This time, Indian occupation army has claimed to have killed three ‘militants’ in a ‘gun battle’ in Srinagar on the night of 30 December 2020. Ironically, this latest incident occurred just days after the police in Indian-occupied Kashmir charged Captain Bhoopendra Singh of Indian Army with murder, conspiracy and other offences for a similar ‘encounter’ in Shopian in July last year. Clearly, the Indian Army is in no mood for lessons.
As in the case of the July 2020 killings in Shopian, the families of the three young boys killed in Srinagar insist that their wards had no affiliation with any group fighting India’s illegal occupation. This is corroborated by initial findings. All three were home until December 29, 2020. One of the slain boys, Aijaz Ganai, is the son of a serving policeman and belonged to Pulwama. According to his sister, he went to Srinagar to full out admission forms for a university. The youngest, Ather Mushtaq, was 16 and also belonged to Pulwama. The eldest, Zubair Ahmed, 25, hailed from Shopian. Indian police sources, however, claimed that the boys were hardcore over-ground workers, a term used for supporters of freedom fighters.
More facts are likely to come to light about this latest ‘gun battle’, but if it turns out to be yet another of several such incidents of extra-judicial killings, no one should be surprised. There is a pattern to this. Over the years, investigations by rights groups and journalists have unearthed many staged killings.
Kashmiris living under Indian occupation, as also foreign rights activists who have lived in IOK or reported from there, know how and why this happens. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) gives total impunity to Indian occupation forces. Staged killings beget promotions, citations and cash awards. They are also meant to instil fear in a resisting population. Combined, this creates an incentive structure that encourages Indian security forces to flout any rules of engagement with utter disdain.
In the three decades that AFSPA has been in operation in IOK, despite investigations by rights groups and police findings, not a single soldier has ever been punished. As far back as September 2006, a Human Rights Watch report had this to say: “Indian army and paramilitary forces have been responsible for innumerable and serious violations of human rights in Kashmir. Extrajudicial executions are widespread. Police and army officials have told Human Rights Watch that alleged militants taken into custody are often executed instead of being brought to trial because they believe that keeping hardcore militants in jail is a security risk.” (Everyone Lives in Fear: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir; HRW)
In a recent study (Oct 2020) of India’s Staff College, The Wellington Experience, a US Army Colonel, David Smith, was drawn to this aspect of Indian Army’s approach to counterinsurgency in his findings in these words: “The Indian Army ignores its own counterinsurgency doctrine in Jammu and Kashmir, and the extrajudicial killing of militants is an unacknowledged feature of that doctrine.”
The underreported fact is that India has a sustained, covert, official policy at all levels (Central and State government; army, paramilitaries and police and intelligence agencies) to deal with militancy in every part of India and make local populations live in fear through extrajudicial executions. That Kashmir is a disputed, occupied territory makes the operation of the policy even easier and with far greater impunity.
Kashalay Bhattacharjee is a senior Indian investigative journalist and author. His 2015 book, Blood on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters, is an eye-opener with respect to how widespread the practice is and how deep the official backing for this policy runs. [NB: I am grateful to Kashmiri journalist and author Gowhar Geelani for pointing me to Bhattacharjee’s book.]
Since I can do no better than what Bhattacharjee has to say, I will put some quotes from his book here. I hope they will prick the interest of the more curious reader to actually go through the book in all its chilling details.
“In the mid-twentieth century, violence perpetrated by States against their own citizens is believed to have resulted in somewhere between two and four times as many deaths are caused by warfare. Since literature and studies around this phenomenon have never included the Indian State, its unenviable record has been overlooked. ” (italics mine; p: 37)
At another place, Bhattacharjee says with chilling matter-of-factness that “India is among several countries that have death squads which kill people with impunity” and then goes on to explain: “Security agencies – including police, army, paramilitary forces, IB, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW, India’s external intelligence agency) – all these carry out extrajudicial killings. Since the media only reports the official version, the truth has never been adequately investigated.” (pp: 33/34)
Staged killings, as I wrote above, are not just the work of individuals trying to get promotions, citations and cash rewards. While that is true in terms of incentivising the soldiers on the ground, it is the Indian State itself that has created that structure.
This is how Bhattacharjee puts it: “An entire network of trespassing and transgression has been generated by the State. Laws have been transgressed and peoples’ lives have been trespassed. In order to secure the nation’s territory, several other territories have been violated. Slowly, and with conscious design, the citizen has been dispossessed of rights that should be guaranteed in a free country; and it has been done with force.” (p: 29)
Bhattacharjee refers to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel acceptance speech. Speaking of what “literature [can] possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence”, Solzhenitsyn said: “But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence.”
Bhattajarjee’s book then is about the falsehood on which India has built itself and through which the State perpetrates and perpetuates violence; its democracy lives a lie every day, not just in IOK, which is not India, but also elsewhere in India: northeast, the Red Corridor, East Punjab, the violence of 60s and 70s in East Bengal, even in its cities like Mumbai and New Delhi to name just two.
“Often, the names of ‘encounter’ victims are changed by the authorities, so the families of the victims keep waiting for the dead to return. In Kashmir and in northeast India, there are ‘half widows’; women who cannot be certain about the death of their husbands following years of absence. This ambiguous violence is a product of regimes of impunity.” (p15).
In all the cases Bhattachrjee investigated, he found a simple, terrifying motif: impunity. “[The] perpetrators are exempt or immune from punishment for the killings they commit. There is no fear of accountability, for the ‘truth’ is buried in layers of invisibility.”
It is in this sense that India, which markets itself as the world’s most populous democracy — though its secular, inclusiveness already has a big question mark under the present RSS-BJP government — becomes a living case study of what Hannah Arendt argued in Reflections of Violence.
Perhaps it’s time for the world capitals to cut through the lie and the web of marketing deception to see India for what it really is.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times. He reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider