NOTES

Unequal Citizens

patrolling the borders, not a counterinsurgent force brutalising civilians.

Field Notes from Rajouri and Poonch

Geographic Separation

Sahba Husain, Rita Manchanda

In the militarised border regions

of Rajouri and Poonch (Jammu
and Kashmir), the boundaries are
blurred. Violence had breached
the security of peoples homes,
changing their lives forever.
Despite the enormity of the
violence done to their lives and
livelihood, the cry for justice
seems to be missing. The region
appeared to have been enveloped
in hopeless resignation.

This paper is based on the two field visits to

Rajouri and Poonch, between July and
October 2012, to study the social impact of
militarisation and security. This is a part of an
ongoing research project of the Womens
Regional Network focusing on peoples
experiences of living in a militarised zone.
Sahba Husain (sabbynanu@gmail.com) is an
independent researcher and activist focusing
on gender, armed conflict and rights issues.
Rita Manchanda (ritamanchanda2003@yahoo.
co.in) works on a rights-based analysis of
conflicts and peace-building with special
attention to the role of women.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

August 3, 2013

or over 20 years, like the rest of

the world, we had focused on
the strategic significance of the
Kashmir Valley. After all, it was Kashmirs ethno-national assertion, which
challenged Indian nationalism; it was
Kashmir over which India and Pakistan
ideologically, territorially and diplomatically battled in three wars, and it was
in Kashmir that the commitment of
Indian democracy to rights and equality
was tested. As for Jammu, Kashmir was
the reference point to its minor narrative
of regional identity politics. The twin
border districts of Rajouri Poonch were
a footnote to Kashmirs turbulent
history of Partition, militancy and
militarisation.
But Rajouri and Poonch refused to
stay neglected. Intriguing news reports
spoke of a different social and political
dynamic that was at work in these
border districts peopled by a complex
mosaic of religious, ethnic and linguistic communities, in contrast to the
largely mono-ethnic Muslim Valley. It
was here that we read of the mass
revenge slaughter of extended families.
Here were the sightings of women and
men whose ears and noses had been
punitively slit or who had been
beheaded for being informers. Here,
women lived in remote, sparsely
populated villages or at heights in
isolated dhoks (stone and wood shelters
of migrant shepherds), while men
migrated for work to Jammu or Punjab,
negotiating the familys survival
between the security forces and the
militants. Here there was no outcry
against mass disappearances, arbitrary
killings and sexual violence, while
across the Pir Panjal, the Valley
resounded with public outrage at
human-rights violations. Here, it was
said, the army was a friendly force

vol xlviii no 31

Rajouri and Poonch districts have a

230-km long border along the Line of
Control (LOC) and it is here that Partition and the wars between India and
Pakistan have most affected Jammu and
Kashmir (J&K), dividing territory, family
and nation. During the uncertain time of
Kashmirs accession to India, an estimated
60,000 demobilised servicemen of the
second world war, largely Muslim-Rajputs
and Jats in Jammu province, rose in
revolt. Backed by Pakistani tribal raiders
and the army, they declared the territory
Azad Kashmir. The Pakistani flag flew
over the whole of Rajouri and rural
Poonch, though Poonch town held out.
Hindus and Sikhs fled from Muslimmajority villages, thronging to towns.
In Rajouri, except for the name Balidan
Bhavan and its chronicler Kuldeep Raj
Gupta, little remains of the site where
women and children huddled waiting
for the marauding mob to pass. Tall
buildings stand on the wells in which
women jumped or were pushed in
to protect the communitys honour
(Cohen 1955: 36).
It took a year before the Indian army
reinforcements reclaimed the territory
in a campaign notorious for its savage
repression. It is remembered too as a
betrayal by Pakistan. The Pakistani
army and establishment melted away
overnight, leaving people defenceless.
Thousands fled in panic across the
border. By the time the ceasefire line
was drawn, 60% of Poonch jagir was on
the other side of the border. Jammu, a
Muslim-majority province had become a
Hindu majority.
The bifurcation of Poonch resulted in
the political minoritisation of Jammu,
vis--vis, the now more populous Valley
of Kashmir. Some 60% of the families
in Poonch and what eventually became
Rajouri district, found themselves
divided following the waves of crossborder migration in the wake of the
1947, 1965 and 1971 wars. However,
as Sandhya Guptas study (2007) of
131

