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Editorial
India must walk the talk in J-K
 Kashmir
has been going through for a long time now what Punjab suffered in
the early 1990s: the State as a killer. Except of course with one
difference. In Punjab, it was the state police that was made the
blood hound with training from KPS Gill in ruthlessness and
illegality. Indian media and establishment saw this as some kind of
a twisted nation saviour role and defended it to the hilt. In
Kashmir, the state machinery has been either a passive witness or
has been resisting such gross violation of human rights and it has
been the Indian Army and the Central Reserve Police Force that has
been trigger happy, leaving behind a trail of corpses of innocent
Kashmiri young men and protesters.
The ugly Indian
national consensus on
Kashmir has been
that the insurgency is wholly a creation of Pakistan; two, there is
no such thing as Kashmiri nationalism; three, the army can do no
wrong.
Indian
establishment has created a legal grid of
Jammu and
Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act, the Armed Forces (Jammu
and Kashmir)
Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Jammu and Kashmir
Public Safety Act. All these laws contain a common provision: “No
prosecution, suit or other legal proceedings shall be instituted
except with the previous sanction of the Central Government against
any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in
exercise of powers conferred by this act.” These laws violate the UN
Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement
Officials, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. According to Amnesty International, the J&K government had
made at least 200 requests for prosecution since the beginning of
the insurgency. All were refused.
It is in this
matrix that the calls to separatists to join the negotiating table
are likely to be in vain. Omar Abdullah and his new found friends
and allies in the Congress need to understand that the youth ready
to die need to see a demonstrated resolve to look to solutions and
will not believe the words of those who play golf and politics
alternatively, with equal qualms and ease.
The PDP
government in
Kashmir some
time back was able to some extent in engaging with the people's
aspirations and concerns and was seen as the voice of the Valley
that had some genuine credentials. The NC-Congress alliance will
have to make some real progress on the ground if it wants to match
that credibility rating. The near daily killings of civilians and
protesters in Army action or CRPF firing is hardly something that
inspires confidence.
The Indian
government and the
Kashmir
establishment will also have to address the problem of mysterious
disappearances that are not so mysterious to anyone well versed with
the ways of the Indian security agencies. At a time when the world
is watching even a superpower shutting down illegal prisons and
ending torture spots, it is sad that India is making the news for
such wrong reasons.
But with the
legal grid of army impunity continuing in place, there is little
hope that things will improve.
Kashmir needs to
learn from Punjab where the police officers who once acted with
impunity have forever forgotten to work within the limits of the
law.
The argument
that such transgressions of human rights were par for the course
because one can’t expect to get information out of these people over
a cup of tea has to be discarded to the mental trash bin from where
it emerges in the first place. Everyone in
Srinagar knew of
the notorious Papa I detention centre, now the residence of Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed. There are crackdowns in which people of an entire
neighbourhood are evacuated and herded together while troops ransack
their homes in search of incriminating material. The Indian Army in
Kashmir
is an army of occupation. It is the instrument for enforcing
India’s
sovereignty over the state, a sovereignty that flows out of the
barrel of a gun and not from the people as it normally should.
25 March 2009
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