B005OWFTDW EBOK (11 page)

S
ince then, Kashmir’s youngest generation has started a Palestinian-style intifada against Indian rule. Young Kashmiris, who are coming of age with war, cable television, mobile phones and the Internet and are exposed to political images from other conflicts, see echoes of the Israeli occupation of Hebron and Gaza in India’s military control of Kashmir. Palestinian stone-throwers become their inspiration. The nucleus of the intifada is the vast square and maze of lanes around Srinagar’s grand mosque, an elegant structure of fine brick and filigreed wooden columns which rises like a trapezium to meet its pagoda-like roof. Two summers ago, when the
stone-pelting
battles between Kashmiri teenagers and Indian paramilitaries and police were nascent, I spent a few days hanging out around the grand mosque. One Friday afternoon, after the faithful had left, and the shops had closed for prayers and remained closed, fearing
kani jung
, or the ‘war of stones’, I stood behind an arched gate. Paramilitaries and policemen carrying assault rifles, tear-gas guns and bulletproof shields stood in a semicircle staring down at the growing crowd of teenagers and young men in their early twenties, wearing jeans, stylish T-shirts, trainers and Palestinian scarves and masks, armed with lumps of brick and stones.

A sudden volley of bricks tore through the nervous silence and struck an armoured car that charged at the boys, firing a burst of shells. Pungent tear gas filled the square; the stone-throwers scampered for cover. The soldiers made a ferocious charge, waving batons and raising a roar. The stone-throwers had melted into the houses, alleys and nooks they knew by heart. Soon a barrage of rocks came flying from balconies and narrow lanes, sending the soldiers retreating to their earlier positions. Stones, tear gas, stones, tear gas. And so it went on. I stood there watching the clashes, until the sun was about to set and the police officer in charge called it a day. A celebratory roar rose from the rebellious crowd. In a brief moment of reprieve I had asked a police officer what he made of the
stone-throwers
. ‘It is a blood sport; it gives them a big kick,’ he said calmly. ‘When they push the police back, they feel like they have pushed India out of Kashmir.’

These clashes have grown increasingly violent. Hundreds have been injured. Many have died, including bystanders. The police launched a serious crackdown earlier in the summer and arrested around three hundred stone-throwers between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. But the news of death is frequent in Kashmir and so are occasions of protest. Another generation of young Kashmiris is being consumed by war.

I
met up with some of this new generation in a college not far from the grand mosque. Wary of police informers, they refused to talk in the college cafeteria and led me instead to an empty classroom. They sat on wooden chairs, in a semicircle facing me, textbooks jutting out of their bags. As we made small talk, a wisp of a boy with curly gelled hair, wearing a white linen shirt, blue denims and black Converse trainers, played with his mobile phone. ‘He is the commander of our group,’ one of them said, half joking. The boy smiled. ‘You can write about us, but don’t use our real names. We will be arrested if we are identified.’ His voice was measured, grave. I agreed. ‘Call me Shahbaaz,’ he said. Shahbaaz – the falcon. The boys laughed.

A friend of Shahbaaz’s passed me his phone. ‘That’s him in a protest after Wamiq was killed.’ I had read about Wamiq Farooq, a fourteen-year-old student who was killed when troops fired at a crowd of boys after a clash in January. I looked at the picture on the phone: a masked boy lunging at a bulletproof police car with a stone in his right hand. The memory hardened Shahbaaz’s face. ‘I was very sad and very angry the day they killed Wamiq. If I had a gun that day, I would have …’

Shahbaaz was born in the autumn of 1988, a year before the war began, in downtown Srinagar in a middle-class home. His father, a bureaucrat, worked for the local government. In 1991, one of his uncles who had joined a militant group was killed by the military. He did not remember the uncle. His first memory of the war is coming back from school when he was in fourth grade and seeing a big protest pass by his house. The military fired. A boy from his neighbourhood was hit by bullets and died outside his door. ‘That was the first time I saw someone being killed,’ Shahbaaz said slowly. He remembered feeling angrier after an incident in the autumn of 2000, when he was preparing for his eighth-grade examinations at his maternal grandfather’s house. Protesters fired at the paramilitary and killed a soldier and angry troops began house-to-house searches, barging into Shahbaaz’s family home. ‘A soldier pushed my aunt around and asked where she had hidden the militants. Another soldier began beating my grandfather and asking him questions.’ His aunt and grandfather repeatedly told them that nobody had come into their house. A soldier grabbed Shahbaaz by the neck and put a dagger to his throat. ‘Tell me where the militants are or I will kill him!’ the soldier shouted. After a while, the soldiers left. Shahbaaz stood there shaking in fear and anger. ‘I still remember the cold edge of that dagger,’ he said, lighting a cigarette.

We left the classroom after a while and walked to Nohata Chowk, the square where Shahbaaz and his friends often clash with the soldiers. Every street corner was a reminder of a battle. ‘Here I was hit by a tear-gas shell,’ Shahbaaz said, pointing to a communal tap. ‘Here I was almost arrested,’ said one of his friends, pointing towards an alleyway. We passed the square near the grand mosque and Shahbaaz signalled at a crumbling, empty house by the road. ‘This used to be a BSF [Border Security Force] camp,’ he said. ‘Two of my friends were taken there and tortured.’ We crossed a small roundabout and the boys stopped and pointed at the plaque on a electricity pole: Martyr Muntazir Square. Date of martyrdom: 7 July 2007.

