Mourning to Protest: Why People Come Out In Thousands At Kashmir Funerals

As Delhi erupted over the government crackdown on Jawaharlal Nehru University, another protest raged in Kashmir, largely invisible to the national media. The Valley went into shutdown mode on Monday after leaders of the Hurriyat factions and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front called for a strike. While the separatist leaders were put under house arrest, local people in the south Kashmir district of Pulwama broke “curfew-like restrictions” to clash with police forces. Stones were pelted by protesters and tear gas fired in return.

The cause of the protest: the death of two students allegedly killed in police and army firing in Kakapora in Pulwama district on Sunday. At least 15 more people were injured. But as usual, in Kashmir, there are two versions of what happened.

According to the police, 22-year-old Shaista Hameed was killed in the crossfire during an encounter between militants and security forces. Nineteen-year-old Danish Farooq Mir was killed when the police used tear gas to quell the the stone pelting crowds. A local militant, Adil Ahmad Wagay, who had allegedly joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba, was killed in the encounter while two others got away under the cover of a hail of stones.

Local residents have a different story to tell. Both students were killed when the police and security forces opened fire on the crowd ? after the encounter. Shaista had been nowhere near the site of the crossfire, which was cordoned off. She took a bullet as she watched the protest from her house. The injuries on Danish’s body, some claim, were also caused by bullets.

A magisterial inquiry has been ordered on the killings.

Grieving as protest

But this is Kashmir, home of Handwara, 1990, Gawkadal, 1990, Sopore, 1993, names that have been graven into collective memory in the Valley. Each place tells the same story ? security forces tracking down militants and civilians killed in the crossfire. Inquiries have been ordered before. What they found has never been made public. The contents of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s charge sheet on the Pathribal killings of 2000, which indicted five army men for staging a fake encounter, did make it to the public domain. But the case wound its way through the courts, into the CBI and back into the army fold, where it was closed for apparent lack of evidence. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, imposed on the state in 1990, has traditionally shielded security forces from civil prosecutions.

As the prospect of justice grew distant, the memory of these wrongs was kept alive by a long and angry mourning. The alleged mass rapes at Kunan Poshpora, which took place on February 23-24, 1993, are commemorated each year as Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day. Sopore shut down on January 6 this year, the 23rd anniversary of the massacre. For a population that feels itself under siege, grieving has become a form of resistance.

In Pulwama this week, local residents did not find much comfort in the promise of a inquiry. So once again, on Monday, Kashmir witnessed a familiar sight ? a long line of mourners following the bodies of the young. They were grieving for the two young students who were shot down. But it is no longer just civilians who are mourned. In Banderpora, thousands also swarmed around Wagay’s coffin.

Reasons for attendance

Mass gatherings at the funeral of militants has become increasingly common in south Kashmir over the last couple of years. They gathered in Tral last January, in Bijbehara and Kulgam last November and in Pulwama itself last month. People from the area say it is not out of support for the extremist outfits these men may have joined or for fundamentalist ideologies. Their reasons for sympathy lie elsewhere.

First, while the insurgency of the 1990s saw a large number of foreign militants cross the Line of Control into Kashmir, the last few years have seen the rise of a new kind of militancy. The centre of gravity has shifted from north Kashmir to the south, and a large number of local boys have taken up arms. So now, when militants are killed in encounters, communities mourn their own. Very often, they are educated, even brilliant, youth who come from affluent families, the generation that cannot remember the peak of the insurgency in 1990s. But they can remember the years of relative quiet disintegrate in the protests of 2008 and 2010, when security forces answered stone pelters with bullets.

Second, as security has been tightened in the state, the space for protest has shrunk. Funerals and religious processions have become an outlet for suppressed energies. Attending the funeral of a militant has become an act of defiance against a government that is perceived to be both distant and repressive. As the resistance hardens, slogans demanding “azadi” grow louder at these funerals.

Caught in the crossfire

Not surprisingly, the person really caught in the crossfire this time is People’s Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti. Forty days after the death of her father, Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, Mufti must decide whether to continue her party’s alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Ram Madhav, national general secretary of the BJP, is said to be in Srinagar this week to finalise government formation.

The coalition, forged after the assembly elections of 2014, has not been popular. The PDP, which started life claiming to be a “soft separatist” party, drawing the impulse for autonomy into the democratic fold, is believed to have betrayed its mandate. If thousands pour into funeral processions for militants, attendance at Mufti Sayeed’s memorial service was a bit thin.

Mufti, who had built her politics around gestures of sympathy for the separatist movement, even attending militants’ funerals at times, now faces a tough choice. Recalibrate her politics, move closer to the BJP and risk alienating her constituencies at a time when popular anger against the government has seen a sharp spike. Or reject the BJP alliance and plunge the state into uncertainty once more. Her response to the civilian killings in Pulwama was certainly milder than of old. Sending her condolences to the victims’ families, she called the incident “unfortunate and uncalled for”.

For Mufti, the season of mourning may be over. But what of the mourners in south Kashmir?  

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