A year after Kashmir saw harshest curfews post 1990’s, Majid Maqbool recounts a compelling journey through the curfewed streets of Srinagar.
My phone rings, around 3pm, on August 26, 2008.
“Your uncle has had a heart attack. Come to SKIMS (Shere-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences). He is in the intensive cardiac care unit,” a voice hurriedly informs in a worrying tone. My first thought: I have to reach SKIMS Soura as early as possible. Somehow. And I have to tell my parents calmly – and tell them that he is out of danger now although I know he isn’t. It’s a lie. But sometimes a lie is needed to convey a painful truth, especially when it is about your loved ones.
There is a problem: We can’t move out of our home. It is the third consecutive day of a strict curfew in the valley. After some successful pro-freedom marches called by separatists over the last few weeks, which saw hundreds of thousands of people coming on streets, the pro-freedom leadership had given another call – Lal Chowk Chalo on August 24. Hundreds of thousands from all over the valley were expected to march towards Lal Chowk. But the government came up with an antidote: A strict, indefinite curfew was clamped in entire Valley on August 24 with shoot at sight orders in Srinagar. A Delhi based Indian news channel broke the news to us. All local channels had been banned. The local newspapers couldn’t be published.
Moving out in a curfew means inviting trouble: the soldier on the street will shout at you first, then threaten with his long bamboo stick, and finally—If you still keep moving, unheeded to his repeated shouts—bullets will come your way. But then, we had to move out anyhow, and try to reach the hospital. When a loved one is struggling for his life in the hospital, you can’t stay at home. Despite the curfew.
I take out a white paper from an old, abandoned drawing book. EMERGENCY, I write in capital letters with a black sketch pen, and paste it on the front window of the car. This should help us with the troopers outside, I tell myself. Outside, as we slowly hesitantly drive, an unmistakable curfew-silence rules the air. It’s palpable. One can hear the faintest of the noises in the air. A curfew silences the noise of everyday life on the streets, and instead, amplifies the silence, manifold. Except for occasional army vehicles whizzing past us, the noise of our car is the only noise breaking the enforced-silence of the curfew. My parents accompanying me are worried—for me, and for the uncle who is battling for his life in the hospital. There is another cause of worry; it’s playing on our mind. We don’t have a curfew pass. And we know that can be fatal. We will be asked for it by the gun and bamboo wielding troopers patrolling the streets. We will have to face angry troopers, their shouts, threatening whistles, pointed guns, and may be bullets. Our added fear was that we didn’t possessed curfew pass.
A curfew-pass, my father tells me as we slowly drive on the deserted roads, functions like an identity card during curfew. If you don’t have a curfew pass, you simply can’t move out; you better stay home. But then we knew this, too: even without curfew passes we had to move out, for my uncle is in the hospital.
After driving a kilometre, at Sanat Nagar, bamboo wielding paramilitary troopers suddenly jump from the pavement to middle of the road to stop us, their bamboo sticks flung in air, their guns slung across their shoulders.
“kahan jana hai… curfew pass dikhav” ( Where are you going. Show us the curfew pass), shouts one of the trooper.
Hospital, I say. I thought they might let us go on hearing this word.
“Who’s in the hospital, where is the patient,” the trooper searches for the patient in the car. There is none.
“The patient is in the hospital. My uncle,” I tell them.
“Where is your curfew pass,” he again asks the question we dread the most.
“We don’t have it,” I say the truth, “We have an emergency.
“we will get it from the police station down the road. Allow us to reach there.”
Despite my explanations, the troopers are unrelenting, unmoved to our repeated pleas.
“Yeh kis nay izazat diya (who allowed you to paste this)”, says one of the soldier, pointing to the EMERGENCY sticker on the front window of the car.
We have an emergency, I explain, “That’s what we’ve written”.
“How did you write it yourself? Who gave you the permission?” his tone acquiring threatening overtones.
I keep quiet, watching his anger rise. Though, at that moment—for not allowing us to move ahead despite our explanations—I also feel my anger surge. But then, my anger was pointless: I couldn’t afford to express it. Unlike me the trooper besides his anger had the gun. I didn’t even have a curfew pass!
Without saying anything the trooper turns his back towards our vehicle – the barricade intact, troopers unmoved. We wait.
Go back, he orders. And then he looks the other way as if we were not there. But we stay. We can’t go back. We have to reach the hospital. My uncle’s life is in danger.
My mother pleads now, then my father—in front of the trooper who are refusing to listen. I don’t like it. I don’t want them to plead before them. “Have mercy, our patient is seriously ill in the hospital,” my mother pleads, then my father. I keep quiet; I am told to be quiet. After repeated pleas of my parents, one of the troopers finally relents.
“Let them go,” he tells other troopers. “ But don’t come back from this side”, he tells us. We move on, thankful to the momentary sympathy of a trooper on a curfewed day.
Two kilometres ahead we are stopped again.
Same questions, same answers. And the same unconcerned, unmoved men in uniform. In the middle of this uncertain situation, a sympathetic Kashmir policeman appears from nowhere on the scene. And he listens.
Somehow prevailing on the troopers, he lets us move ahead. The troopers didn’t like his intervention.
The policeman tells us that he is not sure if they (troopers) will allow us to go beyond Rambagh. But you can try, he says. We drive on; we have no other choice.
We stop near Barzulla to try and get a curfew pass from the police station. Inside, three police officers, sitting in a dimly lit room with old chairs and wooden tables, are attending tense calls from policemen out on the streets. In between they also answer frequent calls from their higher-ups.
