Kashmir, and the inheritance of loss

On July 8, Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old rebel, was shot dead by Indian soldiers and police officers in a small village in the central part of Kashmir. News of his killing spread as fast as the bullets that had hit him. Cellphones, emails, social media went wild: “They’ve killed Burhan! They’ve killed Burhan!”

He had become an internet sensation over the past year, first in Kashmir, then in India and Pakistan, after putting together a small band of Kashmiri militants. Barely out of their teens, they had taken to the forest and social media to challenge the Indian government. Photos they posted on Facebook show them in military fatigues and with stubbly chins, posing with AK-47s against backdrops of apple orchards or mountains. In one video, Burhan plays cricket.

A dozen boys with a few guns – they were no threat to the army, one of the largest in the world. There is no record of Burhan and his crew waging any attack. Their rebellion was symbolic.

Protests erupted on the day of Burhan’s funeral and were repressed by troops with indiscriminate force, including pellet guns: about 50 people had been killed and 3,100 injured, nearly half of them Indian troops but also children as young as 4. Instead of opening political negotiations to address Kashmiris’ calls for independence, the government continues to use military force to maintain a status quo.

When I first saw the photos of Burhan and his boys, I thought: another generation of young Kashmiris about to be consumed. Those apple orchards and mountains in the background, which I know intimately and call home, brought back memories of the early 1990s when I was a teenager in southern Kashmir. An armed insurgency supported by Pakistan and a popular rebellion were underway then.

By the time the insurgency was quashed in the late 2000s, more than 70,000 militants, soldiers and civilians had been killed. Still, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris would occasionally take to the streets. Indian troops continued to respond with violence, even against civilians armed with nothing or nothing more than stones.

Hardly any soldier has been prosecuted for civilian killings because Indian law has long granted immunity to troops posted in Kashmir and other troubled territories (A recent decision by the Supreme Court may change this).

Burhan came of age with this inheritance of loss and rage. He was 15, a top-ranking student from a middle-class family, in 2010 – that summer alone Indian forces killed more than 110 Kashmiri protesters. One afternoon that year, Indian police officers posted in Burhan’s town reportedly sent him and his brother Khalid to fetch cigarettes and then beat up the boys when they returned. Humiliated, Burhan left for the mountains and joined a tiny group of militants. Then last year, Khalid, who was doing postgraduate work in economics, was killed by Indian soldiers.

On the morning of July 9, Burhan’s body was brought to a vast open ground in Tral, his hometown, about 25 miles east of Srinagar. As Kashmiris seethed with desperate anger that day, paramilitaries and police were deployed across the region. In hundreds of locations, people came out to mourn Burhan and raise their voices against the government.

The vast majority were unarmed. In some places, protesters picked up stones and charged at camps of soldiers and police. The troops responded with a brutality rare even by the grim standards of their record in Kashmir. They fired bullets, tear gas and lead pellets. Soon, a military curfew was imposed.

I reached Kashmir from Delhi on July 11, and the next morning when I woke up in my parents’ house in southern Srinagar, I heard only crickets chirping in the backyard. The streets were desolate except for groups of paramilitary troops with guns and bamboo sticks. The politicians who run the Kashmir government had all but disappeared from public view.

Kashmiris, as they do in crisis, turned to themselves for support. At the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital in central Srinagar, where the injured had been brought by the hundreds, scores of volunteers were offering medicine, money, clothes and care to the patients and their families.

I walked into an ophthalmology ward. There were about 20 beds with a teenager or young man in each and relatives standing around in anxious huddles. Almost every patient had large, black sunglasses. “Seventy-two patients with pellet injuries arrived here in one day,” one doctor told me. SMHS Hospital alone had received more than 180 people with serious wounds to the eyes.

A single shot from a pellet gun sprays more than a hundred pellets. A pellet is a high-velocity projectile 2mm to 4mm around and with sharp edges. It doesn’t simply penetrate an eye; it ricochets inside it, tearing the retina and the optic nerves, scooping out flesh and bone.

Insha Malik

I walked through the hospital with Dr Javed Shafi, a surgeon in his early 40s, as he was making bed calls with his patients. In other corners of the hospital: A young man with the face of Adrian Brody whose penis had to be amputated because it had been shredded by pellets. A four-year-old girl, her legs and abdomen riddled by what she called “firecrackers.” And Insha Malik.

I had read about Insha, 14, in that morning’s paper. The photograph accompanying the article showed a face with red wart-like wounds. Her nasal bridge was a lump of raw flesh held together by black surgical thread. The bloodied lids of her left eye had been sown shut. Her right eye was a red alloy of blood, flesh, bone and metal.

Insha was in the surgical intensive care unit of SMHS Hospital, a few rooms away from the ward I visited with Dr Shafi. Afroza Malik, her mother, a woman in her early 50s, sat right by the ICU door on the bare floor. Her husband, who had a leg injury from an earlier accident, was lying on a blanket, his head in his wife’s lap. She was stroking his greying hair.

Malik explained that on July 12, she, Insha and several relatives had taken refuge in an upstairs room of their two-story house in Sedew, a tiny village 40 miles south of Srinagar. They closed the thick wooden windows and sat on the floor. They heard tear gas canisters being fired; they heard gunshots.

A loud noise followed. A pellet gun had been fired at the window. Insha was sitting nearby. “The window was blown to pieces,” Malik told me. “I heard her wail and saw blood flowing out of her eyes. She fell on the floor.”

A few days later, the police raided the offices of Greater Kashmir, the daily that had run that story about Insha, as well as several other local newspapers, and shut down the printing presses. The authorities’ familiar silencing routine had begun again. Officials and thought leaders fell back on tired rituals of obfuscation and denial.