Narrating Fear,Tracing Landscape: Memory and Militancy ka Daur in Doda,Jammu and Kashmir

Introduction

The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has been a theatre of conflict for almost three decades now. The conflict emerged as an armed movement for self-determination in the late 1980s and led to clashes between Kashmiri separatists and the Indian government. Popularly known as Azadi movement, it was initially limited to the Kashmir valley; however, soon, Kashmiri sympathisers who were living across the Pir Panjal in the hill districts of Jammu division also started taking part in the movement. There are countable studies that have tried to make sense of the implications of the azadi movement and counterinsurgency operations that followed. The works include understanding the idea of medical humanitarianism in conflict zones (Varma, 2012), issues of impunity, state power and vernacularisation of human right discourse (Duschinski, 2009) and militarisation and its normalisation on borders (Bhan, 2014). Datta (2016) has studied Pandits in the camps of Jammu and Delhi. However, Doda has not received attention in this regard to the best of my knowledge. In Doda, this period (early 1990s) is popularly remembered as the beginning of militancy ka daur. Largely peaceful before this period, Doda was in fact the first district to be affected by violent Kashmiri militant movement in Jammu division (Puri, 2008). Unlike the Kashmir valley, which became predominantly Muslim after the exodus of the Pandits, Doda remained a religiously plural society. ¹ Throughout Hindus and Muslims continued to live as neighbours in both rural and urban areas. Living in a religiously plural society has shaped people’s experiences and memory of the militancy ka daur, (from early 1990s to 2002) in a complex manner, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Mahajan, 2017). Remembered as a momentous period, militancy ka daur affected society in such an intense manner ‘that when people measured time henceforth, they often spoke of life before or after the period’ (Aggarwal, 2004). Militancy ka daur has become a reference point and the life before and after this event was signified with expressions—militancy se pehle (before the militancy) and militancy ke baad (after the militancy). These memories included discourses of the good old days as well as bad old days, and the same person narrated them. Almost everyone, no matter how sad their recollections, recounted that life in the past was slower, more loving, more interpersonally harmonious than the present.

During my fieldwork in Doda, ² I listened to people telling their memories almost every day. Interestingly, at the beginning of my fieldwork I did not intend to collect memories of the past. In fact, I was not even prepared. My interest was rather to document observed Hindu–Muslim relations in a conflict zone and to map the processes through which these communities negotiated with everyday violence. However, as my fieldwork progressed, I grasped that respondents irrespective of their religious affiliation explained transformation in intercommunity relations by bringing into discussion the past and its comparison with the present. A simple query vis-à-vis the ‘quality of social relations’ (Srinivas, 1976) often led to a comparison of ‘these times’ (yeh zamana) and ‘those times’ (woh zamana) and ‘these’ people’ (yeh log) and ‘those people’ (woh log). A staple response would reverberate, ‘leave, what shall we say, these and those times are poles apart’ (lit. chodo ji, kya bole, iss zamane mein aur uss zamane mein tou zamin asmaan ka farq hai). People’s eye expressions, tonal quality of voice and posture of bodies completely changed as they talked about the ‘past’. There were multiple narratives of past and these pasts had a common nucleus—militancy ka daur—which derived the narrative. To recount militancy ka daur, people invoked the notion of fear (dehshat) through raised eyebrows and stiff bodies. They detailed how fear interfered with local rhythm of life––of going to the fields, tending flocks of sheep and goat, collecting firewood from jungle, washing clothes on the banks of a nallah, bringing fodder for cattle and so on. The pathways that people once treaded everyday uninterrupted turned unfamiliar to them. Percolation of fear with space completely altered the way ordinary people imagined and related to their landscape––neighbourhoods, markets, fields, summer pastures, forests, routes to other habitations and most importantly, homes. Landscape, in fact, became a tool for both state and non-state actors to assert their power upon the people. Power discourse and practices surrounding the landscape were performed in a manner that ‘legitimatised insecurity’ (Gold & Revill, 2003, p. 41) for locals.

In this paper, I discuss the role of fear in contouring collective memories of the people by examining the shifting relations of the locals with their landscape in the shadow of an armed conflict. In doing so, I show how the violence perpetrated by both non-state and state actors to seek control and assert power transformed the local landscape. And, how did the locals negotiate with shifting landscapes embedded with fear and memories of violence.

Memories of Violence and Landscape of Fear

Unquestionably, as a social phenomenon, memory is the engine and chassis of all narrative (Raychaudhury, 2004). Questions wake up memory from its deepest slumber and voice becomes its carriage. When memory flows in the form of a narrative, it allows us to explore encultured meanings of everyday, landscape and violence. Memory touches both ordinary and extraordinary features of life and freely coalesces in time and space. Rendition of memory is a subjective process, a performance. Rather than focusing on what has exactly happened in the past, memory creates meaning. Through this meaning-making narrators attempt to reconcile with their experiences of the past and present (Portelli, 1991). In the context of violence, it is argued that memory gets entrenched not only in people’s bodies and minds, but also the landscapes they dwell in (Schramm, 2011). Events remain tied to the landscapes where they act out. In this sense, landscapes are not merely ‘physical containers’ but ‘containers of lived experience and memories’ and have a ‘distinct potency in enabling us to situate our acts of remembering’ (Rian˜o-Alcalá, 2000, pp. 14–17). Landscape, here can be understood as the outcome of material practices; the product of human activity traced across and marked out in and on the land (Ingold, 1993). Landscape relates to ‘daily engagement with the world, producing ideas of place, belonging and identity generated through the activities of living in and on the land’ (Gold & Revill, 2003, p. 35). In times of armed conflict, the landscape can become a tool to create external circumstances of terror and violence to generate fear. Although fear remains in the mind but it is controlled by the external state of affairs (Tuan, 2013, p. 6).

Fear is a personal experience. Like pain, it can be felt only by those who experience it. Others might barely feel it or understand its intensity. Fear can move beyond subjective personal experience and penetrate the social memory (Green, 1994). Fear is a mean for both the state and non-state actors to create a landscape of power and regulate people’s everyday lives, particularly in conditions of terror and violence (Rian˜o-Alcalá, 2008a). However, when terror and violence becomes extremely unpredictable and there seems no escape from it, ‘the very inescapability renders fear the backdrop of daily life’ (Pearlman, 2016, p. 28). Intrastate violence results into habituation to fear. Fear can pervade people’s lives through lived experiences and serve to remind them of events and conflicts that have ended (Gordillo, 2009). In her brilliant study, Gordillo (2009) found that people looked at the ‘local ruins of distant history of which they had no direct experience’, yet these ruins resulted into the creation of a spatiality of fear in the rural people (p. 344). This serves to show that conflict and its fear leaves its trace into the landscape in the form of physical remains and into the mind in the form of memory. Thus, fear can be carried on by the people, by giving it a place in memory.

In Doda, similar routinisation of fear had taken place. Fear, for locals, became a living phenomenon and a collective experience. Fear was everywhere and shared. With its repetitiveness and familiarity, people in Doda slowly got socialised in fear and terror. They had to learn to accommodate themselves to its presence through silence, forestalling and avoidance of ‘dangerous areas’. They had to negotiate with multiple checkpoints and its fear kept them away from these locations. Incidences of violence at particular places and times led people to use memory as a ‘bridging practice’ which allowed them to maintain local implicit knowledge. Such knowledge informed the villagers on ‘safe circulation routes and the ways of operating while walking or travelling’ (Rian˜o-Alcalá, 2008b, p. 299). In her path-breaking work, Skidmore (2003) noted that people did not talk about fear. It was a strategy they had devised that enabled them not to think about fear. Not thinking about fear is crucial to successful functioning on an everyday basis. In Doda, unless asked, locals never recounted their fear stories and testimonies. Fear, in many ways, had sublimated into their bodies and minds and the landscape around. An empathetic question was enough to melt it into a narrative.

Militancy did not begin overnight. It did not catch the people as unaware as popular discourse might suggest. It was in the public domain that slowly some Muslim boys were slipping across the border. On return, they were being welcomed back by their families, friends and people in general. There was of sense euphoria for local boys and how they are going to get locals azadi. However, their Hindu neighbours remained ambivalent towards the happenings. Hindus had not anticipated the outcome of this chain of events, but some Muslims clearly saw these events as steps towards an imminent azadi. Did the return of the boys coincided with the advent of militancy? No, because militancy began when they decided to leave for the training across the border. These boys were trained in various camps widely spread in Pakistan-administered Kashmir across the border. When mujahids, as these boys were locally known, returned they built extensive underground and above-ground networks. They lived in undetectable hideouts far away from their homes. Being armed, militants enjoyed supremacy and virtually controlled the area. They announced their homecoming by blasting bombs, setting government-owned buildings on fire and killing prominent politicians. These acts gave militants a larger-than-life image and let militants catch the imagination of the locals. Their actions disparaged the credibility of the state in the eyes of the common people and ignited the idea of azadi amongst the common people. ³ With the burning down of buildings, state employees stopped attending offices, especially in rural areas, obliquely partaking in the project of azadi. This ceremonial demolition, which was carried out in the near absence of the state’s security apparatus, left behind residues of violence. These memorised residues transformed people’s relation with their landscape substantially. Before I dig into the layers of these cartographies deeply etched in the minds of people, let me describe how people looked at these transformations. In the following sections of this paper, I will describe in detail how landscape in Doda was altered by the experience of conflict and how it affected people’s lives. For descriptive reasons, I have arranged these transformations into two sections. These changes were brought about first by militants and then followed by the armed forces.

Altering Place, Erasing State ⁴

In the early 1990s, when militants arrived in Bhagwah, there were only a few state-owned buildings in the village. They, along with their sympathisers, burnt down nearly all these structures including buildings of the high school, panchayat ghar and the horticulture office. A section of Muslim villagers, it is believed, actively participated in carrying out these acts. While Hindus unequivocally held this view, the local Muslims denied participating in these exercises. Faqir Chand, an elderly Hindu Rajput, narrated the following scene to me. He was of the view that local Muslims helped militants by erasing every last symbol of the state:

It was dark when a mob of more than two hundred Muslims set fire to the horticulture office building. I cannot recall the exact date but it was in the early 1990s. I cannot forget that scene. I have seen it with my own eyes. I was standing near the main door of my house when they did it. Most of the people were from Chetroo and Khirote. They burnt the panchayat office, too. They did not even spare the High School building. That night they left only after burning all the government buildings.

However, the mob neither harmed any building belonging to the local Hindus nor did they burn the co-operative food store, he noted. With a wink, he added, ‘After all, they also need food to survive’. However, he did not deliberate on why they did not set ablaze Hindu houses. In the summer of 2008, I visited, on foot, Lal Draman, a beautiful meadow, a few miles away from Bhagwah. While roaming around I saw the charred foundations of a building. On questioning, I learnt that the structure was a tourist lodge and the militants burnt it in the early 1990s. Determined to erase symbols of Indian ‘occupation’, militants erased whatever little infrastructure was built by the state in these remote areas. These signs of violence in the local geography serve as reminders of the times of militancy. These sites also doubled as symbols of glorification of resistance which was offered by the militants.

Similarly, every new bomb that exploded not only altered the local geography but also gave birth to new cartographies predicated on the anticipation of violence. Every act of violence, thus, renewed the possibility of more violence (Jeganathan, 2000). Bombs, like people, were given names. A bomb is named after its target: military installation, government offices, hotels or politicians. Bomb blasts occurred at the Kishtwar and Doda bus stands, Doda district hospital, two explosions at the Industrial Training Institute and the Sub-Divisional Magistrate’s office in Kishtwar. Some of the books about this area have documented bomb blasts in the area. The first crude bomb in Bhaderwah, took place in April 1989 as a reaction to the death of Shabir Shah’s ⁵ father Ghulam Mohammad Shah, in police custody (Sinha, 2000). In this bomb blast, Firdous Syed Baba ⁶ set afire a bridge in Bhaderwah, and exploded a government Jeep. ⁷ Luv Puri in his book, Militancy in Jammu and Kashmir: The Uncovered Face, notes that the first blast in Doda took place in August 1991. This bomb exploded at the district headquarters and took the locals as well as the administration by surprise. The primary aim was not to damage the local infrastructure but was a symbolic demonstration of the presence of militants. ⁸ In fact, some of these explosives were locally made. Aditya Sinha, through Baba’s narrative, confirmed that the explosives used to prepare the bomb were obtained locally. Contrary to the popular belief, they were not imported from Pakistan. The following narrative from Aditya Sinha’s book (2000, p. 26) substantiates this:

The blast was easy enough. Firdous’ family was in the construction business, and used gelatine explosives to clear spaces while laying new roads or foundations. Firdous merely hinted a construction site and stole some gelatine. Placing it in the jeep or dousing the bridge with kerosene, also posed no problem, since in those days the government was not highly security-conscious. Firdous got away with it.

The initial incidences of violence caught the government off guard. They did not even acknowledge the fact that there were deep ideological reasons behind these strikes. While the systematic violence was slowly seeping into the everyday lives of inhabitants of the district, the indolent local administration ignored these as isolated incidences. As Aditya Sinha writes, ‘Violence was new to Doda and the authorities dismissed these incidents as the mischief of local boys’ (2000, p. 26). These initial bombings started a chain reaction. Very soon militants started burning deserted bridges, blowing empty jeeps, throwing grenades, firing rounds of bullets and widespread arson. The spectacle of the main towns included week-long protests, demonstrations and stone-pelting. Some politicians such as Satish Bhandari, Subhash Sen and Santosh Thakur, ⁹ belonging to the Hindu community were killed in Doda. These killings left a deep mark on the psyche of the minority community. The killings were condemned by both the communities.

Due to the inefficiency of the administration, militant groups established themselves in all the main towns of the district. This fact can be corroborated with an observation that all the strike/bandh calls were successful. This attracted a lot of media attention, regionally as well as nationally. In fact, the marches which were organised during these bandhs attracted such a huge gathering that they looked carnivalesque.

In later stages of militancy, militants burnt Hindu places of worship in the same way that they burnt the state apparatus. This particular act strengthened the idea of the transformed character of the militancy which was repeatedly described as secular in its earlier avatar by a number of commentators. Hindus read the burning of their places of worship as a blatant attack on their way of life. These activities on the part of the militants paved the way for the further curtailment of the religious freedom of the Hindus. In the winter of 2008, I met a middle-aged woman who narrated to me the burning of the Naga Temple in Gadi. According to her, these militants were local and were killed within a few days of the event. She attributed the instant death to divine intervention.

The above description shows how militants in Doda took hold of the landscape and filled it with dread and terror. Violence became an everyday feature of people’s lives. People, especially Hindus feared the militants. The demolitions, arson and bombings by the militants were aimed at obliteration of the symbols of the Indian state in the region. These incidents of violence resulted into ‘breaks in the texture of landscape that was noticeable by way of contrast with their surroundings’ (ibid., p. 25). Local people attempted to remove these bombings and attacks from their memories but the residues (in the form of burnt buildings and blasted places) left in the landscape were a constant reminder that served to instil fear in the people.

State Response: Camps, Checkpoints and Bunkers

This section maps out the details of various changes that accompanied the belated influx of the armed forces in Doda. In order to reclaim territory, the Indian state resorted to armed forces in large proportions. It was not an easy job for the troops to locate militant locations, as they had no prior familiarity with the place. Routine search operations were launched to hunt down militants. Crackdowns in civilian areas were also a regular activity. Beginning in 1993, various military and paramilitary units were deployed in rural areas of Doda, one after the other. These included the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Rashtriya Rifles (RR). ¹⁰ All these paramilitary forces work along with special counter-terrorism task forces of the state police such as the Special Task Force and the Special Operations Group that operate in a semi-secret capacity outside of the law (Duschinski, 2009).

When they came, they modified the local landscape by erecting camps, bunkers and checkpoints. They took control of strategic locations from where they could keep an eye on the surroundings and control civilian movement. They occupied both government as well as private land and properties. Soon, the paramilitary forces became the visible face of the state and started roaming around the place. As Duschinski (p. 691) notes in a similar vein in the context of the Kashmir valley:

The landscape of Kashmir Valley is mapped by official and unofficial stations of state violence: cantonments, barracks, joint interrogation centers, lock ups and detention facilities.

Structures such as camps, bunkers and checkpoints completely changed the ways in which people related to their landscapes. These structures were built at strategic locations, either at the boundaries of a habitation, from where people entered or exited or at places where people assembled. Their deliberately conspicuous position interfered with the cognitive mapping of inhabitants as well as passers-by. These structures served as symbols of military power. Just like a panopticon in which the inmates cannot know when they are being watched, the villagers also could not figure out whether they were being scrutinised or not, thus making villagers act as though they were being watched at all times. These structures, thus, in several ways, effectively controlled their behaviour continuously.

The most visible signs which dotted the landscape in Doda were the military camps. These camps doubled as interrogation centres, where people were cross-examined on the slightest pretext of suspicion. The processes of questioning were torturous, physically as well as mentally. These camps were also sites where free labour was extracted from the locals. They were asked to collect firewood, to pick and carry daily supplies and groceries from the bus stand to the camp and to clean and maintain the camp. Sometimes, they also had to offer their home-grown roosters to them. Locals were asked to deposit their identity card or ID card at the entrance and only got it back while leaving in the evening, after the work assigned to them was done. As dreaded torture centres, the army camps at Bhagwah are marked indelibly into the local collective memory. Encircled by bunkers, the camp at Bhagwah housed RR officers and their subordinates. It was spread on several acres of land which housed a government High School building and a Block Development office. It also included a piece of commandeered land and an apple orchard owned by a local Rajput family. The owners of the orchard were very unhappy with the situation that the army had occupied their land without their permission. While soldiers were housed in dormitories, the officers had rooms to themselves. One could observe round-the-clock activity in the camp, soldiers leisurely chatting, bathing and washing clothes, eating, gossiping, resting and resuming duties.

A bunker, on the other hand, is a defensive structure, sandbagged and festooned with barbed wire. They are built by armed forces for protection from armed attacks. There were two kinds of bunkers in and around Bhagwah. The first type of bunker encircled the army camp and the second type dotted strategically located landmarks. These bunkers were spaces from where Indian soldiers monitored their surroundings and watched the movements of the common people. These bunkers sheltered the soldiers when firing was underway and symbolised the presence of the state in a highly militarised zone where, as per one media report, for every seven individuals a soldier was deputed! Most of the bunkers looked like temporary structures but even after these bunkers were erased from the landscape; it was not easy to erase them from people’s minds. They were permanently etched in the memory of the people. In 2011, a bunker which was located outside the Doda city district hospital was dismantled. However, as it was located at convenient location, even after its erasure the place was still referred as ‘near the bunker’ (bunker ke paas). Places continued to elicit remembering and give meaning to routine life; they also continue to exist as remembered and symbolic places even when the physical landmarks have disappeared (Rian˜o-Alcalá, 2000, p. 17). Thus, having etched into the cerebral cartography of fear, these bunkers retained their relevance in everyday conversation of the people. They turned into landmarks and if two locals had to meet at a common place, they would ask one another to meet at the bunker.

Several checkpoints were erected by armed forces gradually as they arrived in the area. These checkpoints were built to monitor, regulate and control civilian movement. There were two types of checkpoints. The first types of checkpoints were erected at the entrance of military installations where they lived, strategised and dumped ammunition. In the village, the checkpoint was at the entry of the camp. The camp housed the two most-visited institutions—the school and the Block Development Officer’s office. ‘The encounter at this checkpoint typically involve ID cards, which can be any variety of laminated documents presenting an individual’s name, locality and occupation and thumbnail picture, validated with the official emblem of the Government of India’ (Duschinski, 2009, p. 705). Locals were always required to carry these ID cards with them.

To control the movement of locals, the second type of checkpoints were built on the main road which connected Batote and Doda near Assar. It was there that I first encountered a civilian checkpoint and observed how silence played its part. There were a number of armed policemen standing on the roadside. They stopped all the civilian vehicles, whether these were two-wheelers or four wheelers. The first step was to bring out your ID cards and produce them immediately. While all the men were paraded on the road along with their luggage, these armed men would jump inside buses to check for anything suspicious. They would also scan the women in the vehicle. The men had to open their belongings and display even the most mundane and private things in public. After this, they had to go through a frisking session. This protocol was followed for everyone. They would spare no one. At the security checkpoint locals could not avoid physical contact. They maintained silence and acted docile during the whole process to avoid confrontation with the regime. Others who were unable or unwilling to present their bodies as normalised and passive entities were treated differently (Ole, 2011). If they did not follow the process in silence and with subservience, they were either showered with a volley of expletives or a tight slap.

Checkpoints were the technologies of military control which involved documentary proof of identity. They were places where identities were negotiated. In the initial days when people were not habitual in carrying their ID cards, these checkpoints literally turned into places for their humiliation. It must also be noted that certain sections of people were searched more rigorously and more frequently than others. Normally, these people were Muslims and were looked at more suspiciously by the security forces. A range of ethnographies have studied the role of security agencies in reproducing an often unequal social order, for instance, as certain groups are subjected disproportionately to surveillance and law enforcement violence. Such studies show how differentiated citizenship is produced in routine and spectacular encounters between people and security personnel, as state prioritise and ‘recognise’ certain types of threats in everyday life (Jaffe & de Koning, 2016).

Army control over the local landscape consisted of two components, stationary and dynamic. While camps, bunkers and checkpoints constituted the stationary component, the process of patrolling represented the dynamic component. The patrolling parties walked on earmarked paths, meeting and talking to people on the way. This was a round-the-clock activity. Encounters with armed patrolling parties were pervasive features of everyday life. These patrolling parties would enter any house randomly and demand ID cards. These constant identity encounters had the effect of reproducing vulnerability, alienation and powerlessness amongst the resident population.

The narratives analysed above draw our attention to both visible and invisible cartographies of fear. The remnants of burnt buildings, checkpoints, bunkers and camps of security forces told the visible side of the story. The invisible cartography is far more complex as it is rooted in personalised memories of a place where a particular episode was witnessed. As an ethnographer, I could empathise with villagers’ uneasiness with some of the visible aspects of transformation. Like them I, too, was subjected to the standard practice of showing my ID card when I had to cross a particular checkpoint. However, it took me much longer to understand the invisible facet of the story. It was only by living, walking and conversing with locals that I was able to understand the buried subterranean map of the landscape of fear. The memorised fear of past events appeared on one’s face as we walked past a particular site. Just like memorial stones bring to mind our relationship to a particular person; these invisible spots triggered memories of suffered humiliation and violence, individual or collective. As I would listen to memories evoked by a particular site, more such invisible spots cropped up on the cerebral cartographies of memorised landscape of fear. These cerebral cartographies were etched into people’s thoughts and allowed them to negotiate with the scarred landscape.

Negotiating with Scarred Landscape

The two previous sections discussed how both militant and military appropriated the local landscape. Conflicts unfolded both over time and space. By dividing landscape into security grids, militants and army infused meaning into the landscape which was dense with notions of safety and danger. With this, time, too, was divided into the safe and the unsafe. For example, night time began to be feared more. In earlier times, people did not think much before setting out for journeys at night. With the militancy, however, the notion of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ time became more prominent. I remember that after my interview sessions which often extended late into the evenings, my respondents will forbid me from leaving their house at night. More often than not, I ended up staying the nights at the respondent’s house. These new categories––of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’––which emerged in the wake of conflict added to the existing categories of time such as ‘ecological’ and ‘structural-temporal’. Evans-Pritchard (1968) reported that for the Nuer people, time is divided into an ‘ecological’ and a structural aspect. Social time has many facets: it may be very short, short, long or very long. Immobility within life space, as time passes, is tantamount to continuous change in space and time (Cipriani, 2013). This process of production of unsafe spaces became an essential part of local worldview and thus, their narratives. It was a collective conditioning of people’s ideas of time and place.

This section brings together testimonies and stories of villagers vis-à-vis their immediate space which steadily turned bizarre and perplexing to them––a landscape of fear. The fear of gun-wielding humans was new to them. Before the militancy, they did not fear humans but djjins ¹¹ and haput (wild bear). Gulam Qadir, a middle aged man from Balwas, remarked:

We would walk even at night whether we had to go to Doda or elsewhere. We would only fear djinns and bhuts, nothing else. I would sleep across the road. Either a haput or a bla (spirit) made us fear but there was no fear of humans till militancy came. [Hum raat ko chalte thae humein Doda jana tha yaan yahan bhi jana ho… sirf djinn bhoot hote thae na unse darte thae hum, khaenge, baki kuch nhi, mein udhar raste mein bed laga ke sota tha, yahan peeche, koi haput aa jaye yaan bala aa jaye, Insan ka koi nhi, woh jab aayi militancy].

The comparison between the fear of demons and ghosts and militants and the army was very instructive. In popular parlance, it is believed that ghosts reside in desired spaces and appeared at certain times. They would harm specific people at a particular time. They could be propitiated with gifts. When placated, however, djinn and bhut showed their benevolent side. Militants and military, in contrast, would appear from nowhere. They were all over the place. While going or returning from the fields or the jungle, one could find them along the pathway. They were merciless with their questions and maltreatment without provocation. Unlike the supernatural forces, militants and army men were unpredictable. Also, while the mean conflict between humans and nature and, to some extent, the mundane human–human conflict was part of the worldview of locals, this magnitude of human–human conflict where ammunition was involved was indeed new and startling for them. As Zoona, an elderly Muslim woman, puts it, ‘I had not seen a gun before!’

Master Bhagat Ram brought my attention to yet another domain. He explained to me how summer pastures turned into dreaded landscapes. Every summer when meadows are lush green and water sources are at the zenith, locals as well transhumant Gujjars, Bakkarwals and Gaddis seasonally migrated to tend their cattle. It was a ritual to migrate to summer pastures. These pastures hosted a number of families. Local people as well as Gujjars both had traditional rights to tend their cattle in these pastures. The state forest department was paid a nominal fee per cattle as the mainstay of the local population was agriculture which was supplemented with cattle-rearing. Due to limited land resources at hand, cattle-rearing in these hills included traditional migration to the pastures in the summers and then back in the winters. With the advent of militancy, the practice of cattle rearing suffered a great deal as the Hindus, fearing for their lives, avoided seasonal migration to the pastures. Amidst tension, while some families stopped raising cattle due to their inability to stall-feed them, others entrusted this particular job to their Gujjar Muslim neighbours. Bhagat Ram, an elderly Hindu man, recounted:

We have been going to the pastures (dhok) during the summers with our cattle (maal) for centuries. However, we had to stop that practice altogether during militancy. We would like to send the cattle with the Gujjars. We could not go ourselves.

A few Gujjar families told me that they, too, stopped going to the pastures during the peak of militancy to avoid any confrontation with the militants who would often demand food and shelter from them. The realities of living in a kandi zone, especially, their inability to produce enough fodder forced them to sell their cattle. Sometimes, they even had to procure certain items for the militants. In the eyes of security forces, they were collaborators of the militants.

Doda has a rich forest cover. ¹² Being an abode to militants, forests came under the direct control of militants. Forest guards were amongst the first victims who fell to militant bullets. The new lords of the jungle offered free access to certain people while others were debarred from entering it. ‘The forest contractors who were favoured by militants earned a lot of money’, said an elderly villager. He added, ‘no matter what was the size of the tree, locals had to take permission from the area commander’.

Away from habitations, peasants would find themselves amidst a gun battle and had to run for their safety, leaving their cattle. The interest in cattle rearing and farming declined as it was becoming more and more difficult for people to move out and work in the fields. They would become easy suspects in the eyes of the militants as well as the military.

The militants and the Army exchanged fire every day. Mohinder Singh, the ex-sarpanch of Bhagwah, narrated:

It was a difficult time for us. We would run for safety leaving behind our bullocks in the fields. To save ourselves from the exchange of fire between the warring parties we would run for a safe shelter.

The heat of militancy was not only felt in pastures, forests and terraced fields, but also in neighbourhoods and homes. The villagers suffered immensely as militants and the armed forces contested a battle of supremacy in their neighbourhoods. While some neighbourhoods were described as khatarnak (dangerous) due to their association with militants, others were termed unsafe owing to the presence of the army. Similarly, although certain neighbourhoods were out of bounds for the army, others were avoided by militants. In Doda city, for instance, neighbourhoods such as Shinal, Sah and Hamdanpura were termed as dangerous. ‘Armywallahs in small groups would not dare to patrol in these mohallas as most of the militants in those times belonged to these localities’, said Naseer. Korla locality near Bhagwah was considered dangerous because at least one member from each household was a militant. Most of them belonged to Hizbul Mujahideen cadres. Similarly, owing to its proximity to the RR camp, Bhagwah proper was also considered unsafe. Perceptions of the locals also varied substantially. Although, for the army, the camp, where they lived was a safe zone but people who lived around the camp often feared a violent attack. Some believed otherwise, they thought their proximity with the camp was a boon. The notions of security were constructed subjectively. ¹³

As a vital part of the landscape, the domestic was no less vulnerable. Like other spaces discussed above, the fear of danger entered into the domestic through many routes: rumours, gossips and self-experience. After all, the domestic in a conflict zone does not remain a private space. Writing in context of the Kashmir valley, Butalia (2002, p. 16) noted:

The external violence of war or political (ethnic) conflict is not something that is happening ‘out there’ but has made its way into their homes and hearths. After sunset, a knock on the door, a sound of approaching humans, hushed up human voices or a gunshot faraway was considered dangerous and made one fathom most awful things in the world. In the times of crackdowns, the jackbooted gunmen walked in and out of the domestic, trampling its moral thread often leaving behind a trail of sorrowing memories.

Whenever I walked along with locals on these landscapes––forests, fields, pastures and neighbourhoods––dotted by innumerable events, a testimony would spring out––a testimony waiting to be told. A dot where an encounter had happened. A dot where a militant or military man was killed. A dot where a blast took place. A dot where a local was harassed. Every dot had a story. The mere sight of these dots made them plunge into the past. At this moment, when they narrated a particular story, their sense of past and present merged. They made those stories appear as if they were happening then and there, reliving the past. In that very moment, they would obliterate the difference between space and time.

Fear in the Memory

When I began my field work, officially or otherwise, militancy ka daur was far from over. Years of bloodshed and violence had altered people’s lives profoundly. Those days were fresh in the people’s memories, its quintessence made presence in the form of narratives, expressive silences, unfinished sentences and people’s body language. People shared some memories and muted other. Muted memories could only be read in the silence. And, this silence symbolised inability of language to articulate experience (Skidmore, 2003). Sowed seeds of fear sprouted every time a violent event took place or I reminded them of. Fear was their constant companion and it was impossible for the people to overcome it. As it had fused itself within their bodies and the landscape they were inhabiting. Gunmen encultured fear in their bodies and landscape to assert their control. The frequent acts of violence by these gunmen shattered people’s life worlds.

Landscape, which for them was immaculate and orderly once, was now interspersed with charred buildings, destroyed houses, military checkpoints and bunkers. The roads which were once familiar and predictable by those who walked upon them had become strange and unpredictable to them. These once familiar places which later got altered because of the conflict often served as locations of conflict between the militants and the people, between the people and the army and undeniably between the militants and the army. These altered places were a juxtaposition of one past (familiar and safe spaces) upon another (altered and unsafe spaces). It should be noted here that the changes that were brought to the landscape by the arrival of militancy and later the army, did not take place in isolation or consecutively. For the most part, these changes were simultaneous, creating a mix of challenges and fear for the villagers to sort through and carry on with their daily lives.

In their attempts to deal with the altering landscape, the villagers had to alter the ways of their daily lives. Leaving behind the course they had followed all their lives, people had to learn to avoid unsafe places, find new routes to walk upon, entrust their Hindu/Muslim neighbours with certain activities in order to avoid trouble and confrontation. While the perpetrators of fear often made their religious predispositions clear, fear itself had no religion. It plagued people of both the religions equally and frayed their lives and memories. When I talked to the villagers, there were people and places that evoked their memories of violence and death. It allowed me to understand that memories of violence rendered meanings to people and places even several years after the militancy ka daur was deemed to have passed. Rian˜o-Alcalá (2008a) used the term ‘sense of place’ to show how places are culturally constructed by those who dwell there and ‘memories become important in giving meaning and significance to the place’ (ibid., p. 278). In Doda, the memory of armed conflict had created a landscape intermixed with fear and violence and people in present times are still haunted by these memories.