Srinagar. Mar 2: Terming the response of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to the imprisonment of 14 year old Faizan and other youngsters under Pubic Safety Act (PSA) as bizarre, opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) today accused the chief minister of trying to discredit the established institutions and systems in the state.
“The chief minister is now trying to discredit the established institutions like that of age certification to prove himself correct,” PDP president Mehbooba Mufti said in a statement.
Rejecting chief minister’s observation that the age of Faizan needed to be medically verified, Mehbooba said the chief minister has already declared the boy’s date of birth certificate to be fake when he states that “such certificates were fake in most cases”.
Mehbooba said the Chief Minister of a state could not be more insensitive than that in questioning the juvenile status of a class 10th student just to defend the indefensible action of his government putting a minor in jail for two years without trial or any proven charges. Faizan, she said was in any case not a lone victim of brazen atrocities by a state apparatus that is out to cage an entire people on a flimsy pretext that “some thing was brewing against it in the coming summer”. She reiterated that this was a sure way of destabilizing the situation in Kashmir and upset lives of ordinary people.
Mehbooba said it was no less than a misfortune for the state that a chief minister who is blissfully disinterested in what he has made out of a state that was on way to peace and defiant in blocking any probe into the killing of 117 unarmed civilians at the hands of his security forces should call for investigating the age of a schoolboy, a victim of his government in any case. 
PDP president said the present government had wilfully unleashed a reign of terror on all fronts and the state was once again witnessing incidents and developments that reminded one of the situation prevailing before 2002. “The grenade attack in Srinagar in which an innocent engineer lost his life, the killing of a contractor in Kreeri the other day or alleged sodomization of a boy allegedly a member of government forces in Marmat Doda are only the latest wake up calls for the people of the state against the dark forces that historically surfaced during NC rule,” she said and added that the personal tragedies were mounting in Kashmir with thousands of boys falling into police net without any process of law and people losing lives in cases of encounters, mistaken identities, un-intentional firing, or at the hands of “unidentified gunmen”.
"An entire generation of Kashmiris was being targeted and demonised for rest of their lives by filing cases against them, spoiling their future and making their families cough up ransom money for release" she said calling it the worst phase in state's history.
Meanwhile, in a separate statement, Mehbooba strongly condemned the killing of engineer Showkat Ali Khan, who was critically injured in a grenade blast on Monday evening and later succumbed on Tuesday.
Expressing sympathy with the bereaved family, Mehbooba said such killing in the civilized society should be condemned by all.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 2 Mar 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 2 Mar 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 3 Mar 2011 00:00:00 IST