Death Valley

The near-total alienation of the Valley’s youth and the ascendance of the JeM present an extremely threatening combination.

- Asit Jolly and Moazum Mohammad

Until the video claiming credit for killing the 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel on February 14 afternoon popped up on social media, Adil Ahmad Dar’s family believed their son was a C-category militant. They privately hoped the boy would surrender and serve jail time like his cousin Tauseef Ahmad. There was disbelief and shock in Gundibagh, the family’s village in the southern Pulwama district, when the news came out. Almost everyone who knew the 19-year-old before he dropped out of Class 12 to sign up with the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s Afzal Guru squad (a homegrown Kashmiri cadre) a year ago, remembers him as “shy and quiet”. On the rare occasion when he would open up, his friends say, it was always about cricket. Unusual in these troubled times in the Valley, but Dar was a big fan of the Indian cricket team. M.S. Dhoni was his idol.

But something changed for him (as it did for the Valley) after the killing of the ‘charismatic’ Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in the summer of 2016. A gunshot injury to his leg during the month-long agitation after Wani’s death and his reported humiliation at the hands of the SOG (Special Operations Group) may have also played a part. “The SOG made Adil rub his nose on the ground as a school student in 2016. It always haunted him,” says uncle Abdul Rashid Dar, whose two sons had also turned militants. One is dead now, the other has given up arms. Whatever the truth, 11 months after he joined the JeM, Dar’s transformation was radical—from a helpful youngster supplementing the family income as best as he could to the deadly suicide bomber the like of whom India has never seen.