We wait for them to notice us. They are not authorized to give us a curfew pass, a police officer informs us. Only Deputy Commissioner’s office can issue it, he says. That is a long distance away from here, we think, and on the way there are far too many troopers, far too many barricades. To be on the safer side, we request them to give us some authority slip with a police station stamp. They write something on a piece of paper, put a seal, and hand it over to us. But they are not sure if it will help us with the troopers outside; neither are we. You can take it but it doesn’t work with the troopers down the road, a policeman says frankly. One police officer rues the fact that paramilitary personnel on the roads are not even listening to them, although they should, he says.
They are supposed to follow and work under our rules, he says. But you see in Kashmir things are different, he says in a helpless tone. Yesterday I had an argument with the CRPF officer on the use of force by his men in Rambagh, he informs. “The area comes under our jurisdiction but they are terrorising and beating up people at will,” he says as we come out of the police station on the deserted road.
“Don’t worry, we have something now, this should help us”, my father tells me while we drive away from the police station. Near the Rambagh bridge, as the policeman had warned, we are stopped. The same questions follow. And as we feared, they dismiss the police station slip we were carrying. Nearby, an officer looks on disdainfully from a distance. One of the paramilitary man snatches the police slip from us, and walks up to the officer. To our surprise, without moving from his position and after closely scrutinizing the slip, the officer tells his men to let us go. But not before shouting the same warning: “don’t come back from this side.”
Yes sir, I say, and we drive on. Momentarily relieved.
Finally, we reach the Deputy Commissioner’s office to get that life saving piece of paper: curfew pass! After waiting anxiously in a long queue of anxious people, we get it—a white paper; an official curfew pass. “VALID FOR CURFEW PERIOD,” is printed on it in black capital letters. The possession of the curfew pass, that time, felt as if a life saving drug was handed over to us.
We drive on from the DC office towards SKIMS. We are stopped at many places, asked for the curfew pass, and we confidently wave it from the window of the car. From place to place on the road, after the curfew pass is scrutinized closely by the troopers, we are signalled to move ahead.
Near Eidgah we had to again stop our vehicle. Something has happened down the road. There is tension in the air. Some anxious noises emanate from nearby houses. The troopers carrying bamboo sticks in their hands are angry, all worked up, and shouting. A little ahead, we see a load carrier with its driver and a boy surrounded by troopers. They are shouting at the skinny driver; he is showing them some paper. He pleads them to let him go. The troopers ask him to come out of the load carrier. Hesitantly, he comes out. And they start beating him, all together, with their long bamboos. We watch this savage beating from inside our car. Alternately, every soldier hits one blow, on his legs, without respite. He winces in pain, and keeps pleading, waving that piece of paper. And every time a blow comes down on his legs, he bends a little, and tries to receive the blows on his hands. But the blows still come down on his legs. I could hear the sound of every blow – that sound when the wood hits the human flesh and bone- as it came down on the frail legs of this middle aged man. He kept pleading, and waving them that piece of paper. The blows kept coming.
The young boy, apparently his son, stood still watching this spectacle. He was silent, shocked, terrified. But he did not cry. Tears formed in his eyes did not trickle down. He kept staring at the troopers who were ruthlessly beating his father. How does it feel like seeing your father getting beaten in front of you? And how does it feel like when you can’t do anything about it? I asked myself.
Safe from a distance, perhaps, I could only imagine how it feels like. But the boy knows it. He went through it. In utter disbelief and shock the boy kept looking at the humiliated, bruised figure his father had become. Suddenly a cry rang out, probably from a woman watching the beating from the window of her house nearby. The troopers get angryand hurled abuses in the direction of that house.
“I will come to your home and break your bones if you don’t keep quiet,” threatened one of the troopers, raising his bamboo stick towards that window. The woman immediately disappears from the window. There was silence again. After the beating, and after some abuses, when the load carrier driver was finally let off, he tried to run to his vehicle but he could only limp. He was struggling to start his load carrier. The terrified boy came out of the driver’s seat to help his father. The troopers get angry again and shouted at the boy, asking them to run away from there. This time the boy shouted back; there was a hint of revengeful anger in his voice: “Don’t you see he can’t start the vehicle”. Luckily his father was quickly able to start the load carrier. And the boy, shocked out of his innocence, kept looking at his father, who was silent. And he did not look at his son. They just drove away from there.
Now it was our turn.
The troopers came to us and demanded the curfew pass. I had kept it ready in my hand, unfolded. I hand it over to them, all the while fearing that they might ask us to come out of the vehicle now. But they closely scrutinized the curfew pass, one by one, and looked at us with suspicion. And then we were let off.
Finally, after a long drive – it seemed a long, long drive- we reached SKIMS. Ahead of my parents, I ran, and rushed to the intensive cardiac care unit where my uncle, amidst a mesh of wires and life saving machines attached to his body, lay pale and weak on a bed. With an oxygen mask on his face, a few doctors were constantly monitoring his condition. My mother, in tears now, kept her hand on his forehead; my father held his feeble hand. I asked a doctor about his condition. “Is he out of danger?” He smiled reassuringly, and said: “You should thank God, your uncle is lucky to have reached hospital in time. Many such patients died on their way to hospital. Because of the strict curfew they couldn’t make it to the hospital on time.”
I thanked the doctors, sat near my uncle, and looking at the crests and troughs on the ECG monitor, I said a silent prayer.