We walked through a labyrinth of lanes and reached an old bridge over the River Jhelum. Shahbaaz talked to me about a boy named Muntazir. ‘I was with him when he was shot,’ he said. ‘We weren’t close friends but that day we shared a cigarette before the fighting began.’ He didn’t remember what had led them to come out on the streets that day. Shahbaaz, Muntazir and a few others were leading the attack on a group of paramilitaries outside the grand mosque. The paramilitaries ran for cover and the boys followed them. Then police came out of an alley and fired. ‘Muntazir was hit in the abdomen and shoulder and fell on the street,’ Shahbaaz said. ‘Two of us picked him up and ran back towards the rest of the boys. The police fired tear-gas shells. The other boy was hit and fell.’ Shahbaaz carried Muntazir to the alley where their friends waited. ‘I saw some boys run towards us and they took Muntazir. He was bleeding intensely, dying. I fainted.’

We sat on a
ghat
by the banks of the River Jhelum under the bridge. Beautiful old houses with ornate balconies and shingle roofs towered over the river. A lonely-looking soldier stared out of the box-like hole in a bunker on the bridge. Shahbaaz suddenly stopped talking and turned to his friends. ‘Look at that!’ They rose from the steps we were sitting on and walked closer to the bank. A brown stray dog was struggling to swim his way across the river. The boys debated his chances and stood there until the dog reached the bank. I stood behind them, watching, and hoped they wouldn’t end up as plaques in a town square.

I asked about their fears. They could be killed, or arrested and put in a prison for a year or two, which would block most possibilities in the future. ‘We too have dreams of a good life. I want to be a computer scientist, but we can’t look away when we live under Indian occupation. We aren’t fighting for money or personal gain. We are fighting for Kashmir,’ Shahbaaz said, looking directly at me. He insisted he was aware of the price he and his friends could pay. ‘I was arrested last year. They beat me so hard in the police station that bones in both my legs fractured. I wore plaster and couldn’t walk for a few months.’ One of his friends, Daniyal, who had sat quietly all this while, spoke up. ‘I was arrested after a clash with the CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force]. They took me into a bunker and …’ He stopped mid-sentence, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and held out his bare arms. He had been burned with heated iron rods; each arm had four lines of scarred flesh running across it.

Shahbaaz invited me to his house, a short walk away. A car was parked outside the double-storeyed building. We sat in his carpeted room while he switched on his computer and began clicking through a series of videos on the desktop. He played a video from the early nineties, showing the wreckage of the north Kashmir town of Sopore after its main market had been burned down by Indian soldiers; he played a video of a funeral with relatives crying over the body of a young man shot by the soldiers, and then he played a video of Kashmiri protesters being fired on in Chahal village in August 2008 (the protest that Manzoor Bhat, the house painter turned militant, had been part of ). ‘How can we forget this?’ Shahbaaz said, his eyes on the screen. ‘But do you think stone-throwing will make India leave Kashmir?’ I asked. ‘It makes a difference. We show them that we are not completely helpless,’ he replied. Then he lit a cigarette, took a long puff and said, ‘We are not using guns. When Kashmiris used guns, the Indians called us terrorists. Yes, the gun was from Pakistan, but the stones are our own. That is our only weapon against the occupation.’ He wanted to show me something else and played a documentary about the life and death of Faris Oudeh, the fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy who was immortalized by an Associated Press photograph taken a few days before his death: a diminutive youth in a baggy sweater, slinging a stone at an Israeli tank some ten metres away. ‘He was hit in his neck by an Israeli sniper when he bent to pick up a stone,’ Shahbaaz said. ‘His friends couldn’t get to him, he was so close to the Israeli tank.’ As he spoke, Shahbaaz’s voice was low and full of passion.

I
returned to New York a week later. My thoughts would often drift back to Shahbaaz, as every other day Indian paramilitary and police fired at young boys like him. Each death brought out more protesters and the uniforms would shoot to kill. A friend wrote in a newspaper article, ‘The ages of the boys killed in the past few days read like the scores of a batsman in very bad form … 17, 16, 15, 13, 9 …’ In Srinagar, the troops attacked the funeral of a young protester. Photojournalists, several of whom were beaten, captured the moment. On a stretcher in the middle of a street is a young man killed by the troops as they went about crushing the protests. Behind his fallen corpse, angry soldiers and policemen assault the
pallbearers
and mourners with guns and batons. The mourners run for safety, except for a man in his late fifties: the father trying to save his son’s corpse from desecration, spreading himself over the boy, his arms stretched in a protective arc. By mid-August, fifty-eight boys had been killed by the troops, hundreds were injured, and Kashmir remained under curfew.

I called Shahbaaz several times from New York, but I couldn’t reach him. His phone was always switched off.

Uzma Aslam Khan

NAIZA KHAN
Iron Clouds I,
2008
Charcoal conte and acrylic on Fabriano paper. 150cm x 124cm
Courtesy of the artist and gallery Davide Gallo, Berlin. Fabrizio and Marina Colonna Collection, Milan.