The current state of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) is a graphic reminder of how militarization (systematic) and the state sponsored repression of an entire civilian population, several times size of adversary viewed through the prism of national security and, counterion surgency is difficult. Although India has a decent discourse of democracy, secularism and peaceful coexistence, the reality at ground level in Kashmir paints a very gloomy and alarming situation one filled with bloodshed, intimidation and injustice. The most recent of the worsening situation in wake of the Pahalgam incident has been the intensification of Cordon and Search Operations (CASOs) whereupon the Indian Army has been provided with a free hand literally given the license to kill and to go all out with no check or accountability.
Such sanitized militarily jargon of CASOs conceals the nauseating truth of rampant crackdowns, midnight raids, random arrests, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and all this under the cover of such draconian legislations like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and Public Safety Act (PSA). In the days that followed the Pahalgam episode, Indian forces have claimed to arrested more than 4000 civilians in the broad search operations that exhibit all the signs of collective punishment, resulting in violation of international humanitarian laws and norms. These are not surgical, intelligence based anti-militant operations, as described by New Delhi, this is instead a military terror campaign to suppress the spirit of Kashmiri struggle, killing the youth, the elders, women, and the students suspected of conflict, even including school going children.
The issue is even grave when it is considered that militarized oppression cannot be halted up to the valley itself and that it extends even beyond such as the arrest of the Kashmiri students studying in Indian universities such as Assam University Silchar and SS College Haila Kandi. Being so far away and separated on the one hand, disconnected with the conflict filled places of origin, and on the other, made easy targets of the rightist outfits like the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) that operates off state machinery to intimidate, silence, and persecute Muslim voices in the name of nationalism and campus discipline.
Cordon and search by the Indian Army have also caused humongous resentment and condemnation among the local communities, and this has led to the recent violent protests against military camps in different regions of IIOJK. Indian troops are authorized to kill suspects, shoot to kill and detain without trial all these followed by the passing of the AFSPA which has given Indians soldiers new rights to prey on civilians and not serve as the protectors of the state. Even such unlimited authorities are not directed at establishing peace, yet to destroy Kashmiri identities and ambitions. Every raid in every house, every youngster detained, every family dislocated, constitutes one more page to the alienation of an entire generation which has grown up under occupation.
Seven hundred thousand troops being present on the ground daily and with the ratio of military to civilian being the most in the world is not a symbol of security but suffocation to the people of Kashmir. This excessive militarization is more of an indication of India itself being scared and incapable of capturing Kashmiri heats, since in case it was, as New Delhi brags, a completely part of the Union they would not need to provide such excessive forces in the region to sustain. As a matter of fact, the counterion surgency doctrine of the Indian government in Kashmir does not aim to end militancy and establish peace, but it is a strategic policy targeted to suppress the political demands of Kashmir and change its demography and carry out the Hindutva policy of cultural and religious homogenization.
A major move in this direction was the repeal of Article 370 in 2019, which had given Kashmir formal autonomy, leading to settler colonial ventures that will alter the Muslim majority demography in the area. Military force, which encompasses CASOs, is now the enforcing apparatus of such demographic war. Checkpoints, house to house searches, roadblocks, curfews, enforced drone surveillance and random stoppages have reduced civilian dwellings to questioning rooms and life into continuous torture.
Thousands of them have disappeared or rather disappeared into unknown jails or unmarked graves with nobody to know their fate so far. The human rights organizations put the number of those murdered in extrajudicial killings at a shocking 13000 since 1989, making this number literally a death toll of human tolls, which can only be called out as propaganda when India claims of having zero tolerance towards human rights abuse.
Trauma caused by these surgical operations cannot be overemphasized. Children are raised to look behind the door each time they are knocked at midnight, women fear the search parties, which embarrass the innocent women in the name of security search, young men live with the fear of being arrested, tortured, or killed. The conditions in a deteriorating mental health crisis are taking ludicrous turns in the region with depression, anxiety and post traumatic disorder running like wildfire in all age groups a concealed manifestation of the military suppression that cannot raise its voice in official briefings but wails in the heart of every Kashmiri. Raids at homes at night are not a strategic search, but preplanned psychological war, aimed to leave the populace disintegrated, passive and unable to say anything.
AFSPA guarantees the impunity with which the Indian forces go about their business it is a colonial period legislation that leaves the military with a license of sorts to perpetrate excesses by granting it carte blanche. Those protecting fellow soldiers charged with the killing of civilians on mere suspicion eliminate any chances of having them held under the rule of law, the family of victims are frustrated by having their cases ruled out of court both the military and civilian, the judicial system, the police and administrative machinery as a whole proves to be helpless in the face of army. The result of this lawlessness has made Kashmir one of the militarized areas in the world and at the same time the most unaccountable region where human rights never exist as soon as Indian boot gets on the ground.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are international watchdogs against India, who have time and again thrashed India since cases of torture, rape, custodial deaths, and illegal confinements, have been reported are never welcomed by New Delhi unless called foreign interference. The demands of the UN Human Rights Council of investigation into the war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kashmir are yet to be addressed because India does not allow the international observer powers to come to Kashmir.
Military activities in India have not helped in resolving the conflict, or rather have escalated the opposition in resistance. Every incident of the death of a young person turns into an anti-India demonstration; every killed one turns into a martyr in the collective memory of resistance. The Kashmiri people feel continually patronized by the constant aggression of their army and as a result they become increasingly detached creating a new generation of anger. They point fingers at the culprit’s disruption of peace, formerly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi accuses the presence of terrorists, despite having a government policy that is providing no peace.
The iron fist of occupation can only bring despair and hatred and not harmony. Obsession with military solutions that is characteristic of the Modi regime is not a sign of confidence, but rather signifies the extent to which the Modi regime lives with a sense of paranoia, that unless it uses massive force it could not suppress the truth about the alienation of Kashmir to assert itself.
The tale of the CASOs in IIOJK is not really the tale of counterterrorism, but of colonial occupation in the end. It is not only about the systematic application of military terror to obliterate the political will, culture and collective memories of an entire people, but it is also about the snowballing of the practice between the military forces and their opponents as the major political instrument through which the military unleashes violence in their pursuit to exercise control and domination.
The Indian state thus waging a silent war on the very existence of the Kashmiris under the pretext of the normalcy. These actions are intended to erode the spirit of Kashmir until their only point of survival consists in submission. History has demonstrated that countries beaten into submission never forget; they bide their time, suffer and fight back. Just as Kashmir continues to languish in its unending siege, freedom can only be seen in modest resistance of the Kashmiris, the very resistance that no army, however big or cruel it is, may never kill it off indefinitely.