NOTES

divided families indicates, entire families and even on occasion entire villages
continued to flee across the border.
Following the fencing of the border,
an estimated 30 villages in these
border districts were left straddling the
fenced border.
Twice in two wars, in 1947 and 1965,
the people of Rajouri and Poonch
succumbed to the lure of Kashmir
banega Pakistani and its brutal consequences. That moment of disruption and
uprooting gets reconstructed as territories and people shift due to vagaries of
crossfire shelling, endemic wars and
negotiated settlements. In 2004, when
there was a buzz about Pakistan president Gen Pervez Musharrafs proposals
for settling the Kashmir dispute, the
people of Rajouri and Poonch, especially
the Hindus, were haunted by the fear
of territorial adjustments once again
unsettling them. The border remains an
active participant in their lives. For the
people of the fenced out villages, moving across the border is an ever-present
circumstantial option, but it renders
their loyalty suspect. The border is
full of such narratives, like in Manjakote
in 2001, when overnight, 22 families
melted away across the border due to
intense shelling.
Overlapping Identities
Whereas in the Valley you have a homogeneous Kashmiri-speaking population
and 95% of the people are Muslims,
while the Jammu division is characterised by overlapping identities. It has a
Hindu majority but these border districts
have a Muslim majority Rajouri 60%
and Poonch 91%. The towns have nonMuslim majorities Poonch 66% and
Rajouri 59%. Markers of identity are
more on the basis of caste, tribe and
language rather than religion. Caste is
a pre-eminent category having continuity across the religious divide, e g,
Muslim-Rajputs. The divide between
tribal and non-tribal categories has got
entrenched following the Indian governments decision to accord the GujjarBakerwal communities scheduled tribe
status, thus disadvantaging the Pahadis.
There is a common linguistic and
cultural linkage across the four major
132

languages Dogri, Pahadi, Gojri and

Punjabi (Chowdhary 2011).
However, it is significant that the communal agitation around the Amarnath
land controversy spread rapidly in
Rajouri and Poonch in July 2008. Equally
importantly, as a well-respected Poonch
resident, Yash Pal emphasised, community collective action was able to contain
the growing tension. The communities
are socially and economically very interdependent and as houses burned and
shops were gutted, there was a realisation of being used, said, Hussain
Siddiqui, an eminent member of
Jammus legal establishment who hails
from Mendhar, Poonch. The movement
was imported into Jammu from Kashmir.
They can start a fire but who will put it
out, he said resentfully.
In Mendhar tehsil, journalist Vikram
Bhasin is sensitive to the vulnerability of
the few Hindu and Sikh families in the
town, but he had never thought of moving. His Muslim neighbours were his
security, he said. But in the mohallah
Panditain, the centre of Poonch, the
BamBam Bole agitation had revived
unsettling memories of the minority
being under siege. Re-enacted was the
drama of neighbourhood communal
watch committees of women and men
patrolling the area. A woman resident
spoke of the legacy of distrust: The
army is our security. Pull out the army,
and within hours Poonch would be Pakistan. Dusting off myths of Muslim sexuality and vulnerable Hindu women, she
spoke of Muslim boys running off with
Hindu girls. That myth took a desperate
turn on our detour to Kalakot district as
we faced a beseeching young Muslim
engineering student thrown in jail
because of a suspected liaison with a
young Hindu girl student. She had committed suicide.
Bhajans and Namaz
Our visit to Poonch coincided with the
annual Amarnath Yatra, which happened
to converge with the month of Ramzan.
Late into the night, blaring from the
temple, were devotional songs; early
morning we heard the call of Azan,
followed shortly by the sounds of
Gurbani. Were we witnessing the secular
August 3, 2013

