Hive of dissent swarms police

Christian Cotroneo, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: August 18. 2008 1:45AM UAE / August 17. 2008 9:45PM GMT

Srinagar, INDIA// Emerging from a narrow lane in the old district of Srinagar, the pair of young Indian officers in riot gear could not have wandered into a worse place.

Somewhere behind them, legions of police and military held down barbed wire barricades with heavy machine guns. But ahead of them, there was only the labyrinth of Old Srinagar, the traditional capital of Kashmiri militancy.

In the early 1990s, when Kashmir last clamoured for independence from India, gunmen were a common sight in the upper windows of crumbling buildings. In recent years, the militancy had eased and tourists began venturing into Old Srinagar’s historic alleys.

Today, the neighbourhood is once again a hive of dissent, the base for a separatist movement racking the entire region. In the past week, nearly 30 people have been killed and 600 injured in confrontations with police and military across the state.

But Kashmiris seem undaunted. They are brazenly heckling police and increasingly tangling with them at checkpoints, regardless of the consequences.

In a sign that security forces are scrambling, the government is transferring several senior police officers out of the region. Last week, the government replaced the head of the Central Reserve Police Force, a national agency that was involved in several shooting incidents with protesters.

Despite their often numerical superiority against an unruly crowd brandishing rocks and sticks, police are frequently on their heels and struggling to counter the sheer animosity of protesters.

That animosity became all too evident when two wayward police officers found themselves in Old Srinagar on Friday. Even the locals seemed surprised to find the officers there, decked in riot gear and clinging to bamboo shields. But it did not take long for a shrieking crowd to pounce. Masked young men seemed to appear from nowhere, lunging at the officers – who, for their part, tried to calm the gathering crowd. One of them held up a hand, as if to say, it is all right. We were just passing through.

But all the rage pent up for several weeks before – over the killing of a senior separatist leader and the shootings into crowds of protesters – suddenly came to bear on these young officers.

At first, a few of the neighbourhood men tried to protect the police, yelling and pushing back the assailants. They fell away quickly. Hands gripped one officer’s shield, trying to wrench it away from him. The officer struggled to pull back. But by then, too many hands were pulling.

His comrade tried to fend off an onslaught of his own. The crowd thickened, fuelling its own frenzy. The officers fell to the ground and the crowd devoured them in an orgy of kicking, gouging and trampling. Moments later, a boy emerged from the crowd triumphantly bearing a police helmet.

In that furious instant, Kashmiri rage seemed to crystallise, hurtling India’s most northerly state towards a new destiny. Along the way, as protesters had promised after the police shooting of a separatist leader, there would be “blood for blood”.

The Indian police officers were severely beaten and hospitalised. It was not possible to confirm their conditions or whether they had been released yesterday.

Until very recently, Indian authorities were touting the strides they had made in pacifying the region. But that brief renaissance, which began in the early part of this decade when hotels welcomed hundreds of thousands of tourists and such markets as Old Srinagar bustled with commerce has come crashing down.

Today, Kashmir is a lush, green bunker. About 400,000 security personnel are stationed in the region. The capital, Srinagar, is under military curfew – an edict that Kashmiris seem to take particular pleasure in flouting. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets last weekend, heckling police and soldiers who huddled behind barricades on every street corner. The protesters waved effigies of police officers, blackened US flags and flags of their own – the traditional greens of Kashmir.

A masked protester, calling himself Riaz, expressed it bluntly. “F*** the curfew,” he shouted. “We will continue until Kashmir is free.”

Riaz, like so many marchers in Srinagar, said he believes police have been exclusively targeting Kashmiris. In Jammu, another region of the state (which boasts a slender Hindu majority), there has also been agitation, counter-protests by Hindus mostly, who are outraged that the state government backed down on its offer to grant land for a Hindu temple in the Kashmir Valley.

“They want only our land,” growled Aijaz Ahmad Malik, an economics student at nearby Kashmir University. “That’s it.”

Over the past few nights, activists have overrun several security points and forced police to flee. Each morning, however, uneasy calm was restored with security personnel helming positions throughout the city.

The government had initially hoped that the end on Friday of the Yatra, a Hindu pilgrimage in Kashmir, would ease communal tensions. But with relations between security forces and Kashmiris deteriorating with every protester shot, or police officer beaten – the situation has hurtled beyond a mere land issue. As India celebrated 61 years of Independence from the British last weekend, Kashmiris feel like they are still fighting for it. And an army stands in its way.

It is a battle that Kashmiris don’t see ending soon.

“They killed a lot of people,” Mr Malik said.



ccotroneo@thenational.ae