Seizing Kashmir

On a freezing December night last year, a man I will call Bilal Ahmed lay in bed, surrounded by the silence of the apple orchards outside his two-story house. There was nothing in particular weighing on his mind, but a night of peaceful rest is something of a luxury in Kadder, a village in Kashmir’s Kulgam district. Its residents, who toil in orchards to make a living, endure the constant terror of Indian army raids. Hardly a day goes by in their neighborhoods without the presence of troops carrying out “search and cordon” operations, the ostensible purpose of which are to spot and kill guerilla fighters living in the area. When the army thinks it’s found a target, it first rains gunfire upon a house, then demolishes it with explosives—a penalty to deter other Kashmiris from letting armed fighters stay in their homes.

This hardboiled counterinsurgency has not been much of a success: the resistance has endured. Still, unfazed by the Kashmiri people’s persistence, India’s forces are equally determined to crush any challenge. Earlier that December, a large detachment of army troops, paramilitary forces, and police laid siege to Bilal’s village, taking up positions behind turreted guns. Well past midnight, a powerful explosion shook the area, rattling the wood-framed glass windows overlaid with frost. Inside the darkened redbrick houses with pitched tin roofs, residents crouched in fear. As gunshots pierced the cold night air, Bilal jumped off his bed, ran to the adjoining room, and took his young daughter, who sleeps with her grandparents. The child suffers from an anxiety disorder, and he hoped to console her, but that was the least of his worries that night. Bilal moved the whole family—his wife, three children, and elderly parents—to a room on the ground floor, so that the high concrete wall enclosing their property could protect them from gunfire.

Indian forces have opened fire on noncombatants on numerous occasions during Kashmir’s thirty-five-year resistance against India. Those lucky enough to live another day suffer the psychological toll of living cheek by jowl with 700,000 hostile troops stationed in the disputed territory. Bilal’s family survived that night, but others were not so lucky. Bashir Ahmad Malla, a schoolteacher and a father of three children, suffered a heart attack during the raid and died on the same night. An otherwise healthy man, Malla woke up at 3 a.m., went to the bathroom, then back to bed. He never woke up. Such casualties in Kashmir’s long chronology of loss and servitude are not counted in the official statistics of the conflict’s casualties. Nearly 70,000 people have died, including, civilians, rebel fighters, and Indian troops, since 1989, the date the rebellion broke out against Indian rule. Most of the killing has been done by Indian forces.

When the gunfire in Kadder subsided, news began circulating on social media that Indian forces had killed five fighters from the Hizbul Mujahideen, the Kashmir valley’s oldest armed outfit, formed in 1989 with Pakistan’s support in order to weaken the Indian military’s hold on Kashmir. In a press conference held after the fight, Indian officials declared Kulgam and the nearby region of Shopian to be free of rebels. The guerillas, they announced, had lost the capability to strike anytime soon.

I must have attended at least a dozen such hurriedly arranged press events at the sites of gun battles. Some seventeen years ago, as head of the Kashmir bureau for Times Now, India’s best-known English-language TV news group, I reported on a fight from Yaripora, a town a few miles northeast of Kadder. For three days my crew and I, with a satellite truck in tow, described how a vastly outgunned band of Kashmiri fighters battled for nearly seventy hours before they were overcome in a barrage of bombs and machine-gun fire. At the time, India’s top security officials overseeing the military operation declared, with bravado, that armed struggle against India in the area had come to an end.

That boast proved to be short-lived. Within five years, a new generation of young men took up arms, kicking off another bloody chapter in the saga. And just last month, the rebels launched their deadliest attack yet, killing two dozen Indian tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam.

But even after facing decades of fierce resistance, India refuses to acknowledge Kashmiri demands for self-determination. Instead, it continues to believe that eventually, if it exercises enough military force, it will consolidate power and silence the restive population. And in recent years, Modi’s government has added a new tactic to subdue Kashmir: a project to settle Indians in the region and shift its Muslim-majority demographics.

Atop a highland orchard sprawls a huge military camp overlooking Kadder. Established some thirty-odd years back, it is older than many villagers in the area. Everyone dreads passing through it: the movement of people on the route it lies on, an aisle of wire fence and surveillance cameras, is tightly controlled by Indian troops. Last month, my journalist friend and I decided to take a look. Driving up the narrow winding road connecting Kadder with Behibagh, a village two miles away, was nothing short of crossing a frontier between two hostile nations.