state abetting a competition for religious

ascendency, and division? A young woman
at the guest house fretted, the bhajans
disrupted her offering namaz. Invariably, the lights went off at that time.
Hindus and Muslims, we were told,
feel culturally more bonded with each
other than with their co-religionists in
Kashmir. The geographic separation
between Jammu and Kashmir is mirrored
in their socio-economic and ethnolinguistic distance, which has produced
divergent political legacies. Whereas,
Sheikh Abdullahs National Conference
captured the imagination of the Valley, the
Muslim Conference prevailed in Jammu.
Naya Kashmirs radical land reforms
empowered the Muslim peasants of the
Valley and disempowered the Jammulanded elite. Kashmirs ethno-nationalist
movement finds few echoes as reflected
in the Hurriyat Conference having no
executive member from the region.
According to political scientist, Rekha
Chowdhury (2011),
The identity politics of Jammu is characterised by the demands for re-organisation of
power relations within the State on the
one hand, and contestation of the ethnonationalist goals of Kashmiri identity politics, on the other. There is a strong feeling of
political deprivation due to its lack of parity
with Kashmir region.

Divisive Propaganda
If Kashmiri nationalism gets positioned
in competition with Indian nationalism,
Jammus nationalism gets positioned as
pro-India and its Gujjar and Pahadi
Muslims as pro-India. In such popular
ideological constructs lie the seeds of
communal partitions. Commonly voiced
in Rajouri by elected panchayat members
was the refrain, We are the ones who
hold aloft the tri-colour, we work shoulder to shoulder with the army, yet we
the nationalists get neglected. The state
has deliberately ignored the tourism
potential here, lavishing all attention on
the Valley. The right to information (RTI)
activist Shahbaz Khan complained that,
In Kashmir they reap the benefits of both
militancy monies and the [S]tates appeasement policies. Unka toh roza aur namaz bhi
farzi hai! They have the power to bring
Kashmir to a halt with their hartals, but that
doesnt stop them from accepting the
governments rich doles. If they are against
vol xlviii no 31

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Economic & Political Weekly

NOTES
India, why do they accept all this? All we get
is the dregs, like haathi ke mooh mein jeera,
despite our suffering being greater.

Evidently, neither sympathy nor

empathy crosses the Pir Panjal range.
What was striking was how little knowledge there is of the other. However, with
the reopening of the Mughal Road, already,
there are signs of renewed interactions
as evinced in local TV channels carrying advertisements of medical facilities
and properties to buy in Srinagar as an
option for the residents of Jammu. But
the divide is deep and there are stakes
in deepening that division.
Were not trusted here or there,
chorused a group of students of Jammu
University from the border districts.
Muslim students are discouraged from
participating in student politics lest they
capture a student union and subvert it
for anti-national activities. On one occasion, when some of them had gone to
meet the then vice chancellor on student
issues, he reportedly took one aside and
said, Mr Khan, I hope you realise that I
have several top Indian agencies here
under my control. Do you know the
implications? Do you realise what that
means for you?
Ironically, in the Valley, the border
people are deprecatingly called Army
ke gulam. While these young women
and men echoed many of the stereotypes
and prejudices against the Valley people,
the more mindful were aware of being
manipulated, and the security establishments interest in dividing Muslims. A
Muslim student from Rajouri described
how on a visit to Srinagar with a friend
to hear the Mirwaizs sermon after the
Jumma prayers, he exchanged some
words in the Pahadi language with his
friend, people sitting close by began to
look at us suspiciously; one old man
simply got up and left the mosque. They
suspected us to be either informers or
agents since we did not speak in the
local Kashmiri language.
Corroborating the armys divisive
propaganda, another student added,
when a group of us decided to visit the
Kashmir Valley, one of the soldiers
advised us to only eat at the vegetarian
Vaishno dhabas rather than at restaurants/
cafes owned or managed by Muslims, as
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EPW

