In early 2016, chairing her first Unified Headquarters meeting, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had articulated the broad outlines of what has become now the official surrender policy. She asked the security agencies to give an option of home-coming to the local youth who have picked up gun. Her guideline has since become a part of the counter-insurgency strategy in the state. And it has met some reasonable success. According to Director General of Police SP Vaid, at least 65 youth have been brought back from militancy to the mainstream”. This includes the arrests of many a militant over the past year. The policy is not for the non-local militants.
While a reasonable number of surrenders over the last year would reveal a militancy that has been demoralized, the reality on the ground quite the opposite. In 2017, security forces killed 218 out of 282 militants – highest number in last seven years – but there are still 230 militants left. What’s more, local recruitment continues unabated. Around 117 local youth took up the gun last year. On January 4, Manan Wani, a research scholar from Aligarh Muslim University joined militancy. He was pursuing his PhD in applied geology. Recruits like Wani lend militancy more allure and make it stronger
Militants, on their part, have tried to stonewall the easy exit from their ranks by recruiting only the seemingly ideologically most motivated youth. They have developed their own rigorous rite of passage. According to reports a fresh recruit has to get most of the basic things he would need as a militant. More often than not they are also asked to get weapons by snatching it from police men on security duty. They are also required to announce their recruitment on Facebook so that all their ways of return are closed. This is what Wani did too. But by removing the need to report to police, the new surrender policy is too tempting to be easily resisted. And the return of 65 youth is a testament to its success.
But the real success of the counter-insurgency measures will be if the recruitment stops, which as of now, is not the case. As Wani’s case makes it clear, the militancy has caught the fancy of the youth in North Kashmir too. There’s another catch: even if local recruitment stops, the infiltration will ensure that a sufficient number of militants will always be there to carry on the jihad. So killings of militants and surrenders will hardly make any long term redeeming difference. Only resolution of the factors underlying the lingering turmoil will.
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