Srinagar’s landscape tells the stories – and silences – of five years since August 5, 2019

“Is there any chance of this building reopening?” a local resident in Srinagar’s upscale Raj Bagh neighbourhood asked me.

I had no answer.

The building he was pointing to was once the address of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a powerful voice of separatist politics of Kashmir.

Led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, this group of Hurriyat leaders had held talks with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 2004 to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute.

But those days are long gone. Five years ago, on this day, the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre downgraded Jammu and Kashmir from a state to a Union territory, and rescinded its special status by scrapping Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. This not just cancelled Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and statehood but also signalled a crackdown on separatist politics.

The building is an eloquent witness to that story. The fading blue signboard of the Hurriyat Conference has been torn down. In its place is a large board announcing that the National Investigation Agency has attached the two-storied building on orders of a court in Delhi. The organisation was named in a terror funding case in 2017. Scrawled on the gates in white paint are the words: India, India.

Anyone who stops by and takes a closer look at the structure invites looks from passers-by and shopkeepers, such is the anxiety around any symbol of separatist aspiration in Srinagar today. “Even those who once entered the building or worked in it walk past it as if it’s a ghost,” the local resident told me. “For them, it’s as if it does not exist.”

The half-a-decade since August 5, 2019, has brought sweeping political and legal changes for the erstwhile state and its people – and the continued absence of an elected government.

The story of this upheaval is written not just in legal statutes or voluminous chargesheets against critics or dismissal orders of government servants – but also in the landscape of Jammu and Kashmir’s capital, where New Delhi’s ambitions of creating a ‘Naya Kashmir’ are most evident.

I took a walk through Srinagar’s city centre, from Rajbagh to the Batamaloo-Lal Chowk road to the bund on the river Jhelum, to map the signposts of a new Srinagar, and the silences that float in the air.

The Lal Chowk makeover

The centre of Srinagar city – three kilometres from Raj Bagh – is a changed landscape.

Here is the famous Lal Chowk, once a clock tower surrounded by a concrete park. In 1992, at the height of a militant movement for Kashmir’s independence, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had tried and failed to hoist the Indian flag on the clock tower – and eventually unfurled it atop a small post nearby.

Even earlier, in the autumn of 1948, at this same spot, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had promised a plebiscite to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Over the last five years, those layers of history have been obscured in the heart of Srinagar city.

Today, cobbled streets and tiled footpaths radiate from a redesigned clock tower on which flutters the tricolour.

The wide roads have become narrower, giving greater space to pedestrians and cyclists.

The makeover is a part of the Srinagar Smart City project, which got a big push in 2022.

If New Delhi’s ambition of redrawing a new Kashmir has led to a new manicured geography, it is most evident at Lal Chowk.

While local residents would gather at the old concrete park, the open-air plaza and the lit-up clock tower now draw selfie-seeking tourists in the evening. On the morning I visited, the image of Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha – New Delhi’s representative to the region – stared out from LED screens that ring the plaza.

This is the face that New Delhi seeks to present to the world – when Srinagar hosted a meeting of the G20 working group in May last year, the Smart City projects were on the delegation’s route.

Since 2019, the number of tourists visiting Kashmir Valley has grown exponentially. While tourists once flocked to meadows and hilly spots like Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonamarg, they are everywhere in the city centre these days. It is difficult to find a Kashmiri face near the clock tower in Lal Chowk late in the evening.

But that’s just one side of the story. Despite the fierce crackdown on militancy and its support system, there is uncertainty in the air.

Each street thronged by tourists is flanked by paramilitary troopers and policemen. Gun-toting soldiers stand guard outside famous restaurants in the Srinagar city centre, especially those owned by minorities from Jammu or outside the Union territory.

‘For tourists’

If the Srinagar Smart City project appears theatrical, the makeover of Polo View Street on Residency Road was its climax.

At a distance of a kilometre from Lal Chowk, the famous commercial street has been turned into a pedestrian-only zone by laying down cobbled stones on its surface and making it wire-free.

This was the only street in Srinagar’s city centre visited by the delegates of G20 in 2023. These days, the street is often host to regular government-sponsored programmes and events. Both ends of the street are guarded by paramilitary troopers.

What’s lost in the projection of ‘normalcy’ is the concerns of the local economy. Take the case of shopkeepers of Polo View Street. Ever since the street has been deprived of vehicular traffic, their businesses have suffered. The shopkeepers also say they were not consulted when the government decided to revamp the street.

When the work on Smart City projects gathered momentum, Srinagar’s businesses were yet to recover from the complete lockdown of Kashmir that followed the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 and, then, the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We were already facing losses from the back-to-back lockdowns,” a shopkeeper on Srinagar’s Residency Road told me. “Then, they dug up the roads and pavements and closed it for traffic – for almost two years. We did not get any customers. We are still in debt.”

“It’s a mess,” another shopkeeper told me, asking not to be identified. “Our main income came from the local population, but ever since the so-called beautification of Polo View Streets, local visitors have almost stopped coming to the market because of the restrictions on cars. They say it is a hassle for them.”

But, surely, the tourist footfall has gone up? It has, the shopkeeper conceded. But it is not translating into business. “The government claims that tourists are coming in large numbers, but only a limited number of tourists visit our market, and they don’t contribute much to our earnings,” he said.

