 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us David Deplas, former political editor at Business Standard, former visiting professor at Jamia, and former fellow at Teen Murthy, and someone who has been closely following and reporting the developments in Kashmir since the past many years. Today he will be discussing with us his latest book, The Generation of Rage in Kashmir, a book which tells a compelling narrative of the current youth in Kashmir which was born after the insurgency and began in 1988, and a generation which has grown up seeing only violence in their lives. The book talks about this resentment, the resentment in this youth, and the various ways in which the Indian state has failed, which are the major reasons why this conflict is still going on in the state. So welcome, David. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So starting with these conditions which we have talked about in your book, the conditions in which this youth has grown up, can you tell us more about the sort of humiliation and harassment these people have faced on a daily basis, which is probably compelling them to take up arms today? Well, that's one aspect of it. But one thing that I want to say is when I began work on this book, I thought I was talking about a minor part of the population, one generation, who had been born and raised in a time of violence. After 2016, the uprising of 2016, I realized that I'm really talking about two different generations. So I've noted patterns of difference between those typically born around 1990 and those born around 2000. Now, those who were born, who have called millennials in the latter group, actually didn't witness what happened in the 90s, which was very often quite brutal, the violence, the war, proxy war, whatever you might want to call it at different stages. But it brought a lot of trauma to common people. What's happened with the millennials who are actually on the streets since 2016 is that they have been formed by narratives about what happened in 1990s, as well as narratives about what has happened across the world in terms of their perceptions of Muslims globally being repressed and the global war on terror, things that have happened in Iraq or Afghanistan and elsewhere, all of these have also fed in. And I have made the point that narrativization began in a very, very strong way from about 2008. And it fed in to the kinds of responses that came from Jammu and elsewhere after the land transfer to the Shri Amanath Shrine Board. And that actually helped to shape this new generation, this generation that even today are only teenagers. But because of a demographic bulge, they comprise a substantial part of the population. I've made the point in this book that leadership of various kinds, the established leaders, whether of the Hurriyat or so-called mainstream, whether this party or that party, have actually been discarded to some extent, particularly by these millennials. Yeah, this leadership no longer has any control over the population. Yeah, particularly over this generation. Much, they have a little more influence over those born in the 90s or early 90s. But many of those are introspective and they were the ones who were on the streets in 2008 when there was an uprising following the transfer of land. Many of them were on the streets in 2010 when there was very intense, very angry stone pelting in particularly the city of Srinagar but spread to other areas as well. And my sense is that many of them who are now in their late 20s or even in their 30s have become a little introspective. During 2016, they were out on the streets for the first three or four days, but not so much thereafter. For the next four months or so, it was carried forward. The barricading of the streets, the imposition as it were of Hartaal, ensuring that people could not move, that was done largely by teenagers, 14, 15, 16 year olds, who ironically haven't seen the worst of the 1990s and whatever happened from both sides during the 1990s. But they have heard narratives and they have been formed by it. The other point that I've made in this book is that the state and the various kinds of policy makers and forces lose sight of psychological changes from one generation to another. Kashmiris, by and large, covered when an army truck passed by even at a distance. There was a reaction of fear. This generation that has grown up amid violence and all kinds of bloodshed have become immune to fear, largely. A lot of them are just very, very, very confident about facing bullets or pellet guns. They don't seem to cover in fear the way the forces have been used to. They're an earlier generation or earlier generations covering during the 1990s. So that's been a great shift which the state didn't take cognizance of. And to my mind, that became evident from about 2007. I saw signs of it. I was living there. I helped to set up a university at that stage in 2007. And I noticed from even anecdotal evidence that I was given that this change had come about. People were not responding with fear, young people, the way an older generation had. And it struck me very, very, very strongly. And I thought this is going to make for a major change. But unfortunately, there's a lot of inertia in the corridors of power, in government. There's also a certain degree of being isolated, insulated by bulletproof glass and by the whole apparatus of security so that they don't seem to see, except for the information that they pay for. They don't really seem to get a sense of what's happening on the ground or the changes that are taking place, the flux that is constant in society. So you have, sorry, you have focusing on that and how the corridors of power have been insulated from what is happening on the streets. You have also talked about, when you talk about 2007, how the perception amongst the Kashmiris was that the militancy has receded. But the Indian authorities failed to respond to that. And the counterinsurgency measures still continued. And how that also played into the growing resentment in this generation as well, which is now- The fearless generation was also more resentful because there is a certain inertia in government. Someone takes a decision, let us put up a barricade, let us put up a bunker, let us put up some security apparatus. And maybe at that stage, when the decision is taken, that is required. But there is an inertia in terms of going back to that and saying, do we need this anymore? And there's a sense, and I've noted this in this book, of everyone in authority, or most people in authority, and I'm sure there are very honorable exceptions, but by and large, people in authority tend to look at their one year or two years or three years in that position before they get transferred to look after wind power or railways or something else. So their intention is to make sure that nothing goes wrong during their time so that they don't get blamed. The result is that this inertia that I spoke of becomes much stronger. Nobody wants to take that risk of removing the kinds of security apparatus that is already in place. I have noted that Mr. Chidambaram, when he was home minister, after the uprising of 2010, did take some steps to remove some of the bunkers and other kinds of apparatus. But it was already a little late. The anger and the resentment that had built up from around 2007 had already taken some roots, and not enough was done thereafter. And as you know, Mr. Chidambaram was removed and another person was brought in as home minister, and then Afzal Guru was hanged and the whole situation took another turn. People seem to not have enough of a consciousness of reactions on the ground. The point that I've tried to make is that security forces and governments tend to measure the situation by statistics, and that doesn't tell the story. Statistics about how many killed, how many in the field, how many estimated to be militants, how many forces killed, how many encounters, that doesn't tell the entire story. And particularly in a time when stone pelting became so common that in 2010, for example, and 2016, there were perhaps hundreds of thousands at a time out on the street on certain days, certainly tens of thousands. So your statistics of so many hundred or so many killed or so many bullets fired, et cetera, doesn't really cover the situation, or help you take decisions that are required in that situation. We also talked about how the state failed to notice the reasons of the anger that was different in 2008, different in 2010, different in 2016, how in 2008. People still wanted the rule of law to prevail, but that changed in 2016. And people were against the entire idea of the state itself, of India. And why also 2007, the factors, the things that happened after 2007 played into this. And now moving on to fundamentalism and how these things probably fueled Islamic fundamentalism, we also talked about in the beginning right now, how the global attack on Islam, so to speak, has fueled narratives in Kashmir of this. The perception of global oppression. Yeah, of this Islamic solidarity. So can you tell us more about this rise in fundamentalism and why this is happening in this generation today? I've also talked about in this book, the role that social media has played, that videos and narratives and discourses are televangelism and a lot of narratives and discourses on social media. And a lot of them are video images or just photographs that tend to promote a certain kind of thinking. And that radicalization, which has had the maximum effect on the young, on school children, today's teenagers and even more so I would say pre-teens. And this is something that should be very worrying. My sense is that those in charge of policy making, running various arms of the state, still seem to be pretty much sanguine that they can handle the situation. But what they're failing to see is that the very young, even pre-teens, are getting more and more radicalized in both political and religious terms. So the result of that is the combination, the intertwining of political and religious radicalization means that there is a rejection of with the very concept of nation state, the very concept of democracy. Forget about boycotting one election or another. So it goes far deeper. And that is the sort of radicalization that has occurred, partly as a result of narratives about the global war on terror and what has been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. Also narratives and videos and other material of the Islamic state produced by them. And also dovetailing with the kinds of videos and photographs and other material that has been spread about the local situation, including the pellet gun victims. And that again shows the sort of inadequacy of adequate thought in decision making. That pellet guns were meant to be non-lethal ways of crowd control. But a lot of young Kashmiris compare it with the use of water cannons in other states in very, very agitated situations and see it as a measure of bad intent for with regard to Kashmiris or with regard to Muslims. And this is the sort of narrativization which the state just doesn't take account of. And also the sort of attacks on Muslims happening in the other parts of the country, the mob lynchings, the cow vigilantes, which is also fueling the resentment. Yes, a particular incident that took place in Udampur in 2015 in which a truck was burned. I think the crowd that did it didn't even realize that this was done at night, that there was a young man sleeping in the truck at that stage and he was burned and died as a result. And he belonged to the Kashmir Valley. I think it was Shopean district. And when his body was brought back, it was that also made a lot of impact and people failed to see the effect of these sorts of things. It has a tremendous multiplier effect and each of these various strands that I've talked of, the international discourses, they discourses about these sorts of things on a national scale, what has been happening at the local level with regard to pellet guns, et cetera, all of these intertwine and strengthen each other. Also, another thing you mentioned, I remember in the book, is that how this idea of an Islamic state basically meant for the youth some sort of order in these conditions, in these very chaotic conditions and where the administration is