The Iron Cage

Why the Indian state is failing in Kashmir

Mourners carry the body of the 21-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in his hometown, Tral. Burhan’s killing in July triggered the fiercest protests Kashmir has seen since 2010. TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
01 October, 2016

ON 8 JULY, INDIAN SECURITY FORCES killed the 21-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani in Kashmir’s Anantnag district. Anger immediately erupted in the valley, and protestors took to the streets in their thousands, even in towns and villages that were usually unaffected by past agitations. Protestors blocked roads, imposed shutdowns, shouted anti-India slogans and pelted stones at security personnel who tried to restrain them.

When I travelled through Kashmir in July, most people I spoke to felt that Burhan’s killing was followed by a dramatic upsurge in the Kashmiri resistance movement. “He openly challenged the mighty Indian state,” a Kashmiri journalist told me. “No more hiding guns under the pheran. No more using pseudonyms. No more hiding behind a mask. That appealed to the people who have been suppressed under the fear of large-scale military presence.” Burhan, he added, “brought the discussion back to the dinner table.”

As in 2010, when the valley last witnessed protests of this scale, the Indian government responded with crushing force, deploying army and paramilitary personnel, who fired at protesters in several places across Kashmir. At the time this story went to press, 89 civilians had been killed, and more than 13,000 injured.

In 2010, several separatist leaders—most prominently Syed Ali Shah Geelani—had been at the forefront of the agitations. These leaders regularly issued calendars that told protesters when to begin agitations, when to halt them, when to take out marches, when to visit the families of the dead and the injured, and even when to go shopping. The protesters obeyed unquestioningly. There was little doubt that Geelani was the leader of the Kashmiri resistance—perhaps the first such figure since Sheikh Abdullah five decades earlier.