Once a counter-insurgency base, Hajin now turning pro-militant

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Hajin, October 1

A sluggish town in north Kashmir which once housed the base of a counter-insurgency militia which hunted militants and their support network is undergoing a change of heart as it begins sympathising with the militant cause.

The change, its several residents said, came in pauses.

Hajin, surrounded by harvested rice fields, is at the crossroads of its own existence. There are no policemen on its roads and no paramilitary personnel patrol its neighbourhood.

“They only come out in huge convoys in bullet-proof vehicles and that leads to stone-throwing protests,” said Riyaz Ahmad, a tea vendor in Hajin town. “There was a time when this town would be bustling till late evening, but now every shop shuts at dusk. There is fear everywhere,” he said.

For years, Hajin had remained the quiet backwater of the Kashmir valley. In the mid-1990s, the township evoked fear as it housed the base of a brute counter-insurgency militia Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, which operated outside the ambit of law.

Less than 100 metres from the fortified residence of the now disbanded Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon’s slain commander Kuka Parray, a former folk singer who led a murderous campaign, a wounded Mohammad Afzal attends to a slow trickle of visitors at his home in Parray Mohalla.

Afzal, a carpet weaver, and his family had scuffled with militants on Wednesday evening who had come to kill his brother Mohammad Rameez, a BSF constable who was at home on leave.

“He was talking on the phone when militants came to him and asked for his identity card, which he refused to show. They took away his phone and left. They returned after 15 minutes, we tried to resist but they stabbed us with knives,” Afzal told The Tribune.

By the time the militants left, Afzal, his another brother, his father and his aunt were grievously wounded with knives by militants. Afzal’s constable brother was dead. Three bullets had pierced his head, stomach and leg.

The audacity with which the militants moved around with ease in Parray Mohalla is the evidence of how much has changed in Hajin. In the neighbourhood that once was the base within the base of Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, residents now talk about militants with reverence.

“The militant gun is not bound by any law but they will never hurt any innocent,” a young man, who refused to give his name, said at his shop at Parray Mohalla. A police constable who served five years in the area said many young people in the town now “sympathise with and support” the militants because they want to “shed the baggage of the past”.

The moment of change in Hajin first came during the 2008 protests. Even though the strong-arm crowd control measures of the police contained the protests, they agonised large sections of the population. “We faced a lot of oppression. The police made no distinction between men and women, young and old,” the shopkeeper in Parray Mohalla said.

By 2010, Hajin and its adjoining towns had a zero footfall of militants. “It is where we became a little off guard,” a senior police official said. In 2015, a group of foreign militants made their first entry to the township and managed to set their base.

The counter-insurgency operations to neutralise the militants faced resentment as locals took to stone-throwing, a repeat of a phenomena that was born in faraway districts of south Kashmir. When the unrest swept the Kashmir valley last year, Hajin had completed its transition.

For the first time in the last two decades, its residents were militants in militant ranks. Abid Hamid Mir, a former student of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, and Nasrullah, became militants in May this year. “He would often say that he would pick up a gun and he could not bear the oppression, but thought he was a kid,” Abid’s mother Jawahira said. In August, Abid was the first Hajin militant to die in two decades.

Haji Dar, a mid-aged imam who had come to condole the death of the BSF constable, said the militant commander Burhan Wani’s killing “changed everything”. “It built the support for militants,” he said. Another man interjected, “this is a baand gaam (folk singers’ village), it changes mood with the changing wind”.

Change began in 2008

• In the mid-1990s, the township in north Kashmir evoked fear as it housed the base of a brute counter-insurgency militia Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, which operated outside the ambit of law
• The moment of change in Hajin first came during the 2008 protests. Even though the strong-arm crowd control measures of the police contained the protests, they agonised large sections of the population