Why Is There Dangerous Vacuum In Kashmir?

A clampdown on the valley’s agitators will achieve little; the government has to come up with an innovative outreach process.

- Barkha Dutt

A few months ago when the Kashmir valley was thrown into a spiral of agi-tation and unrest, I met a separatist politician considered relatively moderate even by intelligence agencies and backchannel conduits who have long worked covert communication lines to those demanding secession. Burhan Wani, the Hizbul Mujahideen militant, had just been killed in an encounter and the valley had erupted in tumultuous protests. The separatist warned that people like him were losing control of the street. “We are slowly becoming irrelevant to this new generation and won’t even have the influence to deescalate this agitation,” he warned. “Please go back and tell Delhi they need to start some dialogue process or soon there will be no one to talk to.” What was more chilling was his admission that many of his public pronouncements now deliberately focused on issues of Muslim identity. “I need to speak their language,” he told me, “otherwise no one will come to listen to me.”

A senior officer who has worked in the counterinsurgency grid for decades told me that this may be one of the biggest shifts in the last few years. “Earlier, Islam was a subset of azaadi; now we are heading towards azaadi becoming a subset of Islam,” the police officer analysed. Burhan Wani, who used social media as a weapon of insurgency, underlined this new trend, when in his videos he called for a Caliphate in Kashmir. At a hospital, I met a young, schoolgoing boy who had joined the street marches against Wani’s killing. Now he lay strapped to a hospital bed, his eye sight irrevocably damaged in one eye from the injury caused by a pellet gun. What did he see in Wani, I asked the teenager. “He is fighting for Islam,” he said, barely able to articulate his words, “Islam and also azaadi.”