These are excerpts from an editorial of daily greater Kashmir.
"Kashmir has been turned into a huge prison where everyone is under arrest. It's going bad to worse. As a consequence of it, public suffers. Infact the curfew and the governor's administration have become synonymous. The curfew is imposed all over the Kashmir valley when Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh or Congress chairperson has to visit some border area or some town near the LoC more than hundred kilometers away from the city of Srinagar city or other major towns. People are forced to remain indoors if some political humbug representing some political party that has not even an office in Kashmir addresses some hirelings inside some house behind the sandbag bunkers. It has been three to four days curfew in a week in the Kashmir valley ever since the governor administration took over. More than seven million Kashmiris have been virtually imprisoned for the past four months. The life of the people has been made miserable on all counts. The closure of shops and business establishments has hit the economy of the people. Scores of the daily-wage-earners, the smalltime pavement vendors, hawkers, cart pullers and laborers are living a famished life. The unprecedented and unnecessary curfews have been affecting the academic career of tens of thousands of student. Many students failed to reach the examination halls because of the sudden imposition of the curfew. The sick failing to reach the hospitals and succumbing are routine stories. The imposition of unnecessary and undeclared curfew in Kashmir is not just an administrative arrangement for preventing any disturbances but it smacks of some conspiracy against the Kashmir economy. Some unscrupulous elements infamous for hating Kashmir have been deriving sadistic pleasure by pacing Kashmir valley unnecessarily under curfew. The government in office is yet to explain what prompts it to place the Kashmir valley continuously under curfew. There is no war like or alarming law and order situation at present that would necessitate restricting people to their homes. Placing Kashmir under permanent curfew is no administrative efficiency but failure. The situation as obtains in the state in the wake of the imposition of the curfew for about past five months is the not only biggest human rights violation but grave crime against humanity that has no precedence. The situation as obtains not only deserves attention by the international human rights organization but a condemnation by every conscious and conscientious citizen of the world."
The Problem Is Politics
How did a historically strong state come to look so weak? The answer is politics.
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Given its hapless response to last week's deadly Mumbai attacks and other recent terror strikes, domestic critics these days tend to castigate India as a soft state that has neither the spine nor the skills to fight threats to its people—or to its very existence. In fact, until recently the opposite was true. India may have looked soft, but it had a titanium-hard, brutal core. For decades it used the strongest of methods to squash internal threats. It used air power against tribal insurgents in its northeast back in the sixties, and in 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used tanks and artillery to put down the Sikh rebellion in Amritsar.
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Even in more recent times, terrorists were often met with great resolve, either killed or arrested before they had achieved their objectives. When armed members of Jaish-e-Mohammed attacked India's Parliament on December 13, 2001, they were shot down by the security guards before they made it to the building, and their accomplices were ultimately caught and tried under strict antiterrorism laws. To this day, India has a army that's tough, well trained, highly motivated—and above all, not afraid to take casualties.
Yet in the past two years, this same India has lost more lives to terrorism than any other country but Iraq. Its intelligence services have failed to sniff out and prevent major strikes. It has also failed to acknowledge the advent of homegrown terrorists, including Muslims seeking to avenge the bloody 2002 Gujarat riots, and now Hindus supposedly out to punish Muslims for past bombings. India's police and intelligence agencies have succeeded in nailing some of these groups, but almost always after the damage has been done.
How did a historically strong state come to look so weak? The answer lies in the distorted politics of the past decade. In 1998, a government led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. For decades, India's sizable Muslim minority had voted for the Congress Party as the most acceptable secular alternative to the BJP. Suddenly the defeat of Congress heightened Muslim's insecurities, as did the racial profiling of Muslim populations that followed 9/11.
Initially India's Muslims stayed out of trouble. But the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which more than 1,000 people were killed, changed that. They left India's Muslims angry, fearful and frustrated and persuaded some, particularly the young, that their community needed revenge. That meant terrorism. This created something India had not seen before: genuinely homegrown terrorists. It also played straight into India's increasingly complicated electoral politics.
In May 2004, the BJP was dealt a surprise defeat and a left-of-center coalition led by Congress, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), came to power. Congress still nurtured a fond nostalgia for the days when Muslims used to vote for it en bloc, and many of its UPA allies consider Muslims their captive voters. So whereas the BJP had tried to paint terrorism as a phenomenon caused and rooted exclusively in Islam, the UPA went to the other extreme: total denial. It also proceeded to repudiate everything that the BJP stood for and had done in government. This included, as one of the UPA's first acts, repealing the very tough Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) that the BJP had passed, and under which the surviving conspirators of the Parliament attack had been tried and convicted in a fast-track court. The UPA junked the special law, painting it as anti-Muslim. But this allowed the BJP, under whose reign police had often indeed misused the law to harass Muslims, to accuse the UPA of appeasing Muslims and blame each subsequent terror attack on the government.
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