Tuesday's rioting in Belfast, Northern Ireland can serve as a censure of sorts for the policing methods in Valley. Eighty two police personnel were injured in the night-long street clashes spawned by the annual parades by the Protestant majority of this British province which still smoulders with the remnants of the conflict which broadly resembles the trouble in Kashmir. What is more, most of these injured personnel have suffered cuts, bruises, burns and broken hands. A policewoman has had a rock dropped on her head from a rooftop.  The rioting mob comprising hundreds of masked teenagers - among them children as small as 8 -
and young men threw stones, gheraoed and attacked police armored vehicles and swung clubs at ranks of mob-controlling police. The mob also set afire cars, torched police armored vehicles, tried to burn a train, and one of them even fired shots at the police while they were dousing flames. But what is really significant is that despite all these provocations not a single protester lost his life. This is something that is in sharp contrast with the police response in Valley where by now 15 civilians including an 8 year old boy and a young woman, have been killed - four of them on single day. This calls for a serious debate about the policing methods in Kashmir which nobody in the state seems to be bothered about. After every civilian killing, state government has shown itself more interested in ordering inquiries whose outcome over the years has followed a predictable trajectory. They might nail an odd individual or individuals here and there but the larger lacunae in the policing have remained unaddressed. There has not been a single study as to why the police and paramilitary forces in Kashmir are more prone to kill unarmed protesters in such large numbers. The toll over the past three years is already close to 80 lives lost. There are many popular and political explanations for this phenomenon. One, which is an explanation pioneered by People's Democratic Party: the impunity granted to security forces in Kashmir by Armed Forces Special Powers Act. State government, on the other hand, has struggled to strike a balance between its defense of police action and the acknowledgement of the anger of protesters. Separatists blame the killings on the ''colonial mindset'' of the forces operating in Kashmir and the opinion in New Delhi has come across as weighed predominantly in favor of the security agencies. There has been little debate about the operational methods employed to tackle protests which is what should have been the primary approach. Questions can and should be asked as to why the killings of protesters in Kashmir are more frequent than anywhere else in the country. Do reasons for this lie in the inadequacies of professional training of the police or is it really a certain mindset or a psychological sense of impunity among the forces that is responsible for it. There is a genuine grievance among the people in the state that the forces in the state are more prone to using excessive action in the face of the stone throwing mobs in Valley than in other parts of the country. And this grievance in part fuels not only the endemic sense of alienation but also the protests. Moreover, the gulf this feeling creates between the government and the people is vast and unbridgeable. So, it is high time that the policing methods in Valley are analyzed and re-assessed and the forces are taught better mob control. More so, when the phenomenon of stone throwing, and largely attended protests in the Valley are already three years old. And considering the deeply lodged sentiment that underpins these protests, this is a reality that is unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. Of course, Northern Ireland example can be a good role model for the police to follow in Valley. Or why go that far, police and paramilitary forces in Valley will also have a lot to learn from their counterparts in other parts of India. And ironically, these counterparts do not face mobs on a regular basis.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 IST