A wave of anger is again stirring the tenuous calm in Kashmir. The recent invocation of a Dogra-era ban on cow-slaughter and sale of beef in Jammu and Kashmir has riled up the majority Muslims in the state. The ban did not just bring back old but deeply held memories of repression during the erstwhile Dogra autocracy, which had banned even fishing. It also reignited fears of the ingress of Hindutva forces into the social and religious life of a restive population. A popular discourse in Kashmir already blames the incumbent government for facilitating a bigoted cultural onslaught on the sly.

The angry reaction to the beef ban is sharpened by the fact that it was re-invoked on a petition by a lawyer engaged by the Peoples Democratic Party-led state government in which the Bharatiya Janata Party is a partner. In Kashmir anger never dies down, it just pushes up the threshold of tolerance, as little changes in terms of its root causes. The anger surrounding the ban though is likely to stay palpable until the festival of Eid on September 25. Religious and separatist leaders have called for sacrificing bovine animals on the day to defy the ban. Sacrificing halal animals on Eid al Azha is a religious obligation for those Muslims who can afford to raise or buy one.

Custodial killings?

Just as the state government was handling the fallout of the ban by carefully issuing informal statements that it will not be enforced, three bullet-riddled bodies of young men lying in an orchard were discovered on Monday by the residents of Pattan, a highly militarised area in north Kashmir. The police were quick to identify the tortured bodies the same day as those of locals, claiming they were militants belonging to a splinter faction of Kashmir’s largest militant group, the Hizbul Mujahideen. The police suggested the killings to be a result of intra-group rivalry, a claim rejected by the Hizbul chief, Syed Sallahudin, who operates out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. He said in a statement that the three belonged to his group.

The speed of the police investigation and Sallahudin’s statement strengthened public suspicion that the three were killed in custody by secret forces. It hugely added to the existing public anger.

Kashmiris in their thousands, including women, usually attend funerals of slain militants who die fighting government forces. They are widely revered by residents as combatants for their cause. Such funerals, difficult for the police to disallow, always become a mass expression of resentment towards Indian rule of Kashmir when the familiar slogan “We want freedom” reverberates in the air. Tolerance for suspected custodial killings has worn thin over time, prompting separatist leaders from across the spectrum to call for a strike in protest. Sometimes separatists call for a shutdown under public pressure brought forth through social media and street discourse that filters to the leaders.

In order to thwart demonstrations, the government often resorts to the time-tested option of detaining separatist leaders or confining them to their homes, and impose curfew in Srinagar and other sensitive towns. Street protests during which youth rain stones on the police still occur sporadically. It then leads to a spree of arrests of demonstrators, entangling them in court cases to deal with charges, sometimes as serious as "waging war against the state".

A familiar cycle

This cycle has entrapped a large number of youth, particularly since 2008, and sustains an industry of corruption thriving in Kashmir’s police stations, with help from politically connected intermediaries in the society. The sense of this entrapment has over the years spread laterally among Kashmiri people and appears to be growing more intensely since the incumbent government took seat in March.

A certain degree of constant unrest and uncertainty caused by the status quo in Kashmir notwithstanding, the government’s failure at addressing immediate public concerns after the devastating flood of 2014 has complicated the situation.. Many read the central government’s lack of support for the state’s post-flood reconstruction as New Delhi’s revenge for Kashmiri resistance to its rule.

Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed has just begun publicly expressing his own disappointment at the central government’s attitude towards Kashmir’s needs. He said it was no more for him to demand anything from New Delhi but for New Delhi itself to feel Kashmir’s pain. But his use of superlative rhetoric about making Kashmir a world-class hub of knowledge and tourist destination, the world’s fruit valley and so on, has mostly served to make the people feel insulted. The patriarch no more talks about demilitarisation and his idea of "self-rule".

It is amid this situation that people wake up to a beef ban and appearance of bullet-riddled bodies in the fields as used to happen during the brutal decade of 1990s. The mismatch between an official narrative of "peace and development" and the actual state of affairs on the ground in Kashmir caused a misconceived half marathon in Srinagar to end in anti-India protest recently. Similar combustible situations since 2008 have led to the masses rising in protest. In the end, not much changes in the valley.