August 3, 2013

it was not safe for us. Through this differential development and neglect the
government was creating divisions
between regions and communities
Hindu, Muslim, Gujjar and Bakerwal.
Today in J&K we are facing the terror of
division and communalisation of social
relations, and not so much the terror of
militants or the army, said a Bakerwal
student leader. It was less Armed Forces
(Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) that he was
concerned about and more the states
Public Safety Act under which hundreds
of students like him were jailed.
Many Faces of Militarisation
The hill districts of Rajouri and Poonch
present a mirror to the Valleys future
face as active militancy is contained, the
ubiquitous bunkers dismantled and
thickets of troops withdrew to discreet
but permanent camps and militarisation
gets normalised as a way of life.
Take the road from Rajouri to Buddhal,
on the crossroads to the Valley, once
militancy affected hub with heavy troop
deployment, the Assam Rifles battalion
encamped in Buddhal is being withdrawn. But entire hillsides on both sides
of the road have been taken over by
permanent, sprawling camps of the
Rashtriya Rifles (RR). The strategic
significance of these border districts has
been demonstrated in the three wars
producing permanent entrenchment of
military encampments. The challenge
of militancy has multiplied troop deployment threefold. Estimates for RajouriPoonch are not available. According to
the state government of J&K, as stated
on the floor of the legislative assembly
in 2007, overall army deployment was
6.34 lakhs. Since then, six battalions each
of central paramilitary and army have
been withdrawn.1 According to the then
union minister Ashwani Kumar, 86,260
paramilitary forces were deployed in 2011.
In Surankote or little Kashmir as this
notorious epicentre of militancy in the
hill districts was called, there was often
firing at night across the LOC and
commonly, families huddled in their
homes as bullets flew overhead. It was
the site of the 1998 Sailan massacre in
which 19 women and men were killed
to take revenge against the family of a
vol xlviii no 31

militant who had killed a special police

officer (SPO). Allegedly the armys paraunit stationed nearby was involved.
Surankotes hill posts are part of the
saga of Operation Sarvinash to destroy
the bunkers of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
With militancy abated, the security
forces have withdrawn from the Dak
Bungalow and the schools. But in the
centre of town there remains an
entrenched and encroaching garrison of
a central reserve police force (CRPF) camp
that loomed over educational institutions
the Government Boys Higher Secondary
School, the adjoining temporary building of Womens Degree College and a
primary school. The shrinking school
playing field pressed in by barbed wires
and high walls is witness to the relentless land grabbing of the security forces.
Entrance to the educational complex is
through two openings, one a gap in
barbed wire, the other, a securitised
gate through which jawans and students
enter. Armed sentries watch as students
scramble through the barricades. We
asked some girl students if they felt
intimidated. But they shrugged, brushing aside our questions. Was militarisation so naturalised in their eyes that
they did not notice?
Boldly scrawled on the outer walls of
the army encampments that line the
road from Jammu to Rajouri and Poonch
are sayings such as a country without
an army is like a summer without trees,
alluding to the protective role of the
armed forces patrolling the border.
Eminent professionals from the region
emphasised that when the army and the
agencies came to crush militancy in
the border districts,
They treated us like they did the Kashmiris,
with suspicion and hostility as the enemy,
brutally punishing them for giving militants
food and shelter. No one cooperated. They
got no information. That strategy changed
in 1999 with the realisation that the people
here were not with the militants. The new
strategy was, okay, you gave shelter, food at
gun point, now tell us how many they were,
and which direction they went.

In the early years of militancy the hill

districts were essentially used to access
the all-weather routes into the Valley.
Targeted militancy-related incidents date
from 1996. By then pro-independence
133

NOTES

elements and local militant leadership had

been displaced by the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,
Harkat-ul-Ansar and LeT. Some people like
Rashid Zargar, a goldsmith of Surankote,
were ideologically swept up in the azadi
wave. In 1993, he along with 70 others
crossed over for training. Persuaded by
his family to surrender, he nonetheless
spent three and a half years in jail, a time
when the Hurriyat cruelly abandoned
him. A surrendered militant, he was
easy prey for the colonel in the local
Rashtriya Rifles brigade. He resisted
being turned into a spy, but had to seek
court protection. His nephew, the crucial
witness in the case was killed in a fake
encounter as an unidentified militant.
Today, Zargar is an elected sarpanch, but
as he told us, he still believes in the peoples right to self-determination and
resists the armys overtures to turn him
into an informer.
Zargars story led us into a universe of
legal and moral ambiguity. Here you
could be an army source by day and a
militant accomplice by night. In that
continuum, it was not ideology but the
compulsions of survival that led the
Pahadis, Gujjars, Bakerwals to the remote
passes to guide infiltrating militants,
providing them shelter. It impelled them
to become the armys porters, informers
and trailblazers in minefields. Legality
gets destabilised, and the moral compass
runs aground in a situation of militarisation for both the forces and the society.
Hamara uthna baithna unke (armed
forces) saath hai (we mix socially with
them on a daily basis) said the elderly
panch of Degwar, a fenced-out village in
Poonch. The army had built a school and
health centre, provided electricity and
water and also evacuated them when
shelling intensified.
What does routinised coexistence
mean when power relations are unequal? Samina travelled daily by bus from
Surankote to the degree college in Poonch.
The army would stop the bus regularly.
Male passengers were made to get down
to haul up heavy ammo boxes and supplies to steep hill posts. Refusal was not
an option as Sarwar Khan learnt. Officers
of the RR stopped a bus travelling from
Poonch to Pelera Mandi. Luggage and
ammo had to be taken up to an army
134

post two and a half kilometres away.

According to a son, his ageing father was
forced to carry the heavy load. He offered
to pay Rs 500 to hire a younger person to
do so. Angered, the soldiers thrashed him.
Forced to carry the load, he collapsed
and was abandoned. By the time he was
rushed to the local hospital, he was
dead. The State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) directed that ex gratia relief
be paid as he died serving the army. No
compensation was however ever paid.
The contradictory layers seemed particularly difficult to untangle when we
met Tazeem, the driving force of the
Pakeezah Mahila Mandal, Poonch district.
She is an enthusiastic participant in the
armys Operation Sadbhavna (Anant 2011)
scheme of fostering exchange visits of
women and children in J&K to build
national integration. But any easy labelling of pro-Indian or pro-army soon got
destabilised as she recounted the story
of her panic-attack out of fear of the army.
A few weeks before we met, she was
returning after teaching at her school in
Sawjian village. Dusk had fallen as she
walked down a deserted hill road, a male
colleague visible in the distance. Above,
she heard and saw an army vehicle with
soldiers. In gut reaction, she jumped

towards the river below, but fortunately

found her feet on a lower ledge. The soldiers found her and she saw with relief
her colleague riding with them and got
in. Women teachers from Rajouri added
how soldiers would pass lewd comments
at girls. They were careful never to drink
or eat more than absolutely necessary,
lest they have to go out at night. Early
evening lights were doused so as not to
draw any attention of the militants who
might come for food and the army that
would follow.
Dual Militarisation
One persons security is anothers source
of insecurity is the aphorism. But in the
militarised border regions, the boundaries
are blurred as epitomised in the ubiquitous phrase unidentified gunman
encompassing a militant/soldier or a renegade whether in fauji uniform or salwar
kameez. Militarisation meant the violence
of the gun, be it militants or the army.
Violence had breached the security of
their homes, changing their lives forever.
In 2000, Shahpari, her husband and seven
children were at their dhok in Budhal,
when 13 militants came and took away
her husband to show them the way. Next
day three militants returned without

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vol xlviii no 31

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NOTES

him. He had run away; had he come

home or had he gone to the chowk (police
station), they insistently demanded. One
of the militants was sharpening his knife
in readiness. Gripped by terror, she tried
to appeal to his human side. Instead,
they thrashed her and the children. Her
husband returned at 6 pm. They killed
him. An hour and half later, they killed
her nieces husband at his shop down in
town. He used to tailor uniforms for the
army. For two years the dhoks were
declared off limits by the army.
For the Hindu migrants who fled their
villages for refuge in one-room government quarters, there was no return. In
2005, the forces had killed three militants
and in retaliation, the militants killed the
male members of three Hindu families.
The local Muslims had helped them
pick up the dead bodies and perform
the last rites. But they did not stop us
from leaving and they do not want us to
return to our lands. And without our men
what worth are our lands. With the battalion about to withdraw from Buddhal,
their insecurity is mounting.
Landmine Survivors
As we travelled closer to the border in
Poonch district, the notion of security
was turned on its head. In the rest of the
country people imagine the borders as
secure due to the armys presence there.
But who pays the cost became clear to
us as we were overwhelmed by a crowd
of landmine survivors women and
men, young and old from the villages
on the LoC. One of the regions rare
human rights defenders, Kawaljit Singh
was helping them petition the SHRC for
compensation for hurt and loss caused
by cross-border shelling, landmines,
or while working for the army and
serving the nation.
In some cases, the men had been summoned by the army to fetch wood for
their bunkers; to clear or de-weed the
land near the border fencing; to act as
human shields to search a cornfield for a
hiding militant or scour an area to detect
mines and to function as sources in
hunting out militants. Others had
routinely taken their cattle to graze and
stepped on a landmine. There were
women too, survivors of shelling and
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EPW

