Wordless valley

What is it like to live in the world’s most heavily militarised region that shares borders with two nuclear-armed rivals?

I was 20 when Hizbul commander Burhan Wani was killed by the military, sparking Kashmir’s worst uprising since the 1990s. Scores of people were killed and photos of pellet gun injuries sustained by children and adults went viral. I was active on social media, where many would jump into heated arguments about Kashmir. I maintained a reticent presence online. The Kashmiri students I knew in Mumbai often lacked funds and approached me and my batchmates from Mithibai College for donations through an NGO. They would often mention how bad the situation was back home. Hearing them speak of the Valley had piqued my interest in the Kashmir conflict.

As I completed college, I noticed that the Kashmir problem was a rallying point in practically every state and parliamentary election from which political parties benefited. Five years later, as a cub reporter, many social and civic issues drew my interest, but nothing rivalled my interest in learning and writing about the Valley.

The Valley’s history is like the Kurosawa epic — there is no single “truthful” story about Kashmir — as Prof Amitabh Mattoo, former adviser to the chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir, says. Since 2014 there have been no elections in the Valley, and the repeal of Articles 370 and 35A has left Kashmiris more bewildered than ever.

The first days

Rifat Ara Rouf (name changed) is a proprietor of a bookstore in Srinagar. Her shop boasts books on almost every subject, with an entire shelf dedicated to Kashmir — from its history to its politics — except Articles 370 and 35A. “Can you recommend any books on the repealed Articles?” I inquired. She instantly stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up to assist me browse, saying, “People are too scared to even talk about it, let alone write an entire book.” I told her I wanted to talk to people about it. She stared at my press ID as she handed me a book called ‘Kashmir — Glimpses of History and the Story of Struggle’ by Saifuddin Soz. “Nobody talks to the press here,” she said.

On my first day in Srinagar, I walked from Sonwar Bagh to Mominabad through Residency Road, Lal Chowk, and Hari Singh High Street in the hope of speaking to people. The tricolour, hoisted by Rahul Gandhi on January 30 at the end of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, nearly seven weeks before my visit, fluttered atop the clock tower at Lal Chowk. I was told by flea market vendors that a Pakistan flag had been hoisted on the tower in the mid-90s.

There are sights in Kashmir that one cannot ignore, like the steel mesh that covered the windows of Tyndale Biscoe School, which stands only a few metres from Lal Chowk. As a kid, I would jump out of school windows to bunk classes. I wondered what it would be like for children to grow up in such a fortified society.

As I traversed the roughly 6 km stretch, I began approaching people to chat. Rifat was right. They were nervous about being on camera or chatting with me because they saw my press vest and ID. On the first day, I tried talking to about 15 people but only got short answers or no responses. A local told me, “You people come from Delhi with a script. What is the use talking to you?”

It was the second week of Ramzan, and the streets were buzzing with activity. According to a renowned baker in the Saraibal region, the city is bustling right up until the Isha prayers, and then everything shuts down. It was surprising because the erstwhile state is India’s only Muslim-majority territory, and I expected the celebrations to go late into the night. In Mumbai and Bengaluru, markets are open 24/7 during the holy month.

I walked further to Hari Singh High Street, one of the main markets in Srinagar. The atmosphere was celebratory, but something felt odd — everything was under the shadow of the security forces’ rifles. I had noticed CRPF and BSF soldiers every 100 metres, from the airport to the main town. But the security in the market was more intense. The troops’ full metal jacket brass bullets in transparent magazines, though menacing, gleamed in the soft winter sun, like an embellishment to their uniforms. Again, every civilian I approached refused to talk. Soon, it was Iftar time, and the crowd in the market dispersed. It was hard to believe I was in the same market as an eerie silence enveloped the place within minutes. The only humans left there were the CRPF personnel and myself.

Minutes later, I heard a clang of boots marching into the market from the other side of the Jhelum bridge. It was a patrolling party of the CRPF, armed with rifles, batons, and riot gear. I was told by security personnel that in the past, trouble broke out after evening prayers. Hence, soldiers had to be extra cautious in the evening. Soon, an armoured vehicle followed. More personnel got down and took positions.

In the hairline

I asked a CRPF jawan if I could speak to an officer. “The SHO of the J&K police should be around,” he said, pointing to a decrepit police car. I was trying to peer into the vehicle’s steel-mesh windows when a police jawan about 100 metres away sprinted over with his Kalashnikov rifle, yelling, “Hey! Don’t get close to the vehicle!” I quickly pulled out my ID card and yelled, “Press, sir!” He walked to me angrily and said, “Don’t approach any vehicle without asking the security around, or you may get shot.”

To put him at ease, I explained, “I just wanted to speak to some official and I have come from Bengaluru.” He said, “Speak to bade saahab (the DGP). He will talk to the press.” He gave me the address and asked me to leave.