Down the road from the camp’s entrance, a tall soldier with an automatic rifle at the ready stopped us. “Kahaan jaa rahe ho,” he asked my colleague gruffly. “Where are you headed?”

“Behibagh,” my colleague replied.

The soldier gazed at his identity card: a journalist. He looked up and shoots a glance at me. “Yeh kaun,”he wanted to know. Who is he?

“A friend.”

The soldier commanded us not to receive or make a call on our phones, to roll up our car windows, and to drive slowly, at a crawl. We did as we were told. Turning to my left, I saw a bust on a pedestal: a monument to Umar Fayaz, a lieutenant of the Indian Army from Kulgam who, in 2017, was abducted by guerilla fighters from a wedding, beaten, and then shot to death. In the eyes of the insurgents, Fayaz had made a monumental blunder by joining the enemy against his people. Less than a year later, the army exacted revenge, killing the insurgents responsible for Fayaz’s death. After another ten months, the rebels responded in turn, killing Aman Thakur, a police officer, a mile away. Since then much more blood has been shed, both by insurgents and Indian security men. The cycle of death goes on.

When we traveled back to Kadder later that day, on the same road flanked with apple orchards, we again followed the rules, making sure to return before five in the afternoon, when the guards close the gate for the night. After that point, the villagers on either side must take a detour that takes twice the time, their lives at the mercy of soldiers, the mood and pace of their lives dictated at gunpoint.

Despite the conflict’s long history, today’s efforts to silence the people of Kashmir are unprecedented. In the last few years Modi’s government has ramped up political repression to what experts call near-totalitarian levels. It has jailed leaders and activists of Kashmir’s azaadi (freedom) movement, as well as lawyers, journalists, businessmen, students, clergy, and human rights activists—booking many of them under terrorism charges. Hundreds of young men have been subjected to torture in army camps. Leaked videos show soldiers beating young men’s naked buttocks with batons. In 2019, after having been abused by the army while in custody, fifteen-year-old Yawar Ahmad Bhat ended his life by consuming poison in Pulwama, in southern Kashmir.

Since then the Indian state, indifferent to the censure it has faced from international human rights bodies, has only grown more brazen. Last November, its forces were accused by families of five men, who had been rounded up at night in raids in Kishtwar, for subjecting them to severe torture. In the past few years, as the arid plains bordering Kashmir have experienced an uptick in rebel violence, dozens of Indian troops have been killed in ambushes on forested mountain slopes—in response, leading India to target civilians suspected of making common cause with fighters. The repression has not dissuaded many Kashmiris from supporting the insurgents’ goal to liberate the territory from Indian occupation, even if they must now express their dissent in silence: since 2019, the political activity that used to take place in protests, social media, hotel halls, and street corners has been effectively shut down.

Driving the repression of dissent is a settler colonial project that has hung over the Kashmir valley for more than half a decade. In the first days of August 2019, a state of chaos engulfed Kashmir. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) commanded more than a million migrant workers, holidaymakers, and Hindu pilgrims to go back home to India. From there fresh batches of troops were dispatched, reinforcing the 700,000 already garrisoned in the disputed territory. Despite not knowing the reason for the buildup, Kashmiris stocked up on groceries, medicine, and gas for their cars. The frenzy of the day gave way to uncertainty at night. Tens of thousands of heavily armed security forces poured out of Indian military bases and forced their way into homes across the region. They snatched away political leaders, azaadi activists—both men and women—and anyone they deemed capable of stoking an uprising. Thousands of Kashmiris were transferred to prisons in India, hundreds of miles away from home.

Then, on the morning of August 5, the Indian government announced a security lockdown, confining more than 10 million people to their homes. Internet and phone services were cut off; we had no means at our disposal to find out what was happening to us. The streets were quiet, except for the occasional stamp of soldiers’ boots. I was overwhelmed with worry, helplessness, and fury. My parents, frail and unwell, lived some thirty miles away from me. Did they get a chance to buy an adequate stock of much-needed prescriptions? There was no way of knowing.

