India’s Militant Pipeline

On April 18, 16-year-old Aqib Ahmad Hajam left his home in Redhwani, Kashmir, telling his family that he would be traveling north for a few days. That same day, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed an election rally in Gujarat, claiming that his government had managed to contain militancy to only “two and a half districts” in Indian-administered Kashmir. He added that during the five-year rule of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), “no bomb blast took place in any other part of the country.”

That is not correct. In fact, since the BJP formed a government in 2014, the three-decade armed insurgency in Kashmir has intensified. In a single suicide attack in February 2019, more than 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers died. The incident brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. Yet Modi continued to sell his security credentials throughout his campaign, which won him a mandate for a second term in May.

Just a few months later, on Aug. 5, the BJP delivered on another of its campaign talking points: repealing a constitutional clause that had granted some autonomies to Kashmir and introducing a bill to divide the area into two federal territories under direct control of the federal government. The move came alongside a harsh crackdown on 7 million Kashmiris—including a months long communication ban and the arrests of some 13,000 people—setting the basis for even greater armed militancy, including among young people such as Hajam.

Even as Modi claimed that his administration is in control of militancy, in other words, another young person had joined a militant group—in this case, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Hajam’s story is not unusual. “In 2018, he was arrested, accused of being an OGW, and spent seven months in jail,” his brother recalled, using an abbreviation for “overground worker,” or helper of the militants. Following his jail term, he quit school. After that, his brother said, “he was at home and well, taking part in household work. We don’t know what was going on in his mind, he was very young.”

Many young people such as Hajam who have joined armed groups have also spent time in jail, typically booked under the draconian Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, which allows the government to jail people for up to two years without any trial. In fact, Indian jails are full of people who have not been tried or convicted of any crimes. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, 68 percent of prisoners across the country have not been convicted.

In Kashmir, spending time in jail can strengthen a young person’s resolve to get revenge. Many of the jailed, who were never part of any protest, decide to join them when they are released. Others who are taken in for small crimes, such as throwing stones, become radicalized in jail. An internal analysis on militancy from the Indian Army found that 83 percent of local youth who had joined a militant organization had a “record of stone-pelting.”

Since Aug. 5, the government has used the Public Safety Act to lock away scores of people. And a fact-finding team of several human-rights lawyers that recently returned from Kashmir has reported that, between Aug. 5 and Sept. 30, more than 330 habeas corpus petitions had been filed in cases where a complainant or representatives believes he or she has been detained illegally.

In October, I spoke to a senior counterinsurgency officer in Srinagar who has run dozens of operations to kill militants. Requesting anonymity, he confessed that, in the past, young men had been “picked up for no reason by the police.” In fact, in Jammu and Kashmir, the rate of conviction on charges of possession of unlawful weapons is 0.5 per 100 cases, more than 130 times lower than the national average, according to a 2011 Amnesty International report. The report adds that “the conviction rate for attempt to murder in [Jammu and Kashmir] is eight times lower than the national average, seven times lower for rioting and five times lower for arson. … In contrast, the number of persons in administrative detention without trial in [Jammu and Kashmir] is 14 times higher than the national average.”

The counterinsurgency officer was quick to add, though, that for the last year, police have had instructions not to pick up people on mere suspicion. Rather, he said, they were to “only bring people in if there is evidence.” He claimed that the new policy had helped reduce recruitment of new militants. Indeed, he continued, people expected that there would be an “uprising or … a massive rise in recruitment, but it hasn’t been the case.” The reason, in his mind, was that “mMilitant leadership has been wiped out, so [that] has also impacted the militancy in Kashmir.”

According to the data, militant groups’ recruitment has been uneven over the last few decades.

SOURCE: Observer Research Foundation

The number of militants killed has likewise fluctuated.

*Through July 31. SOURCE: The Kashmir Walla, and author’s numbers.

In the past decade, there were three major surges in violence in Kashmir. The first was a civilian uprising in 2010, which saw the deaths of about 120 young people in street protests. To crush the revolt, government forces arrested hundreds. The second was in 2014, after the BJP took hold of the federal government and went on to form a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir with a regional party. Hundreds protested, leading to a major crackdown. Finally, in 2016, following the killing of a prominent militant commander, Burhan Wani, in July, another civilian uprising rocked Kashmir. According to the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), 145 civilians were killed, more than 15,000 injured, and 10,000 were illegally detained.

Wani, like many others who were killed that year, had joined the militants after the first uprising in 2010. In fact, militancy recruitment rose for almost three years after that incident. In that way, the 2016 revolt is a direct response to the government response to the earlier one. It just took six years to take off.

Militant recruitment continued to increase in 2017 and 2018. As it did, anti-militancy operations also grew more frequent. As data from JKCCS shows, 2018 turned out to be the deadliest year in the past decade, with 586 total killings of militants, government forces, and civilians. This may be seen as a result of the post-2016 crackdown, through which anti-India voices were crushed.

This year’s crackdown thus points to a further meltdown—be it next year, the one after, or the one after that.

Militancy has not yet seemed to intensify, he explained, but due to the communications blockade, there is no confirmation of how many new recruits may have joined the cause. “Young boys pick up guns out of peer pressure or the influence of the places they reside at,” he said.

Such pressures could kick into overdrive once people can connect again. Paul Staniland, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, told me in October that the current situation has a potential for mass protest, though no one knows how long it may take to be triggered or in what ways it could manifest.

“The government’s reliance on detentions and communications blackout suggests that it is well aware of this. The strategy seems to be to get to the winter with continued restrictions (formal or informal), to engage in some highly localized elections, and to eventually dump money into the valley [of Kashmir]. But it’s not at all clear that will change any of the fundamental political dynamics,” said Staniland.

The elections he was referring to were local development council elections held in October, which the regional political parties boycotted, since most of their leaders are in detention. Similarly, the opportunity to vote didn’t change anything for Hajam, who joined the militants during India’s general elections in April. On Oct. 16, less than six months after he left home, two young boys arrived at his parents’ house to inform the family that he was trapped in a gunfight a few miles away from his village. His brother, Javid, visited the spot and confirmed that he had died.

A police spokesperson said that Hajam had participating in planning several attacks on security and civilians. Four cases were registered against him, the earliest from 2017. Beyond mourning his death, his family now worries that they could be implicated in the charges against Hajam. “He had never come to meet us,” said Javid. “It was his own decision and we don’t know what was going on in his mind. We never imagined he will join as he was too young.”