Of the fifty bodies that the Omar Abdullah government piled up this summer there were many minors — two of them nine years old — Tufail Rather in Baramulla and Sameer Ahmad Rah in Srinagar. Tufail was shot and Sameer was caught, beaten and literally trampled under jackboots. As the going got tough, Omar sought to clarify that Tufail was not a nine year old but a ninth standard student! As thousands of people were busy burying Bilal, the police was hawking the theory that he died in a stampede!

In Kashmir, these days, even the last journey of the slain is not peaceful. Desecration of the dead gets to the front page but hardly ruffles any feathers. No questions asked, no answers given. Kashmir, a journalist friend tells me, is a great suppression story. "You do whatever you want and nothing happens, who cares?" In retrospect, having reported Kashmir since 1987, the truth of that statement reverberates almost daily. The powerful state has vandalised the society to a level where bridging people and the state seems a farfetched idea. Every sphere of life is in distress.

Marriage is mankind’s oldest institution, marked everywhere with jubilations, gatherings and celebrations. In Kashmir, it is an elaborate affair. The brides are brought home late in the nights. But in the 90’s, the situation forced a change. Deep in South Kashmir, in May 1990, the BSF intercepted a marriage party. The bus was fired upon without any reason and looted. One person was killed. The bride, Mubina Ghani, and her chaperone aunt were separated from others, taken into the fields and gang-raped. It should have shocked everybody, but barring the incident forcing a change in Kashmiri marriages, nothing changed. Many years later it was revealed that after failing to hush it up, a court martial by the BSF sentenced two constables to five years imprisonment and dismissal from service, while two head constables were punished with forfeiture of seniority and reduction in rank!!

In September 2003, soldiers of Rashtriya Rifles picked up Tahir Hussain, a few hours after he brought his bride home in Tujar, Sopore. Four days later his family was informed by a major that they should visit a nearby forest. The groom had been blasted to death and the family collected a few kilogrammes of his flesh and bones to bury. Any action? No idea.

In the last twenty years, Kashmir witnessed crimes that dehumanised a generation. For me it is impossible to forget a 1995 headline: ‘ The tiger was never so wild’. It told the story of Farooq Ahmad Wani who fled from RR custody and reached Islamabad. He told people that RR had detained four youths.

Ghulam Rasool and Muhammad Ramzan were killed within two days. Two others, Hilal Nasti of Islamabad and the narrator, Farooq, were driven out of the garrison. A soldier, he told people, butchered Hilal and cut his body into pieces — head sliced, limbs cut out. Farooq was then ordered to throw the body pieces into the Lidder river. He did and with the last part of Nasti’s body, jumped into the river. After his disclosure, the body parts were recovered, barring a leg and the arms. The case was taken up at different levels, nothing happened. Instead, Farooq died a mysterious death.

At one point of time Kashmir was a problem that needed a solution. Now it is totally messed-up. It is a can of problems that the ‘problem’ created. It is not only about sprawling cemeteries, it is about the half-dead walking and over half a million people who are unlisted collateral damage. Over eight thousand people are missing, mostly in the custody of the security agencies.

Fayaz Ahmad of Khurhama was perhaps the only person to return from the border of death. After years of his disappearance in the custody of the security agencies, his widowed mother was told to visit the police control room to get her son. It was May 6, 1993. Fayaz had to be rushed to hospital. He had no nails on any of his fingers or toes. Skin plucked at places, kidneys not working. I saw him at the hospital. He could not speak. A month later he did. He could identify from photographs a number of youths who were detained with him. He would talk of furnaces, electrical kettles and unimaginable things that were used to consume humans. Many years later, he too died a mysterious death!

In the last twenty years, I have reported incidents that still haunt me. A young woman raped as her frail father, tied to a tree, was forced to watch. A renegade carrying a pocket notebook that he would open once a wailing mother came to seek help - only to be told that she should stop hunting for her son as he was already dead. Or a young woman seeking the whereabouts of her husband being told to stay as her husband had been murdered and she should now marry his murderer!

Kashmir is unlikely to forget Mustafa Khan, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander whom security forces killed in 2001. In that area of Budgam, nobody has ever had such a huge funeral procession. The reason: he was pushed to become a militant after an agent of the security forces molested his mother when he was a child.

Since 1988, when militancy gushed out of Kalashnikov barrels, a year after the parties led by Rajiv Gandhi and Dr Farooq Abdullah rigged elections, Kashmir has gone through hell. A generation that was brought up during these years is immune to fear, fire and destruction. They have a deep-rooted anger that has transformed their personalities. Presuming that the state stops doing what it did to Kashmiris - killings, arrests, torture, curfews — and even demilitarises the mindset of the people, a young, well-read and employed protestor once told me, “We still have a reason to be on the streets against New Delhi for the next 100 years.”

(Courtesy: The Economic Times, August 9, 2010)

Lastupdate on : Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:30:00 GMT
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