(Dhangri Nācha) After seven Hindus were killed in two consecutive attacks in early January in the village of Dhangri, located in the disputed territory of Kashmir, a former Indian army soldier, Satish Kumar, described his peaceful mountain village as an “abode of fear”.
Days after the deadly violence in the village of the border district of Rajauri, where houses are separated by maize and mustard fields, hundreds of residents staged protests to express their anger in the Jammu region, dominated by the Hindus. In response, Indian authorities revived a government-sponsored militia and began rearming and training thousands of villagers, including teenagers.
Mr Kumar was among the first to join the militia under the new campaign and the authorities armed him with a semi-automatic rifle and 100 bullets.
“I feel like a soldier again,” said Kumar, 40, who has run a grocery store since retiring from the Indian Army in 2018.
The militia, officially called the ‘Village Defense Group’, was originally formed in the 1990s as the first line of defense against anti-India insurgents in remote Himalayan villages that government forces did not could not reach quickly.
As the insurgency waned in their operational areas and some militia members gained notoriety for their brutality and rights abuses, drawing harsh criticism from human rights groups, the militia was largely dissolved.
But the January violence has stirred unpleasant memories of past attacks in Rajauri, which sits near the highly militarized Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan and where fighting between Indian soldiers and rebels is not not uncommon.
Brandishing his gun inside his one-story concrete house on a cloudy February day, Mr Kumar justified his decision to join the militia as the “only way to fight fear and protect [ma] family of terrorists.
“I am a trained person and I have fought against terrorists. But what is training for? [militaire] if you don’t have a weapon? pointed out Mr. Kumar. Believe me, I almost felt helpless because of the fear. »
seven dead
1er January, two gunmen killed four villagers, including a father and son, and injured at least five others. The following day, an explosion outside one of the houses killed two children and injured at least 10 others. It remains unclear if the explosive was left behind by the attackers. A week later, one of the injured died in a hospital, bringing the total death toll to seven.
“There was carnage in our village and Hindus were being attacked,” Kumar said.
Police have implicated activists who have fought against Indian rule for decades in Kashmir, with the Himalayan territory claimed by India and Pakistan in its entirety. However, two months later, they have yet to announce any progress or name any suspects, heightening fear and anger among residents of the village of around 5,000 residents where Hindus make up around 70% of the population, the rest being Muslims.
The civilian rearmament policy comes after India stripped Kashmir of its semi-autonomy and took direct control of the territory amid a months-long security and communications blackout in 2019. Since then, the The situation in Kashmir remained tense as authorities also introduced a host of new laws that could change the region’s demographics, according to critics and many Kashmiris.
In New Delhi’s efforts to shape what it calls ‘Naya Kashmir’ or a ‘new Kashmir’, the territory’s residents have been largely silenced, with their civil liberties curtailed, as India has shown no tolerance for any form of dissent.
So when the Dhangri violence erupted, the Indian government was quick to rearm the civilian militia even though it announced its reinstatement in August last year.
Officials said they had since armed and provided training to more than 100 other Hindu men in Dhangri, while lifting a ban on gun licenses in the already militarized Rajauri. The village already had more than 70 former militiamen, some of whom still possess the British colonial-era Lee-Enfield rifles issued to them more than a decade ago.
For the first time, the militia was also financially incentivized by the government, which said each member would receive 4,000 Indian rupees ($65) per month.
A controversial decision
Still, the decision to revitalize the village advocacy group is not without controversy.
Some security and political experts say the policy could militarize divisions in Jammu’s volatile hinterland where communal strife has always existed.
In the past, more than 200 police cases, including charges of rape, murder and rioting, have been registered against some of the tens of thousands of militiamen in the Jammu area, according to government data.
“The proliferation of small arms is dangerous for any society and when a state does it, it is a tacit admission of failure to secure a society”, explained a political analyst, Zafar Choudhary.
India has a long history of arming civilians in its counterinsurgency efforts and civilian militiamen were first used to fight separatists in India’s northeastern states. In 2005, the Indian federal government founded a local militia, the Salwa Judum, to fight Maoist rebels in the central state of Chhattisgarh. It was accused by rights groups of committing widespread atrocities and was disbanded in 2011.
In Kashmir, civil defense groups have been armed nearly six years after the start of the deadly insurgency against Indian rule.
SP Vaid was a young officer in 1995 when he oversaw the creation of the militia’s first unit after two Hindu men were killed in an attack in a remote hilly village in the Jammu region. Mr Vaid, who recently retired as a top police officer in Indian-controlled Kashmir, said hours after his team reached the village that locals demanded arms for protection.
“I had no instructions from the government on this subject, but I immediately asked permission from headquarters to provide the villagers with 10 firearms,” he recalled. That’s how it started. »
The Indian government officially implemented a policy of arming the villagers a few months later.
Security officials say the arming of civilians has deterred militant activity and helped halt the emigration of Hindus from remote areas, unlike the Kashmir Valley where a year after the outbreak of armed rebellion most local Hindus fled to Jammu.
Kuldeep Khoda, another former senior police officer in the region credited with implementing the policy, said the results “surprised us”.
“It was an experiment but it worked,” Mr Khoda said from his home in Jammu city.
For their work on civil defense groups, police in the region received an award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, an influential US-based police group, Khoda said.
The militia, he said, “played a pivotal role in defeating Pakistani plans to stoke communal tensions”.
But Mr Choudhary, the political analyst, said “civilians are unarmed in a functioning democracy”.
Muslims set aside
The divisions already appear clear in Dhangri.
Muslim residents of the village say fear and grief bind them to their Hindu neighbours, but their request to join the militia has been denied.
Mohammed Mushtaq is a former paramilitary soldier who lives near the house where gunmen first fired on 1er January.
“We have lived together for generations and have a similar social system. But we were singled out,” he testified. Mr Mushtaq and two other Muslim neighbours, also former soldiers, asked the authorities for weapons under this policy, but it was refused, he said.
As Mr Mushtaq spoke while sitting outside his house, the sounds of religious hymns and devotional songs wafted from the loudspeakers of a hilltop Hindu temple. The songs were interspersed with the chirping of birds and the occasional whistling of pressure cookers in some village kitchens.
Moments later, a muezzin called the Muslims to early afternoon prayers.
Mr Kumar, the former soldier and militia member, said the decision not to integrate his Muslim neighbors into the militia was “arbitrary” because “we still don’t know who carried out the massacre” in Dhangri.
Meanwhile, hundreds of former militiamen from the remote hamlets of Rajauri are once again oiling their weapons.
“We locked away our weapons and thought we would never need them,” said Usha Raina, 38, a militia member since 2015 along with more than two dozen other villagers from the nearby hamlet of Kalal Khas.
“The incident (in Dhangri) scared us all and the guns are back in our living rooms,” she said.