Hope springs in Valley

Tangmarg, Baramulla

From the magnificent heights of the Sufi shrine of Hazrat Payam Uddin (revered as “Baba Rishi”), Kashmir looks serene and busy with quotidian pursuits. Peasants are sowing and harvesting; orchards are preparing for a bumper fruit season; craftsmen are finding new buyers from the hordes of tourists pouring in from the rest of India; and the Himalayas are teeming with visitors awestruck by its beauty. Normalcy appears to be around the corner.
There is an air of optimism among ordinary people that their troubles are finally receding. The concrete manifestation of this newfound hope is in a construction boom taking place in the urban centres as well as in remote hinterlands. As one young farmer building a new home in Kulgam district put it, “We want to leave the past behind us and make a fresh start. I am investing all my savings in this house knowing that it is no longer at risk of destruction.”
The widely shared confidence that a full-fledged internal war is not coming back to Kashmir is also reflected in Indian officialdom. The retiring director general of police for the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Kuldeep Khoda, announced last week that armed insurgency by separatists is “in its last phase”, with only 147 terrorists presently active in the Valley and 100 more in the Jammu region.
I passed by a fresh incident of firing in Srinagar by jihadis on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on the third anniversary of the disappearance of two women in Shopian district. People on the spot shrugged it away as an isolated incident. One observer commented that the few remaining “mujahideen” occasionally target specific
individuals within the vast security establishment for their alleged involvement in rights abuses, but the all-out armed conflict is over.
How did “militancy”, as Islamist terrorism is commonly called here, reach this low point in Kashmir after raging fiercely for two decades? I posed this question to commoners in the interiors of Anantnag district, once a hotbed of Islamist holy warriors, and received a fairly consistent answer: “We stopped cooperating and sympathising with them, as they gave us nothing after 20 years of danger.” Kashmiri Muslims across the economic spectrum insist that armed insurrection has lost its social base.
Where did the thousands of fighters swearing by radical Islam and driven by hatred for Kashmir’s Hindu minority evaporate? I enquired from shopkeepers and nomadic tribes in the upper reaches of the Himalayas in Ganderbal district and was told that the jihadis who survived India’s determined counter-insurgency are on the other side of the Line of Control, uncertain about the “war against India”. Their confusion stems from Pakistan’s own internal war, between the Tehreek-e-Taliban and the military establishment. Though it sounds politically incorrect, a Pakistan with domestic security diversions confers security benefits on India.
Many former jihadis in Kashmir are also being integrated into the Indian Army and its affiliated paramilitary units. The practical appeal of working for the Indian state to make a steady living is triumphing over the path of martyrdom with hollow promises of paradise in the afterlife.
Kashmiri Muslims habitually refer to “Indians” and “Kashmiri Muslims”, as if the two constitute two distinct nationalities, but the market power that India now represents is a major factor in the turnaround in the Valley. Indian purchasing power is fuelling Kashmir’s economic lifelines. Access to India’s vast consumer base is every international producer’s dream. Kashmiris, by staying within India, get this priceless gift without the hindrances of tariffs and customs duties. As a gifted people with entrepreneurial abilities, many Kashmiri Muslims acknowledge that their future lies inside India, not outside it.
Insurgencies are won or lost by public guesstimates of which side is winning. One whole generation of Kashmiri Muslims, since 1989, believed that azaadi from India was attainable. Now most young Kashmiris reckon that India is not a pushover. One jihadi who is now a taxi driver, told me that he and several other jihadis from his village in Kupwara district “realised through exhaustion by 2007-2008 that we would never ever get what we want (i.e. azaadi)”.
The writing is on the wall for the jihadis. A prosperous trader I befriended in Pulwama district explained why: “I travel to Allahabad, Chennai and Bhopal to sell saffron and carpets. I see that India is so vast and so powerful, with such a big economy. Jihadis who are trained in Pakistan are indoctrinated that Indians are cowards and weaklings who cannot hold on to Kashmir for too long. Now more and more Kashmiris are calling the bluff of the militants for selling a pipedream.”
Today, most Kashmiri Muslims are tired of the war against the Indian state. They are refocusing energies on the misdeeds of their own elected Kashmiri politicians, though grievances do get channelised against the Indian Army by the separatist Hurriyat Conference. One young resident from a Hurriyat stronghold in downtown Srinagar confided, “If the Army leaves the crowded cities and shifts attention more to the border with Pakistan, we Kashmiris will implicitly give up the azaadi demand.”
The recommendations of the Government of India-appointed interlocutors to “rationalise security installations” and “reduce their spread to a few strategic locations and creating mobile units for rapid response” are widely echoed by the general public in the Valley. Most Kashmiri Muslims contend that there are hardly any armed jihadis hiding in civilian homes these days, and that the Indian military should ipso facto shed its occupation mentality. New Delhi may find this feasible, given the progressive improvement of the security situation in the valley. An intelligence-centric approach, rather than a boots-on-the-ground approach, could push separatists on the back foot and consolidate the recent improvement.
Yet, New Delhi cannot congratulate itself prematurely for decisively prevailing in Kashmir as it did in Punjab by the early 1990s. Unemployment among young Kashmiris is stratospherically high and is a potential ticking time bomb. Security is still not guaranteed for Kashmiri Hindus, whose return to the valley after forced evictions over 20 years ago hangs in limbo. Also, any further ascent of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan’s body politic could infuse fresh vigour into the jihad enterprise.
Kashmir’s fate is delicate because of its geopolitical location and international strategic importance. But as each year in the valley becomes more peaceful, and Baba Rishi’s shrine stays free of accidental fires (a cause of calamities in Kashmir, according to a legend), India may be inching towards assured control of a stubbornly separatist region.

The author is professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs