Kashmir Resistance At A Crossroads
By Adil Beig
19 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org
The recent killings of 5 civilians in Handwara – a small town around 50 miles north from Srinagar – by Indian forces has brought memories of 2010 killings back to haunt Kashmir. During the civil uprising of 2010, around 120 civilians were killed by Indian armed forces in Kashmir. While I write this, Indian military forces are busy silencing the people with brute force. Internet services have been snapped; who knows if they have killed another hapless Kashmiri. For Kashmir – a nation that is fighting for freedom – sacrificing a life brings utmost pain; but for India – the brutal occupier – it is a mere statistics added to its endless list of murders in Kashmir.
Pangs of occupation are horrendous and merciless; this is what Kashmir has been witnessing the day Indian troops landed there. Since then nothing has changed, except the mechanism of occupational forces to crush any form of dissent.
Over the decades, Kashmir seems to have become insensitive to the sufferings caused by the occupation. One wonders, is it essential to spill the blood of innocent people to drive a freedom struggle? The vicious occupation, of course, has always discovered new ways to suppress the political sentiment of Kashmir. During 90s, when armed resistance against Indian occupation broke-out here, Army killed thousands of civilians. Thousands of others were subjected to enforced disappearances. In the years to come, hundreds of youth were killed in peaceful demonstrations and hundreds of others injured during police violence.
As goes the oft repeated cliché, “Freedom comes at a cost.” On this occasion Kashmir needs to contemplate on certain question: Are not the sacrifices given by Kashmir enough to get it freedom? Why hasn’t anything changed over the years despite so many sacrifices? That is not to say that Kashmir should stop its struggle for freedom. But the evaluation of sacrifices hurts.
Over the years, Kashmir’s resistance leadership have been quite reactionary in their approach. Sometimes, one wonders, what will be the face of Kashmir’s resistance struggle if there are no killings at all. Every movement, of course, has its phases of highs and lows; but the perpetual stagnation and redundancy remain biggest hurdle to the success of Kashmir’s freedom movement.
While Indian continues to develop new methods to legitimise violence in Kashmir, on the contrary, Kashmir’s resistance leadership has failed to develop a strategy to channelize these sacrifices. After every killing, the only response which the resistance camp resorts to is expressing condemnations, and subsequently calling the ostensibly-unproductive shutdowns. The pro-Indian leadership on its part has an old apparatus of calling inquiries that have hitherto failed to yield any justice.Occupation cannot survive without the support of vassals and here they have NC and PDP as their loyalists, who effectively are mere pawns and can be used in whatever way they deem it right.‘Circulation of Elites’, as Pareto refers to them, has been going on with each trying to be more loyal to the ‘King’. They have learnt that Machiavellian art of treachery by befooling masses. But who is supposed to conscientise the custodians of freedom struggle.
Over the past 27 years of resistance, Kashmir has witnessed massacres, rapes, tortures, disappearances, and yet it has stood strong to resist. In the hindsight, though, we know this won’t be the last killing and Kashmir has to prepare to shoulder many more coffins in future; but let not the barbarians snatch us of our beloved ones so mercilessly.
Adil Beig is a research student. He can be reached at [email protected]