We turned to Indian television news. Normally, we avoid watching it—its reporting on Kashmir is rarely fair and balanced, parroting state policy and describing every expression of resistance from Kashmiris as an act of terrorism that demands punishment—but this time, we needed information. We learned that, assembling in the Lok Sabha (one of the Indian Parliament’s two houses) in New Delhi, Indian legislators had endorsed the government’s “resolution” to revoke Article 370, a constitutional statute that had since 1949 enabled Kashmiri legislators to draft laws protecting their land, jobs, and culture. For years, the Hindu nationalist government had been scheming for ways to exact a heavy toll on Kashmir for the audacity of its resistance. Now, they had found an answer: stripping Kashmir of its semiautonomous status.

Article 370, among other things, protected Kashmir’s lands by forbidding non-Kashmiris from purchasing property there. But after its cancellation, the Modi government made laws permitting Indian citizens to vote, apply for jobs, and buy land in the territory. For Kashmiris, the wholesale upending of laws protecting land and cultural rights could only be seen as a step toward the fulfillment of the Hindu nationalists’ old revanchist dream of turning Kashmir into a Hindu-majority state.

Their fears have proven justified. After the resolution’s passage, the Modi government began laying the groundwork in earnest for an eventual dispossession of Kashmiri land. In January 2023, it unleashed an eviction drive across the territory, seizing state land from so-called “encroachers,” a matter-of-fact term concealing the true nature of the campaign: expelling thousands of Kashmiris from the farmland their families had cultivated for decades. Indigenous nomads were displaced from the forests where they lived, and homes and business establishments were turned to rubble. The government declared that, all told, it had impounded more than 42,000 hectares of land. In a 2024 report, the International Federation for Human Rights, a French rights group, found that India had expropriated land the size of Hong Kong from the Kashmiris. The new laws, the report wrote, have enabled “the Indian authorities to forcibly evict and dispossess thousands of Kashmiris from their homes, without due process, and in violation of India’s international human rights obligations.”

Gradually, the outline of Modi’s plan to remake Kashmir has come into sight. Under the slogan of development and to “transform” the state into an “industrialized territory,” the Indian government has sold land to Indian capitalists. Sajjan Jindal, an Indian businessman who heads a conglomerate called JSW Group and was a vocal supporter of the cancellation of Article 370, is one of them: as soon as the ownership restrictions were stripped, he bought a nine-acre property to build a steel factory in Pulwama. More than 1,800 businesses have been allotted land in the last few years, with the government reporting that it has received $10 billion in investment proposals.

Expectedly, many in Kashmir consider the so-called development—a curious synthesis of the politics of occupation and neoliberalism—nothing but a red herring to break up the territory’s Muslim majority. In response to the project, armed guerillas have targeted civilians, killing some 130 during the last several years. Many of the slain men are migrant workers from the various states of India, whom the rebel groups see as settlers.

Whenever its troops and civilians come under attack from rebel fighters in Kashmir, the Indian government routinely blames one culprit: Pakistan. By providing rebels with training and arms, India alleges, Pakistan is sponsoring a “proxy war” against its neighbor. Naturally, Pakistan rejects the accusation, saying it only supplies Kashmiris with moral, political, and diplomatic support for the liberation movement. The truth lies somewhere in between. It is an open secret that for the past three decades officers from the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, has sent insurgents across the border to aid Kashmir’s rebels. And Pakistan has historically believed that Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, should have become a part of Pakistan in 1947, when the subcontinent was partitioned on religious lines. After Article 370 was withdrawn, ISI began to boost the rebels’ ranks with tougher, battle-hardened men.

And Pakistan clings to the dream of freeing Kashmir from its archrival. In a span of four days in October 2024, insurgents attacked workers on an infrastructure project and a military convoy, killing 12 people, including three soldiers. In Gagangeer, Ganderbal, some 42 miles northeast of Srinagar, at least two armed rebels opened fire on construction workers in their barracks, killing six Indians and a Kashmiri doctor. Employed by an Indian construction firm, the workers were boring a tunnel through a treacherous and snowbound terrain into the Himalayas for a highway that India hopes would give its military year-round access to the country’s frontier with China in a region, in Kashmir’s easternmost corner.

A few days later, a band of guerillas in the mountains near the heavily militarized frontier with Pakistan ambushed a column of vehicles from a vast Indian military base in Gulmarg, some thirty miles west of Srinagar, before disappearing into the pine forests—an attack that again clearly bore the mark of Pakistan. Three soldiers and two civilian porters died in the strike.

Both raids caught the Indian security establishment unprepared. For many years both remote areas had remained largely free of rebel actions. But the growing prowess of the guerilla offensive, buoyed by the support it enjoyed on the ground, left the security grid struggling to gain the upper hand.

One November morning in 2024, residents of Khanyar, an old neighborhood in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital city, woke to the sound of gunshots piercing the silence of their narrow alleys. A senior guerilla commander from Pakistan had been tracked down to an exact location inside a house. Cornered with no possible escape, he hunkered down to fight. In the scuffle, four Indian troopers were wounded, and it took security officials a full day to regain control of the area. No sooner was the silence challenged in other parts of the Kashmir valley. In Anantnag, thirty-five miles south of Khanyar, another gun battle raged, leaving two rebels, one a local and another from Pakistan, shot dead. And in Bandipora, in northern Kashmir, rebels fired upon Indian soldiers before retreating into the forest, their shots signaling a clear intent: stopping the settlers from India.

The illusion of peace was broken once again in late April in the high meadows of Pahalgam, a town in a remote corner of southern Kashmir. As hundreds of Indian vacationers enjoyed the views of towering peaks and the cool breeze blowing down from the snowy ridges, three men with automatic rifles snuck out of a thick grove of pine trees on a mountain slope above them. The men walked up to unwary couples, some with children, and groups of men and women. Demanding to know their names, they separated the men from the others, shooting twenty-six of them to death and critically wounding many more in front of the shell-shocked children and women, whom they mercifully spared. By asking their names, the assailants made sure the men they killed were Hindus and not Muslims. (The lone Muslim casualty was a Kashmiri horseman, who had wrestled with a gunman and was shot.) The cold-blooded murders revolted many in Kashmir: in the thirty-five-year-long blood-soaked history of armed resistance against India, there has never been an atrocity committed on this scale against tourists. But then again, never before had India’s attempts to settle the region been so brazen.

A few hours after the shooting, The Resistance Front (TRF), an insurgent outfit, put out a statement on its Telegram channel owning up to the carnage. A few days later, however, TRF retracted the claim, instead blaming “cyber intrusion” for an unauthorized posting of the message. The rebels accused Indian “cyber-intelligence operatives” of hacking their social platforms in the hopes of maligning the Kashmiri resistance.

The Modi government, for its part, was convinced that Pakistan, along with the Kashmiri rebel groups it supports with arms and training, was to blame. Pakistan denied being involved in the slaughter, challenging India to offer evidence pointing to its complicity—and then in turn accused India, without evidence, of staging the slaughter in order to give Pakistan a bad name at a time when U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance was on a diplomatic visit to India.

The wide manhunt for the assailants launched by Indian forces up in the forested slopes of the Himalayas has yielded no result. But many Kashmiris see the fresh clampdown below in the Kashmir Valley—and the new cycle of suffering it has set off—as a form of collective retribution: dozens of homes have been demolished; more than 1,500 young men have been detained, one of whom, according to his family, was killed in custody; scores of women of Pakistani origin married to Kashmiri men, some for more than forty years, are being deported back without their children and husbands.

Two weeks after the Pahalgam atrocity, animosity deepened between the rival neighbors as the Modi government ordered missile and drone strikes on Pakistan, claiming to have targeted “terrorist camps” in the country and killed “over 100 terrorists.” Pakistani military officials denied the Indian assertion: the missiles, they said, targeted civilians—killing thirty-one, including children—and mosques, not terrorists. The Pakistan Air Force said it had shot down five Indian warplanes during the dogfight. Initially, India did not confirm or deny the loss of the jets, though the wreckage of many aircraft was found scattered in Kashmir and Punjab (on May 31, it finally acknowledged the jets’ loss).

It did not stop there. Pakistan responded with its own missile strikes and drone assaults on a host of Indian military targets. It was only at the behest of the United States that the slide into full-blown war between two nuclear powers was thankfully stopped. But while the guns have fallen silent for now, the possibility of crisis escalating to war is ever-present.

On a cold January day in Ganderbal, just months before the Pahalgam attack, Modi looked surprisingly calm. The president was there to inaugurate an infrastructure project to boost road connectivity, set to kick off only three months after the killings of the six construction workers that took place at a nearby tunnel-digging site. But in his speech, Modi barely referenced the rebel attack. And he neglected to mention the other incident that hung like a grey cloud over his entire Kashmir development project: namely, the bloody spat that had taken place years earlier between Indian and Chinese armies in the desolate plateau of Ladakh.

Like Pakistan, China had not taken kindly to Modi’s revocation of Kashmir’s semiautonomous status. It had termed the act as “unilateral,” ominously blaming India for having “undermined China’s territorial sovereignty.” What had particularly riled the Chinese government was the carving up of the state into two separate entities: Jammu and Kashmir as one territory and Ladakh as another, both to be administered directly from New Delhi. Making matters worse, Modi’s new map depicted Aksai Chin, a region to Kashmir’s east administered by China, as Indian territory—an act Beijing was quick to deem “cartographic aggression.”

Consumed by the worry that people would rise up in the Kashmir valley, the Modi government failed abysmally to read China’s intentions in Ladakh. In May 2020, its soldiers noted huge detachments of the Chinese army occupying unmanned Indian posts in the Galwan Valley and in nearby northeastern Ladakh. According to Indian defense analysts, China captured close to fifty square miles of uninhabitable land in the area, with some accounts claiming it had seized far more. But amid the worsening situation, the Modi government insisted it hadn’t lost any territory to the Chinese at all.

A month later, the tensions that had been steadily ratcheting finally found their release valve: a deadly brawl between the rival armies in Galwan Valley. In the skirmish, Chinese soldiers beat to death at least twenty Indian servicemen with staves and nail-studded clubs, and four Chinese soldiers were killed by India. After that, the ties between the two nations, already strained by decades of unresolved border disputes, went into a tailspin. The Modi government turned up the heat on Chinese companies, stopping them from investing in some economic sectors. It even banned dozens of Chinese ecommerce and gaming apps. But Beijing, undeterred by the economic costs New Delhi was imposing, stood its ground, steadfastly holding onto its captured territory.

Before that 2019 power play, India only had to contend with the Pakistan-aided resistance movement. But the revocation of Article 370 “forced China into the Kashmir dispute,” according to Dr. Wang Shida, a South Asia expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a Beijing-based think tank. Last October, however, the two countries, after many months of discussions, agreed to a military disengagement in Ladakh, with scarcely a mention of the land taken from India by China.

In Ganderbal, Modi’s rhetoric amplified his country’s concerted push to deepen military control by constructing a wide network of infrastructure projects. “The highest tunnel in the world is being built here,” he said, adding that Kashmir now also boasts of “the highest railroad bridge” and that people “are happy with the developmental works.” But despite his effort to claim benefits for the people of Kashmir, all he has induced among them is fear and loathing.

On a clear morning that same January, I drove down to Bijbehara, a town twenty-eight miles south of Srinagar, on a four-lane highway unspooling itself between rice, saffron fields, orchards, forests, mountains, and streams, linking up Kashmir with India. It was unusually bright for a winter day; in the distance, I could see the sun glinting off the snow crowning the Himalayas. The weather, though, did nothing to improve the mood of the residents of Dirhama, a 150-household community in Bijbehara that has lived with an acute sense of impending calamity for months. Last year the hum of a drone hovering above the village caused a stir in an otherwise quiet quarter of concrete houses with wide glass windows and pitched tin roofs. A team of revenue officers surveyed orchards and furrowed paddy fields for plans to lay a railroad across a zone bordered by a wildlife sanctuary and a stream fed by snowmelt. The Dirhama farmers were put on notice: their farm land was going to be taken over for a massive development project: a forty-eight-mile-long line to Pahalgam, the resort where rebels attacked tourists last month. There has never been a pressing demand from the local population for a rail line between the two towns. So, the residents wonder, why is it being built?

Ghulam Mohammad Bhat, a robust seventy-year-old man with a solemn expression, owns two acres of land on which he grows apples and rice, the sale of which go toward taking care of a family of seven. (Every so often, when the yield is low and blighted by disease, Bhat approaches a bank to borrow money, but he is always sure to pay them back.) Over the years, the Bhats have managed to make a steady living from their orchards and paddies, but with every inch of the estate to be requisitioned for the rail project, the family stares down an uncertain future. “We will not allow them to construct this railway line,” Bhat said adamantly. The farmers, he told me, will risk their lives to defend the land: most of them, Bhat included, have no other source of income.

Abdul Rashid, Bhat’s neighbor, stopped to join us for a chat by the roadside, setting down his handcart heaped with cow manure. A father of four young children, Rashid, an arts graduate, quit his teaching job to take up farming full time. If the construction of the railroad succeeds, he will have to part with at least half an acre of his small holding.

