Burhan Wani death: Lessons from Kashmir

The killing of 22­-year-­old home­grown Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani tells a grim tale of its own. It would be necessary for the people of the Kashmir Valley as well as the Jammu and Kashmir government to learn the right lessons from the incident. The storyof Wani is the most plausible one as to why a young person who has no intention of taking to arms turns into a militant. The narrative constructed around Wani’s defiance and rebellion is that he, his brother and friend were beaten up by the J&K Police as a matter of routine. This is something that the police do, whether the officials acknowledge it or not, across the country and not just in Kashmir.

It is a fact that in other states, the police do not harass middle class youth as often as they do in J&K. In the rest of the country, poor youth from the slums are given the rough treatment, and they are transformed into petty criminals and then into hardened ones. In Kashmir, they take to Kalashnikovs and turn into militants. So, the police across the country need to review as to how they would want to treat aggressive youth on the streets. The colonial legacy of looking at ordinary people as suspects has to be abandoned for good. It will be said that the situation in the rest of the country and in J&K are not the same. And that it does not make sense to make a countrywide comparison of police behaviour.

It is true that the situation in J&K is peculiar if not special, but it would not help matters to look upon the situation in the state in isolation. It is indeed the case that in Kashmir, the old, the poor and the labourers are harassed and insulted day in and day out in the name of security. There is a simmering resentment among the people in the Valley against the police and other security forces. It has fostered alienation and fomented separatism. But the police attitude towards the people cannot be changed unless it is altered in the rest of the country. The police have to recognise that they have a greater responsibility with weapons in their hands than the militant who places himself beyond the pale of civil society.

The politically conscious sections of Kashmir’s civil society strongly believe that theirs is a special position and that they do not share anything in common with the rest of the country. The issue need not be debated because it is not something that can be settled through reasoned argument. The innate sense of privilege and alienation that the articulate sections of the Valley feel will be settled ultimately by common sense that Kashmiris have greater democratic rights as part of the Indian system than they can ever feel as part of Pakistan or as an imagined independent political entity. It is a fact that the other two alternatives are hypothetical, but it is useful to consider them when choices have to be made based on comparisons.

What the Kashmiris have to do is to confront the state government and demand their democratic privileges. The police atrocities cannot be used as a pretext to pursue the separatist political agenda. If Kashmir’s civil society’s leaders can bring about this change and create a vibrant political space in the state, then they can save the lives of bright young people like Wani and his many other followers. There is need for political pragmatism among the leaders in Kashmir. They have to come out of their rhetorical dreamland and face the reality, which has the potential of creating a sane society.