(The writer is the author of “Curfewed Night,” an account of the conflict in Kashmir)
.SRINAGAR, Kashmir — On the morning of Aug. 21, during the foremost Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, I drove through Srinagar, the summer capital of the disputed Indian-controlled region of Kashmir.
A testing month of fasting had just ended, and freshly washed faces smiled on their way to ceremonial prayers. Children in bright clothes bought for the occasion hovered merrily around candy stores and ice-cream carts. In this militarized land full of tensions and resentments, it looked like a morning of sheer joy.
Yet minutes later, crossing through an upmarket neighborhood in South Srinagar, we drove past a large group of armed police and paramilitary troops. It was a familiar sight for that street: Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a hardline Kashmiri separatist, lives here, and he is often kept under house arrest.
“Have they let him out today?” I asked.
“No. Not even on Eid,” my driver replied.
Indian security forces often keep separatists away from large gatherings for fear that they’ll use them as forums to criticize the Indian government and call for the repeal of drastic security laws, demilitarization and the independence of Kashmir.
By the time I had joined my family in our ancestral mountain home in South Kashmir a few hours later, it was clear that the government’s preventive measures had failed: news came that protests had broken out in Srinagar after the morning prayers for Eid.
A leading moderate separatist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq — he, too, under house arrest — had managed to address by phone the largest congregation of Eid prayers in Srinagar. “If the government wants peace in Kashmir, it needs to resolve the issues by addressing them,” he told the gathering. “Imposing curbs on people and preventing them from discharging their religious duties is interference in our religious matters.”
Angered at Farooq’s absence, some of his supporters attacked and torched a police jeep. Three policemen were injured.
In the week after the festival, six young men were arrested, among them 12-year-old Faizan Sofi. Claiming they had identified the boy from a video of the mob that torched the jeep, the police charged him with “waging war against the state,” among other things.
You could say that Sofi fell under Kashmir’s “state of exception,” as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls special legal regimes that suspend the rule of law in the name of security or other general interests.
An essential prong of the regime that has applied here since the pro-independence insurgency broke out in 1990 is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The law authorizes Indian troops stationed in Kashmir — there are about half a million — to shoot anyone they suspect of being a threat. It also protects them from prosecution in civilian courts unless the Home Ministry specifically allows it.
Another prong is the Public Safety Act, which allows the Indian government to arrest and detain, for up to two years, anyone suspected of threatening the public order. In 2011 Amnesty International estimated that as many as 20,000 people might have been detained under this law over the previous two decades.
On Aug. 26 Sofi was placed in police custody under the P.S.A. and sent to a juvenile home. When he appeared in a Srinagar court on Aug. 27, he happened to be spotted by Babar Qadri, a young lawyer who has represented scores of teenagers involved in pro-independence protests in 2010. According to information Qadri obtained from the Home Ministry thanks to India’s Right to Information Act, 5,504 protesters were arrested in 2010 alone, 70 percent of them minors.
Most of Qadri’s clients were kept in general prisons, not facilities for juveniles. “Many were tortured,” Qadri told me. “Beatings were routine. Mice were thrown into their trousers, and in some cases they were given petrol injections, which cause intense pain throughout the body.”
Qadri defended Sofi at a hearing on Aug. 28. “The police charges were based on hearsay. They had no proof of his involvement,” Qadri said. Arguing that a crime cannot exist without intention and that intention cannot be attributed to a minor, he convinced the judge to release Sofi on bail.
Young Sofi returned home eight days after Eid and the torching of that police jeep. But with the police tracking him between home and school since then, his father, Bashir Sofi, a cloth vendor, has decided against sending him to school for a while.
Sofi’s brush with the Indian prison system — and mine with his story — was another stark reminder that, even if Kashmir has begun to attract tourists, it remains first and foremost a police state.
Be First to Comment