Bringing accountability in Kashmir

Tariq Ahmad, 9, was shot dead by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on June 28. So was Tajamul Ahmad, 17. In the last two weeks, the CRPF has killed eight boys in Kashmir. And wounded scores.

Among the dead were Shakeel Ahmad Ganai, 14, Firdous Ahmad,17, Javaid Ahmad Malla, 17, Tufail Ahmad, 17, Mohammed Rafiq Bangroo, also in his teens, and Bilal Ahmad Wani, 21. The elite force insists that it fired in self-defence. After all it’s happening in Kashmir, the land of impunity.

The anger against CRPF troops that has seen riots in Kashmir this week is not entirely unfounded. But more than these callous killings, the rage is perhaps about the culture of impunity in the state.

Shooting at protestors is part of the state’s ham-fisted effort at countering terror in this once blissful land now maimed by militancy. It goes with custodial deaths and fake ‘encounter’ killings that the Kashmiris live in perpetual fear of. But it’s not just the police and paramilitary forces that they need to fear. The culture of impunity was nurtured largely by the army.

This week 20 years ago, the army dug its heels into Kashmir, fortified by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Cross-border terrorism was spinning out of control, the administration had failed in large parts of the state, agriculture and the economy had faltered, and terrorism had killed tourism.

Even if there was some justification for clamping the AFSPA in Kashmir then, there is no excuse for retaining this inhuman Act even now, when Kashmir has returned almost to normalcy.

After largely free and fair elections, a popular government is in place, militancy is at its lowest ebb in decades, farmers are prospering, tourism is flourishing. Amidst all this is the grotesque face of state terror — in the garb of the AFSPA, which allows armed forces to get away with murder.

That is a contagious habit. It seeps out from under the cover of the AFSPA to infect other state agents. And the police and paramilitary forces are most susceptible to this sickness. They are aided by the political system which uses them and the judicial mechanism where justice gets lost in the labyrinth of time and corrupt investigation. Meanwhile, the people of Kashmir are abused and killed, their human rights routinely violated, and their vulnerability exploited by separatists.

Clamping down more forcefully is not the way out. Armed repression may have worked at one time but it cannot be the chosen method now. And amending the AFSPA to make it more ‘human’ could be a disaster. The army believes it would demoralise soldiers and lay them open to fake complaints.

Demoralising the armed forces, the final protectors of the nation, may certainly cause damage, but so does allowing them to run riot.

But I fear that if the AFSPA is ‘humanised’ it would become acceptable. And then we would clamp it everywhere. Our army is not supposed to be fighting us.

The AFSPA has been in force forever in the north-east and Kashmir, where army atrocities are legendary. The state may be pining to implement the Act in hundreds of districts affected by Maoist violence.

And armed with cosmetic changes they may very well do so. If not repealed, the AFSPA should at least be lifted from Kashmir and the north-east. The army must be deployed against the enemy, not ourselves. Certainly not for long periods of time. It must not stand in for the police.

The way out of this mess is to bring in real accountability through police reforms, improving the justice system and the investigative process, and concentrating on governance. We are in a democracy, in peacetime, not in a battlefield. And the state must not believe that power flows from the barrel of the gun.