The Hindu : Crossing the Bhacchi bridge

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Tuesday, Aug 12, 2003

Opinion

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Crossing the Bhacchi bridge

By Praveen Swami

The real tragedy in Kishtwar is the failure of the political establishment to affirm that the carnage there distinguishes little between Hindu and Muslim.

THE SMALL hamlet of Bhacchi is connected to the world only by a small rope bridge, perilously strung a hundred feet over the thundering Chenab river. Food and supplies for the long Kishtwar winter must cross this bridge, as must children on their way to school, people going to work, and the unwell who must be moved to hospital. It is, quite simply, the most important asset the village community has. Some years ago, the villagers decided to recruit god to the defence of their bridge. A mosque was built where it joins the village; adjoining it the villagers constructed a temple, identical in size and very similar in shape.

Syncretic religious practices of this kind are not hard to come by in rural Kishtwar, a sprawling tehsil in the mountain district of Doda. Yet, the Kishtwar region has also become the scene of bitter communal contestation. Early this month, Hindu and Muslim mobs clashed in Kishtwar town, setting off a small-scale battle that left several injured and destroyed over a dozen shops. By all-India standards, such riots are relatively minor. But for the past several years, the Pakistan military establishment and Islamist groups have been pushing for a partition of Jammu and Kashmir between Muslim-majority areas north of the Chenab river, and the Hindu-majority areas to its south. Kishtwar straddles this faultline, a fact which vests the communal conflagration in the region with enormous significance.

Like most past riots in Kishtwar, the clashes on August 1 were rooted in terrorist violence directed at Hindus. Villagers from the hamlet of Pullar arrived in the town, demanding that an Army picket be established to protect them from terrorists who had been intimidating them. Such intimidation has frequently escalated into bloodshed; 32 Hindu villagers were killed across Kishtwar in a series of communal massacres in 2001 alone. These massacres often provoked riots. The 2001 massacres, for example, led Hindu mobs to attack a village mosque in Atholi, while the massacre of 16 bus passengers in 1994 had led to communal violence in Kishtwar town itself.

This time, however, no Hindus had actually been killed or even injured. As such, the traditional cause of communal war did not exist. What is even more intriguing is that the violence came at a time of relative quiet in Kishtwar. There have been no communal massacres this year in Doda district. Indeed, the overall level of civilian killings in Jammu province has declined sharply when compared with previous years. Thirty civilians were killed until August 1 in Doda, compared with 83 in 2002. Between January and June-end in 2002, 210 civilians had been killed by terrorists in all of Jammu; in the same period this year, 124 have been murdered.

Why then the communal rage? Several explanations are possible. For one, the relative lull in killings is not the consequence of real reduction in the presence of terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although no communal massacres have taken place, threats and small-scale killings continue. Even as the villagers from Pullar reached Kishtwar, for example, some 117 Hindu families fled their homes in the Sumbar mountain belt in Ramban tehsil, on the western end of Doda district. The Sumbar refugees fled after two members of their Village Defence Committee, armed volunteer units set up to defend them against terrorist attacks, were killed. Over a dozen Hindu-owned homes were also set on fire in the attacks.

Hindu insecurity is fuelled by the low importance attached to securing Doda. The district, with an area of some 11,500 square kilometres, is almost as large as the entire Kashmir valley. Yet, the region is protected by just 57 companies, or some 6000 men, of the Army, Central Reserve Police Force and Jammu and Kashmir Armed Police. The CRPF and the Armed Police are largely limited to static and patrol duties, leaving only the 28 companies of the 4, 8, 10, 11 and 26 Rashtriya Rifles battalions to operate offensively. Although the Disturbed Areas Act was imposed in Doda after the massacres of 2001, neither the State nor the Centre has put men on the ground: the presence of forces remains at levels lower than 1999, when well over 100 companies were committed to the district.

