BAREFOOT
Dialogues in suffering
HARSH MANDER
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Youth across Kashmir give voice to feelings of loss, anguish and despair.
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Photo: Nissar Ahmad
Learning to live with violence: Kashmiri youth being frisked in Srinagar.
My earliest memory is waking up one night suddenly to find strange men in uniforms with guns had broken into my parents’ bedroom, where I was also sleeping,”’ recalls a university student from Srinagar. “I was only seven then,” she adds, “but my childhood ended from that day. My mother tried to run towards me to protect me, but the soldier stopped her harshly warning, ‘Don’t move, or you will be shot. You will die like a bitch’. These were his exact words. I tried to still go to my mother, but the soldier grabbed me by my hair. Thirteen years later, I can still feel the pain of his rough grasp of my hair. It burns my soul. My father was enraged to see the soldier pull my hair, and tried to run towards him. The soldier raised his rifle to his chest, and pulled the trigger. The gun jumped, and my father was barely saved. I feel terrified when I remember this to this day.” They were all dragged out of the house, charged with giving food and shelter to militants. For a year, the nightmare continued, with one or the other adult being arrested, and constant raids and searches in their home. Her uncle worked with the United Nations, and his intervention finally eased the pressure. But very few are as well-connected as her family.
These are sombre themes — of suffering, loss, fear and despair — that were to recur in many dialogues I held with young men and women of the Kashmir valley, in universities, cottage industries and farms; I was invited as part of International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir, convened by human rights activists Parvez Imroz and Angana Chatterji. Many youth talk of mass graves and custodial killings: of fathers who were “disappeared” by security forces and the family’s aching wait for those who would never return. A young shawl maker, Shafi, speaks of three brothers in his village whose father “disappeared”, and all the boys became thieves. “Without fathers to guide them, so many boys have become awara lafanga (vagabonds),” adds another. One college student said that his father was for long stretches in custody, because he was suspected of sympathy with militant groups. “As a child, I was often angry with my father, because I felt he had brought us so much suffering. I would not even talk to him. But now in college, I endorse his beliefs.” They spoke also of despair breeding a culture of drugs, and the culture of lawless violence ensured that drugs were freely available at every street-corner.
Horror stories
A college student Imran’s father was hurt in a grenade attack in 1992, and went through five major surgeries. In his three years in bed, there was none to feed the family. His uncle suffered a psychiatric breakdown, and has still not recovered. Another student recalls that her entire family was dragged out of their home on the charge that they fed and harboured terrorists. She was a child, and saw that a badly wounded man covered with crimson blood was dragged out of a jeep, and asked to identify them as a family that gave them shelter. The critically wounded man insisted that they were strangers, and they beat him on his head with rifle butts.
Parents of means sent their children out of Kashmir, so that they could study safely. There they would observe the carefree life of college youth with envy and consternation, and realise wistfully how much they had lost. “They would talk of girls, weekend getaways and discotheques; our life was about escaping bombs and crackdowns.” But after the Gujarat carnage of 2002, many parents feared for their safety in other parts of India, and recalled them.
It was not possible for poorer parents to send their children out of Kashmir, and they simply dropped out of school. Their fathers and elder brothers would either be picked up for long periods, or were too frightened to go out for work, so there was no money to pay for their school fees or books. Mothers would also ask children to drop out of school, because there were grenades and gunfire every other day. Shafi said that he walked eight kilometres to school, but school was open, on an average, just two days a week. His mother felt he was safer at home. He soon started adding to his mother’s earnings by working as an apprentice tailor. “There were nights when we had to beg our neighbours for food. In times like this, studies are furthest from one’s mind,” affirms Shafi. “I topped the class 12 in science. I was interested in bio-technology. Instead, I am weaving shawls.” “Life is long,” I try to comfort him. But he counters: “There is still no light visible in these dark times.”
Out of school
Girls were pulled out of school even earlier, and often married off at an early age. In a slum in Srinagar, an NGO had started non-formal classes for girls, and we could see that the fair-faced but begrimed adolescent girls, with pretty shy smiles and graceful head scarves, longed desperately to study further. “But our parents would never risk sending us out to the city to study. It is no use for us to even think about it.”
Young people in a water-locked slum in the middle of Dal Lake in Srinagar said they were often picked up only because they could not speak any language except Kashmiri, and security men misunderstood their answers. They felt bitterly trapped. The violence had anyway almost extinguished their livelihoods, as tourism and trade were in shambles. No one could study: the slum has not a single graduate today. At night, escaping armed militants would arrive in shadowy silent shikaras and stop over in their homes, demanding food, money and a place to rest. They had no option except to concede, or to lose their lives. The next morning, the army or CRPF would be in their homes, thrashing and arresting them for harbouring militants. It is customary to stock their homes with grain when it is cheap, but the soldiers would see their filled stores and insist that this was to feed the militants.
Soldiers everywhere
Even in small towns, you encounter even today bullet-proof tanks stationed on busy market squares, and surly soldiers armed with deadly weapons at every turn. The soldiers themselves dread their postings to Kashmir. Separated from their families, they tell me: “We are lonely. We detest the winter cold, and the long hours. We are forced to stand at our posts with our guns from early morning till late into the night. But worse still is that the local people hate us so much. We are therefore always worried for our lives.”
A young college post-graduate speaks with the controlled, deceptively calm rage of someone twice her years, “My father was an engineer, but he was killed, and the next day the papers carried the claim of the army that he was a Hizb commander. But it is not just my father I mourn. Every person they kill is my father, my brother, my son.” She recites a poem she wrote after her father was killed. It continues to haunt me: ‘I lose myself in pieces, when I lose you in your fullness...’
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