By our correspondent in Srinagar
The wards of Srinagar hospitals have been seeing a lot of traffic over the last couple of months. Several wounded are admitted on a daily basis – most of them young and with firearm injuries usually on the upper body.
The police here answer stones with live ammunition and aim for the chest or head.
Dr Murtaza is a young serious faced surgeon in charge of the Intensive Care Unit at the Sheri Kashmir Institute of Medical Science who talks to me over the distressing sight of two patients lying in a coma, hooked up to ventilators and life support machines. They are from different districts but their stories are similar. Both men were day labourers and poor. They were coming home from the fields, alone and unarmed and were shot by either the police or the CRPF – the Central Reserve Police Force who are such a pervasive presence in the Valley.
In “normal” times – there are 28 battalions of CRPF stationed in Srinagar alone. These days there are 35 – that’s 35,000 CRPF just in this city. And then there are 4000 Jammu and Kashmir police, an un-guessable number of Intelligence agents, and of course the army – more than 600,000 soldiers in the Kashmir Valley which has a population of 4 million.
Kashmiris wonder who all this force is against. Militancy has declined since the 1990’s. Human rights activist Khurram Pervez says “if the government itself acknowledges there are just 1000 militants active in Kashmir, why do we have 667,000 troops here? All these soldiers are here to control the lives of the ordinary people, not just fight armed militants.”
“Guns have been replaced by stones,” says a young local journalist, “and of course, we’re getting our stones from Pakistan” he adds ironically.
The protest movement here has taken on a different tone from the bloody sectarian days of the 1990’s. The rage is being replaced by a “nothing-more-to- lose” attitude. Boys stride towards the heavily armed security personnel tearing open their shirts and asking them to shoot. The effect has been a more muted response from the police. The J&K Police – who, unlike the army or the other paramilitary personnel - are Kashmiri themselves. And they’re unhappy about waging war on their own people.
“This is a police state.” The statement comes not from a human rights activist, but from a senior police officer who declines to be named. “I’ll admit it. And we feel let down by our government – this is a situation that needs a political solution – and instead they’re leaving it to the police to take care of.”
But he’s diffident about acknowledging the brutality that Kashmiris are saying has been perpetrated by the J&K Police on demonstrators.
“We try to have a “graded response” he says. “We first disperse a crowd by loudspeakers but that of course will only work with peaceful demonstrators, not with stone pelters.”
But then how do you account for Reshma, a frail little thing of 11 with a neck brace so large it keeps slipping up over her face and she has to adjust it back down again so she can breathe. She was shot by a stray bullet as she was collecting paper and cardboard scraps from the road - her father Mohammed Sikander re-sells the cardboard to earn the $2.50 a day that keeps his family alive. 
Reshma’s doctor says she was lucky - another millimeter and it would have hit her spine and she’d be a quadriplegic. But I wonder if her father, standing silently by her bed thinks she was lucky. The medical costs will put him and his whole family in debt for years. There’s no compensation offered and his little girl will never regain the use of her left arm.
And he’s not even Kashmiri – he came here from Rajasthan in search of work. This is not his struggle, or Reshma’s. They are just collatoral damage.
The senior police officer tells me that the police only fire as a last resort, when they are openly attacked, but 30 year old Pervez Ahmed was in a peaceful demonstration last week when the police opened fire. Two people were killed, eight injured. His arm is in traction and it will take months to heal. Will he join demonstrations again when he’s out of hospital? “Of course” he replies with a smile. “Next time they can shoot me in the chest if they want.”
I have been hearing of injuries from tear gas shells and I ask the senior police officer why these are being fired into the crowd instead of above their heads. He tells me that tear gas shells don’t work that way – they don’t hurt people until they burst and then the fallout of the hot metal “can pierce the skin and cause injury.” I must have looked skeptical because he invites me to a demonstration where I could shoot one at him.
“You should have taken him up on the dare” says the surgeon at the hospital as he stands over his coma patients in the ICU. This man was shot in the head with a tear gas shell and it’s a high velocity projectile – it pierced his skull and caused a severe brain injury. “I don’t think your police officer would have let you shoot at him.”
Next to Raishma’s bed is a man with horrific facial injuries that make him look like Frankenstein. He can’t talk very well because of the great raw lines of stitches that run over his cheeks, scalp, and nose. He’s missing teeth and both eyes are swollen and closed. He was mauled by a bear in the village of Mantargiam. Twelve people in the village were attacked by the same bear. When the village officers went to ask the forestry department to take out the bear they were told that WWF (World Wildlife Fund) told them that the bears were protected, and at any rate they didn’t have the manpower to even tranquilize the bear and move it to a wildlife reserve. Geelani’s carer tells me, “in Kashmir they can kill people, they have plenty of manpower for that – but they’re not allowed to kill animals.”
