In less than a week, Kashmir has seen seven execution-style killings. Fearful Pandit families are fleeing Srinagar; a grim curfew now shrouds a city where kids were until last week playing cricket past midnight. Is this, as some commentators have claimed, the return of the 1990s—the decade of jihadist hyper-violence, which claimed thousands of lives, before it was finally tamed in the wake of the India-Pakistan crisis of 2001-2002? Is this an early sign of the fallout of the events in Afghanistan?
First up, and headlines aside, the execution-style killings recorded this week aren’t an outlier. In 2019, for example, six migrant construction workers from West Bengal were massacred in Kulgam, as part of a jihadist campaign to drive out “outsiders” following the termination of Kashmir’s special constitutional status. In all, over a dozen migrant workers were killed inside just that one fortnight.
According to the Jammu and Kashmir Police, 28 civilians have been killed by terrorists so far this year, seven of them Hindu or Sikh. The end-of-year toll is likely to be statistically similar to the 33 civilians killed last year, or 36 in 2019—and significantly lower than the 86 killed in 2018.
Large-scale killings of the religious minorities, secondly, are a long-standing feature of the Kashmir jihad. The killings of the Pandit community at the dawn of the violence in 1988 is well known. Less well known are the massacres of migrant workers in the noughties: the Lashkar-e-Taiba, for example, killed 28 migrant workers in southern Kashmir. Twelve brick-kiln workers from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were killed at Sandu, while six Nepali workers were killed at Lasjan.
Even larger killings took place south of the Pir Panjal mountains, in an effort to evict Hindu communities from Muslim-majority regions north of the Chenab river. From 1996 to 2000 alone, over 131 Hindus were killed in communal massacres by jihadists in this region.
What are these killings about?
The immediate trigger for the executions in Kashmir is unclear; some commentators believe the trigger is a government scheme to give Pandits restitution for panic-sales of property made in the 1990s. The underlying cause, though, is well known. Ever since 1947, ethnic and religious identity have been fraught issues in Kashmir. Even in the 1950s, Kashmir’s political patriarch, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, worried that Hindu nationalists might one day seize Kashmiri lands and reduce its Muslims to a minority.
In essence, terrorist attacks on the religious minorities are intended to legitimise the jihadists, by convincing Kashmir’s Muslims the violence will protect them against a predatory Hindu India.
From the late-noughties, as jihadist power waned, this narrative has gathered momentum among Islamist politicians. “Lakhs of non-state subjects,” Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani claimed in 2006, “had been pushed into the Valley under a long-term plan to crush the Kashmiris.” India was, he claimed, using migrants to “promote immorality and obscenity”. “The majority of these non-state subjects are professional criminals and they should be driven out.”
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad propaganda has long been suffused with similar themes.
The large-scale street violence that erupted in 2008—after the grant of land-use rights to the Amarnath shrine—was driven by polemics of this kind. The rise of Hindu nationalist politics across India was also exploited by Islamist leaders to claim India was planning a genocide in Kashmir.
Early in 2019, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Riyaz Naikoo warned that ending Kashmir’s special constitutional status would lead to the expulsion of outsiders from the now-union territory.
Who is doing the killing?
Investigators believe a group of three jihadists from Kulgam, linked to an organisation called The Resistance Front, has carried out the executions of Kashmir pharmacist ML Bindroo, street-food vendor Virender Paswan, and schoolteachers Deepak Chand and Supinder Kaur. The same group is thought to be responsible for the less-publicised murders of off-duty police officer and labourer Shankar Chowdhary in Kulgam last month.
Founded in 2019, the TRF is thought to be made up of cadres drawn from the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. The group is said to have received consignments of small-arms in recent months, ferried across the Line of Control by drones.
A former tailor, 1975-born Muhammad Abbas Sheikh led the TRF from its emergence until his death in a shootout with police. Sheikh recruited from amongst friends he had made during his three stints in prison, as well as from contacts he made during the large-scale street violence that broke out across Kashmir in 2010 and 2016. The TRF chief had served in the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen from 2002 to 2007, until he joined the Jaish-e-Muhammad. He never, however, received any serious military training, bar a short stint in Kashmir’s Redwani forests.
Like him, most TRF cadres have little military training, bar the rudimentary skills needed to fire weapons point blank—but are intimately familiar with the milieu in which they operate.
In interrogations, arrested TRF cadres have told the police that the overall command of the organisation rests with Sajid Saifullah Jatt, a veteran Lashkar-e-Taiba commander living near Kasur, in Pakistan’s Punjab. Interestingly, Jatt is married to an ethnic Kashmiri, Shabbira Kuchay; their teenage son, Umar Rather, lives in Kulgam with his grandparents.
Why have the police been unable to stop the killings?
The problem is, in part, self-inflicted. Like elsewhere in Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar’s police force counter-terrorism operations are centred on the crack Special Operations Group. The Srinagar SOG, though, hasn’t had an executive head since May 14, when superintendent of police Tahir Ashraf was transferred out.
Following the latest killings in Srinagar, Kargil’s superintendent of police Iftikhar Talib— who earlier served in the Srinagar SOG as a deputy superintendent—has been ordered to fill the job.
“The Jammu and Kashmir Police had been asking for an SOG chief for five months,” a senior police officer familiar with the case said, “but the bureaucracy just sat on the file. There are several Indian Administrative Service officers in key decision-making positions who haven’t served at the district level in the state, and have no experience of how things work”.
In addition, the counter-terrorism infrastructure in Srinagar has faced new problems. The city’s extensive closed-circuit camera system, for example, has been defeated by an unexpected enemy—the widespread use of masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
To make things worse, sources said, jihadists have become increasingly disciplined in their use of cellphones and communications. That has made their networks harder for police to infiltrate.
Likely, the perpetrators of the killings will soon be located—as were those alleged to have carried out similar past waves of attacks, targeting political workers and police.
“For the terrorists,” the police officer said, “the executions are a kind of theatrical performance, to spread fear and panic. Sadly, this time they’ve succeeded”.
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