The student agitation that erupted in Kashmir in April has been largely contained and, according to outgoing Inspector General of Police SJM Gillani, attendance in schools and colleges is around 90%. Yet, Women’s College and SP School, both located in the commercial centre of the capital Srinagar, continue to see bouts of violence intermittently.
On May 15, a band of boys, many of them in school uniforms, appeared on the city’s Maulana Azad Road, disrupting traffic and prompting shops to down shutters. Soon, they were pelting stones at the police from an alley off the road. At least one police officer and two journalists were injured in the violence.
On the same stretch last week, on May 9, stones, bricks, glass shards and metal pipes were hurled from within the Women’s College, barely missing passersby. Inside, over two dozen women students gathered near the gate, chanting slogans against India and in favour of the militant organisation Lashkar-e-Toiba as college staff and other students watched from a safe distance, helplessly.
Half a dozen boys stood on the roofs of structures close to the gate, jeering and abusing the policemen deployed outside, and making vulgar gestures at them. After a while, they came down to the main road and, joined by other boys, started shouting pro-militant slogans. The police responded with stones and tear gas.
Similar protests have been taking place in Sopore, Baramulla, Pulwama and Anantnag.
This despite the Kashmir University Students Union calling off the agitation, triggered by a crackdown on Pulwama Degree College by government forces, in mid-April. The unrecognised union is a loosely structured students group which organises protests and discussions at Kashmir University.
Why then are the protests continuing? Gillani blamed “attempts by certain forces” to “disturb normal student activities”.
Abdul Rashid Kabuli does not buy this explanation. “There is anger and resentment, and extremism,” said the former Member of Parliament who started his career in student politics in the early 1960s, “because Delhi is not ready to listen, or deliver justice. In our time, many students were jailed under various laws. Today, it is hundred times more.”
‘Dangerous for India’
Kabuli, a former leader of the National Conference, is worried that this wave of protests has “gone to the extreme” but cautions against laying the blame entirely with the students. “Pellets, deaths and detentions, the lingering resentment from agitations of previous years,” he said, “still has an impact on their minds.”
He is also concerned that this student agitation is “leaderless” and lacks the “intellectual and visionary approach of past movements”. Still, he noted, its momentum will only increase.
Kabuli’s concern is shared by Hilal War, who heads the separatist People’s Political Party. He described it as a “situation of anarchy”. “We had student leaders in our time,” he said. “Today, everyone is a leader. And it becomes a problem when everyone is a leader.”
“It was easy to deal with the situation in our times,” Kabuli said, apparently because it was a generation of “moderates” who were ready to engage with the mainstream. Today’s is a generation of rebels. “They are bolder, they don’t think,” he said. “This generation has seen the worst. These are youth with no stakes, no employment. They have only their youth to be snatched from them. Mistakes were made during our time, but today it is far worse.”
The “leaderlessness” of the ongoing student agitation has been a common refrain since it began, although the Kashmir University Students Union has emerged as a weak coordinator of sorts. In fact, its new-found authority has surprised even the union’s members. A former Kashmir University student associated with the union said they had “tried to do this before as well but were not successful”. Success was achieved this time, he added, because the situation was already brewing and there “was an immediate provocation available. KUSU just gave a call to protest.”
The current atmosphere of unrest in schools and colleges, the former union member said, was conducive for rejuvenating student politics in Kashmir. “There is a momentum at the college level,” he said. “Smart students can take it to an organisational level by building small set-ups [unions].”
Kabuli agreed. This spiral of protests could be the beginning of “a new volatility” in Kashmir, he said, and that would be “dangerous for India”.
What is the state doing to stem the danger?
On May 15, in the evening, the deputy commissioner of Srinagar Farooq Ahmad Lone ordered suspension of classes at SP School the next day. Resorting to such pointless restrictions, and the usual police action against stone-pelting students, is all the government seems to have for a strategy.