Why Multiple Arrests are only ensuring that Masarat Alam will don Geelani’s mantle in the Valley

I

The release of Masarat Alam, a Kashmiri separatist leader, from jail in March this year generated outrage.

“I lend my voice to this outrage,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on 9 March. “This is not one party’s but the nation’s outrage.”

Essentially, the “outrage”—aakrosh as Modi called it—was directed at the orders of the Supreme Court, which had facilitated the release of Alam—today the face of Kashmiri separatism in India.

Modi was responding to the fact that the Parliament had witnessed a desperately debilitated opposition make its most potent attack over the issue since he rose to power last year.

Alam’s release, Modi declared, went against the “nation’s unity and integrity” and there’d be “no compromise” on it. But as the uproar refused to die, a fuming Modi tore through his opposition and, raising his finger, cried out, twice: “Do not teach us patriotism!”

Much to the liking of the Mufti Mohammed Sayeed-led Bharatiya Janata Party–People’s Democratic Party government, an increasingly jingoistic broadcast media has added ample fuel to this fire. Unsurprisingly, a month after his release this year, Alam was back in prison, charged yet again under the draconian Public Safety Act, for raising pro-Pakistan slogans in a crowd waving Pakistani flags.

The fact remains that Alam—booked repeatedly since 1990 under the PSA—has not been convicted for any charges in the 27-odd cases against him. In Kashmir, though, that’s not an exception.

II

It was a cold day in January 2001.

Following a ministerial cavalcade, and moving towards the Srinagar airport, a green government jeep had raised police suspicion. As the cavalcade entered the airport garrison, six men in army fatigues got down from the jeep, and opened a massive gunfire and grenade attack on security. An hour later, the fidayeen attack on the airport had been scuttled with 11 dead, including the six Pakistani militants.

The next day, about a hundred-strong crowd of protesters approached security officials, seeking the bodies of the militants for burial. The crowd was subjected to a lathi charge, and dispersed—except, as the story now stands, for one young man leading them, who stood unmoved. Among the posse of Indian police and paramilitary, the man is said to have singled out a top Kashmiri police officer and shouted: “These Indians are occupiers. It is you, their Kashmiri collaborators, who’ll have to answer one day.”

“It was stunning, raw courage at display,” recalled a top Indian police officer posted in Srinagar during those years.

For the days to come, the police denied they had arrested the man. The Hurriyat—Kashmir’s prominent alliance of political, social and religious organisations committed to achieving political self-determination—fearing the possibility of a custodial killing, which is not uncommon in Kashmir, held a press conference demanding that the government reveal his whereabouts. Under pressure, the authorities admitted to the arrest. The man was kept in one of Kashmir’s notorious interrogation centres in Srinagar, one of his close political associates told me, a gun barrel later driven in to his face.

The mark of that gun barrel has stayed on Alam’s face to this day, covered under his long beard.

It was not the first time Alam had been in jail. In fact, he had spent much of the previous decade there. But after that January incident, a dossier on Alam sent to the highest echelons of India’s intelligence establishment, the security official said, predicted that he would be a major source of coming “trouble” for New Delhi in Kashmir. This has ensured that Alam, who is 43 at the moment, has spent nearly 20 years in jail since 1990.

III

Alam was born in Zaindar Mohalla, old Srinagar, where he continues to reside when he has not been imprisoned. His father died when he was six. Raised by his grandparents, he grew very close to his grandmother, who passed away in 2009 while Alam was away in prison.

He was educated at the prestigious Christian missionary school, Tyndale Biscoe, in Srinagar. Barely out of his teens, in 1990, Alam joined Mushtaq ul Islam, who then headed the militant group Hizbullah. Just two months later, Alam was arrested for the first time.

Alam went on to complete his graduation and joined government service as forester in 1997, a post he held for about eight months. During this period, he was abducted by the Ikhwan—the government-sponsored renegade militia—and severely tortured, a former militant commander who became Alam’s political associate told me. Left crippled for months, he gave up his job. The following year, he joined the Muslim League, a pro-Pakistan political group he later headed.

In 2003, the Hurriyat was battling mistrust among its top members and reeling under allegations that a core member had fielded proxy candidates in the previous year’s assembly elections. At what initially seemed to be a usual conglomerate seminar, Alam, just out of jail, launched an audacious critique of the Hurriyat’s ambiguous stance for Kashmir’s independence. He compared the political conglomerate at that time to a “vehicle whose driver had lost the sense of direction.”

“Either we change the driver,” Alam roared, “or we just get down.” The Hurriyat split in a matter of days, and Alam was chosen—“To his surprise,” the first associate told me—as the breakaway faction’s interim chairman until Syed Ali Geelani was formally elected as its head.

By this time, Alam, barely 32, however, had already found Geelani’s favour as one of the strongest proponents of the challenge to India’s presence in Kashmir.

Alam was soon arrested again, ironically on charges—among others—of engineering a split within the Hurriyat.

