Covering Kashmir’s Summer of Discontent

In the late afternoon on July 8, 2016, I received a phone call from a fellow journalist asking me to confirm if the popular Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was trapped in the then ongoing encounter at Bamdoora in Kulgam. I called up a police officer who said that they believed Wani was holed up in the besieged house, but couldn’t confirm until the gunfight was over. Half an hour later, the same journalist called again to break the news that Wani had been killed. Soon after, the news spread like a wildfire on social media. The picture of Wani’s blood-soaked body lying on a hospital bed went viral.

What we expected was yet another massive funeral in South Kashmir with many villages jostling for the privilege to bury Wani in their respective graveyards, a scenario not dissimilar to what had happened following the death of Lashkar-e-Toiba commander Abu Qasim. But what followed was beyond anybody’s wildest imagination.

As the news of his death spread, thousands of people across South Kashmir poured out into the streets to mourn and protest through the night. The mosques reverberated with slogans of freedom in a slide back to 1989 when armed struggle first broke out in the valley against New Delhi.

By the following morning, news of protestors killed in police action began trickling in. The score was 30 and rising in the 48 hours after Wani’s death. Besides, hundreds of injured started arriving in hospitals in Srinagar, many of them with eye-related injuries due to pellets fired from a pump action gun — a controversial non-lethal weapon deployed for crowd-control since 2010 following the five-month-long unrest. One of these is the now-blind, 14-year-old school girl Insha Malik. A picture of her pellet-riddled face has since become the symbol of that summer’s mayhem in the state.  

The fury of the South soon washed over into the central Kashmir and from there to the North. A familiar scene unfolded. Mosques boomed with slogans and recorded songs calling for sustained “resistance against India”. Youth hit the streets and pelted stones at the police and paramilitary personnel were deployed to quell the strife. In time, the protests billowed up into a full-fledged revolt. The security forces responded by firing teargas, pellets and bullets, leading to more deaths and blindings.

The government suspended internet access and mobile phone networks other than government-owned post-paid BSNL services. But this made little difference. The crowds on the streets only surged further, now seething with greater anger in the wake of the rising death toll.

What made Wani so important as to warrant such a widespread mourning, anger and sacrifice? This is a question whose answer is more understood than articulated in the valley. In his six years as a rebel, Wani had revived the anti-India militancy from its near-extinction.  The strategy he adopted to accomplish this was more technology-driven than any of his exploits as a rebel. According to the Kashmir police “he hadn’t fired a single shot”. But three years into militancy, he had given up the cloak of anonymity and taken to social media, posting videos and pictures of himself and his associates.

The image of a Kalashnikov-wielding, handsome young man in battle fatigues drawn against a pastoral backdrop and calling for a fresh shot at jihad against India held an irresistible appeal for a new generation of Kashiris growing up in the shadow of a two-decade old separatist insurgency and bitter about New Delhi’s perceived oppressive treatment. Wani invested the movement with a fresh moral glamour.   

For a journalist in Kashmir or for that matter from outside the state, covering the eruptions like the one following Wani’s killing is an onerous proposition. More than their intrinsic truth, it is the competing narratives – national, Kashmiri and Pakistani or an overlap of them – that take over. The challenge is to retrieve the essential tragedy of the situation unencumbered by the ideological discourses swirling around in media and the public sphere.  

Did this happen in Kashmir? For a while, it did: The news about 96 deaths, several hundred blindings, and thousands of injured forced its way to the centrestage, helped along by the monumental nature of the tragedy. But the narratives soon caught up. Midway through the unrest, Kashmir suddenly stopped being news, even as the killings and the blindings continued. Now, victims of the violence have been forgotten. Let alone justice, there is not even talk of their rehabilitation.

Covering Kashmir, therefore, calls for a deeper understanding of the conflict in the state and sifting through its various discourses to get to the truth of the events, incidents and mass mobilisations unfolding in the state.  

And it is the wilful neglect of this fact by a section of the national media, especially by some television channels, that made Kashmir difficult to cover in the first month of the strife. A perceived biased coverage of the situation by parts of the media spread its way into public perception on the whole. Journalists, irrespective of where they came from, were beaten by mobs and their vehicles attacked. The only way, you could do your job, was to hide your identity by carrying an alternative identity card and removing the press sticker from your vehicle, something that led to run-ins with the security forces.

The local media, which otherwise enjoys public confidence because of its Kashmir-centred coverage, was also at the receiving end, seen as an extension of the New Delhi based media.  

“It took some conscious foregrounding of the plight of the victims of violence in our coverage that restored the confidence,” says Sajjad Haider, the editor of the Kashmir Observer. The staff of the paper was attacked several times on their way to work. “But I don’t blame the people. Privileging the state narrative as against those of the people as sections of the electronic media habitually do is not only an abdication of their responsibility but it also breaks the trust the people place in journalism” he said.

But this “foregrounding” of the Kashmir situation soon invited the wrath of the state which on July 16 seized local papers and banned their publication. The ban, however, was withdrawn within three days. Two months later the Government struck again, banning the Kashmir Reader. The ban was lifted three months later.

Kashmir is now “normal” again. The Azadi crowds have left the streets and so have security personnel. There hasn’t been a curfew in place for more than two months and the Hurriyat has also withdrawn its weekly protest roster. There hasn’t been a fresh killing in a month and only an odd blinding here and there. Chillai Kalan, the harshest 40 day period of winter has taken over since December 20, plunging the night temperature to sub-zero. A snowless, dry cold makes the days no better. The state government has moved to warmer Jammu as part of the six-monthly Darbar Move leaving the valley to fend for itself with its drastically curtailed power supply.

The five-month unrest is suddenly a distant memory. Journalists are done filing their stories about the turmoil and have moved on to more mundane issues. Once heated discussions on social media have ebbed too. Ordinary people are trying to return to their daily lives. Soon Kashmir will return to its normal routine, receiving tourists once spring arrives. But the families who lost their loved ones or whose children were blinded have been left alone, passed over by the media, the state government and the separatist groups.