Being a policeman in J&K is one of India's most dangerous jobs. Here's why

An uneasy relation

Vilified by the very citizens they protect for embarking on one anti-militancy operation after the next, hated for the role they play in protests that often turn violent, the police force is dogged with suspicion in India's most violent state.

This fact became even more evident last month when six policemen, including a station house officer, were brutally killed and dismembered by militants in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district.

Fewer people attended their funeral as against the thousands of people who attended the jinaza of Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Bashir Lashkari a fortnight later. Laskhari had been charged for killing the personnel.

And despite being largely from the state itself, the force is even thought to be pro-Centre and anti-Kashmiri.

No where was this most visible than the recent incident in Ganderbal district which highlighted just how reviled the force is - that even when they were at the receiving end of senseless violence, the people's sympathies lay elsewhere.

What happened in Ganderbal on the intervening night of 21-22 July and the people's reaction to it is symptomatic of a larger problem, but it appears to have touched a raw nerve in the Valley.

The incident

Confrontations between the J&K Police and the Army are rare, but on 21 July, violence erupted between the two forces when 30 Army personnel in civilian clothes were stopped by policemen headed by an official at naka that was regulating traffic on the Amarnath yatra route.

The 30 soldiers of the 24 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) started beating the policemen without showing their identities. In the scuffle, assistant sub-inspector Ghulam Rasool was injured.

Later, the personnel from 24 RR’s Gund and Surfraw camps barged into the police station and thrashed the police personnel present, damaged official records and some belongings of the police. Eight personnel were injured, two of them seriously.

The police says it had stopped the vehicles as they had been travelling past the “cut-off time” for the pilgrims. Such rules are being followed even more strictly after the killing of seven Amarnath yatris at Botengoo in South Kashmir on 10 July.

“A group of 30 personnel of 24 RR travelling in four different vehicles escaped from the naka point established by police station Sonamarg at Pony Stand. The said vehicles were carrying the Army personnel who were coming back from yatra. Due to the already issued cut off timing and present circumstances, it was not feasible to allow yatris after the cut-off time (sic),” a police statement said.

A troubling state of affairs

Though the police has registered cases against the Army personnel, the incident has transcended its immediate circumstances and taken on a troubling symbolic dimension.

The police sees it as yet another instance of being identified by the central forces with the antagonistic local population except when they are fighting the militancy and battling local protests.

J&K Police has been at the forefront of the anti-militancy operations in the state, and has lost over 3,000 personnel over the past 30 years.

This is why when pictures of the injured policemen and the ransacked police station were splashed across social media and WhatsApp groups, people who generally blame the force for the human rights excesses expressed amusement.

Some of them were also sarcastic. “They don’t see how loyal you are to the king or queen. They don’t care what ideology you wear on your khaki sleeve. They give a damn. For them, you too are Kashmiris and therefore the other. Eight policemen including an ASI injured with head injuries after Indian soldiers beat them up in Gund Ganderbal. No revenge statements. No sympathies,” wrote political analyst Gowhar Geelani on a WhatsApp group, referring to the revenge statements issued by some senior police officers following the killing of six police men by militants.

“The police in Kashmir can be heroes as long as they keep killing militants and unarmed local protesters”.

Even moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq rubbed it in: "Sad to hear about the severe beating of Kashmiri policemen by Army by virtue of being Kashmiri. Even those who aid state oppression not spared!”.

A bitter force

The incident has also upset policemen, although they have stopped short of airing their opinion on social media.

“In closed WhatsApp groups, many officers have expressed their outrage and hurt over what happened at Ganderbal,” said a police officer. “Officers feel they are being distrusted and treated as the other despite all the sacrifices and the record in fighting militancy”.

In 2015, when J&K police was branded as anti-national for lathi-charging non-Kashmiri students at Srinagar’s National Institute of Technology, some policemen expressed their bitterness publicly: "Many of my colleagues have been asking and many more must be thinking 'whose war are we fighting?',” wrote DSP Feroz Yehya on Facebook. “All I can tell them is that this is just another phase and will pass. Further, J&K Police doesn't need any certificate"

He further wrote: "Police action is not doubted when a student from any other institute is booked for breaking law, but there's controversy while we are dealing with students of a particular institute!".

Simmering resentment

The ambivalence towards Kashmir police, despite their critical role in the security of the state may just potentially trigger a major crisis in the state.

In 1993, resentment in police ranks boiled over when the Army killed a police constable Riyaz Ahmad, triggering a month-long rebellion. Later, the Army launched an assault on the Police Control Room Srinagar and disarmed 1,500 mutinous policemen.

Though the situation has come a long way since and J&K Police has taken its position at the vanguard of the anti-militancy fight, a degree of institutional ambivalence about the force has lingered.

An RTI in 2012 found that even the defence ministry would not trust J&K Police investigation into the human rights violations against Army. In the 19 out of the 24 cases against Army personnel sent until then by the J&K government for sanction for prosecution, the defence ministry had found the police investigation too shoddy to merit the sanction. What is more, in some cases, the defence ministry had even suspected foul play by the police.

The cases against the army personnel involved rape, death in custody and fake encounters.

In one such case against Major Raghwan of 5 Kumaon Regiment, accused of killing a civilian in custody on 15 June 15 2000, the defence ministry had charged the police for recording “doctored statements of the witnesses” to falsely implicate the officer. “Post-mortem report of the dead body reflected no injuries except a scratch on the right wrist,” argued the ministry in a reply to an RTI as its reason for denying the sanction.

A constant refrain in J&K Police ranks is that even though they are doing the toughest job in the country, they are not sufficiently rewarded for it. Making it more difficult for them is that their job, they think, enjoys little social respectability. A large section of there own people are hostile towards the force.

“It is tough being a policeman in J&K. You do the most dangerous job for your country. Your are at war with your own people, who hate you in return,” said a police officer. “We draw our moral strength and the meaning from the thought that we are fighting for the larger cause of our nation. But the incidents like NIT and the Ganderbal severely test this belief”.