Youth namely Arif Ahmad Sofi shot dead by unknown gunmen in Sopore village.
February 2018. Unknown gunman shot dead Mohammad Yousuf Rather in Chahrangam, Beerwah, while travelling in a passenger vehicle.
March 2018. Mohammad Ashraf is killed by unknown gunmen at Murran Chowk, Pulwama. In the same month, a class 12 student Omais Rashid of Qaimoh, Kulgam is abducted and tortured by unknown gunmen, succumbing to his injuries. In another incident, Ishtiyaq Ahmad was shot dead by unknown gunman in Kishtwar town.
April 2018. Manzoor Ahmad of Hajin is abducted and later beheaded by unknown gunmen.
These are a few instances of mysterious killings in Kashmir since the beginning of the current year. The horrific phenomenon has taken the shape of permanent happening in the conflict over here. People get killed and nobody knows the killers. Nobody condemns these killings. Nobody protests against them. No tireless advocacy pops up. The bereaved families live in oblivion. No follow-ups appear for their justice.
The kind of obfuscation created around these killings traduces the killed. A silently unwarranted stigmatization is allowed to hush up the heinous crime and mindset behind these killings. Coupled with political doublespeak that curates the scandalous silence over it, demanding justice seems a far cry from the partisan ferocity of our times.
Justice apart, even talking about these killings is deemed censurable. Gradually getting established as an anathema, it betrays the narrative of human rights violations that is becoming unfairly selective and subjective in Kashmir. No human rights study/report from this place, ever since the last two decades of bloody conflict, has evidently and forthrightly collected/ reported the data and details about the unknown killings. Except for one report that simply puts the number of killings by unknown gunmen as 22 in the year 2017.
These cryptic unknown killings in Kashmir are turning oxymoronic. In a jumble fluctuating between so-called gallantry and obvious foolhardiness, many of such killings are tossed up as a part of despicable blame game. The young mother, Beauty Jan, gets killed near an encounter site at Shopian in December last year, leaving behind an eight-month old infant. Today, her death is ‘accounted’ as inverted form of ‘unknown’ killing (Police say Beauty Jan of Shopian was killed by militants, not forces, Daily Greater Kashmir, 28 April- 2018).
Small wonder, death has trivialized life here to the extent that killings are transmuted into stray episodes. What more awful than a killed political worker being disowned by his own Masters! The iffy elements are accumulating and adding up to the terrorized tangle. It’s quite dangerous to retain perspectives even in small matters given the way life is crushed so cruelly here. More so, political chutzpah with common sense is going to be a distant grumble. Seemingly, we all will be writing our struggles on the sand and wretchedly waiting for the tide to come in.
Is obscurity always an indispensable segment of any strategy? Are battlefields balefully perfidious? Are victories more essential than hanging on to life with some modicum of sensibility?
When things turn skewed and senseless, all the wars end wordlessly. What remains is the rubble of remorse and retribution. That invades in modes beyond our prosaic understanding. Ironically.
Bottomline: Assassinations need unequivocal denouncement. Neutralization needs proclamation. Whatever the reason. For the bleakness shrouded in critical conundrums is undeniably going to recast the whole narrative of Kashmir conflict—The drastic dip in the grid of it, when everything will go flat, withdrawing essence, energy and enthusiasm about Life in Kashmir.