Conservationist and author Hakim Sameer Hamdani points out that there is very little in the Srinagar Smart City projects that is aimed at the local people. “The entire notion behind the beautification of Srinagar city centre is only limited to one of attractions for tourists rather than the inhabitants of the city,” he said.

Silence on grub street

The Polo View Street was important not just as a commercial hub, it was also the address of the largest elected body of media professionals in Kashmir Valley – the Kashmir Press Club.

For years, the press club was where journalists would head to, either for cheap food and tea, free parking, or to file a story. It was one the last spaces for critical discussions in the Kashmir Valley – and a forum that could be depended on to speak up against the harassment faced by journalists.

But, as the Jammu and Kashmir administration turned its screws on journalism in the region and put in place extensive curbs, the press club’s days were numbered.

In January 2022, the government effectively took over the club premises and shut it down.

Tellingly, the building is now the office of a senior police official in the city.

A similar story unfolded in Srinagar’s Press Enclave. The hub of media organisations in Kashmir Valley, it was almost always abuzz with ordinary people who had come to seek media attention for their problems – from the lack of jobs to electricity connections to human rights abuses.

Over the last few years, the enclave has been emptied of media houses and replaced with different offices of the Jammu and Kashmir police.

Today, the eerie silence at the Press Enclave tells its own story.

The Indian flag

If there is one feature of post-2019 Srinagar, it is the absence of pro-freedom and anti-India graffiti on the walls of the city.

The ubiquity of those slogans has given way to a new insignia – that of the Indian national flag. The tricolor is everywhere, on government buildings, clock towers, WhatsApp display pictures of government employees and even on the trunks of famed Chinar trees that grow in the Valley.

That is by design. Article 370 of the Indian Constitution had acknowledged and honoured the fact that Jammu and Kashmir had its separate constitution, flag and penal code.

Both the national flag and Jammu and Kashmir’s own flag flew side by side from the top of government establishments. But only the tricolour flutters atop the civil secretariat in Srinagar today. The state flag – three white vertical stripes and a plough on a red background – is but a memory.

The word ‘Sheri’, too, has been removed from the title of the international convention centre on Dal Lake.

The honorific Sheri Kashmir, or the Lion of Kashmir, is used for Kashmir’s tallest leader Sheikh Mohd Abdullah. A man who played an instrumental role in granting India control of Jammu and Kashmir after 1947, Abdullah is an outcast for the current ruling dispensation.

What used to be called the Sheri Kashmir International Convention Centre is now the plain Kashmir International Convention Centre. Despite the change in name, some boards of the centre still carry the name of Sheri Kashmir, clinging on to history.

A political remembrance

As some names are airbrushed out of public spaces, others are added. The state chooses to remember some acts of violence – and forget others.

Take the case of 68-year-old Makhan Lal Bindroo. A renowned pharmacist in Srinagar, Bindroo was shot dead by suspected militants in October 2021 inside his shop – one of a wave of targeted assassinations of Kashmiri Pandits and outsiders. Now, a patch of road on which his pharmacy stands is named after him.

That’s not all. In the middle of the Lal Chowk, the government also plans to build a ‘martyrs’ memorial’ – as a tribute to soldiers and police personnel killed during the years of militancy.

In June last year, Home Minister Amit Shah laid the foundation stone of ‘Balidan Stambh’ in Srinagar’s Pratap Park. According to Shah, the pillar “will inspire patriotism among the youth by immortalising the memory of the martyrs.”

The word ‘martyr’, of course, is a deeply political word in the lexicon of Kashmir’s troubled politics. For the majority of Kashmiris, the word has been used to refer to those who laid down their lives fighting Indian rule.

For instance, in Srinagar’s Eidgah area, there is a separate graveyard for all of those who have died while fighting for an end to Indian rule. For a common Kashmiri, it is a revered space also because it hosts the graves of civilians shot dead by government forces in different uprisings and protests held in the last three or four decades in the Valley.

The site chosen for the Balidan Stambh, too, appears to carry a message from New Delhi.

The memorial is coming up in the Pratap Park, which would host the monthly protest of family members and relatives of those subjected to enforced disappearances in Kashmir Valley by the government forces since the armed insurgency broke out in 1989. No such protest has been held after August, 2019.

Ghosts of the past

Towards the end of the tiled Bund embankment of the river Jhelum that runs parallel to the city centre, sits an old and rickety building.

This is the office of Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society – a rights group at the forefront of documenting human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.

In 2009, the JKCCS was responsible for the unearthing of mass graves in the North Kashmir, exposing the role of alleged perpetrators of human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir by naming officers and army officials involved in those cases, and documenting testimonies of torture victims.

Its office, which used to be brimming with the families of victims of custodial killings, rape and enforced disappearances, is mostly deserted.

The reason is similar – a National Investigation Agency case against the group has made any association with it a fraught matter. Two of its members are in Tihar jail. “There is fear among the victims. As a result, they have disconnected from us,” said an advocate who works with the group.

“There are only a few of us here,” said the advocate, adding poetically, “and the ghosts of some victims who keep asking: ‘What’s the status of our case?’”

All photographs by Faisal Bashir.