Young Guns In The Valley

The centre’s muscular offensive isn’t working, more and more youth are joining insurgent ranks.

- Moazum Mohammad In South Kashmir And Asit Jolly

On April 1, in one of the fiercest encounters in recent years, a joint army, paramilitary and police operation gunned down 13 militants 60 kilometres south of Srinagar in Shopian district. Not far from the encounter site, Padderp ora, a tiny hamlet of some 150 households, suffered the most casualties. Three of the slain militants were from the village.

The deaths should have ended Padderpora’s tryst with Kashmir’s three-decade-long insurgency. But 17 days later, Abid Nazir, a 20-year-old civil engineering student who had just returned from his college in Jalandhar (Punjab), went missing. Abid, who at one point was hoping to join the army (he had cleared the National Defence Academy or NDA qualifying exam in 2016), belongs to a family of staunch CPI(M) supporters. He had been to the funerals for the slain militants. A day after he disappeared, pictures posted on Facebook and WhatsApp showed him battle fatigues brandishing a rifle. They also put out Abid’s new address: the Hizbul Mujahideen.

“Only God knows what was going through his mind,” says Imran Nazir, Abid’s elder brother and also a CPI(M) activist. Insisting his brother had never shown the slightest inclination towards militancy, Imran describes how the family would routinely turn in early because of the threat from local insurgents. “Even our father often stayed away from home to avoid being targeted,” he says.

It’s a story that has become distressingly commonplace in the Kashmir Valley: young men, even boys, wilfully deserting their homes and families to sign up as militants. The numbers have been steadily rising since the killing of Burhan Wani, the widely admired Hizb commander, in July 2016. Local recruitment to militant tanzeems has swelled following Operation Allout, the muscular security force offensive—including night-time cordon-and-search operations—launched early last year.