It was unfortunate timing. At the very moment David Cameron was pleasing his Indian audience by criticising Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism, security forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir were gunning down civilian protesters in the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of the disputed state.
It is not clear why Cameron failed to mention the worsening crisis in Kashmir — the violence and civilian deaths have been all over the Indian media — particularly after he was so forthright about the Gaza crisis during his trip to Turkey. But the killings of demonstrators, curfews and riots in the Muslim-majority state have not gone unnoticed in the Muslim world, and Pakistan’s President Zardari will almost certainly have raised the issue in London this week. The PM’s silence about Kashmir could cost him — and the United Kingdom — considerable Muslim goodwill.
In the West, people tend to forget what a rallying cry ‘occupied’ Kashmir has been for Islamists, Pakistanis and ordinary Muslims. Osama bin Laden said in a 2002 statement that one of the reasons he was making war on America was its support for India over Kashmir. Today, the 21-year-old Kashmiri insurgency is once again coming to the boil. Two years ago the separatist rebellion — co-opted by Pakistani intelligence from the late 1980s — had calmed down. In 2009, tourists were returning in large numbers to Srinagar, and Indian troop levels were being drawn down. All that ended when the rape and murder of two local women in May 2009 — supposedly by members of the security forces, followed by what looked like an official cover-up — provoked mass riots. Things got worse in February when a 13-year-old boy playing cricket died after being struck on the head with a tear gas shell fired by Indian security forces.
The authorities have reacted with clumsiness and ruthlessness. Again and again Indian paramilitary police troopers have opened fire on crowds of unarmed protesters and gangs of stone-throwing youths. Each civilian death has prompted more demonstrations, which in turn are met with more live rounds, more economy-destroying curfews, and attempts to limit media coverage by restricting telephone and internet service.
Those who watch al Jazeera will be all too aware that Srinagar and much of the Kashmir valley have been under suffocating curfews since 11 June — when riots erupted after yet another boy was killed by a tear gas shell — with citizens sometimes allowed out of their houses for only an hour a week. They also know from news reports and internet footage that Indian police have fired on ambulances and local journalists.
Just last weekend, Indian paramilitary police reportedly killed at least 22 more civilians at different locations in the Kashmir valley, including an eight-year-old boy. Angry crowds have attacked police stations and government buildings. New Delhi seems to be incapable of calming the resulting fury. Omar Abdullah, the half-English Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, who came to office promising new methods of non-lethal crowd control, ordered yet more troops into the state on Monday. (By some estimates there are already 700,000 security forces in J&K, guarding the borders and a population of about 10 million.) The Indian army, which had not been deployed inside Srinagar since the early 1990s, has now moved back into the city from its rural bases.
In response, Srinagar’s mosques are broadcasting calls for the faithful to come out on the streets and demonstrate for azadi — freedom.
It is worth remembering that since Kashmir’s uprising began in 1989, at least 80,000 people have been killed in the conflict. That is perhaps ten times the number of deaths in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict since 1967.
To understand the violence in Kashmir you need a sense of the full horror of the war during its worst years. All sides committed appalling crimes. In those days India excluded foreign NGOs like the Red Cross from the state, but according to reliable accounts, hundreds, perhaps thousands of suspected militants were made to ‘disappear’. As a result, Kashmir is awash with ‘half widows’ — women who cannot remarry because the bodies of their vanished husbands have never been found.
What has most infuriated Kashmiris — and their Muslim supporters around the world — is the alleged frequency of rape and torture by the security forces, in particular by the J&K police. Of course, the various militant groups have behaved every bit as badly if not worse than the security forces. Yet ordinary Kashmiris are simply baffled at the lack of coverage, of any kind, that the conflict gets in the West. Justine Hardy, an English writer who has been based in Kashmir for much of the last 20 years, told me that one of the doctors she works with wrote to her from outside Srinagar last month saying, ‘If a rat dies in Gaza, it is on the front page of the New York Times. How many of our civilians have to be shot on the street as they carry on with their ordinary lives before anyone pays attention?’
One explanation is that the Kashmiris are Muslims with the wrong enemies. If they were being shot and beaten by the Americans or the British or the Israelis, it might be different. Yet because the conflict cannot be cast as a colonial first-world versus third-world struggle, there are no earnest young British activists pouring into the state to escort Kashmiri children past Indian soldiers’ guns.
The few foreign and local NGOs who do operate in the valley are hobbled by travel restrictions and the threat of expulsion. The UN presence is minuscule and solely designed to monitor ceasefire line violations. Members of the foreign press corps in New Delhi tend to believe that to cover Kashmir — or any of India’s other insurgencies — too aggressively would be to endanger their precious visas.
In any case, the dark news from Kashmir gets swamped by the clichés about the new India which David Cameron echoed so enthusiastically last month. And it is understandable that foreign investors might prefer to read about India’s booming economy rather than bombs and riots.
In India proper, people choose to believe that Kashmir’s crisis is the result of foreign, i.e. Pakistani, interference and that Kashmiris have no genuine grievances. It’s hard for patriotic Indians to believe reports of security force misdeeds, largely because the army is seen as a bastion of integrity — despite recent corruption scandals and its involvement in incidents such as the mass rape of women in the village of Kunan Pushpura in 1991. Far easier to blame the Kashmiris for allowing themselves to be manipulated by ‘troublemakers’ and insist that they need a good thrashing. It is true that Indian authorities are dealing with implacable and dangerous enemies in Kashmir, as well as a frustrated civilian population. Jihadis have committed many atrocities in Kashmir and in India. They have ruined the economy of the region they claim to want to liberate.
Nevertheless, what is happening in Kashmir looks a lot like the kind of counterproductive repression that the PM and his coalition partners would be quick to condemn if perpetrated by more usual suspects. Some say that Cameron made a grave mistake and undermined the domestic struggle against Islamist terrorism by bringing up Pakistan’s two-faced approach to it while in India. He may be making a bigger mistake if he continues to ignore the crisis in Kashmir.