Army camps

Kashmiri youth

Indian Army

Petronet LNG

ILLUSTRATIONS: KARAN TALGERI

militant leader Burhan Wani

ILLUSTRATIONS: KARAN TALGERI

ILLUSTRATIONS: KARAN TALGERI

As Kashmiri students are hounded out from one city after another, and a sitting Governor asks for a boycott of all things Kashmiri,recalls the story of one young man’s heroic efforts to integrate the Valley with the Indian mainstream.One of the biggestin Srinagar is located about three kilometers from the city centre, Lal Chowk. The fortified gates that lead inside bear the legend: ‘RESPECT ALL. SUSPECT ALL. INSPECT ALL.’ After a share of all three, I get to meet Sameer.He is a compact man with a wellbarbered head and a neatly-trimmed beard. In the battle for the soul of the, Sameer, 27, is fighting a small but ferocious fight. Unlike the militant leaders who seeks to weaponize them, Sameer wants to de-weaponize Kashmiri boys, arming them with education instead.For the past six years, Sameer has been travelling to remote villages in the Valley, and beyond to Ladakh and Jammu, to handpick brilliant students who can be trained for Joint Entrance Examinations of the Indian Institute of Technologies, (IIT-JEE), and through that programme, to integrate them with the Indian educational mainstream. The programme, conducted under the patronage of theand the Public Sector Undertaking,, is run by a Delhi NGO, Center for Social Responsibility and Leadership (CSRL), which employs Sameer as a project manager.Presently, there are 50 boys selected, but when I visit the camp in the August of 2018, some of them are AWOL. There has been a mutiny. Eid has just passed; Sameer, who was called away to the headquarters in Delhi, gave the students three days’ leave; but in the project manager’s absence, the boys ganged up and passed a written resolution that no one would return to camp any earlier than six days. It’s Day Seven when I visit them, but some boys are still not back. Sameer is furious and embarrassed. Around him in the camp he sees a military adherence to command, but in this little enclave he runs, there is civil disobedience.Young and earnest, he fails to see their contretemps for what it is—the pointless rebelliousness of boisterous 18-year-olds. He sees it as a ploy to undermine his efforts to salvage their lives, an act of self- harm. In the class convened that day for my benefit, the boys are expectedly reticent, but they are also curious, and only mildly insolent. Most of them have never been out of Kashmir; they open up gradually to ask questions about the various IITs at which they might be placed if they get through the JEE: Roorkee, Chennai, Kanpur, Bombay, Kharagpur are foreign lands for them. They worry about the weather, the food, the language. There is a gasp of disbelief in the room when I share what the IIT Delhi director, V. Ramgopal Rao, recently told me--that one in four students at IIT Delhi drops out mid-term, unable to cope with the teaching in English, and the rigorous standards his premier institute demands. After the Herculean exertions of JEE, to be denied grace seems unbearably cruel to them.The roiling unrest sparked off by the killing of the younghas affected academics. Schools have been set on fire, terrorized teachers have fled, and en masse promotions have become the norm in the last few years. When the boys come to Sameer for training for JEE, they struggle with basic concepts of Math, Physics and Chemistry. Lacking any good local teachers who can commit time, faculty is flown in from Delhi, two at a time, for ten days each. In the nine months’ time the itinerant faculty has with these students, they cram in two years’ worth of high school teaching, in addition to IIT-JEE crush-coaching. But they never get to know their students well, and for the boys, the prolonged gaps in their education makes it very hard to concentrate for any length of time.Hemmed in inside the Army camp, anxious about families back in the villages, and weaned on a steady diet of romantic separatist ideas, they periodically raise flags of rebellion.On the Independence Day just gone by, Sameer had asked them to write an essay on ‘India of My Dreams—2050.’ Only two boys from Ladakh attempted it. The rest refused, saying, ‘We will only write about India of 2050, if you keep Kashmir out of it’, Sameer recalls in exasperation. There’s a coiled tension about him that doesn’t allow him to be at ease. It comes, I realize, from being largely confined within the heavilyguarded perimeter of the Army’s camp. I suggest next we meet outside the camp.The coffee shop in the foyer of Clark’s Inn near Rajbagh is beautifully appointed with wooden panels, French windows and deep pile leather sofas. There are trays of cakes and biscuits on quaint doilies, and in the velvet hush, the only sound is the sharp hiss of the espresso machine. The coffee shop also leads to a top-of-the-line gym a few flights up. A steady stream of handsome men in athleisure strut in and out, occasionally stopping in the foyer to hug and greet one another in metrosexualese: “Wassup, bro?”In this deceptively urbane setting, Sameer unpacks his story. He grew