After a close shave, I realised that only jawans had spoken to me on the first four days of my visit. As I was walking back to my accommodation, I passed a bunker with a CRPF truck parked behind it at the Jhelum bridge. Before going up to the jawans this time, I made sure my ID was visible and my fluorescent press vest was on. I struck up a conversation with two CRPF soldiers from Satara (Maharashtra) and Rewa (Madhya Pradesh). Their truck, parked behind them, had large dents from a previous stone-pelting incident, which they claimed happened before the abrogation of the special status of J&K. I asked if I may photograph the dent, but they refused, claiming that their commanding officer, who sat inside the truck, would pull them up if he spotted cameras.
I had been reading about motorcycle-borne attackers for over two years. I asked, “How do they get away after an attack? Can anyone escape with security every 100 metres?” The jawan from Satara said, “They have the locals’ support. They can disappear anywhere in the lanes. Even if the locals don’t support them, they won’t refuse to shelter them.” The jawan from Rewa, who also had seen multiple tenures in Kashmir, nodded in agreement.

When I asked the two jawans if they thought it was possible to feel normal amid so many guns, bunkers, and concertina wire, the jawan from Satara said, “They (Kashmiris) are used to guns and bloodshed. There was a period when every home in Downtown was armed with an AK series rifle. Do you think guns bother them? When my contingent arrived here in the 2010s, we were greeted with a torrent of stones on our buses. If we controlled these ‘thugs’ on one side of Lal Chowk, they would come from the other side.”

I didn’t say anything. As an army aspirant with many family members in the forces, I have enormous respect for the soldiers, but I was saddened by the way locals were seen as “the other”. I knew their recollection was flawed, and that not all homes had assault rifles.

The following day, I joined a throng of tourists on the Dal Lake promenade. Just a few kilometres from Gupkar Road, I met S K Chaudhary, his battalion’s second-in-command in the CRPF. He ended up being the only officer-rank soldier I met on the trip. The jawans with him crowded around us and listened intently as I spoke. I said, “Tourists are swarming here from all over the country, but there are guns every 100 metres. With the repeal of Article 370...” I was mid-sentence when he cut me off, saying, “Young man, democracy has been restored! Look around you, people are having fun! You should have fun, too! The repeal of the Articles is the best thing that could have ever happened!” The jawans around him smirked and started clicking photos of their sahab interacting with the media. He gave me his visiting card and said he could talk over the phone if I had more questions.

I then met some Kashmiri soldiers, and I asked them about the claim that the locals were sympathetic to extremists. A jawan from Anantnag said, “It’s true. The militancy attitude won’t just go away. But there is relatively more peace in the region because of the security. You see how heavily militarised this place is. If any radical gets caught, the policies of the centre are so stringent that not just their family and relatives, but even their friends and acquaintances suffer. Nobody related to the family gets a job. No doubt, the attacks have reduced. But it is also suffocating to live like this.”

Motorcycle-borne attackers are in the news as they can operate with little training, unlike old-time militants who went through rigorous training to fight with the forces. He said, “Pulling a pistol trigger is much easier than undergoing training in a camp.”

I tried to get in touch with an army officer the next day. It was bitterly cold. As I stood outside the BB Cantt, an armoured SUV pulled up. A few special forces soldiers were seated inside. I asked the soldier sitting at the back, “I am from the press. Can I speak to you?” He picked up his AK rifle, looked at me suspiciously, and said, “No! And don’t come close (to the vehicle).” A Kannadiga soldier, guarding the gate of the cantonment, saw what happened, and said, “Sir, I know you are from Prajavani, but don’t stand here. This is a sensitive area. All of Kashmir is a sensitive area. Things can get bad quickly. Please go home.”

We got talking

While reporting in Bengaluru and Mumbai, I had spoken to dozens of people in a day. But in Kashmir, four days had passed and not a single civilian had spoken to me at length yet. I decided to drop my press ID and not ambush locals with my questions as a journalist. I started speaking to them as a tourist before revealing my profession. By now, I had figured out that nobody wanted to reveal their identity, so I stopped asking people their names unless they asked me mine.

I struck up a conversation with a cabbie called Zoheb Hasan (name changed), who turned out to be a political science graduate. There was an awkward silence when I told Zoheb I was a journalist. But he warmed up to me. After what seemed like years of hardships, he just wanted to whine and vent. He went on and on about unemployment, radicalism, drug menace, surveillance, and most importantly, the all-too-common sight and news of death.

As we continued to chat, Zoheb, who had been fasting for Ramzan, decided to break his fast in the cab with me. While I sat beside him, he pulled over at the Zaina Kadal market, bought some fruits for Iftar, and then read his kalima while touching the picture of the Kaaba that hung from the rear-view mirror. He was now eager to show me around. I was driven to separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s house, where he briefed me on the events that transpired on the night of his death. I was also shown a graveyard where many rebels were buried.

