Local support for militants changes front lines in Kashmir

The road to Begumbagh passes through hauntingly silent villages.
The houses and shuttered shops looked abandoned and fewer people walked the potholed road on Saturday, the third day of a shutdown to mourn the killing of two militants and a teenaged civilian. An overwhelming eeriness competed with a cloudy grey sky.
Begumbagh is a quiet village in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district, the new heartland of Kashmir’s ageing conflict and home to a dangerous trend of civilians trying to storm the cordoned-off sites to rescue militants.
It was here in this village that Aamir Nazir Wani was born and lived his few teenaged years inside a modest, mud-and-brick single-storeyed house. Wani was a passionate cricketer and nicknamed Herschelle Gibbs, a former member of the South African team.
The 15-year-old Wani became the second civilian to die in recent months near the site of a gunfight between militants and the security forces in circumstances that are redefining the region’s narrative. He was killed on Thursday near Padgampora village, a long distance from his home.
A bullet fired into a crowd of demonstrators, who were trying to push forward and break through the outer ring of the cordon around the site of the gunfight at Padgampora, had made a fatal hole in his neck.
Wani’s labourer father has always worked hard, their neighbours here said. Wani’s elder brother is studying to be an engineer and another brother, Shahid, is doing Bachelor’s in fisheries science.
“He would see the oppression happening around and that no justice was being done,” Shahid said of his slain younger brother. “He felt it happening and he would react,” he said.
He took to the social media sites, where he had shared the picture of a militant from a neighbouring village, and also joined protesters throwing stones at police and paramilitary forces. Shahid said his brother would perform ablutions, a religious ritual to cleanse the body, every time he went to throw stones.
Wani had travelled nearly 10 km from his home, or at least five km from his school in a direction which was opposite to his home, to Padgampora village on Thursday. In his last hours, the teenager lived a trend which has established itself across all districts of south Kashmir and has dangerously changed the front lines of the conflict. New front lines have emerged in recent months and are shaped by belligerent crowds of civilian demonstrators who attempt to disrupt the anti-militancy operations, drawing a stern warning from the Army chief and advisories from the state government.
The neighbours and young men from nearby villagers who had gathered at Wani’s house to offer condolences refused to be named as they did not regret coming to the help of militants. They talked of injustices and admiration for the militant cause, interspersing it with references from religious scriptures to make sense of their attempts to help militants in the midst of raging firefights.
“They (militants) are our heartbeats, we will go wherever an encounter takes place,” said a young bearded man, who said he was a student at a medical college. “The police are instigating the youth, they are forcing us to drop the pen and pick up the gun,” he said.
Another young villager said it was “better to die honourably than face the torture and humiliation”.
A police officer in the district denied the accusations and insisted that any detention was done with precision. “What is happening is not in the interest of anyone. This is no longer about freedom or even about Pakistan, it has moved beyond that,” the officer said, hinting that the religious radicalisation is an overwhelming factor.
“This has become a communal issue,” the officer said, adding that the alliance of the PDP, which had an enormous influence across south Kashmir, with the BJP has largely led to the current situation.

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