A new book traces the trajectories of the Kashmir conflict in the local and the global contexts

A week after the bizarre DDC exercise drew to a close, Mushtaq Ahmad Wani, an apple-trader in his forties, furiously shovelled the earth in the graveyard of his village – Bellow, in the Valley’s Pulwama district, just south of Srinagar – on a bitterly cold day in January 2021 as his wife Rafiqa, teenaged daughter Zarqa and a clutch of fellow villagers looked on.

Mr Wani was making the grave for his 16-year-old son Ather Mushtaq Wani, an eleventh-grade high school student who had been killed in a purported “encounter” (gun-battle) with an Indian Army unit on the outskirts of Srinagar a few days earlier, during the night of 29-30 December 2020. Two other youths were killed along with Ather Wani in the encounter when the army unit closed in on a disused building in Lawaypora, a Srinagar suburb, where the trio were said to have been hiding.

They were Aijaz Maqbool Ganaie, 20, a final-year undergraduate from Patrigam, a village close to Bellow, and Zubair Ahmad Lone, 23, who ran a construction business and was from Turkwangam, a village in the Valley’s southern Shopian district. Ganaie’s father is a head constable in the J&K police, and two of Lone’s brothers are also in the police. The police statement on the encounter said that “the [three] terrorists hurled grenades and fired indiscriminately on the troops, which was retaliated” and that an AK-47 rifle and two pistols, along with unspent ammunition, had been recovered from the encounter site.

When word of the encounter and the deaths reached the families on 30 December, they were aghast. All three families insisted that the youths were not “militants” – the term used for insurgents.

The police admitted that none of the three had any prior record or figured on any wanted lists, but claimed that they were “radically inclined” and “hardcore associates of terrorists (OGWs). OGW stands for “over ground worker” in the parlance of the security apparatus and denotes persons who secretly assist militants in various ways.

According to official counter-insurgency figures, 225 militants were killed during 2020 in Indian Jammu and Kashmir in 103 encounters: 207 in 90 encounters in the Kashmir Valley and 18 in 13 encounters in the Jammu region. The 103 successful encounters were among 9,500 cordon-and-search operations (CASOs) conducted by the security forces in Indian J&K in the course of the year.

Ather Wani, Aijaz Ganaie and Zubair Lone were killed in the last, 103rd encounter of 2020 and are listed as 223-225 on the roster of militants slain during 2020 (another 80 militants died in 2021, until mid-July). Of the 225 militants killed during 2020, 67 died in the first 3 months of the year and 158 were slain during the subsequent 9 months – April-December 2020.

The bodies of the 150-plus militants killed from April onwards were not returned to their families.

This was a sharp departure from the established practice over three decades, since 1990, during which time the bodies of at least 20,000 Indian J&K militants killed in combat – the large majority natives of the Kashmir Valley – were always returned to their families for the burial rites. The exceptions were several thousand militants of Pakistani origin also slain over three decades who had infiltrated from across the border between Pakistani and Indian Kashmir. As they did not have families to claim their bodies they were usually buried in unmarked graves, mostly in remote locations in the northern part of the Kashmir Valley.

The change in policy – not returning the bodies of local militants to their families – was introduced after early April. On 4 April 2020, two funerals of four militants drew thousands of mourners in the southern Valley districts of Anantnag and Kulgam, and on 9 April thousands came to the funeral of a 23-year-old militant, Sajjad Nawab Dar, in a village called Saidpora near the northern Valley town of Sopore.

The change of policy came to light in early May, when the body of Riyaz Ahmad Naikoo, a top guerrilla who was killed in Beighpora – his native village in the Awantipora tehsil of the Pulwama district, south of Srinagar – was not handed over to his family and was buried instead at a location in the northern Valley. Dilbag Singh, the police chief of Indian J&K, then told the media that “the [Indian] ministry of home affairs, through a letter, has advised that bodies of militants not be returned. We are however allowing the family at burials.”

He said that “the home ministry directive cited Covid-19 and the flouting of social distancing at these funerals, and we are implementing that order”, and added that the ministry had taken particular note of the huge funeral gathering near Sopore on 9 April “in violation of the [India-wide] lockdown” to contain the coronavirus.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, other senior security officials in the Valley said that “the Centre [New Delhi] first sought such a policy shift in 2018 but all operating security forces advised against it” to avoid angering people further. But “with the status of [Indian] J&K changing to a union territory directly under New Delhi’s control, the decision was easily pushed through” in 2020, they said.

K Vijay Kumar, a retired police officer who was appointed as the Indian home ministry’s senior security adviser on Kashmir in December 2019, subsequently told India’s The Hindu newspaper that the new policy “not only stopped the spread of Covid-19 but also stopped the glamorising of terrorists and potential law-and-order problems”.

Sonamarg (literally ‘Golden Meadow’) is an alpine valley 55 miles northeast of Srinagar, close to the Zojila Pass (11,300 feet) that connects the Kashmir Valley to Ladakh. Perched at an altitude of 9,000 feet, Sonamarg is a scenically stunning place framed by snow-clad peaks, and one of Kashmir’s major tourist sites.

Since April 2020, a hilly slope in Sonamarg has become a cemetery, the resting place of over one hundred young Kashmiris killed in anti-militancy operations whose bodies were not returned to their families for burial.

On the last day of 2020, Mushtaq Wani followed the police convoy which took Ather’s body to that cemetery, to “see his face one last time”. There he lowered his son’s corpse into a pit dug by an earthmover machine. Since April 2020, many families have visited the Sonamarg cemetery to place flowers and inscribed the names of their loved ones on small boulders to mark their graves.

But Mushtaq Wani felt that his son, who he maintains was an innocent teenager killed in a “fake encounter”, deserves better. So when he returned to his village south of Srinagar, he set to work shovelling a proper grave – to be marked one day with a marble tombstone – as his family and neighbours looked on in bemusement. Then, standing knee-deep in the partially dug grave, he howled: “I want my son’s body”.

The grave remains empty, of course. In February 2021, the police started a case under the federal Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) against Mr Wani, five family members and the imam (preacher) of the village mosque in Bellow for shouting slogans demanding the return of Ather’s body after the weekly Friday prayer congregation. Those arrested under the UAPA can be held for six months without a court appearance and face a standard jail term of seven years upon conviction by specially designated courts.

Since 2 August 2019, when the Modi–Shah government used its majority to pass an amendment to the UAPA (which dates to 1967) in India’s parliament, any individual(s), and not just members of unlawful organisations, can be booked under the law. Of the 2,364 persons arrested in Indian Jammu and Kashmir under UAPA between 2019 and July 2021, 1,100 remain in prison as of August 2021.

Mushtaq Wani was undaunted. “I will continue to ask for it [Ather’s body],” he said.

Excerpted with permission from Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict, Sumantra Bose, Picador India.