Where Crackdowns Are As Common As The Azadi Chant!

Where crackdowns are as common as the azadi chant, what is different about police action at NIT Srinagar?

- Showkat A. Motta

1983: Kashmiris cheer for the legendary Viv Richards and his teammates during the one day India-West Indies cricket match in Srinagar. As India loses the match, the young spectators hold celebrations and jeer at the team led by Sunil Gavaskar. Cricketers from the Caribbean, meanwhile, can’t figure out what’s happening. 2016: West Indies beats India in the T20 World Cup semis in Mumbai, and many Kashmiris, including students at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Srinagar, rejoice. But unlike the 1983 incident, the celebrations and the ensuing clashes between Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri students resonate across the country.

If you don’t live in Kashmir, chances are you would be surprised when your hear Kashmiris cheer for Pakistan. Those who have lived in the Valley, though, know how routine this is. This is nothing new, thanks to 68 years and counting of the Kashmir “dispute”. Feelings ran so high even in 1984—before pro-azadi militants declared “armed struggle” against India—that when Germany drew first blood in the Olympic hockey finals against Pakistan in Los Angeles, a middle-aged man died of cardiac arrest in downtown Srinagar. (Pakistan went on to win.) Two years later, when Javed Miandad hit that famous last-ball six off Chetan Sharma at Sharjah, the celebrations in Kashmir went on for days.

To put the NIT episode in context, take the stark contrast between its reception and that accorded in mainstream Indian media to the protests and security crackdown that ensued after the alleged molestation of a local girl by a soldier in Handwara, in which lives were lost, as is routine in such episodes. The muted interest in the ‘mainland’ was equally routine, despite it coming close on the heels of the hue and cry over police action in NIT. And what happened there was decidedly more minor in scale.