Kashmiris beg for survival as India tightens grip on

region
By Sheikh Saqib
Hameeda, 60, wailed inconsolably on a pathway which runs along the River Jhelum in
the Lal Chowk area of Srinagar, the capital city in Indian-administered Kashmir. Living
in the highest militarized zone on the planet and having survived the longest military
siege, she had finally found a way to rush to the city centre to seek alms from passersby.

On 4 August 2019, the ruling Indian Hindu nationalist party, the Bhartiya Janata Party
(BJP), imposed an indefinite civilian curfew along with a telecommunications and
Internet blockade all across the state. The next morning, on August 5, the Indian
Parliament revoked Article 370 and Article 35A of the Indian constitution that
guaranteed the semi-autonomous status to the Muslim-majority state, and dividing the
region into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Ladakh. In the
meantime, hundreds of Indian client politicians and pro-freedom leaders were either
put under house arrest or imprisoned in makeshift detention centers to prevent them
from challenging this writ from the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. During this
process, thousands of Kashmiri children were tortured and incarcerated while the entire
state was turned into a military garrison.

“India has been unable to assimilate Kashmir and that’s why they have to take off and
on steps to emasculate the voices over here. Revocation of Articles was a reaction to
their failure to curb the mass movement here and they thought they should smash the
state and that is what they did in August 2019,” Dr Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a law
professor and political analyst, told me at his residence in Srinagar.

“I don’t think this era will end, it will get more complicated. Misadventures of New Delhi
will continue. I don’t have any immediate hopes. And globally the situation is at this
juncture that it is free for all; United Nations (UN) is defunct. Even the global hegemony
is crumbling and it seems that there is a situation of ‘might is right’. In the present
situation, geopolitics might compel India to rethink Kashmir as they have created a
hostile neighborhood because of their own action,” he added.

Since 1947, Kashmir has been a disputed Himalayan territory, contested by three
nuclear armed countries: India, Pakistan and China. Remaining unresolved by the UN,
the conflict has taken its toll on the Kashmiri civilian population. With this recent
abrogation in Indian constitutional law and the subsequent restrictions in place, people
like Hameeda found it even more difficult to survive on a daily basis to the point of
being driven to begging for subsistence.
In December, most people remained indoors to avoid trouble with the heavy presence of
police and military personnel on the streets. Hameeda could not avail such options,
instead marching outside out of compulsion. To conceal her identity, she sat in her
traditional cloak (Pheran) with her face wrapped in a green woolen cloth, "a conscious
decision”, she told me. She wanted to keep it a secret that the “mother of a martyr was
begging on the streets.”

“It’s a matter of honour,” she felt. Her grief-filled appeals were breaking the silence of
the deserted street: “Help me; please. India killed my son and my husband.”

She held up a white cotton bag tightly gripped in her hands. “These are the death
certificates of my son and husband.”

I was curious to know more about Hameeda, so I promised her a visit at her house in the
volatile Nowhata area of Srinagar, a place that remains densely restrained by continued
presence of Indian paramilitary forces.

A few days later, I was at the doorsteps of her humble home.

It was afternoon. Hameeda sat preparing HokhSyun (dried vegetables), an ultimate

solution for the long enforced shutdowns and curfews imposed on the populace here.

The soiled walls of the house reflected the family’s continuous tryst with destiny after
losing two members of the family to the conflict and being left to fend for themselves
without breadwinners.

Ulfat, 32, Hameeda’s elder daughter, lost her livelihood as an embroider due to the
prevailing situation of lockdown. “Everyone was locked up in their homes. No one could
visit me for artwork orders. My mother has had no option left but to beg for our
survival,” Ulfat said.

Kashmir has lost nearly USD 5.3 billion since the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A in
August 2019. Months of severe curfew in the region was followed by another lockdown
in the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak.

“The agenda of development in view of the existing situation and the injured financial
condition of locals would only appear to be segregationist and predatory in nature. An
environment requiring a heavy presence of troops armed to the teeth, curtailment of
basic liberties and choking regulations which has left Kashmiris reeling cannot be
conducive for their development,” reads The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and
Industry’s (KCC&I) preliminary economic loss assessment report on Kashmir.

It was in 1990 when Hameeda’s son, Bilal, alias Zabardast Khan, left their home at age
fourteen for arms training in Pakistan. He came back a year later and carried out several
attacks against the Indian government forces. After every such attack by Bilal, the forces
would raid Hameeda’s house and destroy the family’s belongings. This would happen
often at night and the troops would throw all the food supplies of the family onto the
road outside and then trample over it several times so it could not be salvaged nor be fit
for consumption. Sometimes these types of raids would go beyond such excesses, as
Hameeda told me, and they would steal money and jewelry as a sort of “collateral
punishment” for Bilal’s revolt against the state. This thievery plunged Hameeda’s house
into poverty and forced its members to do any job that came their way. “Even my
children had to go out for work on any given day,” she said.

Frequent night raids propelled a mental health crisis among her children while
Hameeda and her husband, Habibullah Kak, grew weak within. Over the years, her
husband’s heart condition worsened “due to the crackling sound of tear gas shells and
gun shots in their volatile area, which subsequently resulted in his death after a sudden
heart attack hit him in 2017,” Hameeda told me. Until then, Hameeda’s family was at
least able to maintain the premise of two meals a day. Being a daily wager, Kak’s daily
wages would amount to Rs. 1500 a month. Now with him deceased, Hameeda has been
struggling to keep her house running all by herself.