He was released two years later, in 2005, when Geelani, who appeared isolated given his uncompromising stand against Indian rule, formed a new political group, the Tehreek e Hurriyat. Alam joined the Tehreek, and an ailing Geelani declared him his jaanasheen—political successor.

The same year, on 14 August, Pakistan’s independence day, Alam married the sister of a slain militant from his neighbourhood, with Geelani reading out the nikah.

Differences over the constitution of the Tehreek and its preference for the Jamaat e Islami cadre and style of functioning, a source close to the party told me, led Alam to quit and rejoin the Muslim League even as his personal and political equations with Geelani only got stronger.

Next year, in 2006, when Pakistan’s then president Pervez Musharraf proposed a four-point “formula” for Kashmir’s resolution, only Geelani and Alam stood together to reject it, reiterating that nothing less than the right of self-determination was acceptable. Alam called for a new movement supported by “Kashmiris alone.”

“We will fight, and we will not surrender before India,” Alam told his party. “Neither will we join ranks with Pakistan in a compromise over Kashmir’s future.” Some of the top leaders soon quit the party, but “as long as Alam stood firm,” the first associate told me, “it didn’t matter.”

The following April, Alam, along with Geelani, organised a political rally in Srinagar’s Eidgah. The attendance of that rally, which reportedly went into tens of thousands, unnerved the government and humbled the rival Hurriyat. A flag of the Lashkar e Taiba raised from among the crowd, however, gave the government an alibi to intervene.

Alam was arrested moments before he could address a scheduled press briefing meant to distance his Hurriyat from the Lashkar, a party member accompanying him at the time told me.

He was released more than a year later, in 2008, as reports appeared of concrete constructions at the Baltal, doorway to the annual Amarnath pilgrimage. Government plans arranging for 40 hectares of forest land to be transferred to the Amarnath Shrine Board triggered off a massive wave of peaceful anti-India demonstrations, with Alam considered to be the main mobiliser; a brutal security crackdown followed.

The reaction was unexpected and widespread: young Kashmiri boys, supported by men and women alike, poured out on to the streets throwing stones at Indian police and paramilitary. The forces responded with gun fire, mostly directed straight at the protesting crowds, killing over 60 protesters and bystanders, a majority of whom were barely out of their adolescence, in the four-month-long agitation.

Alam was back in jail, but not before the land transfer order was revoked, the state government fallen, and New Delhi left clueless about dealing with Kashmir’s shift to a mass uprising that was armed with nothing more than stones.

He was arrested and booked under the PSA, this time on charges—among others—of attempting to unite the Hurriyat.

Two years later, in June 2010, Alam was out on bail. Anger was already brewing across Kashmir over reports that the Indian army had killed three civilians in Machhil in Kupwara district and passed them off as terrorists. Sensing unrest, the government arrested Geelani, who, moments earlier had sent a message to Alam: he must see the killings not go unprotested.

Alam asked Kashmiris to “stock up rations and medicines,” and “get ready for an important announcement.” Two days later, he announced the Quit Kashmir movement. The call met an overwhelming response as Alam released weekly protest “calendars” and churned out videos calling for the exit of the Indian forces from Kashmir.

The coming weeks would see a meticulous security establishment almost collapse in the face of unprecedented defiance. Many would later refer to those months as the Kashmiri intifada—uprising.

The government responded with deadlier violence than in 2008. More than 120 Kashmiri youth were killed on the streets by its forces. The army was forced on to the streets to re-establish control. A massive security crackdown followed, and juveniles were charged with sedition and waging war against the state.

All through this, Alam was directing the agitations while remaining underground. He was finally arrested in September, but not before New Delhi was forced to think of a political response.

Parliamentary delegations visited the state, with home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, standing in Parliament, calling Kashmir a “unique political problem which required a unique solution,” and later appointing a three-member team of interlocutors. The resistance leadership declined to meet them, calling the exercise hogwash.

IV

Alam’s slogan “Go, India, go back” literally enveloped the Kashmiri landscape. A three-day curfew had to be imposed in 2010 just to efface the graffiti before the parliamentary delegations arrived in Srinagar.

In a recent interview with me, Alam showed a distinct hint of disappointment, even disapproval, when I asked if his arrest was the reason the agitations stopped in 2010 without any tangible gains.

He left little doubt that he would have wanted the agitations to continue.

“What is this ‘bilateral issue’?” Alam asked when in the course of the interview I mentioned that New Delhi had reiterated its traditional stand that Kashmir was a “bilateral issue” to be resolved by India and Pakistan with no “scope” for “any third party.”

“What you see in Kashmir is Indian occupation… And occupations are not resolved. Occupations are ended. India must go back, that’s it.”

It is this uncompromising stance that has made him so important. In Kashmir, when you ask people why they support Syed Ali Geelani, the most influential among the resistance leadership, they answer “because he will never be a sell-out to the Indian state.”

It is something they have started saying of Alam as well.

An earlier version of this article identified Masarat Alam as the general secretary of the All parties Hurriyat conference. The Caravan regrets the error.