Of Braids, Blades and the Djinns of Winters Past

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 In July 2017, the mobile and Internet network provider company Jio, owned by the Reliance group, launched a country-wide scheme that offered unlimited free phone calls from a Jio SIM to any number in the country. Kashmiris purchased Reliance Jio SIM cards en masse in 2017 and used its free 4G Internet services to share information on social media about everyday atrocities in Kashmir. Owing to the increased online presence of Kashmiri youth, Internet services are routinely suspended for days after a crackdown by armed forces. Despite the ways in which these services are being used as tools of protest, Reliance Jio is notorious for sharing private user data with the government. Many young Kashmiri protestors are routinely arrested and harassed by police forces for sharing images and videos of protests, crackdowns and encounters online.

2 During the height of the Kashmiri armed conflict, awards and promotions were showered on police, extra-legal armed-civilian forces (called Ikhwan), paramilitary and armed forces personnel who brought in militants, their over-ground workers and their sympathisers, dead or alive. Since it was impossible to determine the identities of militants or present proof of anyone sympathising with militants, it created a spiralling cycle of executions by state forces to gain recognition.

Evidence gathered by rights organisations show that there are around 7,000 mass, unmarked graves, spread over multiple sites in Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society). Over three thousand bodies bearing signs of torture and injuries have so far been found buried in some of these graves that have been opened for inspection by the State Human Rights Commission. While a few of them were recognised by their kin after decades of search, many others remain unidentified and mangled beyond identification.

3 There have been over 8,000 cases of ‘enforced disappearances’ in Kashmir between 1989 and 2019 (Association for Parents of Disappeared Persons). Enforced disappearance consists of kidnapping carried out by agents of the state or organised groups of individuals who act with state support or tolerance, in which the victim is never seen again. Authorities neither accept responsibility for the dead nor account for the whereabouts of the victim, placing such persons outside of the protection of the law.

4 Wives of disappeared persons are called ‘half-widows’ because they are not sure if their husbands are dead or alive.

5 A number of studies by scholars and mental health organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières, and the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Kerala, reveal that nearly half of Kashmir’s population suffers from severe mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe anxiety and chronic depression (Amin and Khan; Housen et al). In addition to this, dissenting Kashmiri youth, in popular discourses in India, are referred to as ‘mentally ill’, ‘hysterical’ or ‘half-mad’.

6 Since 2008, popular rebellion in Kashmir has taken the form of stone pelting at the armed forces. Youth (mostly juveniles) who participate in these protests are shot at with bullets and rubber pellets (1,091 have been blinded by these attacks since 2016) and are incarcerated with heavy fines levied on them (Bhat and Mander). In the discourse around Kashmir in India, stone pelters are often spoken of as militants or ‘almost militants’/‘half-militants’.

7 Dal Lake in the capital city of Srinagar is one of the most picturesque and revered lakes in Kashmir. After the start of the militant struggle in Kashmir in the late 1980s and the brutal state response that followed for over a decade, the lake was desecrated with filth and unidentified dead bodies. Illegal encroachments, by both the locals and the armed forces, resulted in the lake shrinking in size by 36 per cent over the last thirty-seven years (Bansal).

8 Maqbool Bhat was one of the first Kashmiri freedom fighters from Kupwara and founded the militant organisation Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Front in 1965. He was captured and hanged (and buried) without trial in Tihar jail in New Delhi in 1984. He is popular in Kashmir as Shaheed-e-Azam or Shaheed-e-Kashmir (The Great Martyr and The Martyr of Kashmir).

Burhan Muzaffar Wani was a popular militant commander of Hizbul Mujahideen who was killed by the state security forces in 2016 at the age of 21. He was one of the first militants with a social media presence and released audio and video messages to the people from time to time. It is common to find pictures and messages of Burhan saved in people’s cell phones in Kashmir.

9 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is an Indian right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation which is also the parent organisation of the ruling national party of India, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). RSS believes undivided Kashmir to be an integral part of India and seeks to revoke all constitutional measures in place granting partial autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

10 Sabzar Ahmad Bhat was a Kashmiri militant commander of Hizbul Mujahideen and a close aide and friend of Burhan Wani. He was killed by the police in 2016.

11 The term ‘Kashmiriyat’ has been widely used since the 1970s and 1980s by Indian politicians and political commentators to highlight the ‘centuries old indigenous secularism of Kashmir’ (Tak). Subsequently, it was contextualised by historians who located its politics in the historical set-up of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Governed by the Hindu Dogra rulers, the valley of Kashmir was a Muslim majority region. Systemic discrimination, favouritism and blatant oppression by the Dogra regime reduced the Muslim masses to a condition of absolute poverty where thousands worked as bonded labourers for Hindu landowners and officers. Scholars and academics including Chitralekha Zutshi, Mridu Rai and Toru Tak discuss the Hindu majoritarian inflections of this idea and its convenient usage that overlooks the obvious fault lines of the Kashmiri conflict, including the difficult question of a popular uprising of Muslims against a Hindu majoritarian state that claims to be the largest secular democracy in the world.