On Thursday evening a message from a senior Delhi based journalist friend popped up on my phone asking me to confirm if there was an attack on senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari . The message left me totally shocked and terribly distraught. However, I quickly rang up a journalist friend covering crime for a local newspaper. He confirmed the news saying he was pumped full of lead near his office and the chances of his survival are minimum. He soon hung up the phone. Within a few minutes, he called me back and gave the devastating news I still shudder to think: Shujaat succumbed. Quickly I typed a message–”He has succumbed” and sent it across to the Delhi based friend; I couldn’t even spell the words correctly. Soon at a rate of knots, messages and tweets about the demise of Bukhari began pouring in.
Shujaat was a way familiar name in my family ever since he got hitched in a well-heeled family in Srinagar’s Natipora area. His father-in-law AG Hafiz, himself a distinguished journalist who had edited a string of newspapers and journals in his journalistic career was a close friend of my father. Even both jointly brought out a weekly newspaper in late 1990s. Long before I joined journalism, I got a few opportunities to meet Shujaat. Recent was in November 2016 when we met over a dinner at Hotel Green Acer in Srinagar, when a group of Delhi based distinguished journalists including Prem Shankar Jha, Anand K. Sahay and Seema Mustafa visited Kashmir to assess the situation.
I vividly recollect Shjuaat briefing the group about the worsening human rights scenario in Kashmir. He told the group that situation in Kashmir went downhill as government used the muscle power against the protestors. He minced no words in critiquing the military machismo of central dispensation vis-à-vis Kashmir.
Shujaat was very critical of the current government. He was always against, what political observers referred as “unholy” alliance. In one of his articles written for a Pakistani based newspaper, Shujaat argued that although PDP emerged in a jiffy on the political landscape of Kashmir by adopting the pro-people policies, its support has started significantly dwindling as soon as the party tailored an alliance with BJP.
Shujaat was a strong votary of peace. Whenever an olive branch was held out by any government in Kashmir, Shujaat would welcome it in his writings. He was among the few journalists in the valley who had the courage to welcome the recent announcement of non-initiation of combat operations against the militants during Ramazan in the face of its outright rejection by both separatists and militants outfits.
Shujaat was always in favor of keeping the communication lines open between India and Pakistan. As media reports suggest, he was also a part of efforts to keep the two talking. Shujaat always predicated his argument upon logic and reason. I clearly recollect in 2017 Shujaat was invited by Islamic University’s Centre for International Relations ( Peace and Conflict Studies) for delivering a guest lecture. During the interactive session one of the students asked Shujaat what should come first resolution of Kashmir imbroglio or development. The accomplished journalist answered that both must go hand in hand as one could not afford to stop the development until a resolution was reached.