failing with its widespread corruption. They saw it as something which would perhaps bring some order and some sort of peace in their lives. Justice, in fact. Justice. A lot of, you see, the videos that we tend to see, and this is one of the problems of social media, that there has been studies done on this that have shown that social media tends to lead to echo chambers, that you're seeing what people like you are seeing and you're connected with people who think like you and other kinds of people are connected with their kind of thinking, people who think similarly. Now, the kinds of videos and narratives that we have heard about Islamic state are very often very horrifying, but a lot of the kinds of material that may be available to young people in places like this might glorify Islamic state and that kind of caliphate as being divinely ordained and therefore it's just very simple thinking. Something that is divinely ordained must obviously be good and therefore must be something that as a system of governance would end corruption, would end exploitation, would lead to everybody getting their share of whatever needs to be given to them and justice and lack of any kind of oppression. This is the impression that a lot of people get and it's not very well thought out very often. In fact, I've included in the book in one of the chapters, I don't know if you noticed that there's a chapter that contains data from a survey that we conducted across 60 plus schools and colleges and a couple of madarsahs in the valley, right across the valley and we found that in the course of the questionnaire, it used to take about an hour to fill the questionnaire and I was insistent that we needed to make it a qualitative survey because we didn't want to give options because those options tend to be what we think they might want to say yes or no to. So we left blank spaces for each student to answer whatever they felt. In one part of the questionnaire, we asked what kind of system of governance would you like, democratic or sharia based or what kind of laws would you like, those sorts of questions and I was surprised at the number of students who at that stage and this was three or four years ago said democratic and sharia. And in another part of the survey, very far away so that the questions didn't seem to be linked, we asked do you think a person who steals should have their hands chopped off or do you think the punishment for adultery should be stoning to death and a very large proportion said no. So these were not the ways in which they perceived sharia law is what I'm saying. Whereas a lot of people in the West tend to see sharia law in these terms. So it's also important to see how, what certain words, certain narratives, certain phrases mean to people there. And there the state often goes wrong so that when you're talking about non-lethal weapons, the state seems to, the people who run the state seem to think that's very good and so it will be positively received. In fact, it's been more negative, the pellet guns. And we also talk about the failures of the police and the widespread corruption in the police. Even in the use of pellet guns, how the failure of proper training really leads to them not targeting the protesters on their feet but instead aiming on their faces and chests which leads to fatalities. It's going to tell us more about the conditions in the police today and the sort of hatred which has grown in Kashmir against the police forces in particular. Corruption is not just the police, it's widespread. And so there's been corruption by politicians, by bureaucrats, by police. The thing that we tend to not realize when we talk about a conflict situation like Kashmir is that either we valorize the police as defending the country against terrorists or we put them down as being collaborators or some such. We fail to see the fact that police forces in different states act similarly and also in Kashmir. The only thing is that the consequences are far more dangerous in a place like Kashmir in terms of the way they are perceived. The other thing is that I would say in fact that the Jammu and Kashmir police is today far, far more professional than many other police forces. But the perceptions about corruption and exploitation and repression and the brutality in which young people experience their treatment by the police is what dominates their minds. So the professionalism may not be seen or may not be our top of mind. It's the corruption and what is perceived as brutalization that is perceived as top of mind. And we noticed in the survey, in fact, this was quite surprising to many of us who were conducting the survey that there was tremendous anger at that stage against the CRPF, which again has improved and been professionalized to a large extent since then. Also against the police, there was much less rage against the army. And in fact, majority of the students at that stage, because the army was not even active, actively involved with crowd control or any of such. And as I've pointed out, militancy was down to almost negligible levels. In 2006, seven, eight, and then a new militancy has come up in 2009, 10, where the army has only become involved with countering this new militancy after about 2015. So when we conducted this survey, the army was largely confined to camps. And so the majority of students at that stage saw the army as a force that is here for our security or for protection or those sorts of things which were relatively positive things to say. And even those who saw the army in negative light didn't use the strong language. As I said, we left it open for students to say what they wanted to about each of these forces. And the kinds of language they used, for some of them used, for the police and for the CRPF, was extremely strong, was sometimes abusive, with regard to the army never saw at that stage. So finally moving on to this current, not current, this perception has been there since this insurgency began that Pakistan is what is responsible for fueling the rage in Kashmir. But how you have talked about in the book that Pakistan alone could not have done this. It is really the Indian actions that fuel the