Rahul Pandita - Violence in Kishtwar: the Divide and the Design
About ten days before violence broke out in Kishtwar, Jammu & Kashmir, a news item that appeared in a Valley publication reported the presence of suspicious masked men with weapons in this town and the adjoining Doda district who reportedly came knocking at the doors of Muslim houses during Ramzan and terrorised them. Though local police officers found these to be a hoax, Kashmir’s junior home minister Sajjad Ahmad Kichloo, a resident of Kishtwar himself, promptly announced a reward of Rs 25,000 for anyone who could catch one of these masked men. It came to naught. On 7 August, two days before the riots in Kishtwar, the Valley-based separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani claimed during a prayer meeting that Muslims in the state’s Jammu region were being threatened. He asked people to join protests against Village Defence Committees (VDCs).
These VDCs were set up in several parts of Jammu, including Doda (of which Kishtwar was then a part) in the 1990s after militancy broke out there. The VDCs had mostly ex-servicemen whom the Central Government armed to enable them to guard their villages against militant attacks. Today, VDCs have around 25,000 men and some women, mostly Hindus. Across the mountainous areas in Jammu region, where there is no police or Army presence, these committees act as an effective deterrent against militants. In the Doda region and elsewhere, they have been able to repulse many militant attacks. In Surankote area, where large-scale infiltration of terrorists took place in 2003, a VDC of Muslim women helped the Army bust a major terrorist hideout. Sometimes, VDCs have had to pay a heavy price for it, like in one case in 2001 where 15 of them were burnt alive by militants in a village along the Line of Control in the Jammu region. However, in some cases, these licensed weapons have been used by VDC members to settle personal scores or abuse their authority. There have been a few allegations of human rights violations against them.
On the same day as Geelani’s exhortation, posters of Afzal Guru, hanged in February this year after being convicted in the December 2001 Parliament attack case, and militant leader Maqbool Butt, hanged in 1984 on charges of murder, appeared in Kishtwar with messages written in Urdu of ‘Jihad through holy war.’
Kishtwar is nestled in the Himalayas along the Chenab river, about 230 km north-east of Jammu. Carved out as a district from Doda in 2006, the Hindu-Muslim population here is in the ratio of 40:60. In the 1990s, terrorism spread to these parts as well, much like Kashmir Valley, resulting in an exodus of hundreds of Hindu families. Many massacres took place, including the targeted killings of Hindus on a bus and the gunning down of a marriage party. As compared to the Valley, Indian security forces found it harder to fight militancy in Doda because of its mountainous terrain. At one point, this region became a stronghold of the Islamist militant group Hizbul Mujahideen.
As is the case in the Valley, militancy is on the wane in this region too. Security forces have eliminated scores of militant commanders, and the Hizbul Mujahideen has been wiped off. But the influence of Pakistan-based terrorist groups never went away. The three terrorists identified by the National Investigation Agency as key players in the September 2011 blasts outside the Delhi High Court (resulting in the death of 16 people) were from Kishtwar. While one of them, Amir Ali, was killed in an encounter in the upper reaches of Kishtwar in August last year, another one, Chota Hafiz, was killed in December there as well.
+++
In the last few months, tension had been brewing in Kishtwar. There had been at least three incidents of Hindu youth being beaten up by Muslim mobs. In May, posters of Hizbul Mujahideen surfaced in Kishtwar, barely metres away from the town’s police station. The posters issued by the Hizbul divisional commander Amin Butt called for a ‘Jihad’ and warned people against ‘helping the Indian agencies.’
According to investigations by the J&K Police in the last few months, the Hizbul chief Syed Salahudeen, who also happens to be chairman of the Pakistan-based terrorist conglomerate, United Jihad Council, has been asked by his handlers in Pakistan’s ISI to take advantage of the fresh wave of anti-India sentiment in Kashmir after Afzal Guru’s hanging.
Over the past few months, the Hizbul has claimed credit for several terrorist attacks in the Valley that the J&K Police believe were the work of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba. This, the J&K police believe, has been done to portray that militancy in Kashmir is indigenous. The separatist elements had already been successful in exploiting the situation in Gool area in the Ramban district (neighbouring Kishtwar) last month when four people protesting against an alleged desecration of the Quran died in firing outside a BSF camp. A week after the Gool incident, a security review meeting was held by a senior Army commander of the region. By this time, intelligence agencies had warned of a possible flare-up in the situation, aided by certain ‘separatist elements’ active in the area. Soon, on 29 July, there was an incident of eve-teasing during the local Kalash Yatra, resulting in two youths being injured. “Disturbances had been going on for a month. But the administration did not pay heed to the impending signals,” local Congress leader GM Saroori told journalists. Residents in Kishtwar say that the situation was so tense that many taxi drivers had been telling the pilgrims undertaking the annual Machail yatra to stay away.
Days before Eid, police sources reveal, they had prepared a list of people who were fomenting trouble, but they were prevented by the state’s junior home minister Kichloo from arresting them.
+++
On 9 August, the morning of Eid, Muslims had gathered for prayers at Kishtwar’s Chowgan ground. There were more than 20,000 people in attendance. By an account put together from what eyewitnesses say, what happened was the following...
+++
The BJP was quick to cash in on the developments, with senior leaders of the party launching a loud campaign against J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his leadership. The party not only saw a potential upturn in its electoral prospects in Jammu, it sensed that the Kishtwar violence could reverberate with voters in other parts of the country as well. Modelling himself as a modern-day Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley landed up in Jammu to travel to Kishtwar, but was sent back by the state government. In New Delhi, the BJP then launched a tirade against the Abdullah government in Parliament, with Jaitley saying that the developments in Kishtwar were like a repeat of events in Kashmir Valley in 1990 when Hindus were forced to leave in the wake of Islamist extremism. As the Union’s acting Home Minister (as Shinde was in hospital), P Chidambaram was quick to respond by assuring the House that the Centre would not let that happen.
But that may be easier said than done. The BJP’s protests may be motivated by a desire to score political points, but fears of an exodus of Hindus from the Doda region are genuine. Intelligence reports have suggested that there is an attempt to revive militancy in the region, much like in Kashmir Valley... read more:
See also
