At 3 am, CRPF constable Panna Lal gets in queue outside one of the four washrooms at the headquarters of the 161 battalion.
By 5 am dot, he and 30 other jawans need to get battle ready, to be piled up in grey, rusted and dented one-ton trucks.
They will have to traverse Srinagar's most volatile zone – the downtown.
Over the last three weeks, Lal, who is from Uttar Pradesh, has been posted at the dangerous roundabouts at Nowhatta, Bohri Kadal and Khanyar to manage crowds whose size and intensity depend on the mood of the angry young men.
As they get down from the vehicle, Lal and his colleague, Mahindra Rana from Uttarakhand, check each other's body armour before they proceed to patrol the labrynthine lanes of the downtown.
They wear heavy helmets with fibreglass grills, a protective body gear comprising bullet proof vests and arm and leg guards, and wield fibre shields.
They leave nothing to chance as they gear up to face the ubiquitous stone throwers on the streets of the old city.
On ground zero, the mobs vary from a small group to a big crowd, big enough to scare the troops into a defensive position. Most of the protesters stand just a stone's throw away from them.
Some of them are masked, some wear trendy jeans and upmarket shoes; and all of them hurl abuses and insults in Hindi to provoke the soldiers.
For a small platoon of 30 CRPF men it is very hard to fight the stone pelters in the maze of narrow lanes and bylanes that make up the old city neighbourhood. T
These lanes zigzag for several kilometres, and since the local youth know them like the back of their hand, the troops often give up the chase for fear of getting lynched by mobs that seem to appear from nowhere and then melt without a trace.
Posted in Kashmir since last year, Lal has faced these stone-pelters umpteen times during his tenure.
"Twenty of our men are in hospital. They were severely injured when the stone-pelting started early this month," he said, adding that a few weeks back one of the parties came under a grenade attack.
CRPF performs a dual role of maintaining law and order and fighting militants in the strife-torn Jammu and Kashmir.
The paramilitary force plays a key role in helping the local police in counter-insurgency duties.
Most times, the CRPF conducts joint operations with the local police and other security agencies in the valley.
There are around 47 battalions of CRPF deployed in the Kashmir valley, of which more than 25 battalions are posted in the capital city of Srinagar, mostly to quell street protests and stone-pelting.
As many as 3,550 security force personnel and 2,309 civilians were injured in violent protests and stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir till July 25 this year.
There were 1,029 such incidents in the state so far this year, in which 48 civilians and two security personnel were killed.
In the last three weeks, the CRPF men on ground zero have increasingly felt the need to have a better, lightweight and effective protective gear.
They hope crowd management would get better, minimising injuries to troopers fighting stone-pelters.
In fact, the Union Home ministry recently floated a global tender for sophisticated protective gear to equip the troopers. The gear would be on par with ones used by police and paramilitaries in West.
"Our troopers don't want to be like mannequins in a showroom with heavy protective gear.
The gear should be such that troopers should be able to move and manoeuvre freely during stone-pelting", said Rajesh Yadav, commandant of 161 battalion of CRPF.
"Our men need to run, evade stones and chase the stone-pelters too. For that they need to be nimble footed."
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