Although there are only 200 active militants, most of them concentrated in south Kashmir, security agencies acknowledge that for the last one year, they are confronting a new face of militancy that has an appearance of being benign but poses a more dangerous challenge than it was earlier–the home grown one. Army finds itself in a precarious situation with constant criticism over human rights violations. The situation has come to a stage where both a counter-insurgency operation and a law and order scene have narrowed down. Due to a major plug in infiltration, militancy in Kashmir is mostly home grown now. The foreign mercenaries are mostly in north Kashmir. But what worries the security forces more is the “unarmed militant” and his supporters in Kashmir. An armed militant is a visible and known threat and we know how to fight him, but an unarmed militant is camouflaged in public. We don’t know who he is and what threat he and his supporters can pose. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made repeated attempts to engage the Kashmiris, including the Hurriyat leaders like Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Maulana Abbas Ansari. Vajpayee also famously arrived at a modus vivendi with Pakistan and initiated a process that nearly resulted in a Kashmir settlement by 2007. And all this was being done even while the security forces steadily wore down the militant challenge. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came up with the creative idea of convening a roundtable in 2006 which would bring together leaders of all parties to discuss the Kashmir issue. Three roundtables were held, and several working groups sought to offer recommendations on dealing with specific issues, including one on Centre-State relations which took up the issue of autonomy. The present generation is the byproduct of turbulent ’90s and has seen violence in abundance so their reaction to any situation which calls for violent action becomes natural for them. This is a dangerous trend which has to be kept under a close watch in coming days otherwise all that big talk of normalising Kashmir will turn into naught.
