ISIS video of Srinagar attack portends ill
Bharat Bhushan
The Islamic State has announced its presence in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by releasing an alleged live video recording of the shooting of a police officer on Tuesday July 12 in the heart of Srinagar. The incident left one police officer dead and two injured. The video was released by Amaq news agency, an online news outlet linked to the IS. It has been described by the New York Times as the “first point of publication for claims of responsibility” for terrorist attacks.
The video shot with a body camera worn by the attacker shows him shooting at a police officer, changing the magazine of his pistol mid-way through the shooting, attacking a stationary police vehicle and showering bullets on a policeman standing under a Chinar tree vainly trying to shield himself with his arms covering his face.
Up to now, angry youngsters used to wave the IS flag to rile the Indian security forces. Now it would seem that the IS had made inroads into Kashmir and is willing to declare its presence. This has serious security ramifications. It has the potential to shorten the ongoing Amarnath Yatra as well as the postponement of the proposed legislative elections in the Union Territory.
There is no central authority which grants membership of the IS to any terrorist outfit. Any militant group can in principle join it online. It is quite another thing, however, for the IS to claim a group and its activities as its own. The terrorist attack in Srinagar’s Lal Bazaar has also been claimed by The Resistance Force (TRF) associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba but the self-styled Islamic State (Hind Province) have threatened it for doing so.
It would be unwise to dismiss the July 12 incident as a minor attack using a pistol. If the IS has indeed made inroads in the Valley, then not only could such attacks go up but there could be bigger and qualitatively different attacks in the future. Jammu may be particularly vulnerable. Experience elsewhere in the world shows that the capacity of IS to wreak havoc cannot be underestimated.
If the terrorist activities of the IS increase in J&K, the carefully managed narrative of Delhi that everything is “normal” in the Union Territory stands in danger of falling apart. The anti-India narrative in J&K has been contained up to now by cracking down on the media. While the pro-establishment journalists in J&K today are afraid of moving out of their homes, the independent or critical journalists are not allowed to operate freely. This way the Indian public is denied knowledge of the ground situation in Kashmir.
The government may now also find it difficult to hold elections to the UT legislative assembly any time soon. Neither the pro-India mainstream politicians nor the pro-BJP politicians created by the establishment would be able to move about freely. Not many amongst them would be willing to contest legislative assembly elections putting their lives at risk. It could become next to impossible for the administration to provide security for all politicians in Kashmir including District Development Council members, sarpanches and panches, already holed up in secure hotels away from their constituencies.
Meanwhile, the security forces may continue shooting militants few days after every terrorist strike, claiming to have killed the ‘mastermind’ of the attack. Nonetheless, the narrative that the administration has the situation in Kashmir fully under control and terrorism has been eliminated is likely to become less and less credulous.
That is not all. The targeting of minorities in the rest of India by Hindutva activists, often with the connivance of the official machinery, may facilitate the entry of IS outside Kashmir as well. When political doors are shut on a minority community, its grievances not addressed by the state and the civil society is prevented from assuaging its sense of injustice, the ground is fertile for extremism.
Another major consequence of an increasing presence of IS in terrorist activities would be that the Indian establishment would have no one to negotiate with. Unlike a political or sovereign entity, the IS cannot be engaged in a dialogue. India would no longer be able to blame Pakistan for every violent incident in J&K (or even elsewhere) as it can be no one’s case that Pakistan controls the activities of the IS. Such claims, even if made by the Indian government, would not hold much water with the international community.
Even changing the Lieutenant Governor of J&K to a Muslim face will not help. The immediate issue is not whether a Manoj Sinha can be replaced with, say for example, a Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi or another minority leader acceptable to Delhi. It is the suffocation that the Kashmiri society feels after the cataclysmic events of August 2019 – the subjective perception of the people that they have been wronged -- which needs to be addressed.
