What is generally referred to as the “overground” leadership of the separatist rebellions in Punjab and Kashmir does consist of lawyers, doctors, university professors, religious philosophers, professional politicians, and the like. But these venerated if currently radicalized community leaders tend to form exile governing bodies or local human rights committees and leave the actual fighting to the kids, affectionately known to all as “the boys.” One consequence is that the older generation has watched helplessly during the last several years as the center of gravity of the rebellion has shifted from traditional institutions to scattered, quarreling makeshift boys’ clubs supported by foreign governments or religious obscurantists. And as the boys make more and more sacrifices in blood, they become more and more confident of their own righteousness and strength, and less and less amenable to adult supervision or mediation.
Of course, that is partly because many of the guerrillas think it was their parents’ generation that helped to ruin Punjab and Kashmir in the first place. The historical roots of separatist politics in Punjab and Kashmir are deep. At present, the government of India is the enemy in these wars; the nominal, oft-stated goal of the separatist guerrillas is full independence, or in some cases confederation with Pakistan. The cycle of political abuse and mendacity that led ultimately to the eruption of violence in the 1980s can be—and is—blamed by young and old alike primarily on New Delhi’s relatively recent political errors, such as vote rigging and state-sponsored killing. But the younger guerrillas know, too, that much of their older community leadership—the interlocutors between Punjabi Sikhs or Kashmiri Muslims and the Nehruvian state—contributed to and profited from the disastrous politics that led finally to armed rebellion. Now the boys are going to do things their way. And they are sufficiently well armed to dissuade their elders from telling them otherwise.
Islam, the acting Hizbollah chief, is one among many. He was in law school and had just begun a practice in the Srinagar high court when the latest separatist, anti-Indian rebellion began to swell in Kashmir in the late 1980s. He dropped out of formal law and politics and took up the occupation of guerrilla war. As with many young Kashmiri guerrillas, the crystalizing event in his political education was the rigged state election of 1987, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s corrupt local ally, the golf-playing Farooq Abdullah, a nominal Kashmir nationalist, used the Kashmir state machinery to deprive his local political opposition, the rising Muslim United Front, of seats in the state legislature. Young organizers and poll workers for the Muslim United Front were summarily rounded up, jailed, and beaten on suspicion of subversion. In their absence, it is widely agreed, the vote was stolen, which seemed excessive even for a thug-ruler like Abdullah, since the Islamic politicians were not going to win a legislative majority no matter what. In any event, when the jailed poll workers were let free after the deed was done, they drifted toward the radicalized guerrilla clubs, of which there were by now several dozen. The separatist guerrilla organizations drew their strength from Kashmir’s disputed and ambiguous past, its inequitable present, and from India’s enemies abroad, notably Pakistan, conveniently situated across a mountain border.
Since the popular Kashmir rebellion erupted in full fury late in 1989, much attention has been paid abroad to Kashmir’s unresolved historical grievances. These are significant. But this attention has been largely drummed up by Pakistan and by Kashmiri émigrés because the more important causes of the rebellion—the political, social, and economic failures of the Indian state in Kashmir—do not provide Pakistan with any diplomatic right to meddle.
Kashmir is the only state in India with a Muslim majority. By Lord Mountbatten’s ill-considered rules of the Partition in 1947, it did not go to Pakistan, as it almost certainly should have. But the state was ruled by Hindus and it remained with India. This deal later contributed to two of the three wars between India and Pakistan. But it is worth keeping in mind that before the late 1980s, Kashmir’s historical wounds had been bound up rather satisfactorily. The governments of India and Pakistan had dropped the subject. The Vale of Kashmir was one of the most popular tourist destinations in South Asia. The local agricultural economy was booming. The culture was secular, pluralist, tolerant, and ardently commercial. Ethnically and culturally distinct, ordinary Kashmiris were self-conscious and proud. They possessed no shortage of politicians willing to exploit the past for present gain, but armed rebellion, and particularly Islamic holy war, was hardly inevitable.
By now, more than two years into low-intensity guerrilla warfare, the internal dynamics of revolution and response have taken over in Kashmir, so if you ask the boys what they really care about, they will not talk about history or even very much about Islam. What they will talk about instead—shout about, more likely—is the blood that has been spilled, the torture meted out by Indian counterinsurgency forces, the deaths in prison, the rape cases, the martyrs. This widely shared popular anger fuels the fighting and protects the Kashmiri guerrillas for now from the sort of public disenchantment with undisciplined violence that has stalled the parallel rebellion in Punjab. But it does not do very much to explain the origins of the decision to take up arms.
If you listen to the autobiographies of the boys, attentive to that moment in the narrative when they describe dropping out of school and picking up weapons, the most repetitious theme concerns the ways Kashmir’s version of the Nehruvian state failed a generation of youth whose expectations were raised with the valley’s growing prosperity. A complementary theme concerns how Islamic schoolteachers, some supported from abroad, exploited this frustration.
The ethos of Nehruvian socialism teaches directly and indirectly that opportunity is centered in the state apparatus through school placements, government job placements, and the distribution of infrastructure. In Kashmir as in some other places on the subcontinent this channel of upward mobility was clogged by corruption and inequitable patronage controlled by the local elites, Hindu and secularist Muslim. For a student to pass college entrance exams or win a place at the oversubscribed colleges, it was necessary for his family to pay large bribes. To win a government placement required either a bribe or clan connections, with the latter dominated by local Hindu pandit clans. This sort of systemic corruption has become common in South Asia. In Kashmir it was perhaps worse than in most areas, but more important, the perception of injustice was aggravated by the grievances of history.
