Governing Kashmir could be compared with sweeping leaves in the thorny undergrowth in a forest of Chinars during an autumn storm, while watching out for neighbours driving by with tipper trucks full of decaying leaves that they want to empty at the edge of the forest. More often than not over the past 45 years, governance in Kashmir has been held hostage to politics – and politics in turn to the geopolitical questions that hang over the place. That is not the only problem. The extraordinarily diverse peoples and aspirations across the state are a policy-maker’s nightmare. So is the challenging terrain. And, complicating matters further, implementation is mired in corruption, duplicity and a widespread unwillingness to take responsibility.

On the other hand, governance tends to be judged through the prism of insurgency. The absence of violence and the presence of tourists in very limited areas (Pehalgam, Gulmarg, Sonamarg and a small part of Srinagar) is readily accepted as a measure of good governance. As long as this feel-good miasma remains in place, large amounts of money are dispatched to the state.

In addition, vast amounts are funnelled there as 'secret funds.' As counter-insurgency measures, such disbursements are counter-productive. They fuel insurgency. The array of politicians, officers, security personnel, informers, media persons, NGOs and secessionist activists who receive such funds develop a vested interest in the continuation of unsettled conditions – and therefore the secret funds.

Flows of secret funds vitiate governance in two other ways. One, they create extra-constitutional linkages between the funding agencies (whether these be central forces, intelligence agencies or ministries) and various sorts of activists in the state. Access to the centre turns these into channels of disinformation and politicking, which often tends to undermine the state government. Rivalries between different ministries, agencies and forces at the centre (each of which separately disburses secret funds) only add to the confusion.

Two, secret funds oil the wheels of corruption, nepotism and inefficiency in the state government, while little effort is made to build a stable economy that might provide productive, satisfying employment. No effective systems of accountability are put in place. Nor are citizens of the state adequately empowered through institutions such as panchayats, urban bodies or the right to information. Since central laws need to be separately adopted in this state, each of these three instruments of empowerment is weaker in the state than across the rest of the country. Nor is protection provided to citizens against misuse of power, which is often cruel, vindictive and/or for politically partisan reasons.

As long as there are no reports of violence and tourists are seen in those tiny slivers of the state, opinion leaders across the country and naïve sections of the union government remain blissfully unaware of the frustration, anger and despair that many citizens in the Valley feel. For, special powers – the Disturbed Area Act, Public Safety Act, Armed Forces Special Powers Act and, for a while, the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act – are often misused to target innocent citizens. Since most of the abuse is by those who disburse secret funds, and many of those in a position to highlight and oppose these abuses are recipients of those funds, the everyday traumas of ordinary Kashmiris remain unknown to most Indians.

The result is that, unless there is civil unrest, even key central officers charged with dealing with Kashmir remain oblivious to incidents that enrage Kashmiris. For example, a second year student of Amar Singh College (one of the Valley’s best) was killed by CRPF in 2006. The boy had had the temerity to tell a party of the CRPF, which was checking identities on the bus on which he was returning home from college, that identities on that bus had just been checked five minutes earlier. He was dragged off, beaten up and shot in cold blood at Dalgate in the touristy part of Srinagar. When students protested the next day, the CRPF beat them up inside the college and even assaulted the woman principal. No militant connection involving that boy was established. Kashmir seethed over the incident for days, but it remained unreported across most of India. The sad fact is that New Delhi reacts only when public anger spills onto the streets in demonstrations – with confusion followed by brute repression.

The current civil unrest among Kashmiris – mainly teenaged or post-teen males – is only tangentially related with the India-Pakistan dispute, UN resolutions, electoral rigging until the 1980s or even the militancy that erupted in 1989. It is primarily the expression of this generation’s anger against the humiliations and violence they have suffered at the hands of security forces throughout their short lives – and what they have heard about worse torture and rape (in the 1990s) before they became conscious of it. The anger of this generation has been building since at least 2007; it first erupted in agitations against the transfer of land to the Amarnath shrine board in 2008.

There are three key markers of this generation. One, they have grown up amid the violence of the past two decades, largely immune to intimidation through the threat of violence. Two, they do not respect the established secessionist leadership. Three, many of them have absorbed through the net, SMSs and MMSs the narrative of a global conspiracy against Muslims. They believe Muslims are deliberately repressed – in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir.

It is a tragic error to view this anger as instigated by Pakistan or terrorist organisations, and to represent it as such in public statements. For, while such allegations rarely fool the international media, they fuel anger among Kashmiris. More dangerous, such statements could become self-fulfilling prophecies, leading some of the angry Kashmiri youth to take up arms. In situations like last month’s, central ministers and bureaucrats need to make some hard choices. They can either pander to public opinion across India and the world by trying to blame organisations such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, or they can respond with sensitivity to deaths of nine-year olds and teenagers, many of whom had never thrown a stone. One of them was going for tuition, the nine-year old had reportedly gone out to bring home his mentally unstable older brother, and the three boys who were killed in Anantnag on June 30 are reported to have been taken from their homes and shot in cold blood.

One must keep in mind that most Kashmiris see even the deaths of those who were in stone-pelting mobs through the prism of these innocents’ deaths – and of the murder of three impoverished boys from a remote hamlet near Rafiabad, which sparked the vicious cycle of stones-bullets-stones-bullets-stones... According to credible reports, the three boys were taken to an army camp on the assurance that they would be given work and were then killed and buried. Until their bodies were exhumed, the army advertised it as a successful encounter with militants. The apparent motive was for officers of that army unit to claim cash bonuses – plus perhaps get medals and promotions. Inquiries are under way, but there was enough immediate evidence of foul play to remove two army officers from their posts.

Another incident that contributed to this perception of deliberate intent to kill Kashmiris was the killing of a 70-year-old beggar in another remote part of north Kashmir. The army unit there initially described it as the killing of the oldest militant to date. Other such incidents in the past have together sharpened common Kashmiris’ perception that all the recent deaths are a spree of killings deliberately unleashed by India against the Kashmiri people. Many Kashmiris employ the term genocide. As proof of ill-intent, they compare the more restrained responses of security forces against violent mobs elsewhere in the country, as during the Telengana agitation. Some Kashmiris also contrast the condemnation of Kashmiri stone-pelting, particularly by the 'national media,’ with the outrage that was manifest against state repression of agitations elsewhere, for example, the agitation against land acquisition in West Bengal.
These killings have dovetailed with continuing suspicion among many Kashmiris that investigations into the deaths of two women in Shopian last year were cover-ups. More generally, they are linked in the public mind with the widespread rumours of corruption of various kinds among some of the forces. All this generates angry demands for demilitarisation, and the repeal of such draconian laws as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Governments, both in the state and at the centre, have proved unequal in response. It would appear that they are equipped only to disburse monies, preferably slush funds, and to dispatch more troops – both of which responses only pour fuel on the fire. A more effective response would involve zero tolerance of human rights abuses, calibrated deployment of forces, sensitive responses, careful monitoring of security, development and expenditure, and an end to secret funds. A battle for hearts and minds must be the crux of any exercise to build lasting peace between the people of the Valley and those in other parts of India.

This first appeared in the July 16-31 issue of the Governance Now magazine (Vol. 01, Issue 12).