Author: Sankarshan Thakur
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: July 24, 2010
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100724/jsp/nation/story_12720934.jsp
A mob that has wreaked recurrent mayhem demands
the removal of a police officer who has stood in their way and repulsed their
daily assaults. The government pulls him back.
In another district, a station chief locks
up half-a-dozen miscreants for stoking anger with rumours that jawans have
been attacking interior village mosques. He is phoned within an hour by superiors
and instructed to release the men.
At an embattled barricade in downtown Srinagar,
an inspector threatens tear gas and fire on masked boys if they don't halt
hurling stones and retreat. "Go on, go on!" mocks one of them in
challenge, undeterred in his offensive. "We know you have no power to
fire, your bosses won't let you!" The boys press on with their violent
barrage, the inspector retreats in defence.
Security forces across the Valley are getting
trampled in the trenches in pursuit of thankless tasks, rampaged by angry
throngs, reined in by a government that can't seem to summon the resolve to
exercise authority and put a lid on this protracted eruption.
"We have been deployed with our hands
tied behind our backs," complains a top police officer. "We are
getting slammed equally for not being able to control violence and for quelling
it. They are throwing stones at us, we can't be firing flowers in return,
we are almost in a civil war, there will be deaths and injuries if we are
to end it."
Another officer, recently returned from failed
crowd control in South Kashmir, sounded harsher and more helpless. "The
government should realise these are not Gandhian protesters, they know we
have no orders to take hard measures, they are emboldened, they are getting
harsh on us, what is a policeman like me meant to do faced with an inflamed
mob, apply the healing touch? The government is just leading them on, and
my jawans are getting trodden over. The chief minister says this is a battle
of ideas and ideologies, then let him wage it, policemen are not trained for
ideological warfares, we are footsoldiers, have us on the ground fighting
or just withdraw us."
The barracks are fuming at being barred their
quotidian powers and at being blamed for failure. Let the police behave like
the police does to restore law and order and it shall lie restored, they promise.
But if strong medicine is what the forces are prescribing, it is a prospect
that shivers the Omar Abdullah government. It doesn't want deaths, it doesn't
want crackdowns, it doesn't want street confrontation.
The problem is, the angered street does, it
is looping the government into daily confrontation, inviting crackdowns, inviting
more deaths. That's the fodder secessionists and their anonymous backers feed
on. They've caught Omar Abdullah's government in a tight cleft - it can't
draw too much blood, it can't be itself bloodied beyond a point, it rocks
precariously on that slippery dilemma. "The issue is that every death
will bring another round of reprisal," says a senior bureaucrat, in defence
of the government's kid-glove mode. "Things need to calm down, and they
probably will in time, we have to wait and watch."
His words ring less of policy, more of prayer.
Indeed, there are those among the sympathisers of this confounded dispensation
who have begun to look heavenwards with hope: perhaps the onset of Ramazan,
the holy month that begins on August 11, will turn this ugly tide, wait and
helplessly watch.
But the hardline Hurriyat underground is already
dispelling speculations of peace during the introspections of Ramazan; they
aren't about to repeat the "error" of the land agitation of 2008
when they took a Ramazan break and the movement lost its temper. Another calendar
of restrictions is already on the anvil, the promise of continued unrest to
the people by the hardline Hurriyat underground.
But for how long? The Valley has been in ferment
for more than a month now. Seventeen have fallen to street hostilities. Scores
lie injured, among them many jawans. Civil shutdown has become the norm. The
adversaries of the State have become the State, they dictate closures and
openings, they order disruption and calm, they have the agency on command
and compliance.
Life in the Valley erupts and evaporates to
their widely-circulated time-tables. Curfew all week, the separatists bid,
and it has been curfew all week. "Hukumat kiski chalti hai yahan?"
asks a peeved bakery owner in old Sopore who has barely had reason to stoke
his ovens recently, "Hukumat hai masjidon ke eilaan ki, sarkar ki nahin.
Woh dam dikhate hain, sarkar dande bajati hai.
(Who rules this place? The call from the mosques,
not the government. They have the power, the government only beats its batons.)"
Ask Kashmir's policemen and they'd tell you
if only the government had beaten the baton hard enough.
