Kashmir's New Warriors

Their cause is not independence or union with Pakistan but the ouster of India's military from their homeland

  • TIME

    Kashmiri youth throw stones and chant anti-Indian slogans during a protest in the city of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir state, India on Sunday, August 8, 2010.

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    These young men are engaged in a 21st century form of protest. They constitute a rebellion collectively organized through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. (One of the reasons India finds it difficult to respond to the movement is that it has no obvious leaders with whom New Delhi can negotiate.) Text messages are blocked throughout the Kashmir valley, so young rebels find one another and share news of protests through Facebook pages like "I'm a Kashmiri Stone Pelter." They don't trust newspapers or television but debate and share sometimes unreliable reports of the latest shootings on Twitter feeds. Their propaganda medium of choice is the YouTube video, setting handheld digital footage of protests and clashes to music like Everlast's "Stone in My Hand." Says Rashid: "The local media — they are caged. There is only social media."

    New Delhi seems to be getting the message. On Aug. 10, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the nation about Kashmir. "Manmohan Singh did not respond to us," says Farooq, the cleric in Srinagar, a moderate who has engaged in years of fruitless talks. "But he responded to [the stone pelters]. It means that what these kids have been doing is getting noticed." Singh conceded that "many of [the protesters] have seen nothing but violence and conflict in their lives" and promised a solution "that addresses the alienation and emotional needs of the people." But he offered only one proposal: the formation of a committee to figure out how to create jobs for Kashmir's 600,000 unemployed. The offer was widely criticized in Srinagar. Saleh, a stone pelter, says that if Singh had delivered jobs to Kashmir earlier, "it may have had a different effect." But bringing up jobs when young people are asking for justice, he says, is an affront: "The timing of the message is important."

    Frozen in Time
    Saleh's frustration reflects the fact that while India has moved on after the end of the militancy, Kashmir has not. There are 30,000 troops in and around Srinagar alone, with bunkers and barbed wire strewn around the city's labyrinth of lanes and squares, even though there are very few militants left to fight. The sense of being occupied is pervasive; local youths draw parallels between their struggle and that of the Palestinians. They call their movement a "Kashmiri intifadeh ."

    India's highest-ranking man on the ground, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, acknowledges to TIME that "levels of militancy are at the lowest that they have been for the last 20 years." Intelligence officers estimate that there are only about 500 militants still active in Kashmir, compared with thousands in the 1990s. So why not reduce troop numbers? The authorities say they are waiting for calm to return, but there was no significant drawdown even during earlier periods of quiet. Instead, it seems that India will maintain a large armed presence as a show of strength as long as relations with Pakistan are tense.

    New Delhi has also not addressed the culture of impunity that human-rights activists say has characterized the long campaign. The failure to bring to justice the perpetrators of the disappearances, extrajudicial killings and rapes committed by security forces still produces intense bitterness among Kashmiris, and those wounds have been reopened by recent incidents. Among them were the deaths of 80 marchers during the peaceful protests of June 2008, the alleged rape and murder of two young women by security forces in 2009 and the death on June 11 of 17-year-old student Tufail Mattoo, which ignited this summer's demonstrations.

    Since the protests resumed, Srinagar has tumbled back into a replay of the curfews and general strikes that disrupted life during the years of militancy. Leaving the house means negotiating both security checkpoints and makeshift barricades set up by the stone pelters. Some businesses have managed to keep running, but most just close down, turning every day into a scavenger hunt for vegetables and milk.

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