August 3, 2013

landmine blasts or searching for missing

husbands and brothers. The hill sides in
Rajouri and Poonch have their harvest
of unmarked mass graves too. Complaints before the SHRC claim 2,717 and
1,127 unmarked graves in Poonch and
Rajouri (Hamid 2011).
An old man told us:
Life is hell when you live so close to the border.
The soldiers never leave us in peace. They
use us as protective shields. They are the first
to run for their lives in case of a landmine
blast. They dont care whether we survive or
bleed to death; in fact death would be a better
option for us than this daily drudgery.

Poonch district accounts for 62% of

landmine victims in J&K. Landmines
were laid along the border during the
three wars and most recently during
Operation Parakram 2002, when an
estimated two million mines were laid.
Landmine monitor estimates the contaminated area along the border in
Jammu division is around 160 km (Bisht
2009). Most mines are said to have been
removed but mines that moved due to
rain and snow continue to maim people.
Mohamed Bashir, a middle-aged man,
recalled how he had lost consciousness
after a sudden blast. When he came to,
he realised he had been abandoned by
the jawans. He dragged his blown-up leg
some distance to reach help. At the civil
hospital, his leg was amputated. The
family sold their land to pay for his
treatment. For women, it was in the act
of going about their everyday chores
that the violence of the border maimed
them forever. A young woman, who to
all appearances was normal, pulled
up her salwar and showed her prosthetic leg. She was on her way to fetch
water when she stepped on a landmine.
Another woman, Saleemabi, was cooking outside her house when a crossborder shell exploded, destroying her
kitchen and ripping off her left arm.
A now middle-aged woman recalled
how in 1991, she, a student of class VIII,
was in class when a shell pierced her
back. She is still struggling to get a
disability pension.
A 14-year-old Bakerwal boy was
grazing his two goats near the border,
when two Pakistani rangers captured
him and the two goats. The goats they
vol xlviii no 31

must have eaten. I was locked up in a

local jail and was frequently beaten. Five
years later in the Kargil prisoners
exchange, I was sent back. Once here,
he was rearrested and subjected to interrogation and debriefing in Jammu jail
for a year. Back home, he had begun to
lead a normal life but in 2000, as he was
grazing his goats, he stepped on to a
shifted landmine. Mein aise hi ghas per
payr rakha tha jaise aap khade ho aur
achanak mera pair udh gaya (I was
standing like you on a patch of grass
and suddenly my leg blew off), he
said, plaintively.
Serving as a Source
These were the survivors. Many more
were missing, serving as a source in
the Army Liaison Unit or doing labour
(voluntarily or forcibly) for the security
forces. Their torn bodies would be discovered on the LOC and left unrecovered
for fear of exploding mines and crossborder shelling. For instance, Md Qasim
of Timbra, Poonch was known to work
with the army. According to the complaint before the SHRC, he was called by
the commanding officer (CO) and taken
away by a dozen troops of the 12th Dogra
regiment in 1995. It was the second Eid.
There was a mine blast in Titri Morh,
Poonch that night. Md Qasim never
came back. The army gave his mother
Rs 1,800 and ration for two months and
then walked away.
The LoC holds many stories of such
brutally broken, expendable lives and
the impunity with which the security
forces and the government walk away.
For instance, Bagh Hussain of Shahpur
village in Haveli tehsil was attending a
wedding in Salonia, Mandi in 1997, when
Mohammed Hussain, an army source
forcibly took him away at the summons
of inspector Satpal of the border-security
force (BSF) (G branch). At Shahpur village,
Hussain told the chowkidar they were
going to the Chotan post of the 7th
Maratha. Next day, Hussains dead
body was found on the LoC along with
that of a milk seller Md Sharif. First
information reports (FIR s) were filed
and cases registered with difficulty.
Witnesses became elusive. Post-mortem
reports disappeared.
135

