In recent years, several highly qualified youth joined militancy in Kashmir; few survived

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, May 27

When a young man from north Kashmir disappeared into the militant underground in the first week of the year, a signature announcement followed. His photograph was released on a social media site showing him armed with an assault rifle and with a detailed description of his identity.Organisation: Hizbul Mujahideen, name: Manaan Wani, qualification: MPhil, PhD in applied geology (AMU, Aligarh). It also had Wani’s militant name, Hamzah Bhai.In the subsequent weeks of the year, the recruitment of many new militants was announced in a similar fashion and some of them stood out for their educational backgrounds.Wani was the third doctorate student to join militant ranks in recent years and also the most prominent of its educated faces as a completely new generation of ultras — nearly all of them born after the eruption of militancy in the region — took over the rank and file of insurgency.Three months after Wani’s militant picture appeared on the social media, another young man disappeared. Within days, his picture in the signature style made the bold announcement. Junaid Ashraf Sehrai, son of separatist leader Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, was assigned the code name Ammar Bhai. The details on his militant photograph had his qualification noted, ‘MBA from University of Kashmir’.The addition of education qualifications has been acknowledged by the militant groups in most of the photographic announcements adding to their information blitz and also providing a new perspective to insurgency.The insurgency in Kashmir will complete three decades next year and its various phases include periods of shock introduction, decline, indifference and current stage of immense popularity. A senior police official said the education qualifications of new militants were in consonance with the overall increase in the literacy of society and with the increase in the number of Kashmiri youth opting for graduate and postgraduate courses. “It is alarming that educated youth are becoming militants but it is not entirely unexplainable. There is an increase in the educational standards of society and what is happening on the militancy scene is a reflection of that,” the police official said.The inclusion of highly educated youth into militant ranks first surfaced immediately after the 2010 unrest in the region, when thousands of youth participated in months of protests. The first significant case emerged of Masiullah Khan of south Kashmir’s Tral sub-district who had completed Bachelors in Technology in mechanical engineering before becoming a militant sometime in 2010 and was killed in a gunfight a year later. Khan’s joining and death had passed off unnoticed at that time. However, soon, a trickle of youth with distinctive qualifications began to disappear and appeared in militant ranks. In recent years, at least eight engineering students have joined militant ranks and six of them have been killed. The six slain militants who had studied engineering include Tral’s Masiullah Khan and Saifullah Ahangar, Srinagar’s Eisa Fazili and Kokernag’s Syed Owais who were killed in March this year, Bijbehara’s Basit Dar who was killed in December 2016 and Pulwama’s Musavir Wani who was killed last month. The recruitment of Mohammad Rafi Bhat, an assistant professor at the University of Kashmir, to the militant ranks, however, was the defining addition to the new-age insurgency. Bhat, who survived less than two days as a militant, had a doctorate in sociology and was teaching at the university on the day he disappeared. He was killed in a gunfight later.