up in a village in Bandipora at a time when militancy was taking root. The forests of the region were the perfect hideaway. Midnight knocks were frequent. The Army presence began to expand, and ‘encounters’ became commonplace. For Sameer’s family, every time things got bad, it affected their day’s earnings. His father was daily wage farm labour, but all the money the family earned, was spent on sending their first-born to school. Though now under sustained attack from separatists who see education as an impediment, traditionally Kashmir had a strong network of schools and colleges; far better in fact than in other states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa or Uttar Pradesh. The Hindu Pandits who were hounded out of the Valley by the separatists in the years Sameer was growing up had especially excelled at teaching. Vestiges of that culture of learning linger stubbornly on.When he was in secondary school, Sameer had his first brush with violence. “My closest friend was killed in an accident in school,” he says, recalling precisely the time and date, and even describing the colours of the day. “As we were walking out during the school recess, a grenade hit the school ground. Sixteen students were seriously injured and one student, my friend, died. He and I had been together since the age of three.”“Around this time many of my schoolmates took to militancy. Some of them died. A few came back. One of them now works as a mechanic in the village, and refuses to meet my eye. I was saved by my poverty and by my deep sense of responsibility towards my family. I knew I was the only one who could get my family out of the disturbing situation we were in. I did not have the luxury to experiment with militancy.”The year he graduated, the Indian Army conducted a screening test to select and train students for the Combined Defence Services Entrance Test. Sameer and his cousin got through, and soon he, who had never been out of Bandipora, was on a bus to Chandigarh.“When I reached there, I said to myself, ‘This is what USA must be like’. Everything seemed foreign, and I loved all of it: the trees, the people, the architecture, the energy of the place.” Though he did not clear the CDS, he was so struck by Chandigarh that he decided to stay on and pursue MBA from one of the many private universities there.His parents sold their small piece of land kept for days of dire need, and he took up part-time jobs to meet his expenses. In Punjab, always appreciative of chutzpah, his resourcefulness bloomed. Sameer-- who had so far only worked as day labour with his father--started selling academic books on commission, and got so good at it, that within a couple of months he was training other salesmen. On Sundays, he would travel to Hisar, Saharanpur, Shimla on sales calls. In a short time, he had made Rs 40,000. It was the most cash he had seen in his life.Buoyed by his success, Sameer offered business advice to the family with whom he was staying. “They had land, I told them to build rooms on it. After all, what is there to construction—some bricks, sand and cement--I had worked on sites in Bandipora, and I offered to help them build the rooms, and also get my fellow students as tenants.’’ The four rooms they made soon became eight. At present, he reveals, his former landlords run a small hostel of 16 rooms with 32 students and earn Rs 70,000 a month from that enterprise. “I have free lodging for life with them.”One of those serendipitous interconnections that form society, and sometimes engender acts of uncommon grace, led Sameer to an exiled Kashmiri Pandit in Panchkula, a man called Sanjay Suri. It was to become a turning point in his life. Suri ran an ersatz educational establishment called Ambit International--a small shop equipped with nothing but two chairs, a desk and a telephone. Here, he enrolled dummy candidates for schools.Just as a parallel economy needs its shell companies, the educational coaching system needs dummy schools so that students can appear for Board examinations. The comprehensive breakdown of the school system across India has thrown up a rash of coaching institutes, all outdoing each other in baroque promises. (Memorably, this gem from Hisar: “Kuldeep Sir aise padhate hai ki Gajni ko bhi sab yaad rehta hai).In Sameer, with his knowledge of spoken English and Urdu, his even temperament and determination to improve his circumstances, Sanjay Suri found a kindred spirit.“I learnt more about marketing from Suri saab in seven days than I did from my entire MBA. He prepared me to hear the many Nos one hears during sales calls, and to persist through the day for that one positive response. He taught me how to work the phones, and to create a chain of contacts from one single telephone number.”For every admission he secured, Sameer got Rs 200 in commission. At the end of his two month-tenure at Ambit International, Sameer had bagged 150 admissions.The skills he acquired hustling students into the dummy schools in Chandigarh are what got him the job at CSRL.Funded by the statutorilymandated corporate social responsibility initiatives of Public Sector Undertakings, CSRL runs 20 centres across India in Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Itanagar, Bhubaneshwar, Kanpur, Sivasagar, Jodhpur, and NOIDA among other centres. Here some of India’s most underprivileged children are coached to join its best academic institutions.In this socialist-style nation-building project, the ‘Kashmir Super 30’ is CSRL’s most-prized asset. It is also its most difficult centre to run. Elsewhere in India, students flock to these centres for free room and board, and the coaching on offer. In Kashmir, for a student to study inside an Army Camp is not an academic opportunity; it is the staking of a battle position. Few risk it. And so it was that Sameer, the dummy-school hustler, at all of 21 years, became an unwitting soldier to the cause of India.Late one afternoon, we are on our way to the village of Harwan beyond the Dachigam National Park, home to the elusive Kashmiri stag, the hangul, snow leopards and musk deer. A few hundred meters from the gates of the sanctuary, as the narrow road curves uphill, we get caught in our own forest of buses returning home to deposit school children.While idling in that jam, I think of the predicament in which many Kashmiris find themselves. Just a few kilometers away, in downtown Srinagar, the youth are out pelting stones, invoking martyrdom and nihilism. Here, the road is signposted with promises of a glorious future. Like the rest of India, Srinagar too is full of coaching classes for centralized competitive exams, their names signalling a facile optimism: Aakash, Rise, Wave, Hope, Phoenix. Even the more prosaic ‘Career Point’ has a brisk get-up-and-go ring to it.“Last year,” Sameer points to one of the signboards, “they tried to pass off a couple of our boys selected for IITs as their students in advertisements.” He has become less over-wrought, even chattier in the last few hours. He is taking me to meet the parents of Nissar Ahmed, a Kashmir Super 30 student, who got admission to IIT Jodhpur this year. We stop to buy biscuits from the local bakery for Nissar’s family. Sameer says it is the appropriate thing to do. “They are very poor. When an outsider goes to meet them, they might expect something.”In a narrow by-lane, apparently colonized by a large bovine, the house, though solid, is simple, without pretensions. The living room is large. It has no furniture. Instead, as is the norm here, a large rug is spread out on the floor, and we are invited to sit on it. Nissar’s father works on construction sites as a labourer. He is out on a job, but his mother, grandparents and two sisters are there to greet us. The two sisters, both of them post-graduates, fold their legs under their hips in what seems like an elegant vajraasan, while the two older women squat on their heels. When their father was away working in the fields, their mother, who works as a part time housemaid in richer homes in Srinagar, determined that all her children should be educated, says the eldest daughter. “In the homes of the well-off people she worked for, she saw how education makes a difference.”Nissar was sent away to a residential school in Manasbal. He won a scholarship at an early age, and when he finished high school, Sameer selected him for training at Super 30 after a screening test. But that journey to Jodhpur IIT is still not free of its stresses. The family does not have the money for his IIT tuition. There is some back-and-forth with Sameer in Kashmiri on the possibility of an educational loan and whether the IIT library would let him photostat the text books he cannot afford.At this point, the old grandmother, until then sitting smiling toothlessly, gets up and rains kisses on Sameer’s forehead; perhaps she thinks he is organizing more financial help. The young man is embarrassed, but also pleased as the family begins a chorus in his praise.How did the people, in whose homes their mother works as maid, react to Nissar getting into IIT, I ask the older sister who has been interpreting. “They said they were happy for her, but this Eid, many of them did not give us the Eidi they always did, so I wonder what it is they really think.”Poverty in Kashmir does not appear so obviously humiliating and grinding as it does in UP or Bihar or Orissa, states beset with caste-related depredations. But the poor are poor everywhere, and share the same desperation to escape their circumstances. Beyond the stillness of the Valley’s vast lakes and the silent immutability of the sentinel mountains, multitude mutinies are waged every day—and not always only against the Indian state.In the time that Sameer has been running the centre (the present year is his sixth academic year), 16 Kashmiri students have found places in the IITs, 69 in the NITs, including six girls, 18 at the Aligarh Muslim University, and 68 in the state engineering college. The students have been sent out as far as Warangal, Hamirpur, Silchar, Kanpur, Jalandhar and Kharagpur across the length of the country. This year, the first group with which Sameer worked, has entered the work force, reporting placements at Wipro, Samsung and IBM.“This centre is a golden goose for Kashmir. It needs to be nurtured,” says Professor MA Shah, the head of the special centre for nanoscience, department of physics, at NIT, Srinagar. A politically active campus, NIT, Srinagar, has alumni as diverse as Shehla Rashid and Magsaysay award-winner Sonam Wangchuk. It has also been the epicentre of a widespread students’ agitation in recent years. Shah, who comes from a family of academics, was recently invited by the governor to suggest ways to improve education in Kashmir. “I told them,” he says with an ironic chuckle, “it could begin with getting some students to schools.”Two years ago, the anger and unrest in the Valley nearly killed the ‘golden goose’. The turmoil after Burhan Wani’s death, created a ‘new normal’—a 120-week-long curfew, a concurrent clampdown on internet services, and a complete shuttering of all institutions of education. Good and bad days were calibrated by the number of civilian deaths reported by sundown.“For the world it was the 21st century. In Kashmir, we could have been in the 18th,” says Sameer.The streets were empty of civilian presence for weeks, and as the ominous denuding of the street segued into idleness inside the Army camp, he got a call from the Commanding Officer requesting him to enlist at least twenty children. Else, he was told, the centre would have to be shut down.With his friend, the head cook of the camp, Sameer got himself a curfew pass, and at enormous personal risk, the two travelled through nights to Shopian where mutilated bodies had started showing up in the apple orchards, to Gurez, to Anantnag, another troubled spot of south Kashmir, and to his own hometown of Bandipora, talking to parents to send their children to prepare for IIT. “I told them education was going to be the only way forward, otherwise everyone would be brainwashed.”Sameer’s shining sincerity, and his gift of the gab persuaded parents to trust him and to let their children go. That year, he also recruited five girls who would later be sent to the CSRL centre at NOIDA.Everyone was at risk, each man a potential target in those days, and this included the faculty that would fly in from Delhi. “We would smuggle them into the camp under the cover of darkness. If they came by an earlier flight they would have to wait at the airport until 11 pm.”That year, Kashmir Super 30 had 31 children, 29 of whom went on to earn places in leading engineering colleges. Sameer was awarded a prize for outstanding service by CSRL.But in that moment of his great triumph, the worm in the apple turned.This is how he describes it: “At Eid that year, we could not let the students go home as it was not safe. This upset them a great deal and they demanded the least I could do was provide them with a feast. But there was curfew. The entire Valley was boycotting Eid celebrations because of Burhan’s death and the civilian killings. How could I provide them a feast?”Speaking to friends and friends of friends (the cellular networks had been taken down), he organised twenty kilos of mutton which he then smuggled into the camp through the silent, tense streets.But immediately his resourcefulness was tested again, this time by faith. “The boys said the butcher’s knife in the Army camp was not a halal knife as in the camp the Army guys eat jhatka meat. I had to go out again in the curfew and get a kosher knife from the dar-ululoom.”Power play between rebellious students and their wardens is commonplace in the world, but Sameer had made the cardinal error of blinking first. On the August 15 that followed shortly after Eid, the imbroglio took an ugly turn. In his zeal, at sharp variance from the boys’, he brought out the Indian flag and asked them to do a run around the camp holding it aloft. Only two boys from Kargil stepped forward; the others all refused.An uneasy truce settled over the camp. It lasted but a few months. As the time for the JEE approached and the pace of the classes and periodic tests picked up, Sameer pulled up one of the laggards for not doing his lessons properly. “It was winter so I called the guy into my office, shut the door, and began to lecture him. Outside, I don’t know what the other boys thought I was doing to him, they began to go wild. It’s not as if he was a girl and I would do something to him.”A cry of ‘Azadi’ went around, and the students began pounding on doors and windows and shouting slogans. They damaged Sameer’s car, and as the shadows of the strained day lengthened, Sameer was advised to leave the camp for his own safety. He would not return for three months.The spectacular results of that year (29 of 31 students finding places in top engineering colleges), and the fawning of their parents have somewhat soothed the hurt. But two years later, he cannot resist the bewildered question, “They kept chanting ‘Azadi’. From me, when I was doing everything for them?”For the students, scarred by the violence outside, and grappling with their own inchoate, formless anger, shouting for ‘Azadi’, freedom, that night was perhaps not so much a protest against Sameer as it was against the idea of India; an India that, to them, Sameer, and everyone like him, embodies.