wandering journalists brought a new set of rumours to the press club, which were then analysed threadbare. Most conversations would lead to, and end with, the mention of war. “All this talk of war, what do you think it is?” a senior journalist asked me. He answered his own question: “Fatalism. Depression.”
Some of the journalists took these grim thoughts home and spent sleepless nights. Others took it upon themselves to cheer up their companions, puncturing the melancholia with the dark humour that lurks around every corner in Kashmir. Misfortune touched the families of the local journalists too. Another senior journalist, who had been away for a couple of days, told me on his return that his mother, a cancer patient, had a medical emergency one night. Out of sheer desperation to make a call, he knocked on the doors of the closest CRPF camp. Journalists had become their own stories.
The effective abrogation of Article 370 was the biggest political tremor to have hit the Valley since 1947. Its enormity sent Kashmir into a huddle of self-reflection. Every person in Kashmir is otherwise an island of political opinion. But remarkably, even without any modern forms of conferring, different corners of the Valley were unified in their thoughts, reactions and emotions about this move. The most striking of these was the ready and untroubled acceptance of militancy by people of all political hues, including mainstream leaders and supporters, who had previously been sworn to the Indian state. The Indian government has rubbished this fact, terming it alarmist. But even as the government hides behind its own narrative, the Valley is rumbling, deep inside, like a dormant volcano.
TRAGEDIES LIE IN WAIT in unexpected corners of Kashmir. On 23 August, the nineteenth day since the clampdown began, 18-year-old Adil Hussain Dar was playing cricket with
