Kashmir has erupted following the shooting in a forest encounter on Friday of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the 22-year old “poster boy” of the new phase of militant activity in the Valley who became the foremost and most visible leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, the home-grown Islamist terrorist group close to Jamaat-e-Islami and Pakistan. Around 18 protesters have been killed and around 100 injured in action by the security forces across South Kashmir. Around 100 policemen have also been injured. The scale of the protests has been disconcerting, affecting hamlet after hamlet in the southern districts. Its scale and spread brings back to mind the 1989-90 period, when Pakistan was fully involved in the “Kashmir jihad”.
The difference this time is that young men like Burhan Wani took to the gun as autonomous actors in the wake of the 2010 stone-pelting agitation in which around 100 young protesters were shot dead by the J&K police. This future leader of the new era of militancy, who was doing extremely well at studies and came from an educated rural family, left home in deep resentment when his older brother was ill-treated by the security forces. He was only 16. He didn’t duck behind aliases or cover his face like militants of an earlier generation, but using social media exposed himself and became an attraction for youngsters. His death is likely to be a bigger rallying point in Kashmir than might have been the case when the young man was alive, as former CM Omar Abdullah has observed.
After the quelling of the Pakistan-nurtured insurgency of the late 1980s and the early 1990s by the Indian state, the Valley appeared to be settling down, despite occasional unpleasant surprises. But the absence of a new era of politics was glaring. This is what India is paying for now. Former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee made some efforts but Pakistan stymied that by engineering the murder of the government’s interlocutors. The Manmohan Singh era was noteworthy for seeking a dialogue with Pakistan but also for not designing a new politics for Kashmir.
The Narendra Modi phase has been stuck in a rut. Its leaders have wasted two and a half years pushing a Hindu communal agenda and making propaganda noises. The BJP’s Kashmiri partner, the PDP, was known for trying to win over former militants by being sympathetic to “soft militancy”, but Mehbooba Mufti appears to have run out of ideas. If India is not to pay a heavy price, a political design created by the Centre — with an appropriate understanding of the issues at stake — and executed imaginatively, brooks no delay.
