SRINAGAR, India — He was the kind of professor students adored, alwaysready to help with books, advice or small loans. His colleagues in thesociology department found him reliable and ambitious, a scholar whoseresearch on consumerism might propel him to a post elsewhere in India.
So it was out of character when Mohammad Rafi Bhat failed to attend afaculty meeting at the University of Kashmir one Friday afternoon lastyear. His family, too, had no idea where he was. Two days later, when hiscolleagues turned on their televisions, their concern turned to shock: Bhatwas dead. He had joined a group of anti-India militants and was killed in aconfrontation with security personnel.
Bhat’s brief transition from academia to insurgency was part of a troublingtrend. Growing numbers of young Kashmiris turned to militancy in2018, according to official figures, giving new energy to an armed strugglethat as recently as a few years ago appeared to be diminishing.
Eisa Fazili, an engineering student, joined the militancy in 2017 and waskilled last year. (Joanna Slater/The Washington Post)
Some of the recruits, like Bhat, are highly educated and have promisingcareers ahead of them; others are high school dropouts from ruralvillages. But each embraced violence, drawn to a three-decade insurgencyagainst India’s rule in its portion of Kashmir, the Himalayan regionclaimed by India and Pakistan.
One of the recent recruits was Adil Ahmad Dar, a 19-year-old suicide bomberwho nearly sparked a war between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Dar drovea vehicle carrying explosives into a security convoy on Feb. 14, killing 40paramilitary personnel. It was the worst such attack in the history of theinsurgency, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistan-based terrorist group,asserted responsibility for the bombing.
Indian security officials accuse Pakistani authorities of sheltering theleadership of militant groups fighting in Kashmir as well as providing themwith guidance, training and material support. Pakistan denies theaccusations but recently launched a crackdown on militant groups inside itsborders.
Though India has repeatedly denounced Pakistan, it has remained nearlysilent on the increase in local participation in the insurgency. Last year, 191Kashmiri youths joined militant groupslink,accordingto an Indian army official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, nearly52 percent more than in 2017, when 126linkjoined.As recently as 2013, the number of local recruits was put at just 16.link
Bhat, 31, received a PhD from the University of Kashmir and began teachingthere. His students said they were crushed to learn of his death butdescribed it as a form of martyrdom. “It is a personal choice,” saidMohammad Rayees Rafeeqi, 24. “You cannot stop anyone.”
*[The trouble with Kashmirlink]*
Kashmir could be “hurtling towards a heightened phase of terrorism,”according to an assessmentlink recentlypublished by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a New Delhi-based websitethat tracks militant groups in the region. Even as the Indian governmenthas clamored for action against Pakistan, “what is being completelyoverlooked are strategies to restore internal stability and sobergovernance” in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.
Critics say heavy-handed tactics by India have bred anger and despairlink.Kashmiris describe a sense of daily humiliation, sometimes petty andsometimes grave, together with a feeling of suffocation by a conflict thatshows no hope of immediate improvement.
“We can say that Pakistan is fishing in troubled waters,” Mehbooba Mufti,who served as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 2016 to 2018, saidin an interview. Last month, “a Kashmiri boy brought the two countries tothe brink of war,” she added. “It’s very important to stop it now ratherthan wait for another bomb to tick.”
Today’s militancy in Kashmir is smaller and less deadly than at theinsurgency’s peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Indian securityofficials say 300 to 400 militants are active in the territory, most ofthem operating in South Kashmir. Some of are locals, and others havecrossed over from Pakistani-controlled territory.
The lure of militancy for local youths is a “cause of worry,” said anIndian security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because hewas not authorized to discuss the matter with the media. Militants haveused social media to “glamorize gun culture,” he said, while at the sametime, “the world has become smaller.” Events elsewhere in India or aroundthe world now reverberate in Kashmir, feeding a sense among Muslims thatthey are under attack.(Joanna Slater/The Washington Post)
In Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, paramilitary officers stand guard onbridges and roads against a backdrop of stunning snow-capped mountains.Some walls still bear graffiti with the name “Burhan,” a popular militantcommander killed in July 2016. His killing sparked massive and violentprotests to which India responded with deadly forcelink.
Naeem Fazili remembers his son Eisa, a university student, coming to him inan agitated state after a young engineer was killed in the 2016 protests.“You’re saying that we should arm ourselves with degrees and knowledge” tohelp the Kashmiri people, Fazili recalls his son saying. “But what did thisdegree give him?”
A school principal, Fazili placed a premium on education and sent his twosons to the most prestigious private high school in Srinagar. Eisa went onto study engineering at a university in the city of Jammu. Then, one dayduring his final semester in 2017, he disappeared.
The day after Fazili began frantically searching for his son, he received acall from a neighbor. “Uncle, do you know how to use Facebook?” theneighbor asked, and he directed Fazili to a specific page. There, he founda photo of Eisa holding an AK-47 rifle. It was “a bolt from the blue,”Fazili said. His son was killed in an encounter with Indian security forcesin March 2018, the authorities said.
Umair Gul, a doctoral student who has studied the history of the insurgencyin Kashmir, wrote recentlylinkthateducated Kashmiris have long been present among the militants. But thanksto social media, such examples are gaining new prominence and serving as arecruitment tool.
Since the bombing on Feb. 14, India has sent thousands more securitypersonnel to Kashmir. It outlawed an Islamist socio-religious grouplinkandarrested hundreds of its members. Authorities raided the homes ofwell-known separatist leaders. They also postponed state elections,deepening the crisis of democracy in Jammu and Kashmir, whose assembly wasdissolved in controversial fashion in 2018.
(Also last year, the Indian government began requiring foreigncorrespondents to apply for permits to conduct reporting in Jammu andKashmir. The permit received by The Washington Post for this story limitedthe reporter to Srinagar and included a condition that the reporter notmeet with people engaged in “anti-national activities,” without definingsuch actions.)(Joanna Slater/The Washington Post)
At the University of Kashmir, students in headscarves and hoodies strolledalong paths beneath towering chinar trees, their trunks pale in the wintersunlight. When Bhat disappeared from the campus on a Friday last year, hisstudents did not know what to think. Some thought he had gone south for ajob interview in the city of Hyderabad. Then they worried that he had beendetained by the security forces and launched a day-long protest to demandhis release.
Bhat’s father, Abdul Rahim, 64, a retired civil servant, cried as herecalled the phone call he received from his son early on a Sunday morninglast May. Bhat told his parents that he was trapped in an encounter withthe security forces and was going to become a martyr, his father recalled.He told them not to worry, that they would meet in the next life.
Those who knew Bhat expressed shock that he had turned to militancy, but,ultimately, they were not surprised at his motives. “In Kashmir, anythingis possible,” said Pirzada M. Amin, chair of the sociology department atthe University of Kashmir. “It is a conflict zone. It can influenceanybody.”
Sources:link
Ishfaq Naseem contributed to this report.