[In daily Early Times (www.earlytimes.com) dated Feb 2, 2011]

Shopian condemned, Sopore condoned!

Yet another slaying of two young women exposes Kashmir’s double standards on violence

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Feb 1: Brutality has yet again surfaced with a macabre dance of death. Like on scores of occasions in the last 21 years of violence, it has consumed two young women---siblings as usual. In the year 2009, eight young women, most of them in the age group of 15 to 25 years, were found dead in South Kashmir. Valley ignored all---including the killing of a woman who was gunned down alongwith her 4-year-old child---but erupted selectively on the death of two women. Neelofar and her sister-in-law, Asiya of Shopian, alone carried the promise of implicating J&K Police and “Indian” armed forces. The world of politicians, clerics, human rights activists and mediapersons was on the boil for next seven months.

People, perhaps, are not to blame. In fact, the most protected and the most privileged among the politicians, who served as Chief Ministers in the state and Cabinet Ministers and Governors in Government of India, rarely uttered a word to stigmatize violence, perceived to have been committed by pro-Azadi and pro-Pakistan militants. Exceptions like Farooq Abdullah lost themselves in jingoism that appeared less an obituary on the victims and more a labour to strengthen New Delhi’s hold on Jammu & Kashmir.

These dramatis personae did not chose a mime for themselves. They left even the militant leadership and the Hurriyat miles behind in their oral diarrhea of praising all killers brandishing a Pakistani gun. They condemned their acts only after these non-state actors of violence switched over their allegiance to the state. Those who had reneged on Kashmir’s “freedom struggle” and decided, or felt compelled, to eschew violence were almost officially denigrated as “renegades”. Many in PDP as well as NC call them by this sobriquet alone.

Even as the ordinary “renegades” were given a bad name and got killed, seats were cleared for their powerful leaders in not only Legislature but also in the Council of Ministers. Hundreds of them were even used as private army to eliminate political rivals. Some were encouraged to outclass all separatist guerrillas in getting the women raped, men tortured to death and children orphaned. The politicians needed body bags to shed their tears on. The state needed wounds to utilize its stuff of healing touch.

In a strange confluence of interest and vested interest, exactly the same came handy to masters of the “proxy war” across the border. The poor, ordinary Kashmiris kept dying. Every death brought fortunes to stellar players as well as all character actors in the conflict. In the process, all good deeds were placed in the basket of Pakistan, militants and the separatist leadership and all the bad ones in that of “terror state India”. This exactly explains why there is invariably a beeline of politicians, clerics, mediapersons and so-called human rights activists when there is a Shopian and total absence of sympathy when “Mujahideen” are perceived to be the actors.

It is admittedly unfair to identify the killers who, most often, operate under darkness or a mask. But, it needs to be a resident Kashmiri to know as to who has killed whom. The formula that was discovered with the first assassinations in 1988-89---Ghulam Hassan Halwai and Tika Lal Taploo---has remained unchanged. Even today, it takes the Valley a minute to erupt over an act suspected or believed to have been done by Police, troops or counter-insurgents. Nobody has shed tears on killing of all four male members of a family at Gopalpora (Budgam) in December 2002, merciless slaying of dental surgeon Dr Mushtaq in Sopore in October 2006 or half-a-dozen others that happened in South Kashmir in 2009.

That the dingy alleys of Muslim Peer remained deserted in Sopore today serves as a statement of the public perception. That militants are believed to be the killers is evident from the fact that none from Hurriyat to JKLF to PDP has raised fingers on Police or “Indian occupational forces”. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who himself played safe in many of such assassinations---including that of the poor dental surgeon---has succeeded in extorting some statements of condemnation from politicians in the late afternoon today but nobody has heard his own colleagues (including MLA Sopore Ashraf Ganai) sympathise with the bereaved parents of 20-year-old Aarifa and 17-year-old Akhtara.

END