On top of this, a significant minority of young men were educated to the high school level in Kashmir in a system outside the state’s control, in schools run by what is known across the subcontinent as Jamaat-Islami, or the Islamic Society. In these schools small-time mullahs, some of them politicized by the regional rise of militiant Islam after the Iranian revolution, taught their Kashmiri students that the obvious failures of the Indian state could be explained by the failure of Kashmiris to be true to their Muslim religion. The Islamic Society has long been present in Kashmir and for many years represented a religious fringe alien to the secular Kashmiri mainstream, which tolerated much imbibing of liquor and smoking of cigarettes and the wanton enjoyment of Indian
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cinema. Islamic Society teachers did not preach armed revolution but they did forecast inevitable conflict between true Islam and the secularism advocated by Nehruvian socialists. When these Islamic teachers ran for the state assembly in large numbers in 1987, with their eager students out doing the polling work, they showed themselves ready to play by the state’s rules—the mullahs would become big men, free to enjoy the privileges and patronage of state office. Instead, the vote was rigged and the students were beaten and jailed. Ideology acquired a grievance.
Finally—and the Indian government prefers to see this as decisive— neighboring Pakistan’s pan-Islamic military, and the Afghan mujaheddin it armed, worked their way during the 1980s into the Islamic Society network in Kashmir, encouraging young boys from the Islamic schools to come across for arms and training. When these boys returned, they were revered as local heros by their classmates. And as their numbers swelled, they began in important ways to leave their teachers behind.
For now, the older generation views this history with sympathy and offers its support. “They are youth and they have taken an extreme position,” former Kashmir chief minister G. M. Shah explained one cold morning early on in the rebellion. “There was such widespread rigging of the 1987 elections, and after that the youth were highly hurt. Everybody can be brought to the table if you are honest about what you want—but you cannot do anything with this Indian government that has failed on every front. From drinking water to food to industry to terrorism. Show me one place where they have succeeded. Incompetence breeds corruption. And corruption has bred rebellion.”
A gray-bearded mullah named Abbas Ansari, one of the Islamic teachers and candidates whose youthful supporters now form a spur of the armed rebellion, put it this way: “This generation of youth does not belong to the issues of [Partition] in 1947. They do not even belong to 1953. They belong to the age group between fifteen and thirty. They were certainly born after 1957 [when Kashmir received a form of autonomy from New Delhi] and they came to the conclusion that it is not India who are our well-wishers.”
India, he continued, “created a generation of mistrust. The government of India never looked into the basic economic structure to remove poverty and unemployment. ...It seems that so many people around the world have gotten freedom by fighting. We [in the older generation] have not resorted to arms. But we feel suffocated. These youths who have come out with these arms, they have provided a sort of relief to this suffocation.”
Within the guerrilla movement, there is a division between the boys who grew up in the Islamic Society nexus and those who are the children of the traditional, secularist Kashmiri elite and commercial middle class. The nominally religious guerrillas have the closest ties to Pakistan, the best weapons, and in militant Islam an ideology that transcends local politics. The secularist guerrillas, represented by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and its splintered affiliates, speak for the urban classes and almost certainly for a majority of ordinary Kashmiris when they call for full independence, not confederation with Islamic Pakistan. The Indian government hopes to exploit this division through covert counterintelligence operations and to set the militants against each other, as they have done to a degree with Sikh guerrillas in Punjab. But the Kashmiri guerrillas are aware of this strategy and have tried mightily to resist it. For now, among the boys, the disagreement between Islamic guerrillas and secularist guerrillas suggests a high school football rivalry, not internecine war. Many of the key guerrilla faction leaders knew each other earlier at school and they remain able to communicate and occasionally cooperate. Hatred of a common enemy, the government of India, and homogeneity of culture and language sustains the movement’s broad popularity.
The degree of this popularity is impossible to miss on the streets of Srinagar. During my time, as a foreigner, you could wander into any slum quarter, step over to a fruit stall or a car repair shop, declare yourself a journalist, and ask to see some of “the boys.” Much mumbling in Kashmiri would follow, neighboring shopkeepers would be summoned over, and soon you were off walking in a small group through the narrow warrens of three- and four-story tenements. You stopped in one place, then another, then a third, took a seat, drank some tea, and suddenly here were the boys, lifting up their draping phirans like flashers to show their weapons beneath. If you sat for as long as an hour while the word circulated through the neighborhood, an entire regiment would show up, utterly unconcerned about the bunker of Indian counterinsurgency troops just beneath the window.
On one recent visit I was anxious to meet with some of the leaders of the Hizbul Mujaheddin, a Pakistan-backed guerrilla group that grew out of the Islamic Society and is arguably the most influential in Kashmir today. But for the first few days in Srinagar, I had trouble making contact. The night before I was scheduled to leave, the guerrillas finally telephoned. I said I very much wanted to meet them, but I had a ten o‘clock meeting with the governor in the mansion on the hill and a two o’clock plane to catch. No problem, came the reply. When you’re finished with the governor, just drive out. We’ll meet you outside the mansion gate and take you to our headquarters. Then you can go on to the airport. This seemed a little bold. The governor’s mansion is surrounded by Black Cat commandos, squads of army troops, and scores of paramilitaries. Wouldn’t they prefer to meet somewhere else? Not at all—nothing to worry about, they said.
The next morning, after our talk, the governor said he had to drive out of his mansion grounds to a nearby defense compound. So I waited for his heavily armed convoy of vehicles to head down the hill, joined the rear of the line, and drove through the gate. I looked for possible guerrillas but saw none. Rumbling in the Ambassador, no more than thirty yards from the governor’s car, I heard a thump on my door. Rolling alongside was a bearded young man on a motorbike. He cocked his head and we followed him. I waved to the governor as we passed. Best of luck with the counterinsurgency, sir.