One night, Indian security forces raided her house and took her and her sister-in-law
outside. "They locked the other members of my family inside the house, leaving them
there to panic and shout helplessly out of fear that the forces would rape us,” Hameeda
said. Once out, the duo was surrounded by armed forces in their usual combat uniforms
with assault rifles ready, all in an effort to bait Bilal to come and rescue his mother and
aunt from the wrath of the soldiers. But the lack of proper channels of communication in
those days prevented the news from reaching Bilal. “It was horrifying, all alone in the
middle of a bunch of army men. All this while, I kept staring at an Islamic shrine (locally
known as Astaan) nearby and prayed to God for our protection. They could have done
anything to us. They weren’t accountable to anyone and they still aren’t. My only hope
was Allah,” Hameeda recounted amid tears. They were finally let go in the morning. “It
still sends chills throughout my body to think the panic that overtook us, thinking about
the rest of the family stuck locked in our own house,” she said when I enquired about
how it feels when recollecting the details of that night. Kashmiris have seen the first
mass rape perpetrated by soldiers of the Indian armed forces in the twin villages of
Kunan-Poshpora. Early on in the 90s, rape was used as a weapon of war against
insurgents and common civilians. In one case, a young bride, Mubina Gani, was gang
raped on her wedding night by the Indian Border Security Forces in South Kashmir. Her
aunt was also raped. As such, there is a mass scale fear, mistrust and even hatred within
the Kashmiri civilian population towards the Indian army and its many factions given a
repeated history of such violations against Kashmiris.

After few weeks, the Indian forces finally captured Bilal when he had come to meet his
uncle briefly at his shop, a mere kilometer away from Hameeda’s house. “An informer
passed on this news to them after which they reached the spot immediately. One of the
army personnel charged Bilal’s head with the butt of his gun, leaving him unconscious.
They took him to Papa 2 at Hari Niwas—Kashmir’s most feared torture center—where
they tortured him severely,” Hameeda added.

After a few days of intense torture there, Bilal managed to escape from Papa 2 and
reached Srinagar’s Rainawari area after hours of running barefoot. “On reaching there,
some of the locals who knew him had taken him to a safe place where they managed to
dress his wounds,” Hameeda recounted. The news of his escape reached Hameeda after
some locals from the area, who knew Bilal, came rushing in an auto rickshaw to her
place and took her along to see Bilal. “When I reached my son, I saw people had
sacrificed a lamb to express their gratitude to God for his safe escape. He had a huge
following in the city. He was 16 and was standing against injustice. And when we saw
each other, he started crying and told me how he gave a slip to the troops,” she said.
That was the last time Hameeda saw her son alive.

Bilal was being regularly shifted to different households by local people in order to
evade army raids. One day in the Nishat area of Srinagar, an old lady had helped him
escape by helping him hide in a water tank. But he could not evade the pursuit of the
army for long.

In 1992, his dead body finally reached Hameeda’s doorsteps. He was later buried at
Srinagar’s Eidgah Martyrs’ graveyard.

On a lazy afternoon in September this summer, I visited Bilal’s grave where I met one of
his childhood friends, who wished to remain anonymous. After praying for Bilal’s soul,
he walked me to the large playfield adjacent to the cemetery. He lit his cigarette and we
sat facing each other. “Bilal was a young fierce boy who worked tirelessly for Kashmir’s
freedom movement. The government forces were mad after him and launched tens of
crackdowns in different areas to capture him but he always managed to escape. He died
while fighting BSF in Khanyar area of Srinagar in 1992. At the time he was killed , high
ranking government officers in India’s Border Security Force (BSF) removed their caps
in front of his body as a mark of respect for the bravery he possessed,” he said of Bilal
between puffs. “He was just 16-years-old,” he added.

“But even death couldn’t diminish his popularity among the natives,” Hameeda said
proudly. After Bilal’s death, some shopkeepers in the neighboring localities would sell
his photos to teenagers who would feel inspired by Bilal’s courage and strength to fight
the Indian forces at a younger age. “He was our inspiration and we would keep his
photographs in our wallet,” one of Bilal’s neighbors said.

Briefly after his death, Hameeda started receiving offers of help to get the rest of her
children government jobs, which would secure their monthly income. But the family
always turned them down. “How could we sell the blood of our son? Our son fought for
justice. I am proud of him. How could I have let him down by accepting any such thing?”
Hameeda said, adding, “I can accept begging as my only option to survive but I cannot
betray the freedom movement for which my son gave his life.”

Hameeda is presently survived by her daughters, Ulfat, Fozia, 24, Gulshan, 30, and son,
Mushtaq Ahmed Kak, 40, who works as a scrap dealer. A few years ago, Mushtaq fell
from a building at work and had to undergo several surgeries. Today, he is either
frequenting hospitals for treatment or sitting home as he is unable to cope with his
disability caused by severe injuries. “He is not able to contribute much to the family,” his
sister, Ulfat, said. While Fozia helps Ulfat, with handiwork, Gulshan lives with her
laborer husband in the Dargah area of Srinagar.

Just adjacent to Hameeda’s house is a huge playground which has been named after her
son, Shaheed Bilal. “This is the only memory of him that keeps me alive,” she says as she
looks towards the playground.