anger and that Pakistan could have only in ways supported it. So can you tell us about that? Well, one of the points that I've made in the book is that this kind of insurgency or whatever you might call it, is the always has been for many decades now. The result of two factors operating together. One is the anger and alienation and resentment of common people on the ground. And the second is the aid and abatement and whatever kinds of support that Pakistan provides. In this case, my sense is that 2008 Pakistan was not involved. Pakistan, if you remember, was involved in a drenching regime change in 2008. By 2010, when there was another uprising on the streets, it seems to me that Pakistan got involved at least halfway through in coordinating things. And certainly in supporting the new militancy, although the new militancy has had a large number of young Kashmiris from the ground, largely from South Kashmir, but most of them belong to Hezboor Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Tahiba, Jai-Shem-Mohammad and a few other groups, Al-Badr, et cetera, that are based in Pakistan or are very strongly controlled from Pakistan. There have been recently some reports of persons who are from groups committed to the IS, kind of ISIS sort of caliphate thinking. But that seems to be a small minority. The large numbers, although they comprise both Pakistanis and Kashmiris. By the second half of the 90s, it really was to a large extent a proxy war to the extent that most of those who were carrying on the militancy in Kashmir were Pakistanis or Afghans or from elsewhere. So there was a sort of international jihad going on. And many of the Kashmiris who were involved in it in the militancy were acting as supporters, in supportive roles. But on the 1st of January this year, there was a major militant suicide attack on a camp that was right along the highway at Avanti Pura, which was successful and those people were killed. It was meant to be a suicide attack. So from their point of view, it was successful. But it was a very bold attack. The sort that Kashmiri youth were not engaged in during the 90s. So my sense is that Pakistan is very much involved with coordinating. There are many Pakistanis who are involved in the groups themselves. A large number of Pakistanis and others have infiltrated across the line of control since at least 2014. And this is a new wave of infiltration. And they are participating to some extent. My sense is that a lot of the Pakistanis and other foreigners are lurking, are like sleeper cells, waiting for some signal to move forward in a bigger way. So my fear is that the worst is yet to come. But again, even they can just capitalize on the resentment which is already present in the Kashmiris. Absolutely. They won't be able to really continue this. And that is where the state has failed from the opportunity that there was tremendous hope and positivity among young Kashmiris in the middle of the previous decade. Partly as a result of the great faith they had in Mr. Vajpayee's efforts to make peace. With Pakistan and with the Huryat Conference and with Kashmiris at large, there was a tremendous sense of trust that Mr. Vajpayee meant well and was going to bring some kind of peace. In fact, in 2005, 2006, I have noted that there were young people who were declaring openly and very proudly that they were Indian and they were even arguing with their siblings or with their cousins in front of a television during an India-Pakistan match. Some would be supporting Tanulkar and the Indian team and others may be supporting another team, but there was that sense which the Indian state was not able to build upon. In fact, from about 2007 on, there's been a decline and it's been a decline that was visible but was not taken seriously. And it's only after about 2016 that the Indian state became conscious of things having gotten out of hand or going out of hand. And I think it still is a little less concerned than it ought to be. So finally, David, what has been the reception to your book in Kashmir and outside Kashmir? How are people responding? Well, I am very gratified because when I began to write this book, my purpose was and remains to try and build bridges of understanding because unless we understand what the issues are, what the problems are, what people perceive, how people think and what they are saying, it's impossible to come up with sensible responses and ways in which to handle it. I am very gratified that people in authority in very senior positions, also people on the ground, young Kashmiris, have both liked this book. That it's reached out to a very large part of the spectrum of opinions and responses to Kashmir. One of the chapters in this book actually deals with how opinions and narratives and responses to Kashmir have become so polarized. That chapter is called Hateful Polarization. It's about how whether you have even in the media or in public discourse, either very, very negative or very, very positive or there are mirror images, in fact, of black and white narrow vision opinions about the current situation in Kashmir. And what I'm gratified about is that young Kashmiris have several of them said to me, one said that this is like I was reading my life story. Another said this is a book that I wish that I could have written. And during the past few weeks, I've also come across people in very important positions of authority over the past few years or currently who have said this has been very useful. This is very useful learning. We can understand things which we didn't realize earlier. So from that point of view, I am very happy and gratified that it has been a very difficult exercise to find out and to live in very dangerous and difficult circumstances to be able to do this research. But I'm happy that it has been able to reach out to persons across the spectrum, which is so important. Because we're living in an age in which more and more we are getting divided. And have very, very single-minded ideas, very singular, non-nuanced ideas about others. And it's very important that we reach out and understand. Thank you for joining us today. And thank you for watching this clip. Thank you.