Cast in stone — uncut, unrepentant : The Tribune India

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Cast in stone — uncut, unrepentant

Last month, former school principal Altaf Ahmad had to drive through Srinagar’s downtown neighbourhood to attend the marriage ceremony of a relative.

Cast in stone — uncut, unrepentant

STREET ‘WARRIORS’: Stone-pelters are becoming more audacious, and increasingly provoke security forces to retaliate. AFP



Azhar Qadri in Srinagar

Last month, former school principal Altaf Ahmad had to drive through Srinagar’s downtown neighbourhood to attend the marriage ceremony of a relative. The region was already in the midst of an unrest in which protesters, including stone-pelters, had taken a centre-stage.

On the way back home during night hours, Ahmad encountered groups of protesters and was surprised how much of it has changed. It was an entire new level of defiance, he says. In the mid-1960s, the former school principal said, young men would also throw stones at the police outside his ancestral home in a downtown locality of Srinagar. He remembers how it ended: a policeman would run to his station to get a bullet of a self-loading rifle and fire it into the air. “This was it. Everyone would disperse after that,” he says.

During those years, the protesters would make it a point to stay out of harm’s way, he said. Decades later, in 2016, it has changed. The protesters now cross the line and attack police stations, camps of counter-insurgency forces or a mini secretariat.

The pattern of stone-pelting is usually rudimentary. Groups of young men and teenagers assemble in a locality, block roads and wait for the police to arrive. Once the security forces come in sight and range, the protesters throw stones and rocks. The clash can last for a few minutes or for many hours, depending on the strength of the protesting crowd, location of the clash, and amount of anger.

Here’s a first-hand account: On a mid-summer afternoon in the last week of August, a group of protesters blocked a narrow road connecting Dadsara and Noorpora village in south Kashmir’s Tral sub-district. The roadblock was set up with logs and stones. The protesters were made up of nearly 10 teenagers and young men, some of whom sat on a roadside under the shade of a weeping willow. One of them wore a black mask and stopped a feeble traffic movement by signalling them with a stick.

“We will continue doing this for six months,” said a teenage protester, a cab driver by profession. “If nothing happens, then we will do it for six more months.” 

The roadblock on the Dadsara-Noorpora road is one of the several that have been set up on roads exiting Tral sub-district, the heartland of new-age militants and home of militant commander Burhan Wani whose death on July 8 sparked the latest unrest. The intensity of clashes in Tral has been less compared to the other parts of the region, where more than 80 civilians have been killed and several thousand injured as police and paramilitary forces attempted to quell demonstrations.

A police officer, in charge of a district in south Kashmir, says stone-pelting is increasingly becoming ubiquitous. “It has now become, almost, a genetic trait.” 

Separatists are separate

“It is usually driven by a lot of factors, and sometimes it has specific objectives and sometimes it is simply agitational,” the official said. “There is no definite linkage between stone-pelters and separatist groups,” he said.

The teenage protesters, who had blocked the Dadsara-Noorpora road, refused to give their names as most fear getting identified. After a few questions, the group became suspicious and demanded the reporter to show his bag. It contained a laptop, a notebook and a camera, enough to cconvince them and continue questioning.

“We follow the Hurriyat but only when they support this. If they call if off, we will not follow them,” a teenager said of the love-hate relationship. 

During the first week of unrest, the police had no detailed record about the number of stone-pelting incidents that took place in the region as it was overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation.

‘Ticking time bombs’

A few years ago, a team of experts had studied batches of young stone-pelters and later concluded that these boys were “ticking bombs”. “The situation now is different. All psychology fails in this place,” a member of the team said, refusing to speak further.

Police officers say though the pattern of stone-pelters differs, some of them do become hardened, a “sort of urban legends in their locality.” In some cases, stone-pelting becomes a futile exercise. For instance, a stone-pelter in south Kashmir, known as ‘Tiger’, is now a militant. The police said he was a “pioneer” of stone-pelting in his locality and was arrested several times on charges linked to stone-pelting before he became a militant.

Ahmad, the former school principal who saw stone-pelting this summer after decades, says boys today are different from the previous generation. “They don’t seem to fear anything. They are not even afraid of losing their lives.” 

The stone-pelting took an increasingly frontal role in the Kashmir conflict for the first time in 2008 when the region’s witnessed its first unrest. The second time the stone-pelters paralysed the state government’s writ was in 2010 when the unrest continued through the entire summer and autumn.

Nearly 5,000 protesters were booked under different sections for stone-throwing during the 2010 summer agitation while 1,325 persons, including 95 minors, were arrested during 2013 when Kashmir witnessed widespread protests following the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

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