Estranged In Their Khakis

For the first time, the kith and kin of policemen in J&K find themselves in the crosshairs of millitant' rage.

- Naseer Ganai in Pulwama, Tangmarg and Kulgam

IT’S a first for the Jammu and Kashmir Police in three decades of battling insurgency in the Val­ley. Never before had militants abducted the kin of Kashmiri pol­ icemen in response to detentions and alleged harassment of the rela­tives of militants and ransacking or burning down of their houses by gov­ernment forces. That rubicon was crossed this August, when three pol­ icemen and eight kin of policemen were abducted and the police warned by Hizbul Mujahideen’s local top gun, Riyaz Naikoo, to refrain from involv­ing militants’ families in their efforts to quell the insurgency.

For long, it’s been usual practice for security agencies to arrest family members of militants or detain them under preventive detention laws, deny passports to them and so on. By abducting family members of policemen, the militants have thrown a new challenge at the government’s policy and practice on how to deal with militants’ families.

In an audio message he released on August 31, a day after the abductions, Naikoo is heard saying that the policemen’s relatives were abducted so that policemen “know how a mother feels when her son is taken away”—in an apparent reference to alleged enforced disappearances and arrests of unarmed civilians associated with the history of counterinsurgency in Kashmir. The immediate trigger was the detention of Naikoo’s father Asadullah by the police and the burning down of houses belonging to families of two militants.