Child 'Warriors' of Kashmir
Radicalisation of children in Kashmir and why that is the single most disturbing development in the last 100 days of Kashmir unrest.
By Sushant Sareen | Oct 17, 2016
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| Child Soldiers flanking Ummat-e-Islami leader Sarjan Barkati (Sarjan Ahmad Wagay), the pied-piper of Kashmir, known to have coined slogans like "One Solution, Gun Solution, Gun Solution". Image Source: Sarjan Barkati Official Facebook Page |
In all the political and security-related heat, dust and noise that has been generated over the disturbances in Kashmir, the single most sinister development – the emergence of ‘child agitators’, or if you will, ‘Child Soldiers’, most of them teenagers and some in their pre-teens – seems to have somehow got side-lined. The pernicious phenomenon of Child Soldiers is neither new nor unique to Kashmir – it has manifested itself in many conflict theatres around the world, including Sierra Leone, Congo, Somalia, Syria (ISIS), Pakistan (most suicide bombers were teenagers). But wherever it has manifested, it has had devastating consequences for the society’s equilibrium and coherence. Not just Kashmir but also rest of India will pay a very heavy price in the not too distant a future if this issue isn’t addressed with the sensitivity, seriousness and sincerity it deserves. And yet, the entire issue has been reduced to anecdotal narration instead of having become a matter of central concern for both state and society.
The first time I heard of this phenomenon was at a round table discussion in Delhi where a senior Kashmiri journalist narrated, with a mix of horror and admiration, the story of a ‘checkpoint’ manned by 12-14 year old kids who were stopping all movement on the road. When they learned of a family travelling for Haj, they requested them to pray for their ‘shahadat’ (martyrdom). Another anecdote was about a particularly desperate family pleading with one of the kids (of around 12 years) to let them pass, he said he would need the nod of his ‘commander’ who was a 14 year old kid! Since then, there are any number of accounts of these ‘child soldiers’ who are beyond everyone’s control and have, in a sense, redefined the state of unrest in the Valley. Stories that evoke memories of the Cultural Revolution in China are now fairly common place in Kashmir, the only difference being that the Red Guards were under control of Mao and his coterie while in Kashmir the kids are pretty much running amok. They are assaulting teachers, browbeating officials, extorting money from traders, and deciding who gets to travel past their checkpoint and who must turn back. While many of these kids allegedly are getting paid for doing what they are doing, there doesn’t seem to be any real command and control system guiding them. There are also reports that many of these kids are junkies and get their high from opioid based cough syrups, which they sometimes buy from the proceeds of the money they get and often just snatch from local chemists.
The separatist leaders, whose own kids go to elite schools and are mostly kept out of harm’s way, are not just pretty blasé about this phenomenon but are actually quite encouraging it. Some of them, even as they publicly rave and rant about deaths in police firing, are in private quite smug over the deaths of kids – most of whom were not as innocent as they were made out to be and were in fact involved in launching murderous assaults on security force personnel when they fell to police firing – because that keeps the cycle of violence in play. In any case, these separatists no longer call the shots on the streets of Kashmir. But even if they did call the shots, it would be quite pointless to expect them to make any positive or sensible contribution to prevent kids from taking to streets. What is of greater concern is the dumbed-down, self-serving and rather lazy analysis of the phenomenon by allegedly seasoned observers of Kashmir. Essentially, they explain this phenomenon by saying that these are children of conflict. Asides of the fact that in India in general and in Kashmir in particular, there is no culture of doing serious psychological and sociological study of conflict and violence and how it impacts society – much of what passes off as serious analysis is really nothing more than anecdotes, stories and observations often tainted by ideological predilection of the narrator – the facts also don’t support the theory of children on conflict.
Kids who are 14-15 year today were born around the turn of the century, and the pre-teens even later. This means that most of these kids were around 2-3 years old around 2004, the year from which violence levels fell steeply year after year until 2015-16 when they started to rise once again but still remains far below the violence levels of the preceding decade. Clearly, if there are any children of conflict they are the ones who were either born in the 1990s or were growing up in those years, and not the ones born in the early 2000’s who grew up at a time of relative peace. In other words, more than being children of conflict, these kids are victims of conditioning (at the level of family, a sample of which comes from videos doing rounds on social media showing toddlers shouting slogans and behaving as ‘mujahids’) and indoctrination at the level of society, mosques and even schools. Many of these kids come from less than privileged backgrounds and live in a social milieu where peer pressure, braggadocio and faux bravado coupled with inadequate parental supervision or control pushes them along the path of violence to earn social respect and acceptability. While kids manning the barricades mouth the slogans of ‘Azadi’ and strut about like soldiers, it is too much to expect a 12 or 15 year old to understand the connotations of that term, much less be able to articulate the concept with any degree of coherence and clarity.
The separatists and their sympathisers and supporters are quick to point to these child soldiers as a sign of how even kids have risen up against India, but more discerning sections of the Kashmiri population see this as a societal breakdown and fear the short, medium and long term consequences of this phenomenon if it is not addressed and arrested. There is also a loathing developing against the high-handedness of these child soldiers who insult, even beat, elders. From a security point of view, this is an extremely dangerous development because it is precisely such kids who in other parts of the world have become suicide bombers. Jihadist terror outfits find these kids excellent cannon fodder. For the army and police officers, these kids create a serious dilemma. It is one thing for the security forces to fight terrorists who attack them and quite another for them to take on and fire on kids even if they are part of or leading a murderous mob. In the long term, unless weaned away from the destructive path they have embarked upon, these kids will become an even bigger security threat than what they are now. The bottom-line is that neither Kashmir nor India can afford to lose the GenNext of Kashmir to the fires of jihadist separatism.
The big challenge before the state and society is how to deradicalise these children. Arresting them and putting them through the mill is hardly an answer. In fact, many of these kids who have been picked up by the police and kept for a few days in police stations have come out even more hardened. The juvenile justice program is totally ill-equipped to tackle this problem. This means that something more innovative and effective will have to be considered. One such suggestion (from journalist Praveen Swami) is to pull these kids along with their families out of the environment in which they are caught and put them in rehabilitative facilities located within Kashmir for a few years. The kids can then be put through proper schooling and counselling and the parents can be given some employment or imparted some skills which help them once they go back home.
Clearly, the situation as it exists on ground in Kashmir cannot be allowed to fester endlessly. Ignoring or underplaying the phenomenon of child soldiers will only imperil security of the state and stability of society in the future. Instead of waiting for greater virulence to erupt in the months and years ahead, it would make more sense to start taking corrective measures and do whatever it takes to pre-empt the approaching tempest.
