Amarnath Land Deal

[Bodhi]

Young, leaderless revolt that defies control
SANKARSHAN THAKUR

Ganderbal (North Kashmir), Aug. 14: They were no more than two thousand of them at the core of the horde, but they had the muscle of their frenzy. It sent them up the high walls of the district headquarters and into the compound in no time. Then they clambered up the wooden awnings and balconies and leapt to the sloped roof and unfurled a green flag atop. “Hum kya chahte, Aazaadi! Lad ke lenge Aazaadi! Chalo Muzaffarabad!”

The standard of rebellion had been raised, it was fluttering atop Ganderbal’s padlocked administrative hub. The throng rippled with the surcharge of facile victory. Police, and, behind them, the CRPF and the army, watched on.

The men, mostly youngsters with black kerchiefs pulled across the faces, scaled the wall again and collected back on the road. They unfurled more green flags and screamed their defiance before heading off towards the local mosque.

The shops were all shut but the men were all out on the streets and falling behind the processionists. By the time the column reached the bridge over the Sindh, it had become swollen and turbulent like the river itself.

This has become the standard operating procedure of a revolt that is spreading across the Valley unabated. Spontaneous eruptions of youngsters, often even children and the elderly, that nobody seems to be able to contain. There are no political parties in the lead, no known faces commanding or exhorting them, they are not the National Conference, not the PDP, not even the Hurriyat. These are just people crying freedom. “Chalo Muzaffarabad!” When the current period of mourning ends on Saturday, that will be the pressure mounted again — breach the LoC, walk into Muzaffarabad!

“That’s one of the problems dealing with them,” admitted a senior officer back in Srinagar yesterday, “They have no clear leadership, we do not have established routes to them, we do not know who can control and calm them down. They are just people coming out everywhere to calls from mosques, or even without that. This is a leaderless disruption and that is a problem.”

Over the past couple of days, the N.N. Vohra administration has been able to prevail upon established parties and even the Hurriyat to issue public appeals for calm. Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani have both asked people on local cable networks not to indulge in violence or in confrontation with the security forces. But like curfew orders, these appeals have been rampantly defied.

As a bewildered government gropes for control, the movement is slipping out of grasp. It hasn’t helped that voices of solidarity from across the troubled frontier are getting bolder. “Pakistan is surely becoming a greater and troubling factor,” the officer conceded, “They are encouraging this with more than just statements of support. They have established links, the people can watch Pakistani television and listen to the radio. They are leading all this on, it is spreading.”

“Daily,” muttered the jawan following the phalanx in Ganderbal, tear gas cans buckled at his waist, “this happens daily and every day there are more people. And the slogans become louder. This will end in terrible trouble.”

He looked a tad sheepish that the flag had been hoisted unchecked. He said he couldn’t stand the slogans — anti-India and pro-Pakistan — anymore. But he also said the orders were to keep restraint: take the provocation, don’t provide any. The jawans would have to wait for nightfall before they can take the flag off the district offices, and off the many lamp-posts across town; by day, the crowd wouldn’t let them. That would amount to provocation, invitation to greater trouble.

But confrontation isn’t a thing anyone in Kashmir is betting against at the moment. We drove a hundred miles into the Valley’s northern heartland through the day witnessing elaborate arrangements of a stand-off.

Getting past Srinagar’s endemically explosive downtown itself accounted for half the time of journey. The security forces are nervously bunkered at the downtown’s narrow entry points. Once you get in, the barricades all belong to the residents. Garlands of burning tyres, logs thrown across the streets, diesel barrels and drainpipes rolled onto the road.

There is not a window in downtown Srinagar, not a shop, not a power pole, without a black flag aflutter. The cloth merchants of town must have a sudden run on their stocks of black material, bales and bales of it, torn and ripped into flags and strung everywhere you looked. Teenaged boys in Amirakadal had commandeered an electricity board repair van and were moving about hanging black flags on high street-lamps. A black flag was spiked atop the car we took; handier than a curfew pass and in downtown Srinagar, a necessity. We couldn’t have moved through town without that.

At one crossing in Safakadal, where one was shot dead in firing this afternoon, they had knocked timber and cardboard to make a crude scarecrow of “Indian Democracy” — with a mawkish stuffing of hay on top — “Indian Dogs go back!” was the graffiti scrawled across it. It will be torched tomorrow, Independence Day, traditionally a day of protest in the Valley. "Mera Bharat Mahan" will merely be a knocked up slogan on scurrying armoured carriers.