Another explanation might lie in the local politics of Kishtwar itself. "Until 1980", says Kishtwar hardware-store owner Bhushan Parihar, "almost all the shops in our market were Hindu-owned." From the 1970s, however, a Muslim bourgeoisie began to emerge to challenge the Hindu monopoly of trade, using the community's new-found political muscle to gain timber and road construction contracts. Contracts awarded during the construction of the massive Dul-Hasti hydroelectric project further enriched this new class. From 1998, the Hindu elite turned to the Bharatiya Janata Party to try and secure its interests. Mr. Parihar, for one, had then lobbied with L.K. Advani and Chaman Lal Gupta "for help in breaking the Muslim monopoly of Dul-Hasti contracts."

Hindu chauvinism was mirrored by the growth of Muslim communalism. While the mobilisational strategies of the National Conference leadership in Doda were expressly targeted at the Muslim community, it generally stopped short of confrontational communalism. With the death of the National Conference heavyweight, Bashir Ahmad Kitchlew, and the fracturing of the party's near-monopoly of power in last year's elections, the field was wide open for new aspirants. While the Congress concentrated on traditional National Conference-style coalition-building, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) focussed on labour discontent at Dul-Hasti to put together a fledgling constituency.

The new contract-fuelled elite started using aggressively communal tactics to break the mainstream parties' hold on the Muslim vote. It turned to the People's Democratic Party, a new entrant with no real mass base. It is not surprising, perhaps, a key figure in the recent rioting was a new PDP leader. He is charged by local Hindus with having led the Muslim mob that burned down Hindu-owned shops on August 1. Muslims, in turn, charge a BJP leader with having started the violence, by inciting the Pullar refugees to throw stones at Muslim-owned shops which failed to down shutters that day. Whatever the truth, both groups have benefited from the riots, gaining legitimacy as defenders of their respective religious communities.

All of which, of course, points to the real tragedy in Kishtwar: the failure of the political establishment to affirm that the carnage there distinguishes little between Hindu and Muslim. In each year bar 1995, more Muslims have been killed by terrorists than Hindus. They became victims of jihad fought in the name of their faith for being members of pro-India parties, allegedly passing on information to security forces, or simply resisting Islamist diktat. Like Hindu refugees, Mohammad Aslam Mantoo, Sarpanch of Sarthal village, can rarely spend the night in his own home because of terrorist threats. The story is repeated across Jammu. On August 6, for example, 66-year-old Noor Mohammad Choudhary, headman of Mehrot near Surankote, was shot dead for his supposed proximity to the National Conference.

The bad news is that things could get worse, and sooner than most believe. Despite the limited security resources available in Doda, terrorists have been hit hard; 73 terrorists have been eliminated since January, against 101 in the whole of 2002 or just 88 in the whole of 2000. Yet, most in Doda believe these successes are not the reason why major massacres have not taken place so far. Terrorist groups seem to be biding their time as the India-Pakistan détente process continues, waiting for what they believe will be its inevitable collapse. Then, most experts believe, the killings will resume, a proposition affirmed by Hizb-ul-Mujahideen chief Mohammad Yusuf Shah's August 8 threat of an escalation in "targeted attacks." "We've done well", says Doda's Senior Superintendent of Police, Sunil Kumar, "but, yes, its simply not possible for us to protect every village community all the time."

Sadly, the PDP-Congress alliance regime does not seem to be taking the crisis in Kishtwar with any seriousness. Persistent delays in payments to Special Police Officers, local recruits paid Rs. 1,500 a month to participate in offensive operations and man defensive village pickets, have generated the impression, right or wrong, that the PDP is insensitive to Hindu concerns. So, too, has the failure of both Union and State Governments to upgrade the equipment and skills of Village Defence Committees. The biggest failure, though, is political. Until Hindu shopkeepers in Kishtwar learn to down shutters when Muslims die, and Muslim shopkeepers when Hindus die, Kishtwar's religious communities will continue to be sundered by a wall of hatred and mistrust.

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