Kashmir Insecurity Barometer: The Case of the British Armoured Car

The UK High Commission official choosing to bring a secure vehicle for his visit to Kashmir has a twin message.

Handwara in Kashmir has been at the centre of major unrest since Tuesday, 12 April, 2016.(Photo:AP)

That UK Deputy High Commissioner, Alexander Evans, brought an armoured vehicle along for a tour of Srinagar this week has ruffled feathers in the local police force – which is responsible for providing security to visiting dignitaries, including diplomats.

A local newspaper reported that the vehicle was an ‘armoured Range Rover’ fitted out for high security.

More than the snub to local security forces – as some of the police see it – the move is a significant indicator of the current security situation in the Valley; for Evans is no ordinary diplomat. He speaks Kashmiri, and his knowledge of the place is almost incomparable.

Long Association

Nor is Evans’ visit just a formal diplomatic tour of duty. He has been visiting Kashmir for the past quarter-century – more than half his life. He told me many years ago that he spent time in Kashmir in the early 1990s, when he was barely out of his teens.

He was apparently described as a student then, but the decision to spend substantial time in what was then an extremely violent and chaotic situation was surely more than a scholastic choice. He was not only in Srinagar, but spent substantial time in Sopore, which was at the time a hotbed of Hizbul Mujahideen militants.

Evans has considerably deepened his scholarship on Kashmir and its militancy during academic stints over the past decade. He spent time at Yale University in the US and at Sciences Po in Paris for research. He has read extensively on Kashmir.

As a diplomat, Evans has been the Deputy High Commissioner in both Pakistan and India. Not only that, he has headed the United Nations’ division on counter-terror. He has kept abreast of the situation in Kashmir in all these capacities, and also when he was posted at the UK High Commission in New Delhi as a relatively junior diplomat many years ago.

Armoured Message

The fact that Evans chose to bring such a secure vehicle for his visit to Kashmir has a twin message.

The first, of course, is that he doesn’t trust the security he would have been provided.

The other side of the coin is that such an extremely knowledgeable expert considers the place far more unsafe than the government would have liked to project – especially just ten days after Home Minister Rajnath Singh urged tourists to flock to Kashmir.

High-Security Areas

This threat perception is all the more serious since it relates only to highly secure places and persons. Besides travelling from the airport to his hotel – and then to places like Raj Bhawan and the Chief Minister’s residence – which are both a stone’s throw from the hotel – most of Evans’ meetings would have taken place at his hotel.

Under the UK government’s security protocols, even the High Commission’s Indian staff are not permitted to visit many parts of Srinagar – let alone travel farther afield – when they visit Kashmir for official work.

His perception of the security threat must be taken seriously, since during decades of intense focus on Kashmir, Evans has developed extraordinarily diverse sources of information on both sides of the Line of Control – and also in the capitals of not just India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also other key countries around the world.

So one ought to sit up and take note that Evans, with the apparent backing of his government, now seems to place Kashmir in the same category as some parts of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tradition of Exploration

Evans’ expertise on Kashmir is remarkable even in the tradition of Britons who –particularly in the 19th century – have gone to great lengths to explore, chart, and document the peoples, cultures and histories of various places, especially in south Asia, the Arabian peninsula, and Egypt.

One British explorer spent several years in the 1820s camping on a mountainous plateau above Ganderbal in the east of Kashmir. And in the 1890s, a British settlement commissoner spent five years travelling across the length and breadth of Kashmir, and documenting the place, its people, culture, names, castes, flora, fauna, and much else.

(The writer is a journalist and the Kashmir-based author of ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)