NOTES

For 15 years, Fatima Jan of Guntrian

village (Haveli tehsil) on the LoC has
been waiting, not for justice, but for statutory compensation. In December 1998,
her husband Hakim Din Mohammad,
who worked as an army source was
summoned by subedar Balraj of the 8th
JK Light Infantry to the army post in
Guntrian. When her husband did not
return, she made enquiries at the post
and was told he had been sent to report
to the CO at Sackloo post. When he did
not return, she told them she would file
an FIR against the jawans. They threatened her. For four and a half years, the
jawans kept her under house arrest.
Part of the village is fenced out. Even
when one of her six daughters fell sick,
the jawans brought a doctor, but did not
allow her to leave. Only when the army
unit was transferred was the siege
lifted. His successor did not want to
waste resources in this manner. In 2008
the SHRC directed the police to register a
case for custodial killing. She is yet to
receive compensation.
Ironically, these petitions seeking
compensation emphasise that their loss
resulted from duty to the nation.
Apparently that duty included fomenting terrorism across the border. In 1995,
an adventurist army colonel, the CO of the

6th Assam Regiment had his own ideas

of getting even with Pakistan and used
two young men, Mohammed Yusaf (18)
and Mohammed Shabir (20) of Degwar
Tarwan Haveli, to cross the border into
Pakistan and plant bombs. According to
the complainant, Mohammed Din, the
father, the boys were given some rudimentary training to plant bombs in PoK.
The bombs exploded before they could
be planted. Yusaf was killed on the spot.
The other was injured. He was thrown
into jail. Five and half years later, in the
prisoner exchange programme in 2000,
he was released. By then he was unhinged.
Shabir, since his return from PoK, has
not been issued an identity card, without which he cannot move about safely.
In his application, the father laments
It is very surprising that a person, who
was compelled by army personnel to
cross over the Line of Control for
National interest, is now being deprived
of his constitutional rights of having an
Identity Card. The SHRC recommended
compensation, but none has been paid.
After 15 years of waiting the father, in
desperation, now claims that his son
was serving as a porter with the army
and got killed in a blast on the LOC.
Despite the enormity of the violence
done to their lives and livelihood, the

cry for justice was missing. It was in

sharp contrast to the human-rightsbased outrage that is the foundation of
the language of grievance and resistance
in the Valley. There we would have heard
loudly the clamour for justice. Here, it
was hopeless resignation and a feeble
struggle for compensation. It was as if
the multilayered experience of oppression, exploitation and marginalisation
had stripped the people of their sense of
being right-bearing, equal citizens.
Note
1

As shared by Gautam Navlakha, from his diary

noting from daily newspapers, 21 March 2013.

References
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Op Sadhbhavna in Jammu and Kashmir, IDSA
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Bisht, Medha (2009): Revisiting the Indian Policy
on Antipersonnel Landmines, IDSA November,
viewed on 18 July 2013 (http://www.idsa.in/
idsacomments/RevisitingtheIndianPolicyonAntipersonnelLandmines_mbisht_301109).
Chowdhury, Rekha (2011): Caught in Tangle,
Lokniti, viewed on 18 July 2013 (http://www.
lokniti.org/pdfs_dataunit/publications2011/
caught-in-tangle.pdf).
Cohen, Maurice (1955): Thunder over Kashmir
(New Delhi: Orient Longman).
Gupta, S (2007): Reconciliation across Divides: Survey
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Dialogue and Reconciliation).
Hamid, Peerzada Arshad (2011): Silent Fields:
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Kashmir, Himal magazine, December.

REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRS

March 30, 2013
(Un)Settling the City: Analysing Displacement in Delhi from 1990 to 2007

Gautam Bhan, Swathi Shivanand

Revitalising Economies of Disassembly: Informal Recyclers, Development Experts

and E-Waste Reforms in Bangalore

Rajyashree N Reddy

Biometric Marginality: UID and the Shaping of Homeless Identities in the City

Ursula Rao

Protest, Politics, and the Middle Class in Varanasi

Jolie M F Wood

Revisiting the 74th Constitutional Amendment for Better Metropolitan Governance

K C Sivaramakrishnan

Governing Indias Megacities: Governing Indias Megacities

Ashima Sood

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email: circulation@epw.in
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August 3, 2013

vol xlviii no 31

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly