J&K is waiting for an emotional outreach

As the all-party delegation prepares to head for Srinagar, it will be confronted with the spectre of the Valley still smouldering like a powder keg, perhaps waiting for the next match. Though curfew restrictions have been eased, a clueless BJP-NDA government at the Centre and a paralysed PDP-BJP government in J&K continue to run around like headless chickens trying to catch their own tail.

The question India needs to ask is: why should the death of a self-professed militant trigger an outpouring of unrest that refuses to go away Why should children under 15 be pelting stones at the symbols of the state, ready to face the wrath of pellet guns in return What is this new ogre the Indian nation is confronted with

The current Frankenstein is unfortunately one of our own creation. A child born in 1989-90 in the Valley will be 26 years old today. During the transition from childhood to adolescence, and then finally adulthood, s/he will have seen conflict and chaos as the natural order of things.

Now extrapolate it to someone who was 10 or 15 years old in 1990, and you have two generations of young Kashmiris for whom curfew, cordon and search, street protests, azadi, AK-47, AK-56, Pakistan-trained mujahids and enforced disappearances, torture, interrogation and encounters, fake or real, are as much a part of everyday lexicon as school, college, ice-cream, career and dating are for youngsters in any normal part of the world.

Myth, rumour, folklore, history and institutional memory bring these words to life and direct anger and bitterness towards the men in khaki or olive green. Perhaps this is the only enduring face of the Indian state they have seen. It is, therefore, unsurprising that over 14 per cent of those with debilitating pellet injuries are under 14. The closest parallel is Afghanistan, where violence has been the new normal since 1980.

In the 26 years since the current violence began in the Valley, the media paradigm has seen a transformation. Private cable and satellite TV have come of age and, more important, Internet and new media platforms have become both sources of information exchange and a vent for the young and others to direct their angst and annoyance.

However, the noxious steam that is released re-circulates in the overheated pressure cooker called Jammu and Kashmir, ratcheting up pressure to explosive levels. It blows the lid at regular intervals, and the poisonous brew overflows like a deluge. That is what happened in 2008, in 2010 and again in 2016. Each time, the trigger may have been different but the result was the same, leaving India rummaging to put together a response and invariably tilting at windmills.

Today Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh keep parroting the clichéd “insaniyat, jamhooriyat and Kashmiriyat” line, without really trying to understand what these words really mean. Rather than applying balm, therefore, these phrases end up having the same effect and impact as the ubiquitous “triple talaq”.

On April 18, 2003 when then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee used these words from the rostrum of the Sher-e-Kashmir Stadium, he extended the hand of friendship to both Pakistan and people outside the mainstream in J&K. By then, he had understood after many false dawns that there could be no meaningful dialogue with the separatists without concurrent confabulations with Pakistan. Most of them had a symbiotic relationship with the Pakistani establishment in varying degrees. While some were on a tight leash, others enjoyed a slightly longer rope, but the cord was always omnipresent.

The assassination of Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone a year earlier in May 2002, when he spoke out against the foreign militants and in favour of a dialogue, asserting that the militant gun had no justification in Kashmir, may have solidified Mr Vajpayee’s belief that the separatists and the “deep state” in Pakistan were conjoined as Siamese twins.

Similarly, when the UPA government took office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh followed the twin tracks of exploring with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf the modus vivendi of making borders irrelevant in J&K, while holding out an olive branch to domestic splittists in J&K.

Contrast this with the situation now, where Mr Modi has decided to deploy the rhetorical arsenal of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan to surmount a disastrous Pakistan policy. This has only further queered the pitch of bilateral relations. No wonder that despite Rajnath Singh’s tweeting the clichéd mantra of this government, he didn’t get a chance to play host to a single separatist leader of any consequence during his recent stay at the Nehru Guest House in Srinagar.

Pakistan’s decision to send 22 MPs to different countries to raise the Kashmir issue with their interlocutors, ahead of Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif’s annual pilgrimage to “the mecca of talk shops” — the UN General Assembly session in New York later this month — is only going to make the gobbledygook between the two countries even more vile.

This will feed right back into the Valley’s pressure cooker ecosystem, further estranging the populace. It is slowly becoming a redundant oxymoron that Kashmir requires a political solution. What is the political solution a 14-year-old is looking for when he pelts stones What the state needs is an emotional outreach to people under constant stress — a regular conversation with the rest of India that creates an emotional bonding. A jackboot on the door and the cold tip of a gun in the ribs certainly doesn’t create the ambience for such a conversation.

In every counter-insurgency doctrine, winning the hearts and minds of the populace is a core objective. It involves the simultaneous application of both hard and soft power by the State. However, in Kashmir’s case, the soft touch has either been conspicuous by its absence or too faint to make any tangible impact.

What India hasn’t grasped despite handling countless insurgencies is that till the time a separatist impulse has popular partisan support and the oxygen of the media, it is impossible to surmount. J&K has both these ingredients in abundance: an angry young population with the power of new media to boot. It’s a deadly cocktail, to say the least.

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari