By AUQIB JAVEED / Article14
Srinagar: Ineligible for a driving licence, the 15-year-old left home on his brother’s motorcycle, clearing many security checkpoints during a 3.5-km ride to a deserted corner of the Eidgah locality in the summer capital of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
It was 3 pm on 2 October 2021 when the teenager pulled up and waited till two men appeared and climbed onto the motorbike with him, according to the police. He dropped them at a marketplace called Karan Nagar, a hub of pharmacists and medical diagnostic centres clustered around Srinagar’s premier tertiary care centre, the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital.
At the bazaar, the two men walked up to a man called Majid Ahmad Gojri, 24, a self-styled “social-media influencer (here and here)”, whom militants suspected of being a police informer, a claim the family and police denied. One of them shot Gojri six times with a pistol. As Gojri collapsed, the two men climbed back on their teenage driver’s getaway motorcycle and fled.
“Later, the boy attended Gojri’s funeral prayers and returned home,” an investigating officer privy to the case told Article 14 on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Article 14 contacted the teenager’s family, but they only said the case was going on in court and they had “full faith in the judiciary”. They said the 15-year-old was “too young to kill anyone”.
“We don’t want to talk about it, the case is going on in the court and we have full faith in the judiciary,” said the boy’s father, whose identity we are withholding because the juvenile cannot be identified as per the law.
The Rise Of ‘Hybrid’ Militancy
In 55 civilian assassinations over the last 20 months in Kashmir, over 70% are now attributed by police to ‘hybrid militants’, of which one in five was a juvenile, according to data shared with Article 14 by the J&K police.
These hybrid militants lead double lives as school or college students or dropouts, shoot dead targets assigned to them, according to police by Pakistani handlers, and return to normal lives without families knowing.
Unlike the previous generation of militants who used social media and often attacked security forces, the new generation shuns social media. Their targets: civilians, minorities and unarmed police.
Security officials in Kashmir, determined to disrupt what they call the Valley’s “terror ecosystem”, have gained some success, with overall killings of civilians down by 42% over the last three years, according to police data.
Stone-throwing incidents dropped from 618 between January and July 2019 (there were none later because Kashmir spent the rest of the year under curfew) to 222 in 2020 and 76 in 2021, according to data from the union ministry of home affairs.
Unlike the 1990s, when militant groups were often dominated by foreign fighters, militancy over the last eight years became increasingly home-grown, with a starring role for social media, which became both a major vehicle for radicalisation and was used by young militants to create online personalities and recruit others to the cause.
“Social media gave Kashmiris new channels for their grievances and political aspirations,” wrote Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy, an ORF fellow, in a July 2021 research brief. “Anti-India narratives grew stronger, and mass radicalisation and alienation heightened.”
Local recruitment, for instance, went from 53 in 2014 to 218 in 2018 to 128 in 2021. But the social media persona of these militants, experts noted, also allowed security forces to track and capture or kill them.
The Desire For Anonymity
Police officials that Article 14 spoke to for this story said they regarded these secretive, new militants as more dangerous versions of their predecessors in the 1990s and the years preceding the ending of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional privileges in 2019.
On 5 August, 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted limited autonomy to the conflict-torn region, and converted it into a union territory directly government by New Delhi.
Since the abrogation of Article 370, 118 civilians, including 21 Hindus, among them five Kashmiri Pandits, have been killed in J&K, union minister of state for home Nityanand Rai told Parliament on 21 July 2022.
In 2022 alone, 24 persons were shot dead by militants, including seven policemen and eight civilians, six of them minorities.
The teenagers involved in the latest series of attacks, according to police, were trained online to use handguns and tasked to attack “soft targets”. Their cover was the mundane daily lives they lead, making it difficult to track them, said a J&K officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Families tend to know their children were militants or associated with insurgency after they are arrested or killed. “Sadly, some of our boys are becoming fresh fodder for Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir,” said a counterinsurgent officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Associated with hybrid militancy is another term that security forces have evolved: over ground workers or OGWs as they are known in official parlance. OGWs are not militants but, according to police, those who provide logistic support without attacking civilians or armed forces, unlike hybrid militants who do.
The new terminology has been criticised by human rights activists who argued it was being misused by security agencies. Anyone, they said, can now be branded an OGW or hybrid militant, in a region where police excesses are widely alleged (here, here and here), and the army has had special powers and immunity under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958, for 30 years.
This story was originally published in article-14.com . Read the full story here