India arms Hindu militias to combat Kashmiri fighters

DHANGRI: Indian government has armed more than 5,000 Kashmiri villagers who have joined all-Hindu militia units armed and trained by Indian forces to fight off Kashmiri fighters.

Delhi has more than half a million soldiers permanently stationed in parts of held Kashmir, as the Hindu nationalist government presses a bid to crush anti-India fighters.

Authorities announced the new militias last year, and a deadly assault in Kumar’s village in January prompted him to sign up. “We were totally terrorised by the attack,” the 32-year-old municipal worker in the electricity department said.

India has fought against the freedom groups demanding the Muslim-majority territory’s independence, or merger with Pakistan, in a fight that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The new militia units, known as Village Defence Guards, were unveiled last year in the wake of a string of murders targeting police officers and Hindu residents of India-held Kashmir.

The scheme has been broadly popular among the region’s Hindu residents, but Muslim villagers are concerned the militia will only exacerbate occupied Kashmir’s woes.

Many residents of Dhangri, the remote hamlet where Kumar lives, are still grief-stricken by the attack that claimed the lives of seven of their neighbours.

One Indian paramilitary officer said the newly armed villagers were on such a constant state of alert that his unit informed them beforehand of their night patrol, so that they were not accidentally mistaken for the Kashmiri fighters and fired upon.

“The purpose is to create a line of defence, not a line of attack,” Kanchan Gupta of India’s information ministry said.

India first created a civil militia force in held Kashmir in mid-1990s as a first line of defence when the armed resistance against Indian rule was at its peak.

About 25,000 men and women, including teenagers, were given wea­pons and organised into village def­ence committees in Jammu region.