ON THE COLD EVENING OF 23 DECEMBEr 2021, about twenty Kashmiris gathered in Srinagar’s Pratap Park for a protest. Two army trucks soon arrived at the nearby Regal Chowk, and dozens of soldiers cordoned off the park. Some were in civilian clothes—two of them confirmed to me that they were with the Indian Army. The protesters seemed unperturbed, however. This was unusual, given how the army normally interacts with protesters in the Kashmir Valley.
A few minutes later, two uniformed soldiers brought a hoarding out of the truck and handed it over to two plain-clothed personnel inside the park. The billboard had three bold words, Aakhir Kab Tak—how much longer—against a background of spilt blood. Below, amid a sea of loud hashtags, including #VoiceAgainstTerrorism, #StopKilling-Kashmiris, #KashmirBadalRahaHai and #KashmirForTiranga, the banner advised, “Kashmir let us unite.”
Fifteen minutes after the soldiers hoisted the hoarding and lit a row of candles in front of it, the who’s who of the protest arrived: a politician belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party and others from minor groups, retired civil servants known for their less-than-stellar service records and a couple of people who sat on the fence between journalism and hyper-nationalist bombast. An army officer, who identified himself to me as Colonel Sanjay Bhalay—from the 125th battalion of the Territorial Army—lit a tiki torch and handed such torches to the most vocal of the protesters. The group shouted a few slogans against terrorism and called for the destruction of Pakistan for less than five minutes before taking a break to provide sound bites to the expectant cameras of Doordarshan, Asian News International, Asian News Network and a handful of local web portals.
The first speech was delivered by Shaheena Bhat, an elected member of the Srinagar Municipal Corporation, who had personally been handed a torch by the colonel. “We raise our voice whenever there is a killing or injustice,” she said. “The BJP has controlled the situation in Kashmir, and I am thankful to them for stopping the killings here. Development is coming to Kashmir.” The whole affair was over in under half an hour. The candles were put out with only a quarter of their wicks burnt. The media hurriedly left. Three soldiers in mufti brought down the hoarding and safely stored it in a nearby army truck.
The event seemed to be a phony re-enactment of the protests organised by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons. For over three decades, the half-widows and mothers, of thousands of young Kashmiris who had been disappeared, gathered on the tenth of every month at Pratap Park to remember their loss and demand answers from the state. The Aakhir Kab Tak protest used the same bloodied hand usually found on the posters of the APDP and placed it right alongside messages of support for the armed forces.
The Aakhir Kab Tak protests seemed to re-interpret the history of Kashmir’s relationship with the Indian security services. My conversations with its organisers suggested that the army is trying to establish a new generation of politicians and power-brokers in the valley, tied indivisibly with the BJP’s vision