Eighteen miles from there, Shopian residents await with dread the coming of another rail line from Pulwama into their town. A survey has been done, land has been identified, and the farmers have been notified. The railroad will go through apple, pear, and almond orchards, laying waste to large swathes of land producing some of Kashmir’s highest-quality fruit. For the thousands of families living along the two routes who will be deprived of their farmland—a group that includes residents in Dirhama, Shopian, and beyond—the railroad is nothing but a vindictive act from the Hindu nationalist government to rob them of their livelihood, doom the local economy, and push the whole region into grinding poverty.

The seizure of the villagers’ farmland in Dirhama and Shopian is only a single episode in a relentless assault on Kashmiri land that has stretched on for years. In the name of building highways, railroads, and townships, Modi’s government has appropriated thousands of hectares. According to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in New Delhi, between 2021 and 2024 more than 576 hectares of forest land were allotted for “infrastructure and commercial projects.”

And with nearly the entire resistance leadership in prison since 2019 and political dissent criminalized to the extent that expression of support for the resistance against India risks imprisonment or worse, the task of voicing opposition has fallen to pro-India Kashmiri political outfits—ironically, the very same outfits that have for decades provided India with the political cover to deepen its military control. One such new dissident is Aga Ruhullah Mehdi, a Lok Sabha member from the National Conference (NC) who represents the Srinagar constituency there. Although he remains convinced that Kashmir should not secede from India, he believes the territory should get back its revoked semiautonomous status under Article 370. A vocal critic of Modi’s Kashmir policy, Mehdi enraged many Hindu nationalist supporters early this year with his remarks on the heavy influx of Indian tourists in Kashmir, terming the nearly three million visitors to the region in 2024 “a cultural invasion by purpose and by design.” This March, Mehdi stood up in the Lok Sabha and denounced the Modi government for “forcing” railway lines on Kashmir. The land, he declared, was being “snatched away” in the name of building townships while there had been no demand from Kashmiris for it. “It will destroy orchards and the land,” he said. “Horticulture is a big source of income for us and also part of our identity and heritage. We don’t want our orchards to go.”

At the same time, Kashmiris feel their Muslim identity coming more and more under attack. On Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the holy month of fasting, that feeling was compounded. Traditionally Kashmiri Muslims hold Eid prayers in a large open grassy expanse in Srinagar to mark the festival. But on March 31, the Indian government, concerned that the occasion could be turned into a platform to ignite large-scale anti-India demonstrations, banned the assembly of worshippers at Eid Gah. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s head priest, posted a video message on X denouncing the government for curbs on exercising religious rights. “It is an infringement upon our rights to prevent Kashmiri Muslims from congregating together,” Farooq said.

The despair and fear in the voices and faces of people I met there haunted me for days after leaving the place.

In the meantime, for the residents of Kadder, the cycle of suffering continues. The village bears the scars of violence on its pockmarked walls, splintered trees, and fearful residents’ faces. In January, my old colleague and I trudged through knee-deep snow to reach the orchard where slain fighters had made their last stand in December. Strips of gauzy white cloth daubed with mud covered the damaged tree branches, as if they were healing a wound. But the village isn’t healing. Despite ample resources, it doesn’t have a chance to enjoy its riches. The despair and fear in the voices and faces of people I met there haunted me for days after leaving the place. Children, young people and the middle aged, the elderly—no one seems to have been spared. The town’s pharmacist tells me that prescriptions for treating mental illness, particularly anxiety and psychosis, have skyrocketed. Doctors even prescribe the medications to patients with gastrointestinal and orthopedic complaints: anxiety, they believe, is the root cause.

Unsurprisingly, the suppression of political dissent has been met with violence from rebel fighters. When Kashmir was observing the Eid festival, a shooting erupted between Indian forces and rebels in a forested area of Kathua, in the Jammu province. Four policemen and two armed fighters were killed, and the shooting went on for many hours before petering out.

Last February, homes in Kadder were subjected again to night raids. Nearly 500 young men were taken away by government forces for “questioning,” a government euphemism for torture. So widespread were the raids that even pro-India Kashmiri politicians were horrified, terming them “collective punishment.” A few days before, rebel fighters had killed a former soldier and wounded his wife and niece in a shooting in Behibagh. They blamed the soldier, Manzoor Ahmad Wagay, for “anti-resistance activities”—in other words, his association with government forces against them, and the inference that he was responsible for the death of five rebels in Kadder in December.

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