“I know somebody who was once influenced by radical ideology. But today, he is a family man and owns a business. He is a friend. I could take you to meet him,” he told me. Zoheb called up his friend Ramil Khan (name changed) instantly and told him in Koshur that a journalist was interested in speaking about “taboo topics”. Ramil agreed to join us. I was now with two locals, in a car, driving through the lanes of Downtown, just listening to what they had to say. The only question I asked them was how it is live under the shadow of guns. It was as if the two had been set up for a therapy session where they would not stop ranting.

Ramil’s best friend was killed in crossfire by a stray bullet, which he says came from a security personnel’s gun. “It was a regular day in 2008. My friend was going about his day, and suddenly he was dead,” he said. Ramil lives in Srinagar’s Nowhatta area and is one of the many people who have lost their loved ones in the decades-long conflict in Kashmir.

Ramil told me why people are hesitant to speak freely: “Do you know about the J&K Public Safety Act? If I say something on record, they might book me and take me straight to Tihar jail in Delhi. They think every Kashmiri is a terrorist.” He gave me several examples of people getting punished for liking, reacting to, or sharing Facebook and Twitter posts. The Act allows for detention of people for two years without a trial or charge in case they are acting in a manner that is prejudicial to the security of the state or the public order.

“They deal differently with us,” Ramil said, adding, “Militancy can never be cured with brute force. It can only be cured with conversation, and understanding... The more guns you show people, the more they will hate you. When the uprising in Kashmir began, we were just seven or eight years old. Do you think we weren’t fazed by the sound of gunfire and explosions?”

He dubbed the Kashmir conflict as a “carefully mad war because there are brains behind this chaos, there is politics behind this disorder.” Some rural areas in Kashmir have become dens of militancy, he claimed. “Too much fear can turn into fearlessness, sir ji. That is why militancy persists even when there is so much fauj around,” he observed.

After a particularly choppy stretch of road, Zoheb turned to me and remarked, “Does it appear that you are in the capital of a Union Territory? I have been to Delhi and Mumbai... They are both capital cities like Srinagar, but so much better. There are barely any international brands in the market here.”

Ramil stated that locals were upset over the ongoing G20 smart city project. “The government is saying they would give us a new city, but they are erasing Kashmir’s history,” he said, referring to the city’s iconic clock tower that was demolished shortly after my return and is now being rebuilt.

I made sure that I didn’t distract the two by taking notes, or make them paranoid by turning on the voice recorder on my phone. They spoke to me for nearly three hours. While many factors contribute to militancy, Zoheb and Ramil said people got so desperate that they took up arms even if they realised they had fewer than three months to live. “I gave up being a rebel because I realised my family would not survive without me,” Ramil said.

Shikara ride

I returned to the Dal Lake and asked a tourist family if they felt safe visiting Srinagar. The children were too young to understand, but the parents smiled uncomfortably and said, “It is a lovely place, but there is a bit of risk.” They chose Srinagar because “TV news says everything is okay now.”

A few steps ahead, I met Hamid, a boatman who took me for a ride on his shikara. He spoke impeccable English but wore torn shoes and a holey pheran. When I told him I was a journalist, he lit up a bidi and briefed me on his business. “Tourism in the Valley picked up after the pandemic, but terrorism has severely restricted the foreign tourism. Indians from middle-income backgrounds make up the largest demographic of tourists but they don’t spend as much as our foreign patrons. A foreigner would spend lakhs on a single trip to Kashmir, splurge on the most luxurious Pashminas and papier-mâché products decorated with gold leaves, and enjoy winter sports in Gulmarg and Sonmarg over many weeks,” he said.

I was fatigued and drinking kahwa in the government Circuit House on my last night in Srinagar when two men at the next table noticed my press ID. They waved and invited me over. One of them had been a journalist. He is currently a BJP functionary from Budgam district. He introduced himself as Hakim Ruhullah Ghazi. He asked if I had spoken to any officials. He gave me the contacts of politicians, MLAs, MPs, the police commissioner, and Kashmiri filmmakers.

On my way out, I asked Hakim why the capital of UT felt more neglected than a tier-3 city in India. He replied, “If all the focus is on security, governance suffers…”

I grinned to myself at the green blinker at Sheikh ul-Alam airport that read: “We hope to see you again in Heaven on Earth.” As I boarded the plane to Bengaluru, all I could think of was the fear of Kashmiris speaking to a journalist.

Repealed articles

On August 5, 2019, the Centre revoked the decades-old special status granted to Jammu & Kashmir under Article 370. It formerly allowed the state to have its own constitution, a separate flag, and independence to make laws in all matters except finance, defence, foreign affairs and communications.

Article 35A, which branches out of Article 370, thus, stood scrapped. It gave residents privileges related to jobs and scholarships, and the exclusive right to own and buy property in the state.

In October that year, the state was formally split into two union territories – Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh.