It is not only the Indian government, however, which has long distrusted the JKP—so, too, have Kashmiri Muslims, for whom the JKP are gaddars, or traitors. Considering their role in counterinsurgency operations in Kashmir, and in implementing divisive and anti-Muslim policies, this should come as little surprise. They have, as a result, been targeted by Kashmiri militants, who have killed approximately 1,700 police personnel since 1989, many while off-duty, including 508 personal security officers (PSOs) deployed in protecting pro-India civil society leaders and politicians.
Yet JKP members are also enmeshed in the Kashmiri resistance movement through their kith and kin. In 2022, for example, a member of the JKP whose son—an engineer turned militant—had previously been killed in counterinsurgency operations was himself murdered by militants. Such complex subjectivities mean that members of the JKP are distrusted by both their own community and the Indian state. In an incident in 2017, for example, JKP officer Ayub Pandith was brutally murdered by a mob after being caught spying during a religious celebration.
As a result of the danger their jobs place them in, JKP members often refrain from divulging what they do for a living to outsiders, and conceal their identities through, for example, changing into their uniforms at their police stations and removing them before they head home (while some JKP personnel in Srinagar stay in a designated and garrisoned locality called Police Colony, since such accommodation is both limited and dependent on hierarchy and rank, most personnel have to live elsewhere). Some also refrain from returning home at predictable times and carry fake identity cards—although in passing as ordinary civilians they run the risk of harassment by Indian soldiers. They are, furthermore, rarely posted to their own neighbourhoods to help keep them from being identified as JKP officers.
Militants are aware, however, that members of the JKP seek to keep a low profile. In 2018, for example, the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) responded to JKP harassment and arrest of family members by exposing the identities of many of its low-ranking police personnel online, and demanded that such personnel quit their jobs and post videos online of their resignations. About two dozen Special Police Officers (SPOs) did so—although the Indian government tried to prevent such postings going viral and declared that they were propaganda.
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The JKP and Military Humanism
How, then, has the JKP sought to overcome the distrust with which its members are viewed by both the Indian state and Kashmiri population? One key way in which it has tried to juggle doing such a seemingly impossible task is through playing a role in the Indian military’s project of military humanism in Kashmir. Though seemingly an oxymoronic term, military humanism, which entails military engagement with civil projects related to healthcare, education, sports, and infrastructure building, has become a key component of global counterinsurgency tactics.
But rather than being altruistic in intent, namely to genuinely improve peoples’ wellbeing, such engagement is instead a means of changing perceptions of the state in the eyes of insurgent populations, in particular of the army as munificent as opposed to an occupying force—through, in other words, ‘winning hearts and minds’. In the case of Kashmir, the Indian army has, since 1997, undertaken a project of military humanism known as Operation Sadhbhavana (Goodwill) in an effort to merge the army with the civil administration.
The Indian army, however, is not alone in such initiatives, since the JKP has, for the past two decades, undertaken a parallel program called the Civic Action Program (CAP). According to the JKP, the CAP is a ‘bridge between the Security forces and the local people’. The aim of the program is to win the hearts and minds of Kashmiris, especially Kashmiri youth, to draw them away from anti-India politics and to reframe resistance to the Indian state as deviance and misguidedness. The focus of the programme is what the JKP calls ‘deradicalisation’, which includes the mentoring and counselling, through sports, educational activities, and entertainment, of those who it designates as misguided youth. Such activities include cricket matches, cycle races, skiing courses, and talent shows, among other events. To change the nature of the relationship between the police and people from antagonism to camaraderie, the JKP also arranges sports matches between civilian teams and the police. However, those who refuse to partake in CAP activities are penalised and harassed by the JKP—which, rather than winning hearts and minds, drives some youth, ironically, into militancy.
This excerpt by Ather Zia in ‘Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Realities’, edited by Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.